An unavoidable desire
to create
“What is important for the lucid ordering of the work – for its crystallisation – is that all the Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist in motion and make the life-sap rise must be properly subjugated before they intoxicate us, and must finally be made to submit to the law: Apollo demands it.”
Impossible to claim, therefore, that Igor Stravinsky is a composer of unrestrained excesses! Stravinsky referred in his revelations on composing, Poetics of Music, to the classical correlation between Dionysos and Apollo, excess and control, emo and ratio. By doing so, Stravinsky endowed his neoclassical writing with a certain philosophical permanence. It goes without saying that this ancient correlation, in which Dionysian drive evaporates into Apollonian control, should be tested out in the finales of Stravinsky’s ‘mythological’ compositions. Stravinsky, in fact, always created a remarkably Apollonian musical catharsis in these works. That is how the ‘operatorium’ Oedipus rex ends, with the literally blinding sense of guilt felt by Oedipus whose slowly fading heartbeat drives him to just within the city boundaries of Thebes. The ballet Apollo ends with the ephemeral deification of Apollo; the melodrama of Perséphone continues to contemplate the renewal of life in the closing bars; while the ballet Orpheus closes, full of significance, with the ascension of Orpheus’ lyre into heaven. However, even if one leaves aside these ‘mythologically’ coloured compositions, Stravinsky was always anxious to produce a final, Apollonian cleansing. Anyone who has experienced, live, the horrifyingly still finale of his ballet The Fairy’s Kiss, will know how impassive Apollonian Stravinsky can be.
‘Impassive’ is also the adjective sometimes used to describe Stravinsky’s religious music, so it will be no surprise to learn that this part of his oeuvre is less well known than his early, arrhythmic, chest-beating ballet compositions. In an attempt to move away from romantic expression, Stravinsky shifted towards a musical language that was simple in idea, pure in form and straightforward in composition, as well as being deliberately unsophisticated. Let us, once again, hear the master himself: “Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature,… If music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality.” And further: “The essential aim of music is to promote a communion, a union of man with his fellow-men and with the Supreme Being.”
Stravinsky’s style-conscious objectivity and apparent reserve appear to have been extremely handy when it came to writing religious music. It is as if the composer tried to give Apollo a religious aura in this part of his oeuvre. There is indeed a hint of the same Apollonian control with which Stravinsky wrapped his attractive mythologies, but he rephrased his religious compositions to produce uncompromising austerity. His gradually increasing occupation with religious themes was even reflected at the end of his life in his interest in serial (referring to ‘rows’) composition techniques.
Stravinsky’s religious discretion should never be confused with cerebral hermetism; perhaps this is best illustrated in his most famous ‘religious’ work, the Symphony of Psalms. The first movement of this composition is based on Psalm 39 which focuses on a dying person’s supplication: “Hear my prayer, O Lord, listen to my cry for help; be not deaf to my weeping. For I dwell with you as an alien, a stranger, as all my fathers were. Look away from me, that I may rejoice again before I depart and am no more.” The second movement responds to this plea with the following verses from Psalm 40: “I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear and put their trust in the Lord.” The ‘new song’ mentioned here can be heard in the third and last movement of the Symphony of Psalms in which the whole song of praise in Psalm 150 resounds.
This spiritual journey is reflected in the music. Stravinsky opens his Symphony of Psalms with fidgety rhythms and nervous wails which fit in perfectly with the religious desperation of the text being sung. The second movement is a perfect representation of Stravinsky’s Apollonian dictum: in the same way as God places man – in his downcast state – back on safe ground, Stravinsky forces the orchestra and choir into the most rigid of all musical forms, the fugue – in this case a double fugue. In the closing movement, where the ‘new song’ resounds, Stravinsky alternates jubilant happiness with devote introspection, and concludes with an unworldly awe (a surprisingly subdued rendering on the word ‘dominum’). Thus, we do not need a great deal of imagination to follow the story of spiritual upheaval in the Symphony of Psalms; it conveys us via rigid control and supremacy (the fugue) towards apology, apotheosis and contemplation.
Stravinsky wrote very little music for liturgical settings. There are three short choral works for the Orthodox liturgy, an anthem written on a text by TS Eliot, and just one composition for the Mass. Stravinsky’s Mass was not written to commission, but composed on his own initiative. Although it shares a proclamation of belief with the Symphony of Psalms, it lacks musical theatricality. Stravinsky scored his Mass for only four-part choir plus 10 wind players, with a surprising lack of musical rhetoric. Both these facts indicate that he wanted to focus on the essence of the Mass text. In addition, the archaic scoring (Stravinsky preferred choirboys to women’s voices) and the fact that he chose the Latin version of the text, emphasise his desire for compositional purity. During the process of composing, he listened to Mozart’s Masses; these he criticised as “rococo-operatic sweets-of-sin”, so there is no point in searching for neoclassicism in his Mass. If Stravinsky did have a model in mind, then it was the art of composing a Mass as demonstrated by polyphonic composers such as Guillaume de Machaut. Almost the whole repertory of Renaissance Mass technique is manifested here: Gregorian paraphrase, syllabic chants, homophonic choir passages alternating with polyphonic interweaving, and antiphonal question-and-answer games, and the occasional decoration on words such as ‘Gloria’ or ‘Sanctus’.
Stravinsky’s religious feelings fired him to write orchestral works such as the Symphony of Psalms as well as strictly liturgical compositions such as the Mass. Between these two extremes, the eccentric Russian explored a wide range of related or intermediate, and religiously charged, forms. As would be expected of a devote neoclassicist, Stravinsky was not above creating a tasteful arrangement or paraphrase, his orchestration of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Choral-Variationen über das Weihnachtslied ‘Vom Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her’ being the most famous example. Stravinsky did not just place the original choral variations in a completely new setting, he added even more counterpoint lines to Bach’s already chock-full vocal interplay. It was a daring move because, by supplementing this almost too familiar composition (described by Milton Babbitt as “the cornerstone of canonic writing”), Stravinsky created an extravagantly layered network. Remarkably, the composer did not merely add a few modern touches at random; he also inserted ‘interfering’ little motifs and melodies totally according to Baroque rules.
Monumentum pro Gesualdo Venosa ad CD Annum is another of Stravinsky’s ‘recompositions’. The rather prosaic title says it all; it is a work written in memory of the 400th birthday of Carlo Gesualdo. It was easy to see that, sooner or later during his foray into neoclassicism, Stravinsky would stumble upon this illustrious Renaissance composer. The crunching melody lines and the intense expression that make Gesualdo’s eccentric Renaissance music so unique must have sounded very familiar to him. However, instead of paraphrasing this music, Stravinsky showed his respect for his older colleague by re-composing three of his madrigals, although ‘recomposition’ is perhaps an exaggeration. In fact, Stravinsky only tackled the original score in the case of the first madrigal (Asciugate i begli occhi). The other two madrigals (Ma tu, cagion di quella and Belta poi che t’assenti) he patched up orchestrally without really adding anything new. In the first madrigal, however, Stravinsky did his best to interpolate himself in the original material. The first 24 bars follow the Gesualdo madrigal obediently, but after that Stravinsky starts to meditate a little over what went before and then switches to a free adaptation of the rest of Gesualdo’s material. Stravinsky replaces the original, rather monotonous, setting with a scintillating vocal interplay, but ends by “re-instating” Gesualdo’s harmonies.
Although Stravinsky’s Monumentum is not religiously inspired as such, it nevertheless reflects something of his increasing interest in exerting control over the interweaving of melody lines. This interest ultimately drove him to the boundaries of serialism, and even beyond. By studying twelve-tone techniques, baroque counterpoint rules and Renaissance interplay of voices, Stravinsky tried constantly to get a better grip on reality (on what might be called the Dionysian chaos) as he got older. He was made for this task: “Since I myself was created, I cannot help having the desire to create”. Should we link Stravinsky’s growing fascination for control to his religious attitude? For the time being, that has to remain an open question. One thing you can be certain of: this was the expression of his lifelong attempt to achieve Apollonian control.

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