IGOR STRAVINSKY RITE OF SPRING

IGOR STRAVINSKY

RITE OF SPRING

INSTRUMENTATION:  1 piccolo, 3 flutes (third doubling second piccolo, 1 alto flute, 4 oboes (fourth doubling second cor anglais), 1 cor anglais, 3 clarinets in B-flat and A (third doubling second bass clarinet),1 clarinet in E-flat and D, 1 bass clarinet, 4 bassoons (fourth doubling second contrabassoon), 1 contrabassoon, 8 horns (seventh and eighth doubling tenor Wagner tubas), 1 piccolo trumpet in D, 4 trumpets in C (fourth doubling bass trumpet in E-flat), 3 trombones, 2 bass tubas, percussion, and strings

DURATION: About 33 minutes

RIGHTING THE RITE

It is little known that in 1920 Igor Stravinsky began supervising programming of piano rolls for the major works he had so far composed as he said, “to create a lasting document which should be of service to those executants who would rather know and follow my intentions than stray to irresponsible interpretations of my musical text.”

The most astonishing aspect of the rolls of The Rite of Spring is that the final “Dance Sacrale,” in which the young virgin dances herself to death, goes far faster in relation to the rest of the work than we ever hear it played now, even on Stravinsky’s own recordings.

What happened? Can Stravinsky have indeed intended this to be the tempo of the section when all his scores bore a metronome mark nearly 30 points slower than what we hear on the piano roll?

The eminent American musicologist William Malloch first drew my attention to this remarkable information. One of the most insightful and creative thinkers about music today, Mr. Malloch has explored in great depth the way in which the existing technology of the day, i.e., barrel organs, music boxes, piano rolls and metronomes, can shed light on the tempi at which pieces of music were originally played. He argues that the reason Stravinsky reduced the tempo for this section was that the music was so difficult for the players of the day and for Stravinsky himself to conduct, that the composer simply wrote the score and used it in his own performances at a tempo that he and his musicians could manage. All conductors since then have followed suit. It is interesting to note that Pierre Monteux, the man who conducted the work at its stormy premiere in 1913, and therefore the musician closest to the original conception, is heard struggling to drive the Paris musicians into playing the section at very nearly the tempo of the piano roll on his 1929 recording, though the results verge on chaos. Stravinsky fares no better in his own recording of the same year at the slower tempo, underscoring the fact that this music presented an extraordinary challenge for even the best European musicians of the day at any speed!

Malloch ingeniously offers the theory that other composers who happened to be in Paris around this time were influenced by the heady effect of the “Dance Sacrale” and quoted it in their own works.

In Bartók’s Sonata for “Two Pianos and Percussion,” Aaron Copland’s The Young Pioneers and, most strikingly, in the finale of Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata, there are passages that quote almost verbatim the “Dance Sacrale.” but at the tempo of the piano roll, not at the familiar slower tempo. Since all three composers, by coincidence, made piano rolls of their own works at the Pleyel studio, it is inevitable that they would have heard Stravinsky’s roll of the “Dance Sacrale” at the fast tempo, and it apparently made an indelible impression on them.

Could the dancers have danced the section at this breakneck speed? Perhaps this wasn’t Stravinsky’s primary concern. At one of the rehearsals for the “Rite,” the great Russian dancer, Marie Rambert, describes how, “Hearing the way the music was being played, Stravinsky blazed up, pushed aside the fat German pianist...and proceeded to play twice as fast as we had been doing it and twice as fast as we could possibly dance. He stamped his feet on the floor and banged his fist on the piano and sang and shouted.”

At the galvanizing speed of the piano roll, the conclusion of the work’s second part matches and even surpasses the cumulative excitement of the first part, instead of being something of an anticlimax, and certainly we can readily understand how a sacrificial figure could have danced herself to death at such a tempo, whereas at the slower tempo she seems to have a chance to survive! No one will ever know what Stravinsky would have wanted had he heard the “Dance” played by an orchestra at the tempo of the piano roll. It is hard to imagine that he would not have joyously embraced it as “the truth,” so staggering is its effect.

Perhaps there is poetic justice that a conception that was abandoned because the most experienced musicians of the day could not realize it in 1929, is here restored to its original power by a youth orchestra 80+ years later!

Benjamin Zander