Igor Stravinsky’s Les Noces, the Rite of Passage
piano-vocal score,14 drafted after Prtc-W, probably between 1917 and 1919. Coupled with my earlier discovery of the work’s original version, previously unknown,15 it became possible to trace how its conceptual formation evolved from a linear description to a non-linear abstraction.
A brief biography of Svadebka / Les Noces16 The first mention of the work comes from Stravinsky’s correspondence with Alexander Sanin, a famous Russian stage director and the régisseur of all opera productions presented by Sergey Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes from 1908 to 1914. In early 1913, Sanin had been approved as one of the founding artistic directors of the new Free Theatre in Moscow. In the hope of enlisting Stravinsky’s efforts in making the opening season of his Free Theatre a sensation of Russian avant-garde theatre, Sanin wrote to the composer on 17 February / 2 March 1913 (Julian calendar / Gregorian calendar), requesting ‘a three-act piece’ and encouraging the composer – clearly in the spirit of the ground-breaking development in Russian synthetic theatre, headed by several stage directors, most notably Vsevolod Meyerhold – to combine on stage all kinds of music theatre, ‘opera, and dance, and mimo-drama, all together’. He specifically inquired about the details of Svad’ba, the work Stravinsky mentioned to him in the summer of 1912 in Paris. Instead, Stravinsky, then engrossed in The Rite of Spring, offered the Free Theatre another work, Solovey (Le Rossignol, The Nightingale).17 While Sanin’s request for Svad’ba obviously came to naught, it is not implausible that Stravinsky was initially inspired by Sanin’s idea of a work in three acts, as well as by the remarkable concept of Svadebka as a synthetic spectacle. The latter, Stravinsky recalled, was his original vision of the work’s theatrical form:
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I wanted all my instrumental apparatus to be visible side by side with the actors or dancers, making it, so to speak, a participant in the whole theatrical action. For this reason, I wished to place the orchestra on the stage itself, letting the actors move on the space remaining free. The fact that the artists in the scene would uniformly wear costumes of a Russian character while the musicians would be in evening dress not only did not embarrass me, but, on the contrary, was perfectly in keeping with my idea of a divertissement of the masquerade type.18 In July 1913 in Ustilug,19 Stravinsky met Stepan Mitusov, a poet, pianist and friend from Stravinsky’s gymnasium years in St Petersburg, to finish the libretto of Solovey, commissioned by the Moscow Free Theatre. Mitusov had sung Ne vesyolaya da kompan’itsa (Not a merry company), a village protyazhnaya (long-drawn-out) song, which he recalled from memory (Figure 1).20 The song, which had clearly made an impression on Mitusov, evidently had a similar effect on the composer. He noted it down, and it became the single folk melody quoted in its entirety in Les Noces ([110]+2 to [132]) (hereafter, the Mitusov melody). Stravinsky’s transcription in Figure 1 shows his struggle with text underlay and barring as he attempted to cope with the unusual prosody and complex interplay between stress and duration in sung words. Transcribing the Mitusov song became an early step on the path to what Stravinsky dubbed his ‘rejoicing discovery’ of shifting stress in folk song and flexible relationships between melody and text in Russian village song – the discovery that Richard Taruskin’s in-depth exploration has made so familiar.21 Its conscious realisation came in the autumn of 1914 as the composer worked on Pribaoutki and other songs on folk texts, but in the process of transcribing the Mitusov song, he had already embarked upon the experimentation with prosodic ‘distortions’ typical of Russian folk song.
The latter manuscript contained the final touches applied by the composer to Les Noces’s structure, most notably the extension of the concluding episodes of the third and fourth tableaux (lament of the mothers and the tolling bells respectively). The manuscript FS-1 containing version 1 is part of the Stravinsky Archive at PSF, but it has never been recognised as the original version of Les Noces. In the present essay, I use the term ‘version’ to designate a distinct conceptual stage of the work, in preference to ‘draft’, which refers to a specific continuous manuscript. My labelling of different versions and drafts is constructed as follows: ‘FS’ stands for a draft in full score; the number (1 to 5) identifies one of the Les Noces versions; the ensuing lower-case letter refers to a specific draft of that version (‘a’ being the first draft, ‘b’ the second,’ and so on). For example, ‘FS-3b’ refers to the second draft (‘b’) in full score of version 3. The absence of a lower-case letter indicates that only one full-score draft of a particular version is known. Bold numbers enclosed in brackets refer to rehearsal numbers in the published score. Numerous scholars have examined Les Noces and written its ‘biography’ as part of a general investigation into Stravinsky’s life and music. Robert Craft’s intimate record of the life of the composer and, indeed, his voice in conversation about Les Noces were pioneering (see specifically Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, pp. 114–18, Stravinsky and Craft, Retrospectives and Conclusions, pp. 117–22, and Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (New York, 1978), pp. 144–62). The most comprehensive discussion is in Richard Taruskin’s epochal work, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through ‘Mavra’ (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 1319–86. See also Stephen Walsh’s biography, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring. Russia and France 1882–1934 (New York, 1999), pp. 243–365. Alexander Sanin, letters to Stravinsky, PSF, Box 36; English translation in Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, ed. Craft, 3 vols (New York, 1982–85), vol. 2, pp. 197–200. An Autobiography (New York, 1962 [first paperback edition]), p. 106. Ustilug is a small town in the Volhïn’ province in the Ukraine, where Stravinsky built his estate. The song is from Pesni Russkago naroda sobrannye v Arkhangel’skoy i Olonetskoy guberniyakh v 1886 godu, ed. Fyodor Istomin and Georgiy Dyutsh (St Petersburg, 1894), pp. 161–62. See Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, pp. 1206–36 and 1269–71.