The Rightness of His Wrongs

"Mark him well," Diaghilev said of the 27-year-old Igor Stravinsky. "He is a man on the eve of celebrity." When celebrity came, Stravinsky had a long day of it: a stormy dawn of controversy, a high blaze of creative influence, a waning afternoon of waspish polemics and high-priced memorabilia. Last week the night finally fell, as Stravinsky died in Manhattan at 88.* It was the end of six decades of dominance, in which he had incalculably shaped the musical thought of generations to come. It was the end, too, of what Conductor Colin Davis called "a chain of great composers left us by the 19th century, and a line of music that began with the early church music of the 14th century." With his passing, the music world lost its most vital link with both the future and the past.

The young Stravinsky's artistic calling card was a bombshell: The Rite of Spring, a sophisticated evocation of primitive myths and energies completed in 1913. Conductor Pierre Monteux recalled that when he first heard the composer run through it on the piano, bobbing up and down to accentuate its jagged rhythms, "I was convinced that he was raving mad." Later, when the work had its Paris premiere at the Theatre des Champs Elysees, many members of the audience thought so too. They erupted in perhaps the most notorious riot of music history, booing, fighting one another, pelting Monteux and the players with programs and hats.

No Repeats. Polytonal, polymodal, polyrhythmic, The Rite took some getting used to. It did not so much reject conventional harmony, as did the twelve-tone works of Arnold Schoenberg. Rather it brought contrasting tonalities crashing dangerously into one another. With its unexpected clustered stresses and pile-driving climaxes, it raised rhythm to an unprecedented preeminence. Jarring the 20th century out of its lingering romanticism, it was more than "the cornerstone of modern music," as Pierre Boulez calls it. It was one of those works, like Joyce's Ulysses and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, that announced a new consciousness.

The Rite influenced nearly every composer who followed except the serialists--and Stravinsky himself, whose genius never repeated itself. His earlier work had been marked by the colorful nationalistic flavor of his native Russian tradition. The son of famed St. Petersburg Basso Feodor Stravinsky, he was raised in an aristocratic and intellectual atmosphere and became a favored pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov. His first durable score, the orchestral fantasy Fireworks, was written in 1908 as a wedding present for Rimsky's daughter Nadia.

Freeze-Dried Piquancy. Fireworks dazzled Diaghilev, and the impresario commissioned Stravinsky to write a ballet. The result was the Tartared and feathered The Firebird (1910). This was followed a year later by the even more brilliant Petrouchka, in which the solo piano part projected a Pierrot-like puppet at a Russian fair--a part realized on the stage by the great Nijinsky. Both works were to remain Stravinsky's most popular with the public, to his eventual dismay. They also established his lifelong identification with the dance, which in later years produced notable collaborations with George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet.

In the years following The Rite, Stravinsky narrowed down to spare and unusual combinations of instruments and voices. Les Noces, composed between 1914 and 1917, was scored for four vocal soloists, chorus, four pianos and percussion. In 1918 came L'Histoire du Soldat, piquant, freeze-dried chamber music for seven players. Works like Pulcinella (1920) and The Fairy's Kiss (1928), based on themes of Pergolesi and Tchaikovsky, crowned Stravinsky's neoclassical shift away from the Dionysian revels of his youth. Oedipus Rex (1927) and Apollon Musagetes (1928) eloquently confirmed not only a new sobriety and austerity but also a new allegiance to the Apollonian ideal of lucidity and order.

Tending the Image. The astonishing thing about Stravinsky's development up to this point was that unlike Schoenberg, he never turned his back entirely on the tonalities of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries or on the modal style of earlier eras. In the 1940s, Stravinsky, always a wandering cosmopolite, moved to Hollywood, near Schoenberg's home. Yet the two rivals maintained a chilly distance from their respective hilltops. It was only in 1953, two years after Schoenberg's death, that Stravinsky finally embraced serialism. Of the dozen or so twelve-tone works he produced prior to his death, the best by far were Agon (1957), Movements (1960) for piano and orchestra, and the "Huxley" Variations (1965).

Such pieces, though much less doctrinaire than Schoenberg, were probably the least understood and least performed of Stravinsky's whole corpus. Yet like the rest of his work, they were unmistakably Stravinsky, and their quirky unconventionality continued to open fresh byways to other composers. In the words of Aaron Copland: "It is the rightness of his 'wrong' solutions that fascinates one. The notes themselves [seem] surprised at finding themselves situated where they are."

One indisputable factor in Stravinsky's conversion to serialism was the arrival within his household of Schoenberg's former research assistant, the young American conductor Rober Craft. In addition to becoming Stravinsky's rehearsal conductor, literary collaborator, companion and surrogate son, Craft was the unofficial custodian of the Stravinskian image. In this role especially through a series of remarkable "conversations with" books, he enabled a wide audience to savor the composer's pungent personality.

Bisexual Hairdo. Despite Stravinsky's fragile, birdlike appearance (in his prime, 5 ft. 3 in., 120 lbs.), he had indomitable physical zest. Repeated onslaughts of lung congestion, blood clotting and surgery reduced his body to "a ruin," according to his doctor. Yet until the end, which was attributed to arteriosclerotic heart disease, every one of his maladies seemed somewhat curable, save for his hypochondria. The remarkable features that had been caricatured by such friends as Cocteau and Picasso --bull-fiddle nose, guitar-like ears, pince-nez, natty mustache--remained mobile and alert. Stravinsky carried on with the conversational crowds he loved so well, often speaking to one guest in French, another in English, or in Russian to his wife Vera, a former costume designer for Diaghilev. And always there was plenty of good food and wine.

Nor did the 30-year-old Ballantine's Scotch that he consumed in moderate rations (down from the half quart a day of former times) ever dull his tart, epigrammatic wit. Conductors, critics and colleagues regularly felt its sting. Stravinsky once said of Leopold Stokowski that "he must have spent an hour a day trying to find the perfect bisexual hairdo." He called New Yorker Music Critic Winthrop Sargeant "W.S. Deaf." Of a new Gian Carlo Menotti opera, he said, "It is 'farther out' than anything I've seen in a decade; in the wrong direction, of course." He also took on broader targets. The technology of today's recording engineers, he complained, removed natural sound and human errors, producing "a super-glossy, chem-fab music substitute that was never heard on sea or land, including Philadelphia." And to him, the one conspicuous success of Puccini's La Fanciulla del West was "the attempt to make it American--simple-minded."

Jaunty Note. Not surprisingly for a composer who lived to such a ripe age, Stravinsky wrote his own requiem. This week his body was to be flown to Venice for burial in the Russian corner of the cemetery of San Michele. His Requiem Canticles (1966) were to be sung at a final service in the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. All this is in accordance with the composer's own devout wishes. Still, even Stravinsky himself might have liked the additional jaunty note of the epitaph he tossed off nine years ago, before leaving for an African conducting tour: "If a lion eats me, you will hear the news from him. He will say, The old man was tough, but a tasty meal.' "

*Sibelius was the only major composer to live longer (91). Schuetz and Verdi died at 87, Telemann and Saint-Saens at 86, and Vaughan Williams and Richard Strauss at 85.

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