Notes for: July 16, 2019
After you’ve made musical history with The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring, what do you do next? If you’re Stravinsky, you turn to jazz.
In 1917 Stravinsky, having fled Russia, was stranded with his family in Switzerland and in desperate need of income. He and the novelist C. F. Ramuz decided to create a simple-to-stage theater piece, to be read, played, and danced, that they could take on tour. They adapted a Russian folklore version of the Faust legend, in which a soldier trades his violin (his soul) to the devil in exchange for a book containing the secrets of wealth. Years later, the soldier wrests his fiddle back from the devil and uses it to win the hand of a princess. But when he tries to return to his old home to visit his mother, the devil claims his soul. The opening performance of The Soldier’s Tale was a success, but the production was immediately shut down because of the deadly flu epidemic that was sweeping through Europe. The following year, Stravinsky created this five-movement Concert Suite for clarinet, violin, and piano.
The Soldier’s Tale marked what Stravinsky called his “final break with the Russian Orchestral School” and the beginning of his fascination with the syncopated rhythms of American jazz, which Stravinsky heard for the first time when his friend, the conductor Ernest Ansermet, returned from a trip to the United States with sheet music. As Stravinsky later wrote, “My knowledge of jazz was derived exclusively from copies of sheet music, and as I had never actually heard any of the music performed. I borrowed its rhythmic style not as played, but as written…. Jazz meant, in any case, a wholly new sound in my music….”
That new sound is evident from the first notes of the jazz-inflected Suite, in the constantly shifting meters of the Soldier’s March. Independent rhythms play out against each other, with the bass of the piano keeping up a steady ostinato pulse while the violin and clarinet gambol, entering on a different beat almost every measure or phrase. Throughout – from the soldier’s gritty fiddling, through the Little Concert that cures the princess and the celebratory dances that follow, to the raucous, propulsive Devil’s Dance – Stravinsky mixes rhythmic complexity with acerbic wit and a wide range of styles. The fourth piece is a delicious parody of three musical dances – a swooping tango, a loopy waltz with an excess of grace notes, and a syncopated rag that Aaron Copland called “a kind of extract of ragtime that is more characteristic of Stravinsky than it is of Afro-American music.” Even so, it is as irresistible as the rest of this clever and groundbreaking work.