Natasha's Dance

7

The Revolution found Stravinsky in Clarens, Switzerland, where he had been stranded behind German lines since the outbreak of war in 1914. 'All my thoughts are with you in these unforgettable days of happiness', he wrote to his mother in Petrograd on hearing of the downfall of the monarchy in 1917.¹⁴³ Stravinsky had high hopes of the Revolution. In 1914 he had told the French writer Romain Rolland that he was 'counting on a revolution after the war to bring down the dynasty and establish a Slavic United States'. He claimed for Russia, as Rolland put it, 'the role of a splendid and healthy barbarism, pregnant with the seeds of new ideas that will change the thinking of the West'.¹⁴⁴ But Stravinsky's disillusionment was swift and emphatic. In the autumn of 1917 his beloved estate at Ustilug was ransacked and destroyed by the peasantry. For years he did not know its fate - though there were signs that it had been destroyed. Rummaging through a bookstall in Moscow in the 1950s, the conductor Gennady Rozh-destvensky found the title page of Debussy's Preludes (Book Two) inscribed by the composer 'To entertain my friend Igor Stravinsky': it had come from Ustilug.¹⁴⁵ Not knowing what had happened to the place for all these years could only have intensified Stravinsky's sense of loss. Ustilug was where Stravinsky had spent the happy summers of his childhood years - it was the patch of Russia which he felt to be his own - and his profound loathing of the Soviet regime was intimately linked to the anger which he felt at being robbed of his own past. (Nabokov's politics were similarly defined by his 'lost childhood' at the family estate of Vyra, a vanished world he retrieved through Speak, Memory.)

19. Stravinsky transcribes a folk song sung by a peasant gusli player on the

porch of the Stravinsky house at Ustilug, 1909. Stravinsky's mother, Anna,

holds Theodore, his son

Stravinsky did the same through his music. Cut off from Russia, he felt an intense longing for his native land. His notebooks from the war years are filled with notations of Russian peasant songs which reappeared in Four Russian Songs (1918-19). The final song in this quartet was taken from an Old Believer story about a sinful man who cannot find a path back towards God. Its words read like a lament of the exile's tortured soul: 'Snowstorms and blizzards close all the roads to Thy Kingdom.' Stravinsky seldom talked about this brief and haunting song. Yet his notebooks show that he laboured over it, and that he made frequent changes to the score. The song's five pages are the product of no fewer than thirty-two pages of musical sketching. It suggests how much he struggled to find the right musical expression for these words.¹⁴⁶

Stravinsky laboured even longer on The Peasant Wedding (Svad-ebka), a work begun before the First World War and first performed in Paris (as Let Noces) nine years later, in 1923. He worked on it

longer than on any other score. The ballet had its origins in his final trip to Ustilug. Stravinsky had been working on the idea of a ballet that would re-create the wedding rituals of the peasantry and, knowing that his library contained useful transcriptions of peasant songs, he made a hurried trip to Ustilug to fetch them just before the outbreak of war. The sources became, for him, a sort of talisman of the Russia he had lost. For several years he worked on these folk songs, trying to distil the essence of his people's musical language, and striving to combine it with the austere style which he had first developed in The Rite of Spring. He thinned out his instrumental formula, rejecting the large Romantic orchestra for the small ensemble, using pianos, cimbaloms and percussion instruments to create a simpler, more mechanistic sound. But his truly momentous discovery was that, in contrast to the language and the music of the West, the accents of spoken Russian verse were ignored when that verse was sung. Looking through the song books he had retrieved from Ustilug, Stravinsky suddenly realized that the stress in folk songs often fell on the 'wrong' syllable. 'The recognition of the musical possibilities inherent in this fact was one of the most rejoicing discoveries of my life,' he explained to his musical assistant Robert Craft; 'I was like a man who suddenly finds that his finger can be bent from the second joint as well as from the first.'¹⁴⁷ The freedom of accentuation in the peasant song had a clear affinity with the ever-shifting rhythms of his own music in The Rite of Spring; both had the effect of sparkling play or dance. Stravinsky now began writing music for the pleasure of the sound of individual words, or for the joy of puns and rhyming games, like the Russian limericks (Pribautki) which he set to music in 1918. But beyond such entertainments, his discovery came as a salvation for the exiled composer. It was as if he had found a new homeland in this common language with the Russian peasantry. Through music he could recover the Russia he had lost.

This was the idea behind The Peasant Wedding - an attempt, in his own words, to re-create in art an essential ur-Russia, the ancient peasant Russia that had been concealed by the thin veneer of European civilization since the eighteenth century. It was

the holy Russia of the Orthodox, a Russia stripped of its parasitic vegetation; its bureaucracy from Germany, a certain strain of English liberalism much in

fashion with the aristocracy; its scientism (alas!), its 'intellectuals' and their inane and bookish faith in progress; it is the Russia of before Peter the Great and before Europeanism… a peasant, but above all Christian, Russia, and truly the only Christian land in Europe, the one which laughs and cries (laughs and cries both at once without always really knowing which is which) in The Peasant Wedding, the one we saw awaken to herself in confusion and magnificently full of impurities in The Rite of Spring.¹⁴⁸

Stravinsky had hit upon a form of music that expressed the vital energy and spirit of the people - a truly national music in the Stasovian sense. Stravinsky had drafted the first part of The Peasant Wedding by the end of 1914. When he played it to Diaghilev, the impresario broke down in tears and said it was 'the most beautiful and the most purely Russian creation of our Ballet'.¹⁴⁹

The Peasant Wedding was a work of musical ethnography. In later years Stravinsky tried to deny this. Immersed in the cosmopolitan culture of interwar Paris, and driven by his hatred of the Soviet regime, he made a public show of distancing himself from his Russian heritage. But he was not convincing. The ballet was precisely what Stravinsky claimed that it was not: a direct expression of the music and the culture of the peasantry. Based on a close reading of the folklore sources, and drawing all its music from the peasants' wedding songs, the ballet's whole conception was to re-create the peasant wedding ritual as a work of art on stage.

Life and art were intimately linked. The Russian peasant wedding was itself performed as a series of communal rituals, each accompanied by ceremonial songs, and at certain junctures there were ceremonial dances like the khorovod. In the south of Russia, from where Stravinsky's folklore sources were derived, the wedding rite had four main parts. First there was the matchmaking, when two appointed elders, one male and one female, made the first approach to the household of the bride, followed by the inspection of the bride, when by custom she sang her lament for her family and her home. Next came the betrothal, the complex negotiations over the dowry and exchange of property and the sealing of the contract with a vodka toast, which was witnessed by the whole community and marked symbolically by the singing of the song of 'Cosmas and Demian', the patron saints of blacksmiths

(for, as the peasants said, all marriages were 'forged'). Then came the prenuptial rituals like the washing of the bride and the devicbnik (the unplaiting of the maiden's braid), accompanied by more laments, which were followed on the morning of the wedding by the blessing of the bride with the family icon and then, amid the wailing of the village girls, her departure for the church. Finally there was the wedding ceremony itself, followed by the marriage feast. Stravinsky rearranged these rituals into four tableaux in a way that emphasized the coming together of the bride and groom as 'two rivers into one':1) 'At the Bride's'; 2) 'At the Groom's'; 3) 'Seeing off the Bride'; and 4) 'The Wedding Feast'. The peasant wedding was taken as a symbol of the family's communion in the village culture of these ancient rituals. It was portrayed as a collective rite - the binding of the bridal couple to the patriarchal culture of the peasant community - rather than as a romantic union between two individuals.

It was a commonplace in the Eurasian circles in which Stravinsky moved in Paris that the greatest strength of the Russian people, and the thing that set them apart from the people of the West, was their voluntary surrender of the individual will to collective rituals and forms of life. This sublimation of the individual was precisely what had attracted Stravinsky to the subject of the ballet in the first place -it was a perfect vehicle for the sort of peasant music he had been composing since The Rite of Spring. In The Peasant Wedding there was no room for emotion in the singing parts. The voices were supposed to merge as one, as they did in church chants and peasant singing, to create a sound Stravinsky once described as 'perfectly homogeneous, perfectly impersonal, and perfectly mechanical'. The same effect was produced by the choice of instruments (the result of a ten-year search for an essential 'Russian' sound): four pianos (on the stage), cimbalom and bells and percussion instruments - all of which were scored to play 'mechanically'. The reduced size and palette of the orchestra (it was meant to sound like a peasant wedding band) were reflected in the muted colours of Goncharova's sets. The great colourist abandoned the vivid reds and bold peasant patterns of her original designs for the minimalist pale blue of the sky and the deep browns of the earth which were used in the production. The choreography (by Bronislava Nijinska) was equally impersonal - the corps de ballet moving all as

one, like some vast machine made of human beings, and carrying the whole of the storyline. 'There were no leading parts', Nijinska explained; 'each member would blend through the movement into the whole… [and] the action of the separate characters would be expressed, not by each one individually, but rather by the action of the whole ensemble.'¹⁵⁰ It was the perfect ideal of the Russian peasantry.