The composer who spent most of his life driving himself to evolve, terrified of turning into a dinosaur, first became known to many of us from the dinosaur segment in Disney’s “Fantasia.”
Happy birthday, Igor Stravinsky! Fight for your “Rite” to party!
PHOTOS: (left) Disney and Stravinsky; (top to bottom) “The Rite of Spring” segment from “Fantasia;” George Balanchine, Stravinsky, and Disney with Pteranodon model; and Stravinsky caricature by Disney
It’s Saturday night! Celebrate by cutting a rug with Sergei Diaghilev. The famed ballet impresario was born on this date 150 years ago.
The company he founded, the Paris-based, world-renowned Ballets Russes, never actually performed in Russia, due to the upheaval of the Russian Revolution. However, from 1909 to 1929, the Ballets Russes performed throughout Europe, and North and South America, collaborating with some of the most-esteemed artists of the time and building a reputation as the most influential ballet company of the 20th century.
Among those commissioned or employed by Diaghilev were composers Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Sergei Prokofiev, and Erik Satie, choreographers Marius Petipa, Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska, Léonide Massine, and George Balanchine, visual artists Vasily Kandinsky, Alexandre Benois, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, and costume designers Léon Bakst and Coco Chanel.
The enterprise flourished until the double-blow of the Great Depression and the death of its founder in 1929. In 1932, the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo rose from the ashes, reconstituted by Colonel Wassily de Basil, a Russian émigré entrepreneur from Paris, and René Blum, ballet director of the Monte Carlo Opera.
Within four years, the organization was rent by creative differences, and a splinter group, led by Blum, emerged. This ultimately promoted itself as the Original Ballet Russe.
During World War II, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo spent significant time touring the Americas. As dancers retired and left the company, they began teaching or founded their own studios – Balanchine started the New York City Ballet – so that Diaghilev’s influence pervaded American dance. Tamara Toumanova, Maria Tallchief, Cyd Charisse, Ann Reinking, and Yvonne Craig were all alumni of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo.
Alumni of the Original Ballet Russe, which toured mostly in Europe, were influential in teaching classical Russian ballet technique there.
For the sesquicentennial of Sergei Diaghilev, get your toes tapping with 12 works written or adapted for the Ballets Russes!
MAURICE RAVEL, “DAPHNIS ET CHLOE”
Shepherds, pirates, and Pan!
NIKOLAI TCHEREPNIN, “NARCISSE ET ECHO”
Tcherepnin was actually Diaghilev’s first choice to compose “The Firebird.”
IGOR STRAVINSKY, “PULCINELLA”
Diaghilev produced Stravinsky’s three breakthrough ballets, “The Firebird,” “Petrouchka,” and “The Rite of Spring,” but this one is the most unremittingly joyous.
RICHARD STRAUSS, “JOSEPHSLEGENDE”
Poor Richard Strauss never got paid for his opulent biblical ballet on account of WWI.
MANUEL DE FALLA, “THE THREE-CORNERED HAT”
Ballet meets flamenco.
PETER ILYCH TCHAIKOVSKY, “AURORA’S WEDDING”
Stokowski conducting, at the age of 95!
LORD BERNERS, “THE TRIUMPH OF NEPTUNE”
Sailor Tom Tug’s adventures in Fairy Land.
CONSTANT LAMBERT, “ROMEO AND JULIET”
Not really an adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, but a backstage romantic comedy. Just a clip, with set and costume designs by Max Ernst and Joan Miro.
OTTORINO RESPIGHI, “LA BOUTIQUE FANTASQUE”
“The Fantastic Toybox,” after melodies of Rossini.
SERGEI PROKOFIEV, “THE PRODIGAL SON”
Bad boys get the best music.
ERIK SATIE, “PARADE”
Selections, choreography by Massine and designs by Picasso.
FRANCIS POULENC, “LES BICHES”
Before you get any smart ideas, the title means “The Does,” slang for coquettish young women.
PHOTO: Diaghilev, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Igor Stravinsky
“Despite such criticism – which was entirely typical of Stravinsky’s unfiltered personality – he clearly remembered the visit with fondness and gratitude. In January, 1964 he commemorated John F. Kennedy – who had been assassinated on November 22, 1963 – by composing ‘Elegy for J.F.K.,’ a vocal piece with words by W.H. Auden. ‘I felt that the events of November were being too quickly forgotten,’ the composer told The New York Times, ‘and I wished to protest.’”
Leonard Bernstein was also in attendance at the dinner. Bernstein’s “Fanfare for JFK” was heard for the first time on the eve of Kennedy’s inauguration, also on this date, though one year earlier. It’s only 40 seconds long, so if you blink, you’ll miss it.
In 1978, Bernstein gave the opening speech at the first Kennedy Center Honors, at which the honorees included Marian Anderson, Richard Rodgers, George Balanchine, Fred Astaire, and Arthur Rubinstein:
I’ll spare you the entirety of Bernstein’s “Mass,” commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy for the opening of the Kennedy Center in 1971, but here’s the piece’s hit tune, “A Simple Song”
Where are our Bernsteins and Stravinskys – or for that matter our Marian Andersons, Richard Rodgerses, George Balanchines, Fred Astaires, and Arthur Rubinsteins – and provided they can be identified, why are they not honored at the White House, or even on television?
And so it begins: bracing for that first step onto the greased slide through the Crazy House. January 2, where art thou?
To get you in the proper mindset for Thanksgiving, here’s a rarely-heard work by Antonio Vivaldi.
The story goes that it was Igor Stravinsky who quipped that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto 500 times. Without making claim to having heard all of them, I have to say, they seem to be of uniformly high quality, if in binge-listening they do tend to become a mite indistinguishable. Would “The Four Seasons” ever have gained the traction it has without its programmatic associations?
Anyone familiar with classical music can tell you that concertos and symphonies with nicknames tend to have a better chance of getting played or at the very least remembered.
A few years ago, one of my colleagues was searching through the station’s CD library, when he stumbled across an album titled “Viva Vivaldi: The Unknown Gems” (Centaur Records #3299). From this disc, we were astonished to learn of a certain “Turkey” Concerto, RV 506.
It turns out the canny artists themselves named it such, because of the “fiendish, cascading broken third passages in the solo lines in the 3rd movement.” In any case, it’s a good way to get your disc played. On reflection, why should a nickname bestowed in the 18th century be any more valid?
Winston Churchill’s assessment of Russia in 1939 could have just as easily been applied to Arnold Schoenberg. He was a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma – a man cloaked in irony and contradiction.
For one thing, his very name, “Schoenberg,” translates as “beautiful mountain,” yet those who would characterize his music as such are distinctly in the minority.
He was the greatest prophet of dodecaphonic music, who claimed an artistic kinship with Johannes Brahms.
He preached the death of tonality, even as he orchestrated his share of Viennese operettas and arranged Strauss waltzes for performance by his friends.
He was a Jew, who converted to Lutheranism, but swung back hard to Judaism, in defiance of Hitler, with the rise of the Nazis.
He was probably the least “popular” composer in the world, but his tennis partner was none other than George Gershwin. The two also shared a love of painting.
Schoenberg was a triskaidekaphobe, who died on Friday the 13th. It was all right to count to twelve, apparently, but never to thirteen.
Adding to this beautiful mountain of contradictions, Schoenberg, like that other titan of 20th century music, Igor Stravinsky, wound up living in Hollywood.
Both men were suspicious of the movies (and each other), yet both were hoping to break into films. Stravinsky wrote cues for “The Song of Bernadette,” “Jane Eyre,” and “The North Star” (ultimately scored by Copland). None of his music was used in the pictures – Stravinsky was too slow and demanded too much money – but some of it was recycled in his concert works.
Likewise, Schoenberg was courted for a film adaptation of “The Good Earth,” but his proposed $50,000 fee put an end to that.
Twelve-tone music did eventually make it into the movies, thanks to composers like Leonard Rosenman and David Raksin. Rosenman’s landmark score for “The Cobweb” (1955) is credited as the first predominantly twelve-tone score written for a motion picture. Raksin, the composer of “Laura,” also employed a tone row in the Edgar Allan Poe mystery, “The Man with a Cloak” (1951).
Interestingly, Schoenberg, the creator of “Pierrot Lunaire” and “Moses und Aaron,” was also a great fan of Hopalong Cassidy. Like Walt Whitman, an admittedly strange comparison, Schoenberg contained multitudes.
Happy birthday, Arnie!
“Variations for Orchestra,” conducted by Bruno Maderna
“Pierrot Lunaire”
With goats!
A kinder, gentler Schoenberg – the Suite for String Orchestra, given its premiere in Los Angeles in 1935:
Stravinsky in Hollywood
Schoenberg in home movies – on the tennis court, naturally – with Gershwin and others. (Gershwin appears around 2:20.)
