Igor Stravinsky’s Les Noces, the Rite of Passage
up to [17], presumably the end of the first tableau at the time (Figure 5). The composed parts of Les Noces villageoises were surely not limited to the first tableau up to [17], where FS-3c stops: the music for [21], parts of the lament for the episode of combing the groom’s curls ([35]–[38]+5), the incantation at [55]–[57], the chant at [50]–[52], and other patchy episodes for the second tableau, were sketched and some partially composed as well, though they cannot be dated precisely. Some blocks for the fourth tableau – the opening chorus Yagoda, the ‘hiccough’ duet at [91] and [127],38 and the Mitusov melody, along with some other bits and pieces – were also sketched by the end of 1915 / beginning of 1916. The non-linear process of composing Les Noces should be clear from this list and the previously stated considerations. Stravinsky worked on version 3 throughout 1915 and played the first tableau for a small gathering of friends at Misia Sert’s apartment in Paris at Christmas. It was the last time Diaghilev heard a note of Les Noces until April 1917. At the beginning of 1916, Diaghilev went to America with the Ballets Russes. Stravinsky, left behind in Switzerland, began to understand that staging Les Noces villageoises would have to be postponed until after the war. His relationship with Diaghilev started to cool. Like many others in Europe during the war, Stravinsky’s financial situation was dire: the activities of the Russian Music Publishers, Stravinsky’s main publisher, were disrupted; the income from his estate in Ustilug ceased (the estate was destroyed during the war); and he could not get a penny from performances in America, where the rights of Russian composers were not protected by international law. He thus became involved in other projects that were commissioned or which had a reasonable prospect of being paid and performed. Meanwhile, Les Noces villageoises was shelved. In composing Renard, for which he had secured a firm commission from the Princess Edmond de Polignac, Stravinsky immersed himself in the sounds of his cimbalom and the mocking folktales about the fox. Like Pribaoutki and other of his ‘Swiss’ songs on Russian folk texts, Renard is an offspring of Les Noces. The liberties taken with folk texts, the focus on de-personified folklore characters detached from the ‘real’ world, the fragmented musical form, comprising juxtapositions of unrelated blocks, characteristic melodic gestures, borrowed from folk song and re-invented anew, rhythmic procedures and harmonic idioms, the octatonic framework, a soloistic and chamber divertimentolike approach to instrumentation, even the handwriting – all point to a close relationship between Renard and Les Noces. The theatrical form envisioned by the composer for Renard was notably similar to his earlier idea of staging Les
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Noces (as well as Histoire du soldat in 1918), that is as a synthetic spectacle mixing musicians, dancers, clowns and acrobats on the stage. The idea had travelled all the way from Sanin’s initial letter about Svadebka, reinforced in 1914 by Alexander Benois’s ground-breaking productions of Le Rossignol and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’or for the Ballets Russes. Additional similarities between Renard and Les Noces are many, but I shall pause here to mention Stravinsky’s approach to text setting, because it may be helpful to performers of Les Noces, both vocalists and dancers. Putting into practice his ‘rejoicing discovery’, the composer turned his discovery into a certain technique of shifting verbal stress, depending on the musical durations of particular syllables. The syllables then acquired an additional value as independent sounds and durational units; they were no longer just elements of a verbal construction. Music in Les Noces was often said to be born of the phonetic sound.39 No wonder that the dancers of the Ballets Russes learned their timing not by counting endlessly changing musical metres but by memorising the syllabic durations of musical scansion: ‘We sang along, and that was how we remembered when to do things, by singing and dancing at the same time.’40 * * * With his new commission for a ballet based on Le Rossignol in November 1916, Diaghilev’s relationships with Stravinsky warmed, particularly after he secured the finances for the May 1917 season of the Ballets Russes in Paris, the first full season since the beginning of the war. Diaghilev’s new activities re-energised Stravinsky’s work on Les Noces villageoises, and he played it in Rome in April 1917, when Diaghilev summoned him to take part in the Ballets Russes’s tour. It was during this trip to Italy that Stravinsky became close to Picasso; they spent much time together in Rome and in Naples, developing a lasting friendship that was meaningful for both artists and, in some ways, specifically for the further transformation of Les Noces. A new era in the compositional history of the work began in July, when Stravinsky and Diaghilev signed a contract for several pieces; Diaghilev now had the exclusive worldwide rights for productions of Les Noces villageoises for two years. Stravinsky thus set himself to finish the piece, focusing on the last tableau, from [110] to the end in HMB-2, Les Noces’s second notebook. He possibly even drafted the entire fourth tableau in short score.41 Like so many others in Paris and London at the time, Stravinsky was under the spell of mechanisation and
In late January 1915, Stravinsky heard a curious duet of two drunken Vaudois men – one repeated a short phrase, the other hiccoughed at regular intervals – and jotted it down in alternating 4/4 and 3/4 metres (Schaeffner, Strawinsky, pp. 65–66). For an early account see Boris de Schloezer, ‘La Saison musicale’, La Nouvelle Revue française, 1 August 1923, p. 245. Alexandra Danilova, Choura (New York, 1986), p. 76. The separate pagination and the state of completeness of the fourth tableau in the Winterthur manuscript Prtc-W, discussed below, raise this possibility.