STRAVINSKY NOW
325
art. Music should represent distinct features of this or that nationality
and in a very complete sense reflect the "tone color" of a national cul–
ture. This belief naturally leads to the conclusion that Stravinsky's
interest in the revival of the eighteenth-century tradition, its form and
technique, is nothing but a perverse intellectual aberration, designed
to camouflage the decline of his creative powers, his loss of self-confi–
dence and national deracination. His latest works, it is said, are com–
posed in a vacuum, being unrelated to the general trends of musical
development in this period; these "mechanically calculated" works
do not in the least respond to or describe the state of mind of his fellow
men in these chaotic years of successive catastrophes and emotional
tribulations. All of which contributes, of course, to the idea of Stra–
vinsky as an artist shut up in a "Californian" ivory tower.
It
goes without saying that people who air such views had at one
time or another fallen in love with earlier compositions of Stravinsky's
(chiefly
The Firebird
and
Petroushka),
and it is because of this love
of the "Russian" Stravinsky that they cannot accept the so-called
"neo-classical" denationalized Stravinsky. He is accused of being a
"cultural renegade," of having rejected the great traditions of his
motherland, the Rimskys, Moussorgskys, Borodins, for the sake of
mechanical tricks, "freaklike instrumentation," "jazz rhythms," "self–
satisfied play (
herumspielerei)
with trivial melodies of doubtful
origin," and the whole bag of tricks invented during "the Parisian
pastiche years" of the twenties.
Another opinion, held by considerably fewer people, goes part
of the way with Stravinsky in his recent transformation but stops short
of certain pieces whose "classical aridity" and "retrospective nature"
it does not wish to comprehend. Here the irritation gives way to a
feeling of bewilderment and perplexity. "I see what he is doing," says
a critic of this school, "but what is the meaning of this adaptation to
our modern musical terminology of the various traditions of the past?
What is the reason for this retrospection?" It seeme'd plausible
to
these
critics that at a certain time in his life Stravinsky should have "dis–
covered" the "classics" and that in connection with classical subjects
such as
Oedipus R ex, Apollo, Persephone,
he should have used a kind
of stylistic analogue in the form of a stylized classical idiom. However,
to crystallize a whole style within the terms of such a retrospective
dogma seems to them absurd and quite contrary to what Stravinsky's
work had been taken to mean by an entire generation of musicians.
For to most of us this composer's music had meant a complete over–
turn of outmoded rules of musical writing, and a process of liberating
the musician from the habits of past harmonic systems. Now this same
