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Igor Stravinsky’s Les Noces, the Rite of Passage
and mid-March of 1915.35 He learned to play the instrument, set himself to composing on it, and used it in the initial draft of Svadebka’s version 3 and every subsequent version except the last. Sergey Prokofiev, after witnessing the first presentation of the new version on 1 April in Milan, gave his report to Vladimir Derzhanovsky, the editor of the Russian journal Muzïka, who published the first detailed essay about Svadebka.36 The article supplies most invaluable information about how Stravinsky verbalised his ideas at the time, however embellished they became in this mixture of Prokofiev’s report and Derzhanovsky’s editorialising and guesswork. We learn from this article that Stravinsky already thought of Svadebka as ‘not an opera and not a ballet’, without a ‘plot in the crudely utilitarian sense’. The composition was in four tableaux, with the first two tableaux defined as in the final work, and with the final scene – the young couple being led to the bedchamber – defined exactly as in the composition we know. The only scene missing was the departure of the bride for church, the third tableau of the final score. The new instrumental ensemble, the result of the composer’s ‘new views on instrumentation’, consisted of about forty instruments, exclusively individualised, ‘an orchestra of soloists’. The chorus, Derzhanovsky said, was conceived as part of the instrumental roster; it had a ‘purely instrumental colouristic role, and it takes part from beginning of the score to end’. A composition in four tableaux for an idiosyncratic ensemble of about forty solo instruments as described in Derzhanovsky’s article is instantly identifiable as Svadebka’s version 3. That version includes twenty-seven wind instruments, fourteen of which are brass, all heavily involved, creating sonority at times resembling a wind band, particularly with tuba, keyed bugles and the B flat baritone on the instrumental roster. The two string quintets of versions 1 and 2 are reduced here to eight string instruments (three violins, two violas, two cellos and a double bass), but the string section, too, is enriched by the new percussive colour of harp, piano and harpsichord (probably used for the first time in a twentieth-century composition), and – above all – cimbalom. The idea of the strings playing pizzicato against arco is retained in version 3, but the instruments are no longer sharply divided into two groups: the scoring often calls for divisi, and at times a single instrument functions as two different soloists. The scoring of version 3 was spurred by Stravinsky’s clear intent to create a unique, pure musical colour for each soloist. He defined soloistic identity here not only by timbre, but also through the way an instrument contributed to the overall
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texture, voicing and sonority, even if sometimes it took several instruments to produce the unique character of a ‘soloist’. With such an approach, doubling of the ‘soloists’ could not – and in fact did not – exist: in practical terms, no two parts were exactly the same. In order to protect individual instrumental colours, the front page of the longest fair copy in full score of version 3, FS-3c, carries Stravinsky’s forceful warnings not to double and not to substitute any instrument. The idea of soloistic scoring was of course not new for Stravinsky; he had already experimented with it in Petrushka and the Japanese Lyrics, not to mention all the previous instrumentations of Pribaoutki and Svadebka itself. In version 3, however, the principle finds the fullest and utmost heterogeneous realisation, the lavish sound of which appears even more vibrant and astonishing because it is so diametrically opposed to the austerity and homogeneity of the final product. To keep the work and the spirit of the Ballets Russes active during the first wartime summer of 1915, Diaghilev rented a large villa, Bellerive, in Ouchy, Lausanne, on Lake Geneva, where he reassembled a core group of Russian artists, painters and dancers, who rehearsed regularly and discussed new projects. At Bellerive, Diaghilev invited Natalia Goncharova to design the costumes and the sets for Svadebka, while he began thinking of Leonid Massine, then a young dancer, as a possible replacement for Nijinsky as the choreographer. The Svadebka production team for the 1916 première was assembled, with Stravinsky living in Morges, a short bicycle ride along the lake. There in Ouchy, on a page with the letterhead ‘Bellerive / Ouchy-Lausanne’, Stravinsky jotted down the St Paul’s bells theme as a new musical idea for setting the song Vo gornitse vo svetlitse (In the room, in the bright-lit room), which would be used in the third tableau (see [70] ff). Another idea, most likely initiated at Bellerive, was the unaccompanied chant for two solo basses in the second tableau at [50], the only unaccompanied passage in the whole work. Diaghilev, obsessed with Liturgie, a new ballet after the Passion of Christ, wanted Stravinsky to write some a cappella choruses, based on ancient Orthodox znamennïy chant. Presumably with Liturgie in mind, Stravinsky copied down from Oktoikh (a Russian version of Byzantine Octoechos, The Book of Eight Echoi)37 one chant, Bogorodichen (a hymn to the Mother of God) in fifth glas (echos) and used it as the starting-point for composing [50]–[52], a chant-like episode in the second tableau of Les Noces villageoises, as the composition became known towards the end of 1915. The longest fair copy in full score of version 3, FS-3c, goes
Vera Stravinsky and Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, p. 152. Renard was partially composed on the cimbalom. The cimbalom was also part of the eleven-instrument ensemble of Ragtime. In addition, Stravinsky arranged for Rácz the ‘Polka’ from Trois pièces faciles (ibid., p. 177). ‘The Latest Compositions by Igor Stravinsky’, Muzïka, no. 219 (18 April / 1 May 1915), pp. 262–63. Oktoikh contains znamennïy chants in eight glasï (echoi) necessary to support the eight-week cycle of the Orthodox service. Other sections of Les Noces also contain melodic gestures of znamennïy chant (see, for example, [21], [27], [28], [55] ff. and [74]), which are particularly prominent in the second tableau.