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Igor Stravinsky’s Les Noces, the Rite of Passage
in the first three tableaux (the opening, [34] in the second tableau and [80] in the third) are sung by solo voices in a slower tempo; they are relatively unconstrained in terms of melodic range, flow and metre (as far as possible in this generally rigidly constructed piece); syllable durations vary and fluctuate; and, notably, the laments contain downward glissandi and numerous grace notes – Stravinsky’s invention as an aural representation of sobbing and wailing, which makes his laments sound indeed like village laments. Songs, on the other hand, are given to the chorus, in a faster tempo and with notably more restrained melodic gestures; together with their syllabic and predominantly equidurational setting, the songs sound like choral recitations rather than singable tunes; and they certainly never have glissandi or grace notes (for example, [2] and [10] in the first tableau or [27] in the second). When the opening theme of the bride’s lament recurs at the end of the composition, it conspicuously appears without any aural icons of crying. It is thus a song now, not a lament; in the village ritual, too, the lament belongs to the first part of the ritual, comprising episodes of separation and symbolic death, and cannot cross the ritual’s main watershed into the second part, which comprises celebrations of the new union, the rituals that protect the consummation of the marriage and assure the couple’s proper future. The recasting of the bride’s lament into the groom’s song thus symbolically affirms the ritualistic merging of the parallel plots and the transformation of the young bride into a married woman. By toying with the distinctions and similarities between lament and song, both learned from his sources and invented, Stravinsky deepens the kosa / kudri parallel and creates referential musical interconnexions between its two sides. Further reinforced by verbal and phonetic similarities, the kosa / kudri parallel strongly binds together the first three tableaux, bringing them into a unity like the facets of a single gem, framed by laments and punctuated by music and the changes on the stage. The idea of two parallel plots and their fusion at the end of the work never ceased to remain important to Stravinsky.28 Although his treatment of the three-part kernel is by no means the single feature responsible for the work’s unity, the result is a breathtaking coherence.
Versions 1 and 2 The composer himself admitted his uncertainty regarding the number and sequence of Svadebka’s preliminary versions, confessing, ‘I am no longer certain how many versions I may have begun, or how extensive each fragment may have been. […] Nor am I certain of the chronology.’29 Thus far, three preliminary versions have been known. All are unfinished 28
29
and all begin just like the final score, with the work’s signature lament of the bride about her kosa (tress). A draft in full score of what has been usually considered the earliest version goes up to [4] (FS-2b hereafter). At first, it was planned for the second act of the three-act scenario. The original title, still seen on the first page, reads ‘Second Act, First Tableau’; it was later revised to ‘First Act, First Tableau’ (see Figure 3). The revision of the title indicates that, in the process of working on this draft, Stravinsky abandoned the first act of the three-act scenario and settled on the beginning of the piece in the way we know from the final score. Careful re-examination of all autographs, however, led me to discover an earlier and significantly different original version, pivotal to understanding Svadebka’s creative process and hitherto not mentioned in Stravinsky scholarship (FS-1 hereafter). Entitled ‘Second Act, First tableau’, FS-1 is clearly connected with the three-act scenario (see Figure 4). Moreover, it is based on a short libretto, entitled ‘U nevestï’ (At the bride’s), a descriptive passage Stravinsky copied almost verbatim from an ethnographic narrative in Kireyevsky’s book. According to this libretto, and unlike any other preliminary version, FS-1 begins not with the bride’s lament, but with the chorus Chesu, pochesu Nastas’inu kosu (I comb, I am combing Nastas’ya’s tress), the song which represents SHE on the sketch identified above as the conceptual kernel of the work, and which would become the second episode in all subsequent versions ([2]–[3] in the final score). Already in FS-1, the chorus music is remarkably close to that in the final score. It is important to note, however, the interpretative marking ‘in loud whisper’ (see the first bar in Figure 4) that magnifies the susurrant phonetic qualities of the text. Such an expressive indication would be out of character in the stripped-down score known to us, but it describes well the sound Stravinsky wanted, clarifying the sound colour behind the abstract mezza voce in the final score at [2]. The distinction between FS-1 and FS-2b – which seemingly resides in the deceptively simple insertion of the opening lament – actually bespeaks a significant shift in Stravinsky’s conceptualisation of the work as a whole. For the process that condensed the ritual’s repetitive episodes with the bride’s laments and the combing of the bride’s kosa into a single scene gave rise not only to the new opening of Svadebka, but also reframed the entire composition. The original idea from which the three-act scenario arose was no longer valid. With the next version, as exemplified in FS-2b (Figure 3), Stravinsky thus moved definitively away from the firmly ethnographic representation of the wedding ritual in FS-1 towards a more abstract and symbolic Svadebka. The instrumentation of both versions is the same, however. Both are scored for an ensemble with two string
As late as 1922, while making the final fair copy of the piano-vocal score, Stravinsky titled the first and second tableaux ‘Kosa’ and ‘Kudri’ respectively. They were changed to the original titles, which appear in several sketches as ‘U nevestï’ (At the bride’s) and ‘U zhenikha’ (At the groom’s), only at the time of the third (for the second tableau) and fourth (for the first tableau) proofs. Stravinsky and Craft, Retrospectives and Conclusions, p. 118.