Читать книгу The Rest is Noise - Alex Ross - Страница 14

May 29, 1913, was an unusually hot day for Paris in the spring: the temperature reached eighty-five degrees. By late afternoon a crowd had gathered in front of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, on the avenue Montaigne, where Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was holding its spring gala. “There, for the expert eye, were all the makings of a scandal,” recalled Jean Cocteau, then twenty-three. “A fashionable audience in décolletage, outfitted in pearls, egret headdresses, plumes of ostrich; and, side by side with the tails and feathers, the jackets, head-bands, and showy rags of that race of aesthetes who randomly acclaim the new in order to express their hatred of the loges … a thousand nuances of snobbery, super-snobbery, counter-snobbery …” The better-heeled part of the crowd had grown wary of Diaghilev’s methods. Disquieting rumors were circulating about the new musical work on the program—The Rite of Spring, by the young Russian composer Igor Stravinsky—and also about the matching choreography by Nijinsky. The theater, then brand-new, caused a scandal of its own. With its steel-concrete exterior and amphitheater-like seating plan, it was deemed too severe, too Germanic. One commentator compared it to a zeppelin moored in the middle of the street.

Diaghilev, in a press release, promised “a new thrill that will doubtless inspire heated discussion.” He did not lie. The program began innocuously, with a revival of the Ballets Russes’ Chopin fantasy Les Sylphides. After a pause, the theater darkened again, and high, falsetto-like bassoon notes floated out of the orchestra. Strands of melody intertwined like vegetation bursting out of the earth—“a sacred terror in the noonday sun,” Stravinsky called it, in a description that had been published that morning. The audience listened to the opening section of the Rite in relative silence, although the increasing density and dissonance of the music caused mutterings, titters, whistles, and shouts. Then, at the beginning of the second section, a dance for adolescents titled “The Augurs of Spring,” a quadruple shock arrived, in the form of harmony, rhythm, image, and movement. At the outset of the section, the strings and horns play a crunching discord, consisting of an F-flat-major triad and an E-flat dominant seventh superimposed. They are one semitone apart (F-flat being the same as E-natural), and they clash at every node. A steady pulse propels the chord, but accents land every which way, on and off the beat:

one two three four five six seven eight

one two three four five six seven eight

one two three four five six seven eight

one two three four five six seven eight

Even Diaghilev quivered a little when he first heard the music. “Will it last a very long time this way?” he asked. Stravinsky replied, “Till the end, my dear.” The chord repeats some two hundred times. Meanwhile, Nijinsky’s choreography discarded classical gestures in favor of near-anarchy. As the ballet historian Lynn Garafola recounts, “The dancers trembled, shook, shivered, stamped; jumped crudely and ferociously, circled the stage in wild khorovods.” Behind the dancers were pagan landscapes painted by Nicholas Roerich—hills and trees of weirdly bright color, shapes from a dream.

Howls of discontent went up from the boxes, where the wealthiest onlookers sat. Immediately, the aesthetes in the balconies and the standing room howled back. There were overtones of class warfare in the proceedings. The combative composer Florent Schmitt was heard to yell either “Shut up, bitches of the seizième!” or “Down with the whores of the seizième!”—a provocation of the grandes dames of the sixteenth arrondissement. The literary hostess Jeanne Mühlfeld, not to be outmaneuvered, exploded into contemptuous laughter. Little more of the score was heard after that. “One literally could not, throughout the whole performance, hear the sound of music,” Gertrude Stein recalled, no doubt overstating for effect. “Our attention was constantly distracted by a man in the box next to us flourishing his cane, and finally in a violent altercation with an enthusiast in the box next to him, his cane came down and smashed the opera hat the other had just put on in defiance. It was all incredibly fierce.”

The scene superficially resembled Schoenberg’s “scandal concert,” which shook up Vienna in March of the same year. But the bedlam on the avenue Montaigne was a typical Parisian affair, of a kind that took place once or twice a year; Nijinsky’s orgasmic Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun” had caused similar trouble the previous season. Soon enough, Parisian listeners realized that the language of the Rite was not so unfamiliar; it teemed with plainspoken folk-song melodies, common chords in sparring layers, syncopations of irresistible potency. In a matter of days, confusion turned into pleasure, boos into bravos. Even at the first performance, Stravinsky, Nijinsky, and the dancers had to bow four or five times for the benefit of the applauding faction. Subsequent performances were packed, and at each one the opposition dwindled. At the second, there was noise only during the latter part of the ballet; at the third, “vigorous applause” and little protest. At a concert performance of the Rite one year later, “unprecedented exaltation” and a “fever of adoration” swept over the crowd, and admirers mobbed Stravinsky in the street afterward, in a riot of delight.

The Rite, whose first part ends with a stampede for full orchestra titled “Dance of the Earth,” prophesied a new type of popular art—lowdown yet sophisticated, smartly savage, style and muscle intertwined.

It epitomized the “second avant-garde” in classical composition, the post-Debussy strain that sought to drag the art out of Faustian “novel spheres” and into the physical world. For much of the nineteenth century, music had been a theater of the mind; now composers would create a music of the body. Melodies would follow the patterns of speech; rhythms would match the energy of dance; musical forms would be more concise and clear; sonorities would have the hardness of life as it is really lived.

A phalanx of European composers—Stravinsky in Russia, Béla Bartók in Hungary, Leoš Janáček in what would become the Czech Republic, Maurice Ravel in France, and Manuel de Falla in Spain, to name some of the principals—devoted themselves to folk song and other musical remnants of a pre-urban life, trying to cast off the refinements of the city dweller. “Our slender bodies cannot hide in clothing,” goes the text of Bartók’s Cantata profana, a fable of savage boys who turn into stags. “We must drink our fill not from your silver goblets but from cool mountain springs.”

Above all, composers from the Romance and Slavonic nations—France, Spain, Italy, Russia, and the countries of Eastern Europe—strained to cast off the German influence. For a hundred years or more, masters from Austria and Germany had been marching music into remote regions of harmony and form. Their progress ran parallel to Germany’s gestation as a nation-state and its rise as a world power. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 sounded the alarm among other European nations that the new German empire intended to be more than a major player on the international stage—that it had designs of supremacy. So Debussy and Satie began to seek a way out of the hulking fortresses of Beethovenian symphonism and Wagnerian opera.

But the real break came with the First World War. Even before it was over, Satie and various young Parisians renounced fin-de-siècle solemnity and appropriated music-hall tunes, ragtime, and jazz; they also partook of the noisemaking spirit of Dada, which had enlivened Zurich during the war. Their earthiness was urban, not rural—frivolity with a militant edge. Later, in the twenties, Paris-centered composers, Stravinsky included, turned toward pre-Romantic forms;

the past served as another kind of folklore. Whether the model was Transylvanian folk melody, hot jazz, or the arias of Pergolesi, Teutonism was the common enemy. Music became war carried on by other means.

In Search of the Real: Janáček, Bartók, Ravel

Van Gogh, in his garden at Arles, was haunted by the idea that the conventions of painting prevented him from seizing the reality before him. He had tried abstraction, he wrote to Émile Bernard, but had run up against a wall. Now he was fighting to put the brute facts of nature on canvas, to get the olive trees right, the colors of the soil and the sky. “The great thing,” he declared, “is to gather new vigor in reality, without any preconceived plan or Parisian prejudice.” This was the essence of naturalism in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century art. It surfaced in works as various as Monet’s transcendent visions of train stations and bales of hay, Cézanne’s hyper-vivid still lifes, and Gauguin’s steamy visions of Tahiti. It animated various other contemporaneous cultural phenomena, such as Zola’s novels of miners and prostitutes, Maxim Gorky’s exacting portraits of peasant life, and Isadora Duncan’s free, anti formal dancing. In whatever medium, artists worked to dispel artifice and convey the materiality of things.

What would it mean for music to render life “just as it is,” in van Gogh’s phrase? Composers had been pondering that question for centuries, and, at various times and in different ways, they had infused their work with the rhythms of everyday life. The Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder had proposed that composers find inspiration in Volkslieder, or folk songs—a phrase he coined. Countless nineteenth-century composers installed folkish themes in symphonic and operatic forms. But they tended to take their tunes from published collections, thereby filtering them through the conventions of musical notation—major and minor scales, regular bar lines, strict rhythm, and the rest. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, scholars in the nascent field of ethnomusicology began to apply more meticulous, quasi-scientific methods, and came to the realization that Western notation was inadequate to the task. Debussy, browsing through the multicultural sounds that were on display at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889, had noticed how the music fell between the cracks of the Western notational system.

The advent of the recording cylinder meant that researchers no longer needed to rely on paper to preserve the songs. They could make recorded copies of the music and study it until they understood how it worked. The machine changed how people listened to folk music; it made them aware of deep cultural differences. Of course, the machine was itself helping to erase those differences, by spreading American-style pop music as a global lingua franca.

Percy Grainger, the Australian-born maverick pianist-composer, was among the first to apply the phonograph’s lessons. In the summer of 1906, Grainger ventured out into small towns in the English countryside with an Edison Bell cylinder, charming the locals with his rugged, unorthodox personality. Back home, he played his recordings over and over, slowing down the playback to catch the details. He paid attention to the notes between the notes—the bending of pitch, the coarsening of timbre, the speeding up and slowing down of pulse. He then tried to replicate that freedom in his compositions. In 1908 he heard a Devon sailor sing the sea shanty “Shallow Brown,” and later fashioned from it a symphonic song for soprano, chorus, and a unique chamber orchestra that included guitars, ukuleles, and mandolins. The ensemble creates a fantastic simulacrum of the sea, as pungent as any paragraph in Melville’s Moby-Dick. String tremolos churn like surf, high woodwinds squawk like gulls, lower instruments hint at terrible creatures in the depths. The voice sails above, bursting outside bar lines to drive the emotion home: “Shallow Brown, you’re going to leave me …” With each performance, John Perring, the man whom Grainger originally recorded with his cylinder, sings his song again, and the orchestra preserves the grain of the voice as a machine could never do.

The best way to absorb a culture is to be from it. Three great “realists” in early-twentieth-century music—Janáček, Bartók, and Ravel—were born in villages or outlying towns in their respective homelands: Hukvaldy in Moravia, Nagyszentmiklós in Hungary, and Ciboure in the French Basque country. Although they were trained in the cities, and remained city dwellers for most of their lives, these composers never shook the feeling that they had come from somewhere else.

Janáček’s father served as kantor—schoolmaster and music master—of the remote hamlet of Hukvaldy. As Mirka Zemanová writes in her Janáček biography, he was hardly better off than the peasants he taught; the family lived in one room of the damp, rundown school house. At the age of eleven, Leoš received a scholarship to attend choir school in Brno, and his parents welcomed the award because they could not afford to feed all their children. He went on to study in Prague, Leipzig, and Vienna, compensating for his humble origins with a fierce work ethic. In the 1880s he founded the Brno organ school, which later became the Brno Conservatory, and began to enjoy local success as a composer in a Romantic-nationalist vein.

Then, on a trip home in 1885, Janáček experienced the street music of his village with fresh ears. In a later essay he recalled: “Flashing movements, the faces sticky with sweat; screams, whooping, the fury of fiddlers’ music: it was like a picture glued on to a limpid grey background.” Like van Gogh, he would paint the peasants as they were, not in their Sunday best.

When Janáček began collecting Czech, Moravian, and Slovakian folk songs, he wasn’t listening for raw material that could be “ennobled” in classical forms. Instead, he wanted to ennoble himself. Melody, he decided, should fit the pitches and rhythms of ordinary speech, sometimes literally. Janáček did research in cafés and other public places, transcribing on music paper the conversations he heard around him. For example, when a student says “Dobry večer,” or “Good evening,” to his professor, he employs a falling pattern, a high note followed by three at a lower pitch. When the same student utters the same greeting to a pretty servant girl, the last note is slightly higher than the others, implying coy familiarity. Such minute differences, Janáček thought, could engender a new operatic naturalism; they could show an “entire being in a photographic instant.”

The oldest of the chief innovators of early-twentieth-century music, Janáček was almost fifty when he finished his first masterpiece, the opera Jenůfa, in 1903. Like Pelléas and Salome, written in the same period, Jenůfa, is a direct setting of a prose text. The melodies not only imitate the rise and fall of conversational speech but also illustrate the characteristics of each personality in the drama. For example, there is a marked musical distinction between Jenůfa, a village girl of pure and somewhat foolish innocence who has a baby out of wedlock with the local rake, and the Kostelnička (sextoness), her devout stepmother, who eventually murders the baby in an effort to preserve the family reputation. In the opening scene of Act II, the Kostelnička sings in abrupt, acerbic phrases, sometimes leaping over large intervals and sometimes jabbing away at a single note. Jenůfa’s melodies, by contrast, follow more easygoing, ingratiating contours. Behind the individual characterizations are pinwheeling patterns that mimic the turning of the local mill wheel, the meticulous operation of social codes, or the grinding of fate. The harmonies often have a disconcerting brightness, all flashing treble and rumbling bass. The coexistence of expressive freedom and notated rigidity in the playing suggests rural life in all its complexity.

Jenůfa seems destined to end in tragedy. The heroine’s baby is found beneath the ice of the local river; the villagers advance on her with vengeful intent. Then the Kostelnička confesses that she did the deed, and they redirect their rage. Jenůfa is left alone with her cousin Laca, who has loved her silently while she has pursued the good-for-nothing Števa. Time stops for a luxurious instant: the orchestra wallows in elemental C major. Then, over pulsing, heavy-breathing chords, violins and soprano begin to sing a new melody in the vicinity of B-flat—a sustained note followed by a quickly shaking figure, which moves like a bird in flight, gliding, beating its wings, dipping down, and soaring again. This is Jenůfa’s loving resignation as she gives Laca permission to walk away from the ugliness surrounding her. Another theme surfaces, this one coursing down the octave. It is Laca answering: “I would bear far more than that for you. What does the world matter, when we have each other?” The two sing each other’s melodies in turn, the melodies merge, and the opera ends in a tonal sunburst.

Janáček, like Mahler, talked about listening to the chords of nature. While working on his cantata Amarus, he wrote: “Innumerable notes ring in my ears, in every octave; they have voices like small, faint telegraph bells.” These natural sounds are linked to the opera’s tough-natured emotional world, the hard-won love of a man and a woman in the wake of a terrible crime. No wonder audiences in Vienna and other European capitals were struck by Jenůfa when it finally made its way past Czech borders in the year 1918. Following the devastation of war, Janáček had unleashed the shock of hope.

Bartók’s father, like Janáček’s, was a teacher who worked with the rural population, running an agricultural school that aimed to introduce modern farming methods to the Hungarian countryside. He died young, and Bartók’s mother supported the family by giving piano lessons in towns around Hungary. A shy and sickly child, Béla took refuge in music even before he could speak. By the age of four, apparently, he could play forty folk songs with one finger at the piano.

In 1899, at the age of eighteen, Bartók moved to Budapest to study at the Royal Academy of Music. He made his mark first as a pianist of fierce technique and fine expression; his early compositions emulated Liszt, Brahms, and Strauss, whose Ein Heldenleben he transcribed for the piano. But his musical priorities shifted when he read the stories of Maxim Gorky, in which peasants, long scorned or prettified in literature, become flesh-and-blood people. With another gifted young Hungarian composer, Zoltán Kodály, Bartók set about inventing a new brand of folk-based musical realism.

At first, the young Hungarians followed the established formula, collecting folk melodies and concocting handsome accompaniments for them, as if putting them in display cases. Then, after several expeditions into the countryside, Bartók acknowledged the gap between what urban listeners considered folkish—a professional Gypsy band playing a csárdás dance, for example—and what peasants were actually singing and playing. He decided that he had to get as far as possible from what he would later call the “destructive urban influence.”

In his manipulation of folk material, Bartók went rather further than Janáček, who found authenticity in city and country settings alike. There was a certain fanaticism inherent in Bartók’s philosophy; as the scholar Julie Brown observes, his diagnosis of the contaminating influence of cosmopolitan culture was only a step or two away from the noxious racial theorizing that was à la mode in Bayreuth. What saved Bartók from bigotry was his refusal to locate his musical truths in any one place; he heard them equally in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Turkey, and North Africa. The mark of authenticity was not racial but economic; he paid heed mainly to the people on the social margins, those who had lived the toughest lives.

Bartók’s most intense encounter with the Folk took place in 1907, when he went to the Eastern Carpathian Mountains, in Transylvania, to gather songs from Hungarian-speaking Székely villagers. Personal upheaval added urgency to the mission; the composer had fallen in love with a nineteen-year-old violinist named Stefi Geyer, who received his advances first with bemusement and then with alarm. Both the letters he wrote to Geyer that summer and his meticulous notes on Transylvanian songs give the impression that a fenced-off soul is opening itself to the chaos of the outer world.

Like Grainger in England, Bartók brought with him an Edison cylinder, and he listened as the machine listened. He observed the flexible tempo of sung phrases, how they would accelerate in ornamental passages and taper off at the end. He saw how phrases were seldom symmetrical in shape, how a beat or two might be added or subtracted. He savored “bent” notes—shadings above or below the given note—and “wrong” notes that added flavor and bite. He understood how decorative figures could evolve into fresh themes, how common rhythms tied disparate themes together, how songs moved in circles instead of going from point A to point B. Yet he also realized that folk musicians could play in absolutely strict tempo when the occasion demanded it. He came to understand rural music as a kind of archaic avant-garde, through which he could defy all banality and convention.

Emotional rejection can have a radicalizing effect, as Schoenberg’s history in 1907 and 1908 suggests. Bartók, pining for the unavailable Stefi, swung away from Romantic tonality in those same two years. The Violin Concerto No. 1, his main work of this period, shows him still in thrall to a Richard Strauss aesthetic, with a five-note theme representing his beloved at the head of the piece. He planned but did not compose a third movement, which would have shown the “hateful” side of the unfortunate girl. Some of that negative energy spills out in the Fourteen Bagatelles for piano, written in the spring of 1908. A kind of substitution of love objects occurs: in place of Stefi’s leitmotif there are now rusty shards of folk melody, showing the impact of the Transylvanian trip and other research expeditions. The Woman becomes the Folk.

The first Bagatelle begins with a radical harmonic break: the right hand plays roughly in C-sharp minor while the left plays in something like the key of C (in the Phrygian mode). This is “polytonality” or “polymodality,” the juxtaposition of two or more key-areas, and it will play a significant role in early-and mid-twentieth-century music. Bartók probably derived the practice from Strauss and Debussy, but he also liked to attribute it to folk players, who periodically wandered free from their accompanying harmonies.

The Bagatelles, together with subsequent works such as the Two Elegies, Allegro barbaro, the First String Quartet, and the opera Bluebeard’s Castle, veer close to atonality. They make frequent use of Schoenberg’s searing motto chord of two fourths separated by a tri-tone. But Bartók’s ardor for folk melodies prevented him from going over the brink. As the musicologist Judit Frigyesi observes, Hungarian modernists were not prone to annihilating rage of the Viennese type; instead, they sought higher unities, transcendent reconciliations. The philosopher and critic Georg Lukács put it this way: “The essence of art is form: it is to defeat oppositions, to conquer opposing forces, to create coherence from every centrifugal force, from all things that have been deeply and eternally alien to one another before and outside this form. The creation of form is the last judgment over things, a last judgment that redeems all that could be redeemed, that enforces salvation on all things with divine force.” Bartók, likewise, talked about the “highest emotions,” a “great reality.” The artist in his loneliness need not bring about Vienna-style antagonism and scandal; instead, Frigyesi writes, he can stand in for all humanity, becoming a “metaphor for wholeness.”

Bartók’s quest led him both onward and inward. In the first days of June 1913, he boarded a steamer in Marseille, bound for Algeria. His ultimate destination was Biskra, on the northern edge of the Sahara, where, seven years before, Henri Matisse had found the inspiration for his raw, sensual Blue Nude. The trip lasted only two weeks: the composer fell ill with fever and had to retreat to Algiers. He hoped to return the following summer, and researched diets that would have allowed him to stay healthy. But the onset of the First World War put a stop to his plans. His wax-cylinder recordings of North African music remained a prize possession and led to a landmark ethnomusicological essay. They also furnished new compositional ideas, particularly in the area of rhythm. Bartók wrote from Algeria: “The Arabs accompany almost all their songs with percussion instruments; sometimes in a very complicated rhythm (it is chiefly varying accentuations of equal bar lengths that produce the different rhythmic patterns).” This could serve as a description of “The Augurs of Spring” in Stravinsky’s Rite, whose first production was still playing to giddy Paris crowds as Bartók set out for Africa.

Maurice Ravel is a special case among turn-of-the-century “realists.” He was a man both urban and urbane, disinclined to go wandering up a mountainside with an Edison cylinder on his back. Yet, during his brief and brilliant career, he drew on a sizable library of folk material—variously, Spanish, Basque, Corsican, Greek, Hebrew, Javanese, and Japanese. He, too, was a phonographic listener, sensitive to microscopic details of phrasing, texture, and pulse. A gentleman flaneur with unusual powers of empathy, Ravel could spend his day as a man of the crowd, then reconstruct the experience in the privacy of his garret.

Commonly considered the most purely French of composers, Ravel was in fact something of a cultural mutt, part Basque and part Swiss. Although he was taken to Paris when he was four months old, his Basque origins held sway over his imagination, the connection maintained in the songs his mother sang for him. Manuel de Falla judged Ravel’s Spanish-themed works “subtly authentic,” which is a good general description of the composer’s music as a whole. Ravel’s father was a Swiss engineer who helped to pioneer, in unsung ways, the automobile; the Ravel prototype of a gas-powered car perished during the German bombardment of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War. In a sense, Ravel’s music split the difference between his parents’ worlds—his mother’s memories of a folkish past, his father’s dreams of a mechanized future.

In a series of piano works in the first de cade of the new century, Ravel carried out a kind of velvet revolution, renewing the language of music without disturbing the peace. In Jeux d’eau, melody and accompaniment dematerialize into splashing, skittering lines, imitating the movement of water in a fountain. In “Valley of the Bells,” from the cycle Miroirs, novel notation is used to enhance the impression of bell tones resonating in space: the music is spread over three rather than two staves, each line moving at an independent tempo. In “Le Gibet,” from Gaspard de la nuit, ghostly figures rise and fall around a continuously tolling B-flat—a structure that was in itself a new kind of musical narrative, one of proto-minimalist repetition. Falla, in his writings on flamenco, points out that melodies of the “deep song” type often rotate around an obsessively repeated note, and pieces such as “Le Gibet” may allude to the great Andalusian dance, although the one-note pattern could just as well have come from Gregorian chant. Some years later, in the 1928 showpiece Bolero, Ravel would take the aesthetic of repetition to the extreme: for fifteen minutes the orchestra hammers away at a theme in the key of C.

Ravel put his Spanish-Basque heritage proudly on display in the orchestral suite Rapsodie espagnole, first heard in 1908. The Rapsodie calls to mind the explosive colors of Fauvist painting, especially the early work of Matisse. Again, harmonic movement freezes on static sonorities; the narrative is driven by transformations of texture and rhythm. At the climax of “Feria,” the festival finale of the Rapsodie, Ravel creates a dynamic effect of rhythmic layering, superimposing five separate pulses: two against three against four against six against twelve.

In the penultimate bar, in the midst of a quick rush of sound across the entire orchestra, the trombones make a gloriously rude noise—a glissando, a slide from one note to another. This effect was first popularized by Arthur Pryor, the virtuoso slide trombonist in John Philip Sousa’s band, who featured it in such numbers as “Coon Band Contest” (1900) and “Trombone Sneeze” (1902). As it happens, the Sousa band toured all over Europe in 1900 and 1901, just before glissando effects spread through classical composition. Schoenberg and his brother-in-law Zemlinsky were among the first to notate true trombone glissandos in orchestral works, in their symphonic poems Pelleas und Melisande and Die Seejungfrau, both from 1902–3.

In Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra the glissando is an expressionistic moan, a noise from the beyond. Ravel manages to have it both ways; his glissando in the Rapsodie has the exuberance of jazz to come, but it harbors a dangerous, drunken energy, as if the orchestra were about to be invaded by foreign hordes.

Stravinsky and the Rite

In the summer of 1891 French ships sailed into the Russian naval base at Kronstadt, to be greeted not by hostile fire but by ceremonial salutes. Tsar Alexander III, whose great-uncle had withstood the Napoleonic invasion, made a show of toasting the French sailors and listening to “La Marseillaise.” These were the first public signs of the secret military convention between France and Russia, which was ratified the following year. The pact was kept hidden, but the friendliness between the two countries played out in the public eye. When Diaghilev began presenting concerts of Russian music, in 1907, his performances were quasi-official occasions, underwritten by money from the Romanov dynasty. By 1909, Diaghilev’s relationship with the tsar’s circle had deteriorated, but by then his Paris operation—now expanded to include ballet—had won an avid following in France. Nightly attendance at the Ballets Russes replaced pilgrimages to Bayreuth as the obligatory fad among the French aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie.

When the French ships arrived in Kronstadt, one German observer skeptically wrote that the civilized French would find “few points of sympathy with barbaric Russia.” In fact, the sympathy already existed, and composers played a role in developing it. Debussy had visited Russia as early as 1881, in order to teach music to the children of the Russian music patron Nadezhda von Meck. It may have been on that trip that he first encountered the whole-tone scale, by way of the works of Mikhail Glinka. Eight years later, at a concert at the Paris Universal Exposition, Debussy fell under the spell of RimskyKorsakov, who was working with another novel mode, the octatonic scale of alternating semitones and whole tones. The speech-like vocal lines of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov influenced Debussy’s word setting in Pelléas. In the first de cade of the new century, the latest French works began traveling east. Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole, which owed much to Rimsky’s Capriccio espagnol, became a cult object among Rimsky’s students, one of whom was the young Stravinsky. Then Stravinsky came west with his Firebird, Petrushka, and Rite, and the French were bewitched by the Russians once again.

In later years, Stravinsky preferred to describe himself as a deracinated modernist, a dealer in abstraction, and went to some lengths to conceal his early folkish enthusiasms. As Richard Taruskin documents, in his huge and marvelous book Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, the composer actively suppressed information—“lied” is not too strong a word—about the source material of the Rite, claiming that there was only one folk song in the ballet. In the same vein, he derided Bartók’s “gusto for his native folklore.” In fact, the young Stravinsky steeped himself in Russian material, striving to become a vessel of primitive energies. On one occasion he described his homeland as a force of “beautiful, healthy barbarism, big with the seed that will impregnate the thinking of the world.”

With his egg-shaped head, bulging eyes, and luxurious mouth, Stravinsky had a slightly insectoid appearance. His manners were elegant, his clothes impeccable, his jokes lethal. In every way, he personified Rimbaud’s dictum “Il faut être absolument moderne.” If there was something of the dandy or aesthete about Stravinsky, he did not create an artificial impression in person. His mind was in perfect sync with his body, which he kept in trim, gymnastic condition. His friend and fellow composer Nicolas Nabokov once wrote: “His music reflects his peculiarly elastic walk, the syncopated nod of his head and shrug of his shoulders, and those abrupt stops in the middle of a conversation when, like a dancer, he suddenly freezes in a balletlike pose and punctuates his argument with a broad and sarcastic grin.”

Stravinsky was born in 1882. His ancestors were landowning aristocrats, members of the old Polish and Russian ruling classes who controlled much of western Russia. Young Igor spent many summers at his uncle’s spacious country estate in Ustyluh, close to the present Polish-Ukrainian border. There he would have heard folk songs and dances of the region, which resembled to some extent the music that attracted Bartók and Janáček. Ustyluh lies about two hundred miles from Janáček’s birthplace of Hukvaldy, and not too much farther from the Carpathian Mountains, where Bartók had his folk-music epiphany. But Stravinsky’s sensibility was shaped equally by the sophisticated atmosphere of St. Petersburg, which, at the turn of the century, was experiencing a Silver Age, its artistic productions rivaling those of fin-de-siècle Vienna and Paris in luminosity of surface and intensity of feeling.

Stravinsky’s father, Fyodor, was a noted bass-baritone at the imperial Mariinsky Theatre. Their home was comfortable, although Fyodor’s cold, strict personality cast a shadow over it. Igor drew close to his brother Gury, who provided a measure of emotional warmth that was otherwise missing from the house hold. Although Igor read scores and improvised at the piano from an early age, he came late to composition, and began to display real ambition only after his father’s death, in 1902. He took lessons from Rimsky starting that year, his student exercises mostly bland and imitative. The first flashes of genius came as late as 1907 and 1908, in the brief orchestral showpieces Scherzo fantastique and Fireworks, both of which blended French and Russian sounds. The works caught the attention of Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes, who was on the lookout for gifted young composers. In the 1910 season, Diaghilev planned to stun his Paris public with a multimedia fantasy on the folk legend of the Firebird, and when several more illustrious names turned him down, he took a chance on the novice.

The Firebird was a magical concoction: Russian musical sorcery, overlaid with French effects, lit up by the X-factor of Stravinsky’s talent. The score is infested with references to Rimsky’s works, and it leans heavily on the master’s tone-semitone scale. But Stravinsky makes his mark in the zone of rhythm. In the climactic “Infernal Dance,” in which the minions of the evil Kashchei are put under the Firebird’s spell, the slashing Stravinsky accents make their first appearance. The timpani lays down a steady ostinato of rapid pulses. The bassoons, horns, and tuba play a jumpy theme whose accents fall between the beats. Then, at the end of the phrase, the accent shifts and now falls on the beat: the ear has been tricked into thinking that the offbeats are main beats and the main beat is a syncopation. The full orchestra sets the record straight with a whiplash triple forte. Such syncopations were not uncommon in nineteenth-century music, and Stravinsky may have heard something like them in rural Russian dances. But they also echo some of Ravel’s favorite devices, and the last few bars of the “Infernal Dance” are basically lifted from the Rapsodie espagnole.

Overnight, under the spotlight of Diaghilev’s patronage, an unknown became a phenomenon. Within days of his arrival for the Firebird premiere, Stravinsky met Proust, Gide, Saint-John Perse, Paul Claudel, Sarah Bernhardt, and all the major composers. “This goes further than Rimsky,” Ravel wrote to a colleague after hearing Firebird. “Come quickly.” Buoyed by the Paris atmosphere and by his impressive new fans, Stravinsky set to work on a second ballet, Petrushka, a tale of an animate puppet who performs at a Russian village fair. Unorthodox ideas emerged from his conversations with the intellectuals of the Ballets Russes. The choreographer Michel Fokine talked of a stage full of natural, flowing movement, the antithesis of academic ballet. Stravinsky responded with a score of exhilarating immediacy: phrases jump in from nowhere, snap in the air, stop on a dime, taper off with a languid shrug. The designer Alexander Benois had asked him to write a “symphony of the street,” a “counterpoint of twenty themes,” replete with carousels, concertinas, sleigh bells, and popular airs. Stravinsky answered with periodic explosions of dissonance and rhythmic complexity, which mimic the energy of the modern urban crowd.

The young sophisticates of Paris, for whom Debussy’s music had always been a little too murkily mystical, rejoiced. It was as if all the lights had been switched on in the Wagnerian room. Jacques Rivière, the influential editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, wrote of Petrushka: “It suppresses, it clarifies, it hits only the telling and succinct notes.” The composer had succeeded in carrying out Wagner’s “synthesis of the arts” without resorting to Wagnerian grandiloquence. Stravinsky could never be described as a humble man, yet there was something selfless in the way he made himself a collaborator among collaborators, exchanging ideas with Fokine, Benois, and Diaghilev, adapting his music to their needs. No prophet descending from the mountaintop, he was a man of the world to whom writers, dancers, and painters could relate. Ezra Pound once said, “Stravinsky is the only living musician from whom I can learn my own job.”

One night in 1910, Stravinsky dreamed of a young girl dancing herself to death, and soon after he began to plan Vesna svyashchennaya, or Holy Spring. (The ballet’s standard Western titles, Le Sacre du printemps and The Rite of Spring, miss the “holy” element, the pagan devotion.) Taruskin’s Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions contains the definitive account of the ballet’s gestation. For help in fleshing out the scenario, Stravinsky turned to Roerich, the painter and Slavic guru, who plotted out a sequence of historically accurate springtime rituals. Stravinsky delved into folkloric sources, drawing variously on a book of Lithuanian wedding songs, Rimsky’s folk-song arrangements, and his own memories of peasant singers and professional balladeers at Ustyluh, where he had built his own summer house in 1908. He may also have seen the impeccably prepared folk collections of Yevgeniya Linyova, notated with the help of recording cylinders. Stravinsky hardly matched Bartók in the thoroughness of his research, but he thought carefully about which songs would be most appropriate, favoring geo graphical areas where paganism had persisted longest and emphasizing songs on the theme of spring.

Having assembled his folk melodies, Stravinsky proceeded to pulverize them into motivic bits, pile them up in layers, and reassemble them in cubistic collages and montages. As in Bartók’s Bagatelles, the folk material enters the genetic code of the music, governing all aspects of the organism. Bartók was one listener who had no trouble figuring out what Stravinsky was up to. In a 1943 lecture at Harvard, he called the Rite “a kind of apotheosis of the Russian rural music” and explained how its revolutionary construction was related to the source material: “Even the origin of the rough-grained, brittle, and jerky musical structure, backed by ostinatos, which is so completely different from any structural proceeding of the past, may be sought in short-breathed Russian peasant motives.”

In a resonant phrase, Taruskin calls the Rite a “great fusion” of national and modern sounds. Its folkish and avant-garde traits reinforce each other. Consider that percussive, pungent chord in “The Augurs of Spring,” the one that fuses a major triad with an adjacent dominant seventh. It is not unprecedented: something like it appears in Salome, at the line “She is truly her mother’s child.” But the aim of the gesture is not to outdo the Germans in the race toward total dissonance. Instead, it points up relationships among the simple folkish patterns that surround it. Immediately before the chords begin their stomp, the violins play a little figure that spells out the E-flat portion of the harmony. The winds resume that figure a little later. After several such back-and-forths, the ear can easily pick out the tonal components within any dissonance.

If other composers went further in revolutionizing harmony, none rivaled Stravinsky in the realm of rhythm. Off-the-beat accents had welled up in Firebird and Petrushka, although there the syncopations usually followed a set pattern. In “The Augurs of Spring,” there is no way to predict where the accents will land next. As the composer-critic Virgil Thomson once explained, the body tends to move up and down in syncopated or polyrhythmic music because it wants to emphasize the main beat that the stray accents threaten to wipe out. “A silent accent is the strongest of all accents,” he wrote. “It forces the body to replace it with a motion.” (Think of Bo Diddley’s “Bo Diddley,” with its “bomp ba-bomp bomp [oomph!] bomp bomp.”) In “Augurs” the positioning of the “bomps” and the “oomphs” changes almost from bar to bar, so that the main beat nearly disappears and the syncopations have the field to themselves.

In “Pro cession of the Sage,” Stravinsky takes a different tack: in the climactic eight-bar section, each instrument plays a regular pattern, but almost every pattern is distinct. Tubas play a sixteen-beat figure three times; horns play an eight-beat phrase six times; a guiro plays eight pulses to the bar; the timpani play twelve pulses to the bar; and so on. This is Rapsodie espagnole raised to the nth degree, and it rivals the most intricate structures of West African drumming. As in much African music, asymmetrical “time-line” patterns jostle against a hidden master pulse.

“Une musique nègre,” Debussy called the Rite. There is no evidence that Stravinsky knew African music, although a few early ethnographic studies of that largely unknown realm, such as Henri-Alexandre Junod’s Les Chants et les contes des Ba-Ronga, had circulated. Taruskin points out that irregular rhythms were also a long-standing feature of Russian folk music. But his notion of a “great fusion” in the Rite might ultimately be widened to mean something more than a thoroughgoing assimilation of folk motifs into modern music. These rhythms are global in reach, and at the time they were global in their impact. Jazz musicians sat up in their seats when Stravinsky’s music started playing: he was speaking something close to their language. When Charlie Parker came to Paris in 1949, he marked the occasion by incorporating the first notes of the Rite into his solo on “Salt Peanuts.” Two years later, playing Birdland in New York, the bebop master spotted Stravinsky at one of the tables and immediately incorporated a motif from Firebird into “Koko,” causing the composer to spill his scotch in ecstasy.

The first part of the Rite, which ends with the sweat-inducing crescendo of “Dance of the Earth,” is viscerally exciting, even celebratory. Part II is grittier, swaying between languor and violence. Debussy’s influence is palpable at the outset: the crawling sextuplet figures in the winds and the ghoulishly bouncing string figures in the Introduction come from Debussy’s Nocturnes, as does the snaking flute melody in “Ritual Action of the Ancestors.” But Stravinsky has hardly run out of original ideas. At the end of the latter section the bass clarinet plays a soft, quick, spooky solo—the lower winds periodically show up in the score like black-clad cabaret hosts, ushering the next scandal onstage—and the final “Danse sacrale” begins. Another means of forward propulsion kicks in: in place of regular pulses in simultaneous layers there are variable rhythmic “cells” that expand or contract. As Bartók observed, these features are also ethnographically precise; severe rhythmic and metric asymmetries are common in Russian and Eastern European folk music. The cumulative effect is of exhaustion, not of intensification. The every-which-way pulsation leads to a feeling of stasis. The earth seems to be tiring itself out, just as the young girl is dancing herself to death. At the end comes a morbid spasm.

The notion of a female sacrifice was Stravinsky’s special contribution. As Lynn Garafola points out, no pagan people except for the Aztecs demanded the sacrifice of young girls. Stravinsky was giving voice not to ancient instincts but to the bloodthirstiness of the contemporary West. At the turn of the century, purportedly civilized societies were singling out scapegoats on whom the ills of modernity could be blamed: Russian townspeople were enacting pogroms of Jews, white Americans were lynching young black men, and, closer to home, the denizens of the sixteenth arrondissement had cheered on the anti-Semitic campaign against the Jewish patriot Alfred Dreyfus. Against that backdrop, the urban noises in Stravinsky’s score—sounds like pistons pumping, whistles screeching, crowds stamping—suggest a sophisticated city undergoing an atavistic regression.

More than a few people left the premiere both thrilled and chilled by the experience. Jacques Rivière, who took such joy from Petrushka, spoke no less rapturously of the Rite, but in the end he found himself falling into a despondent mood. “There are works that overflow with accusations, hopes, encouragements,” Rivière wrote. “You suffer, regret, take confidence with them; they contain all the beautiful perturbations of the spirit; you give yourself to them as to the counsel of a friend; they have a moral quality and always partake of pity.” The Rite, he admitted, was not among them.

War

When the guns began firing in August 1914, French, Russian, and English composers were swept away by the same patriotic fervor that had overcome their Austro-German counterparts. The long-standing resentment of Teutonic hegemony in the classical repertory blossomed into hate. In London, Strauss’s Don Juan was taken off a Proms concert. The League for the Defense of French Music sought to ban “infiltrations funèstes,” or fatal infiltrations, of enemy composers. Manuel de Falla urged colleagues to reject any “universal formula,” by which he presumably meant, as his biographer Carol Hess says, the “purely musical” ethos of the German canon. After the United States entered the war in 1917, Wagner disappeared from the Metropolitan Opera stage and Beethoven symphonies from programs in Pittsburgh. Karl Muck, the German-born conductor of the Boston Symphony, was thrown in prison on the spurious grounds that he had refused to conduct “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Stories circulated that Muck had been communicating with U-boats from his cottage in Seal Harbor, Maine.

Absurd as this musical paranoia now seems, it was activated by deep shock at Germany’s campaign of total war. Several significant composers lost their lives in ways that underlined the changing definition of combat. Albéric Magnard, composer of four eloquent Franckish symphonies, was burned alive along with a number of his works after he fired on marauding German soldiers from a window of his home. The refined Catalan composer Enrique Granados drowned in the English Channel after a passenger vessel he was traveling on was torpedoed by a German submarine. England mourned the loss of George Butterworth, who worked alongside folkish composers such as Grainger, Gustav Holst, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Butterworth’s specialty was morris dancing, and on his expeditions into the countryside he made meticulous notes such as these:

Both hands touch lower chest

'' '' '' upper ''

clap

slap with opposite

Then Hey

He was killed in August 1916, aged thirty-one, during an early-morning assault on a German trench in the Battle of Pozières Ridge.

Maurice Ravel nearly died at around the same time. The tiny-framed composer should have been barred from military service, but, enraged by the bombing of Reims, he enlisted as a truck driver. By the spring of 1916 Ravel was deployed just behind the front lines, and witnessed the ghastly aftermath of the Battle of Verdun. He often had to weave back and forth on pockmarked roads as shells fell all around him. Once he found himself in an abandoned town on a sunny day, walking through the empty, silent streets. “I don’t believe I will ever experience a more profound and stranger emotion than this sort of mute terror,” he wrote. Another time he entered an abandoned château, found a fine Erard piano, and sat down to play some Chopin.

Such unreal experiences provide clues to the piano cycle Le Tombeau de Couperin, Ravel’s principal work of the war years. In the context of its time, Le Tombeau may seem a little precious, as if it were averting its gaze from the carnage. Not only the title but also the names of the movements—Prélude, Fugue, Forlane, Rigaudon, Menuet, and Toccata—look back to the French Baroque, paying homage to the harpsichord suites of Couperin and Rameau. But, as ever with Ravel, emotion smolders under the exquisite surface. Each piece is dedicated to a friend who died in battle; the old styles pass by like a procession of ghosts. There are also hints of muscle, glints of steel. Glenn Watkins, in his study of music during the Great War, argues that the metallic stream of tone in the Toccata is meant to suggest the twisting motion of a fighter plane. Ravel dreamed of being an aviator, a solitary hero in the sky.

Stravinsky spent the war in neutral Switzerland, urging humanity to resist “the intolerable spirit of this colossal and obese Germania,” but otherwise immersing himself in musical business. The creator of the Rite was entering a period of experimentation, momentarily uncertain about what to do next. Never entirely secure in his reputation as the leader of the moderns, he glanced around to see what his rivals were doing. During a 1912 visit to Berlin, he attended one of the early performances of Pierrot lunaire, and came away impressed by the economy of Schoenberg’s instrumentation, the use of a pocket orchestra of two winds, two strings, and piano. Next to the Wagner-sized orchestra of the Rite, the Pierrot band was like a motorcar speeding alongside a locomotive. Stravinsky effectively imitated Schoenberg in the second and third of his Three Japanese Lyrics, written after the Berlin visit.

If Richard Taruskin is right, Stravinsky drew lessons from the reviews of the Rite, both in Paris and back home in Russia. Parisians appreciated not just the wildness of the music but also its precision and clarity. Innately sympathetic to Stravinsky’s anti-Romantic attitude, they applauded his prominent deployment of winds and brass and his relatively minimal use of strings. Jacques Rivière, in his review in the Nouvelle Revue Française, emphasized what the Rite was not—it lacked “sauce” and “atmosphere,” it rejected “Debussysm,” it refused to behave like a conventional “work of art.” In the small-scale Cubist-Oriental opera The Nightingale, which Stravinsky began in 1908 and finished in 1914, Rivière heard the beginnings of a new kind of unsentimental, abstract music in which “each object will be set out apart from the others and as if surrounded by white.”

Meanwhile, in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Russian critics and musicians dismissed the Rite as so much trendy noise. Taruskin suggests that the confluence of praise abroad and criticism at home essentially impelled Stravinsky to cut his ties to home and to become a Western European composer: “By imperceptible degrees, [he] came to resemble his hosts and exploiters.”

The process of “progressive abstraction,” as Taruskin calls it, governed Stravinsky’s next big project, Les Noces, or The Wedding. The idea of a dance spectacle about a boisterous rural Russian wedding had first surfaced back in 1912. By the time Stravinsky began sketching the music, in the summer of 1914, he had lost interest in the lavish resources of the Rite, and was thinking in terms of a more limited orchestra of sixty players. As the years went by, even that ensemble came to seem too extravagant. In its final incarnation, which appeared in 1923, Les Noces was scored for singers, chorus, percussion, and four pianos. The critic Émile Vuillermoz called the result “a machine to hit, a machine to lash, a machine to fabricate automatic resonances.” The sound of Les Noces is not inappropriate to the action: it suggests a harsh truth of pre-twentieth-century life, which was that most marriages were the result of a preconceived parental design, not of spontaneous romantic feeling.

The consummation of Stravinsky’s hard-edged, steel-tipped style was Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920)—a nine-minute sequence of lamenting cries, meandering chants, and chordal blocks. It was conceived as a memorial for Debussy, who had died before the end of the war. The dedication is ironic, for Debussy had disliked Stravinsky’s first ventures in “objective” composition. Russians were losing their Russianness, Debussy had complained in 1915; Stravinsky was “leaning dangerously toward the Schoenberg side.” Later that month, Debussy sent his colleague some pointed praise: “Cher Stravinsky, you are a great artist! Be, with all your energy, a great Russian artist! It is a good thing to be from one’s country, to be attached to the earth like the humblest peasant!”

Stravinsky was determined to forsake his past. As Taruskin shows, Symphonies of Wind Instruments is based on the Russian Orthodox funeral service, whose solemn chant may signify that the composer is ritualistically burying his old Russian self alongside the body of Debussy. A string of catastrophic events—the demise of tsarist Russia, the onset of the Russian Revolution, the early death of his beloved brother Gury—meant that by 1918 the world of Stravinsky’s childhood had been effectively erased. The Ustyluh estate, where the polytonal chords of the Rite were hammered out, had passed into the hands of Polish farmers.

Debussy suffered much in his final years, both in body and in mind. He was afflicted with rectal cancer and could sometimes hardly move on account of the pain. Germany’s conduct during the war angered him no end; in his 1915 letter to Stravinsky he declared that “Austro-Boche miasmas are spreading through art,” and proposed a counterattack in terms borrowed from the new art of chemical warfare: “It will be necessary to kill this microbe of false grandeur, of organized ugliness.” The last two phrases presumably signify Strauss and Schoenberg. A certain icy fury possesses Debussy’s ultravirtuosic Études for piano, and also his explicitly war-themed two-piano piece En blanc et noir. Then came a remarkable turn. Abandoning his former opposition to the use of canonical classical forms, Debussy set to work on a cycle of six sonatas for diverse instruments, and lived to finish three—one for violin, one for cello, and one for flute, viola, and harp. They were couched in a taut, songful style, perfumed with the palmy air of the French Baroque. New beauty should fill the air, Debussy told Stravinsky, when the cannons fall silent.

On March 23, 1918, the day before Palm Sunday, the Germans opened a two-pronged campaign of terror against Paris. Gotha planes launched an audacious daytime air raid, killing several people in a church. Krupp’s latest masterpiece, the Paris Gun, began firing on the city from seventy-five miles away. Paris was awash in noise—shells booming in the air every fifteen or twenty minutes; policemen beating warning signals on drums; church bells ringing and trumpets pealing as the planes approached; recruits chanting in the streets, schoolchildren singing “La Marseillaise,” people defiantly shouting “Vive la France!” from windows. The death of Achille-Claude Debussy, on the following Monday, was hardly noticed.

Les Six and Le Jazz

In an absorbing study of war’s effect on twentieth-century music, the composer Wolfgang-Andreas Schultz observes that feelings of “hyper alertness, distance, and emotional coldness” often overcome the survivors of horrifying events. Just as the traumatized mind erects barriers against the influx of violent sensations, so do artists take refuge in unsentimental poses, in order to protect the self against further damage. Stravinsky’s assumption of a “hard” aesthetic after 1914 exemplified a deeper shift that was taking place in the European mind—a turning away from the luxurious, mystical, maximalist tendencies of turn-of-the-century art. This was one aspect of the postwar reality. Another was the rise of popular music and mass technologies—cinema, the phonograph, radio, jazz, and Broadway theater.

Paris audiences got a foretaste of the Roaring Twenties in the spring of 1917, during one of the bloodiest periods of the war, when the Allies launched the ill-considered Nivelle offensive and the Germans responded with a lethal defensive strategy named Operation Alberich (after the master dwarf in the Ring). On May 18, six years to the day after the death of Gustav Mahler, the Ballets Russes again shocked the city by presenting an uproarious, circus-like production titled Parade. A scintillating array of personalities participated: Erik Satie wrote the music, Jean Cocteau created the libretto, Pablo Picasso designed the sets and costumes, Léonide Massine choreographed, Guillaume Apollinaire wrote the program notes (inventing the word “surrealism” in the process), and Diaghilev provided the scandal. As Francis Steegmuller recounts, the great impresario had conceived a brief passion for the Russian Revolution, and at a previous Ballets Russes evening he had unfurled a red flag behind the stage. Because the Bolsheviks were at that time pushing for a Russian withdrawal from the war effort, French patriots took umbrage at Diaghilev’s revolutionary symbolism and showed up at Parade shouting, “Boches!”

The plot of Parade, such as it is, deals with relevance: how can an older art form, such as classical music or ballet, still draw an audience in the age of pop music, the cinema, and the gramophone? At a Paris fair, the managers of a traveling theater are deploying various music-hall performers—acrobats, a Chinese magician, a Little American Girl—in order to entice passersby. But the side acts prove so entertaining that the audience refuses to go inside. Low culture thus becomes the main attraction. Cocteau made some notes to Satie in which he described the pseudo-American aesthetic he had in mind:

The Titanic—“Nearer My God To Thee”—elevators—the sirens of Boulogne—submarine cables—ship-to-shore cables—Brest—tar—varnish—steamship apparatus—the New York Herald—dynamos—airplanes—short circuits—palatial cinemas—the sheriff’s daughter—Walt Whitman—the silence of stampedes—cowboys with leather and goatskin chaps—the telegraph operator from Los Angeles who marries the detective at the end …

Satie’s score defines a new art of musical collage: jaunty tunes don’t quite get off the ground, rhythms intertwine and overlap and stop and start, sped-up whole-tone passages sound like Warner Brothers cartoon music yet to come, bitter chorales and broken fugues honor the fading past. The “American Girl” episode contains a kooky paraphrase of Irving Berlin’s “That Mysterious Rag,” with one passage marked “outside and aching.”

Francis Poulenc recalled the elation he felt as a teenager on attending Parade: “For the first time—it has happened often enough since, God knows—the music hall was invading Art with a capital A.” Poulenc typified a new breed of twentieth-century composer whose consciousness was shaped not by the aesthetic of the fin de siècle but by the hard-hitting styles of the early modernist period. This young man had studied the Rite, Schoenberg’s Six Little Pieces for Piano, Bartók’s Allegro barbaro, and the works of Debussy and Ravel. He had also soaked up French popular songs, folk songs, music-hall numbers, sweet operetta airs, children’s songs, and the stylish melodies of Maurice Chevalier.

Poulenc was one of a number of young composers who stormed onto the scene after the war, enacting a generational turnover in French music. Others were Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Louis Durey, Germaine Tailleferre, and Georges Auric. In 1920, they were dubbed Les Six. Satie was their godfather, or, more accurately, their funny uncle.

Cocteau appointed himself spokesman of the group and supplied a manifesto in his 1918 pamphlet The Cock and the Harlequin. The first order of business was to get rid of Wagner and Debussy. “The nightingale sings badly,” Cocteau sneered, playing off the line “The nightingale will sing” in Verlaine’s “En Sourdine,” which Debussy had twice set to music. Stravinsky, who four years earlier had failed to respond to Cocteau’s proposal for a ballet about David and Goliath, also came in for criticism; the Rite was a masterpiece, yes, but one that exhibited symptoms of “theatrical mysticism” and other Wagnerian diseases. “Enough of nuages, waves, aquariums, ondines, and nocturnal perfumes,” Cocteau intoned, pointedly slipping in titles of pieces by Debussy and the no longer cutting-edge Ravel. “We need music on the earth, MUSIC FOR EVERY DAY. Enough of hammocks, garlands, gondolas! I want someone to make me music that I can live in like a house.” For all his glib generalities, Cocteau succeeded in articulating the spirit of the moment: after the long night of war, composers were done with what Nietzsche called, in his critique of Wagner, the “lie of the great style.”

Paris in the twenties displayed a contradiction. On the one hand, it embraced all the fads of the roaring decade—music hall, American jazz, sport and leisure culture, machine noises, technologies of gramophone and radio, musical corollaries to Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Simultaneism, and Surrealism. Yet beneath the ultramodern surface a nineteenth-century support structure for artistic activity persisted. Composers still made their names in the Paris salons, which survived the general postwar decline of European aristocracy, partly because so many wealthy old families had succeeded in marrying new industrial money.

The chief hosts and hostesses of Paris, such as the Comte de Beaumont, the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles, the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, and the American-born Princesse de Polignac, were eager, even desperate, to present new “looks” each season. The virtue of salon culture was that it illuminated connections among the arts; young composers could exchange ideas with like-minded painters, poets, playwrights, and jacks-of-all-trades like Cocteau. The disadvantage was that all this bracing activity happened at considerable distance from “real life.” The members of Les Six were writing “MUSIC FOR EVERY DAY” that everyday people had little opportunity to hear.

The first great vogue was le jazz. Paris had taken a fancy to African-American music as early as 1900, when Sousa’s band played the cakewalk during its first European tour and Arthur Pryor showed off his trombone glisses. Debussy responded with “Golliwog’s Cake-walk,” from the suite Children’s Corner (1906–8), where rag rhythm was interlaced with a wry citation of the initial motif of Tristan und Isolde. In 1917 and 1918, American troops came to Paris, bringing with them syncopated bands such as Louis Mitchell’s Jazz Kings and James Reese Europe’s 369th Infantry Hell Fighters. In August 1918 the Comte de Beaumont hosted a jazz night at his town house; African-American soldier-musicians played the latest dance tunes while Poulenc presented his prankishly charming Rapsodie nègre, full of pseudo-African mumbo jumbo on the order of “Banana lou ito kous kous / pota la ma Honoloulou.”

There is no need to belabor the point that le jazz was condescending toward its African-American sources. Cocteau and Poulenc were enjoying a one-night stand with a dark-skinned form, and they had no intention of striking up a conversation with it the following day. Baroque pastiches, Cubist geometries, or the music of machines could just as well express modern, urban, non-Teutonic values, which is why the craze quickly ran its course, at least among Paris composers. Yet they did learn significant lessons from jazz, even if their music only faintly resembled the real thing.

Among Les Six, the most alert practitioner of le jazz was Darius Milhaud, an ebullient man with a wide-open mind who wrote a memoir with the unlikely title My Happy Life. Milhaud had spent the last years of World War I on a diplomatic mission to Brazil, where he made regular excursions into the teeming nightlife of Rio de Janeiro and received a crucial education in how “art” and “pop” motifs could be reconciled. In these same years the young Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was merging rhythmic ideas from Stravinsky with complex patterns that he had detected in Afro-Brazilian music. In neoprimitivist scores such as Amazonas and Uirapuru, Villa-Lobos wrote percussion parts of riotous intensity; Milhaud, likewise, used no fewer than nineteen percussion instruments in his brightly colored ballet Man and His Desire. He also produced two dazzling fantasies on Brazilian motifs, Saudades do Brasil and Le Boeuf sur le toit.

Because Latin American musicians had originated many of the tricky rhythms that figured in early jazz, Milhaud made an easy transition to jazz-based writing. When he returned to Paris, in 1919, he maintained the habit of ending his week with a night on the town. He would invite fellow composers and like-minded artists to his home for Saturday dinner, then lead them out into the wilderness of the modern city—“the steam-driven merry-go-rounds, the mysterious booths, the Daughter of Mars, the shooting-galleries, the games of chance, the menageries, the din of the mechanical organs with their perforated rolls seeming to grind out simultaneously and implacably all the blaring tunes from the music halls and revues.”

When the Saturday-evening crowd grew too large to handle, Milhaud moved his soiree to a wine store on rue Duphot, in a room named Bar Gaya. The pianist Jean Wiéner, who had been working in nightclubs, set the tone by playing jazz-like music with an African-American saxophonist named Vance Lowry. Soon the audience got too big again, and the club settled on rue Boissy d’Anglas, where it took the name Le Boeuf sur le Toit, in honor of Milhaud’s Brazilian showpiece. Virgil Thomson described it as “a not unamusing place frequented by English upper-class bohemians, wealthy Americans, French aristocrats, lesbian novelists from Roumania, Spanish princes, fashionable pederasts, modern literary & musical figures, pale and precious young men, and distinguished diplomats towing bright-eyed youths.” Everyone from Picasso to Maurice Chevalier joined the hilarity. Cocteau sometimes sat in on drums.

In early 1923, Milhaud made his first trip to America. Paul Whiteman’s plush orchestral jazz was at that time the sensation of American high society, but Milhaud avoided it; like Bartók in the Carpathian Mountains, he sought the genuine article. At a Harlem joint called the Capitol Palace, where the stride pianists Willie “The Lion” Smith and James P. Johnson were in residence and the young Duke Ellington would shortly be indoctrinated into the Harlem elite, Milhaud was stunned by the unadulterated power of the blues. Of the singers who were in town in this period, the great Bessie Smith best fits the description in the composer’s memoirs: “Against the beat of the drums the melodic lines criss crossed in a breathless pattern of broken and twisted rhythms. A Negress whose grating voice seemed to come from the depths of the centuries sang in front of the various tables. With despairing pathos and dramatic feeling she sang over and over again, to the point of exhaustion, the same refrain, to which the constantly changing melodic pattern of the orchestra wove a kaleidoscopic background.”

The language is revealing: it could describe the Rite. Indeed, Milhaud is replicating, consciously or not, a phrase from Cocteau’s 1918 description of the ballet: “Little melodies arrive from the depths of the centuries.” Also revealing is the fact that Milhaud did not record the singer’s name.

Milhaud summed up his exotic adventures in the African-chic spectacle The Creation of the World, which the Swedish Ballet presented in Paris in 1923, with a scenario by the Simultaneist poet Blaise Cendrars and sets and costumes by the Cubist innovator Fernand Léger. None of the participants had deep knowledge of Africa, but Milhaud’s score rises above art nègre stereo types on the strength of its elegant intermingling of Bach and jazz: in the opening passage of the overture, trumpets dance languidly over a saxophone-laced Baroque continuo. On his Latin-American travels, Milhaud had encountered the music of the Cuban danzón composer Antonio María Romeu, who liked to frame syncopated dances in Bachian counterpoint. He may also have heard Villa-Lobos speculating about common ground between Brazilian folk music and the classical canon—an idea that would eventually generate Villa-Lobos’s great sequence of Bachianas Brasileiras. Later, the notion of a pan-historical conversation between Bach and jazz would be taken up by the likes of Bud Powell, John Lewis, Jacques Loussier, and Dave Brubeck, the last of whom studied with Milhaud and drew inspiration from his work. Milhaud became a link in a long chain, connecting centuries of tradition with new popular forms.

Stravinsky, too, cocked an ear to jazz. His guide was the conductor Ernest Ansermet, who toured America with the Ballets Russes in 1916 and wrote excitedly to Stravinsky about the “unheard-of music” that he was encountering in cafés. ( Just as the Ballets Russes was arriving for its tour, the Creole Band, pioneers and popularizers of New Orleans jazz, was playing at the Winter Garden in New York. Later that year, the jazz historian Lawrence Gushee reveals, both the Ballets Russes and the Creole Band played on the same night in Omaha, Nebraska.) Ansermet brought back to Switzerland a pile of recordings and sheet music, including, possibly, Jelly Roll Morton’s “Jelly Roll Blues.” Stravinsky played some of these for Romain Rolland, calling them “the musical ideal, music spontaneous and ‘useless,’ music that wishes to express nothing.” (“Dance must express nothing,” Cocteau had written to him back in 1914.) If nothingness wasn’t really what Jelly Roll had in mind, it did explain why so many people responded to jazz during the last bloody years of the Great War: it offered a clean slate to a shellshocked culture.

In 1918, Stravinsky wrote a puppet-theater piece titled Histoire du soldat, or Story of a Soldier, which had a decisive influence on younger composers in France, America, and Germany. It is a down-to-earth Faustian tale of a soldier-fiddler who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for untold riches. Later, Stravinsky would tell the New York press that the instrumentation was copied from jazz ensembles, and, indeed, the combination of violin, cornet, trombone, clarinet, bassoon, double bass, and percussion resembles the makeup of the Creole Band (which had a guitar in place of a bassoon). The first scene of Histoire starts with a simple, plucked, one-two-three-four pulse. The violin breaks up and rearranges this beat, entering on a four, then on a three, then on a two, in a triplet motion, then in phrases of five and three, then in yet more complicated phrases of odd-numbered beats. The interplay between a pulsing bass figure and freewheeling solos suggests a café-band performance, though perhaps not of jazz as such.

As Stravinsky later confessed, Histoire was a Russian émigré’s dream of jazz, rather than a reflection of the real thing. Of course, he had written the Rite the same way, assembling a fantasy world from scraps of evidence.

By official reckoning, le jazz lasted all of three years. Cocteau called it to a halt in 1920, announcing “the disappearance of the skyscraper” and the “reappearance of the rose.” That same year Auric explained in the pages of the journal Le Coq that his piece Adieu New-York, a fox-trot for piano, was his farewell to jazz, which had served its purpose. Auric’s new slogan was “Bonjour Paris!” By 1927, even Milhaud had lost interest in the mysteries of Harlem. “Already the influence of jazz has passed,” he wrote, “like a beneficial storm that leaves behind a clear sky and stable weather.”

What next? Lynn Garafola has introduced two useful terms to describe music and dance in the twenties: “period modernism” and “lifestyle modernism.” Period modernism indicates the cultivation of pre-Romantic styles, notably the orderly and stylish Baroque. The trend was already well under way in turn-of-the-century Paris, when Debussy extolled Rameau, Satie revived Gregorian chant, and Reynaldo Hahn, Proust’s lover, wrote neo-Handelian arias. But the retrospective impulse intensified after the war, perhaps as a way of escaping recent history. Diaghilev, not Cocteau, took the lead in promoting period modernism: he had collected tattered scores by the likes of Cimarosa, Scarlatti, and Pergolesi and began editing them for modern performance, hiring favorite composers to do the orchestration. In 1920, Diaghilev asked Stravinsky to arrange ballet music from a sheaf of scores attributed to Pergolesi. Stravinsky did more than arrange: by elongating and truncating notes here and there, by introducing discontinuities, irregularities, angularities, and anomalies, he emerged with Pulcinella, a new type of ultramodish Stravinsky confection.

A less celebrated guru had already nudged Stravinsky toward the classical past. This was the Princesse de Polignac, née Winnaretta Singer, heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune, whose story is chronicled in Sylvia Kahan’s book Music’s Modern Muse.

Singer’s early passion was for Wagner, but she later developed a consuming love of Bach. In a turn of phrase that captures the inborn melancholy of period modernism, she wrote that a Bach chorale “reconstitutes the past, and proves to us that we had a reason for living on this rock: to live in the beautiful kingdom of sounds.” At her salons, new works were often paired with Bach’s, and the former began sounding like the latter. Oddly, the Princesse received inspiration from Richard Strauss, whose use of a thirty-six-instrument orchestra in Ariadne auf Naxos gave her the idea that “the days of big orchestras were over.” She promptly asked Stravinsky for a score requiring thirty to thirty-six instruments, even specifying the instrumentation, though she wisely seems not to have mentioned the Strauss angle. (Decades later, Stravinsky snapped to Robert Craft, “I would like to admit all Strauss’s operas to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant banality.”) Aloof, intellectual, secretly lesbian, Singer had the personality of an artist herself. She sat in a high-backed chair in front of the rest of the audience so that she would not be distracted. Much displeased her, nothing surprised her. When the instruments for Les Noces were delivered to her house on avenue Henri-Martin, a butler announced, in horrified tones, “Madame la Princesse, four pianos have arrived,” to which she replied, “Let them come in.”

If the Hôtel Singer-Polignac was the clearing house of period modernism, the racier salons—those of Étienne de Beaumont, Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, Elisabeth de Clermont-Tonnerre, and the outrageous Natalie Barney—catered to lifestyle modernism, the spirit of high fashion, low culture, and sexual play. The rules of the game were laid down by the Ballets Russes, which in 1922 moved its center of operations to the playboy capital of Monte Carlo and began receiving support from the Société des Bains de Mer. The exemplary lifestyle production was Le Train bleu, which took its name from the train that conveyed the beautiful people from Paris to the Riviera. The action involved a gigolo, his flapper girl, a golfer, and a female tennis champion, all attired in sportswear by Coco Chanel. Milhaud, who wrote the music, was asked to tone down his polytonal harmonies so as not to ruffle the high-society audience. “Le Train bleu is more than a frivolous work,” Cocteau said. “It is a monument to frivolity!” It was also a monument to the beauty of a boy, in the form of Anton Dolin. Diaghilev had long catered to a gay subculture, but he now became rather brazen, outfitting his favorite dancers in tight bathing suits or minuscule Grecian shorts.

In this giddy ambience, Poulenc came into his own. “What’s good about Poulenc,” Ravel said, “is that he invents his own folklore.” Poulenc, too, was gay, and held a kind of coming-out party in his own Diaghilev ballet, Les Biches. It is easy enough to read between the lines of his subsequent description of the scenario—a “modern fêtes galantes in a large, all-white country drawing room with a huge sofa in Laurencin blue as the only piece of furniture. Twenty charming and flirtatious women frolicked about there with three handsome, strapping young fellows dressed as oarsmen.” Bronislava Nijinska’s original choreography, as Lynn Garafola describes it, made the innuendo fairly explicit: the strapping young fellows spent more time looking at one another than at the women, and the Hostess tried to revalidate her beauty by posing with the boys.

There must have been a menacing disconnect between Nijinska’s dances of modern narcissism and Poulenc’s aggressively antique genre pieces. Things go musically out of joint right at the start: first come two Stravinskyish signals, with jagged grace notes like catches in the voice; then a clear major third in clarinets and bassoons; and finally the cartwheeling main theme. Poulenc would write more substantial scores—he had the richest, most surprising career of any of Les Six—but Les Biches retains its nasty champagne kick after all these years.

Stravinsky reached the apex of his hipness. He wrote manifestos, gave inflammatory interviews (“Defend me, Spaniards, from the Germans, who do not understand and who have never understood music”), took homes on the Côte Basque and the Côte d’Azur, conducted, performed on the piano, met famous people, attended parties. There was a fling with Coco Chanel; there was a long affair with the bohemian émigré Vera Sudeykina, who eventually became his second wife. His premieres were A-list events at which luminaries of art and literature congregated. Joyce and Proust had their only meeting at a dinner following the 1922 debut of Renard, although they had trouble finding anything to talk about. Stravinsky’s life took on a name-dropping Andy Warhol quality, as is evident in the questions that Robert Craft asked in the first of his “conversation books” with the composer:

You were a friend of D’Annunzio’s at one time, weren’t you? … You knew Rodin, didn’t you? … Wasn’t there also a question of Modigliani doing a portrait of you? … I once heard you describe your meeting Claude Monet … You were with Mayakovsky very often on his famous Paris trip of 1922? … Would you describe your last meeting with Proust? … I often hear you speak of your admiration for Ortega y Gasset. Did you know him well? … How did Giacometti come to make his drawings of you?

The after-party for Les Noces took place on a barge in the Seine. Stravinsky jumped through a wreath, Picasso created a sculpture out of children’s toys, and Cocteau went around in a captain’s uniform saying, “We’re sinking.”

All the while, Stravinsky was writing rather little music. His output of major works from 1921 to 1925 consisted of the brief opera Mavra, the Octet, the Concerto for Piano and Winds, the Sonata for piano, and the Serenade for piano—less than ninety minutes in total. The composer seemed to spend as much time explaining his music as he did writing it, and amused himself by adopting the flat-toned, in-expressive jargon of a researcher defending his experiments to fellow experts:

My Octuor is a musical object. This object has a form and that form is influenced by the musical matter with which it is composed … My Octuor is not an “emotive” work but a musical composition based on objective elements which are sufficient in themselves … My Octuor, as I said before, is an object that has its own form. Like all other objects it has weight and occupies a place in space …

Stravinsky further claimed that he had never done anything but create “objects” of this kind. “Even in the early days, in the ‘Fire Bird,’” he told an English interviewer in 1921, “I was concerned with a purely musical construction.” Some years later he declared, “I consider music by its very nature powerless to express anything: a feeling, an attitude, a psychological state, a natural phenomenon, etc.” This chic formalism echoed Cocteau (“Dance must express nothing”), who probably got it from Oscar Wilde (“Art never expresses anything but itself”). The new objectivity was the old aestheticism.

Stravinsky had cast aside his old Russian self but had not yet hammered out a new identity. On the one hand, much of his writing in the twenties fell under the rubric of “period modernism.” Mavra is a love letter to nineteenth-century Russian imperial style, especially Tchaikovsky. The Octet bustles through the antiquated arts of sonata form, theme and variation, and modulation through the major and minor keys. The becalmed slow movement of the Piano Concerto unfurls like an aria by Bach or Handel, replete with long, cantabile lines and stately, processional rhythms. Period modernism in music would come to be called neoclassicism, and it would hold sway well into the second half of the century. One early adherent was Manuel de Falla, who set aside his pursuit of flamenco in order to write a Harpsichord Concerto that equaled anything by Stravinsky in severity of method and austerity of tone.

Yet Stravinsky did not neglect the modern world. Better than almost any composer of his time, he understood how the radio, the gramophone, the player piano, and other media would transform music. When he first heard a pianola, in London in 1914, he was entranced by the thought that he could eliminate the unreliability inherent in human performers. Later, in Paris, he signed a contract with the Pleyel player-piano company to record his works, and for a time he even worked out of a studio in the Pleyel factory. He also tailored a few of his works to the needs of the gramophone. During his first visit to New York, in 1925, he recorded some short piano pieces at the Brunswick Records studio, where, the following year, Duke Ellington would set down “East St. Louis Toodle-oo.” Each movement of the Serenade in A fit on one side of a disc. One advantage of the neo-Baroque aesthetic was that its churning ostinatos and arpeggios readily suggested machines in action. For Stravinsky, as for many other composers, technology became a new kind of folklore, another infusion of the real.

The Politics of Style

In 1919, at the Peace Conference in Paris, Woodrow Wilson gave voice to the dream of a League of Nations—a harmonious new world order of “open covenants openly arrived at.” One year later, at a festival of Gustav Mahler’s music in Amsterdam, an international group of composers issued a manifesto welcoming the opportunity “to shake the hands of our brethren in art, irrespective of nationality and race,” and “to rebuild the broken spiritual bridges between the peoples.” To this end, they hoped for “a great international festival or congress of music … at which every musical nation of the world may present its last and best contributions to the art, and at which the workers in musical aesthetics and criticism may exchange their thoughts and the results of their studies.” The idea of a musical League came to life two years later, with the formation of the International Society for Contemporary Music, or ISCM. The ISCM’s festivals—in Salzburg in 1923, Salzburg and Prague in 1924, Prague and Venice in 1925, Zurich in 1926, and Frankfurt in 1927—were integral to music in the twenties, and the organization still exists today.

The postwar spirit of comity led to some odd alliances, none odder than the one that flourished briefly between Les Six and the Second Viennese School. “Arnold Schönberg, the six musicians hail you!” wrote Cocteau in 1920. Milhaud conducted part of Pierrot lunaire in December 1921, and presented the entire piece three times during the following year. Schoenberg, for his part, placed works by Debussy and Ravel on his series of “Private Musical Performances” in Vienna. When the two groups met face to face, Schoenberg called Milhaud “a nice person,” while Poulenc pronounced Webern “an exquisite boy.” As might be expected, this strained exchange of pleasantries didn’t last. By the middle of the de cade the ISCM was beginning to divide into opposing camps, one arrayed around Schoenberg and another around Stravinsky. The old Franco-German musical war resumed.

The twenties were years of runaway inflation, rampant stock speculation, and instant fortunes. The historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his book The Age of Extremes, writes that the economic boom was largely illusory, underwritten by a shaky network of international loans and undermined by widespread unemployment. Music, too, seemed trapped in a bubble economy; a composer could make his name with one or two attention-getting gestures but had a harder time sustaining a career. Publicity was guaranteed for any work that combined classical means with modern themes. Honegger proved adept at this trick, writing pieces titled Rugby, Skating-Rink, and the much-played Pacific 231 (a steam locomotive with two front axles, three main axles, and one axle in the back). The young Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů produced works depicting a football match (Half-Time), crowds celebrating Lindbergh’s flight (La Bagarre), jazz-dancing kitchen utensils (La Revue de cuisine), Satan as a Negro Cyclist (The Tears of the Knife), and a ballet about music itself (Revolt), in which classical music fights dance hits, gramophones rebel against their masters, critics commit suicide, Stravinsky escapes to a desert island, and a Moravian folk song saves the day.

The festivals of the twenties were the first great battleground of what the critic Bernard Holland has called the twentieth century’s “politics of style.” Composers weren’t simply engaging in artificial games; they were asking mighty questions about what art meant and how it related to society. Yet, as in the salons of Paris, this discussion about music and modernity took place within an unreal ecosystem that was removed from daily life. The audience at the new-music festivals was a motley gathering of elites—culture-building captains of industry, American heiresses looking to acquire European status, snob aesthetes with no pressing responsibilities, members of the new leisure classes. Ordinary people could not book a hotel for a week in Venice or Zurich. The audience at the average symphony-orchestra subscription concert was more socially diverse; those in the upper galleries made modest wages and came out of a simple love of music. But most preferred to hear Brahms.

“That is no country for old men,” William Butler Yeats cries in “Sailing to Byzantium.” The youngest composers, the children of 1900, adapted most easily to the racing tempos of the twenties; they had the metabolism to digest fresh paradigms overnight. The older ones faced an agonizing adjustment—and to be old in that youth-mad time was to be over the age of forty. Bartók probably spoke for many when he wrote in a letter of 1926, the year of Yeats’s poem: “To be frank, recently I have felt so stupid, so dazed, so empty-headed that I have truly doubted whether I am able to write anything new at all anymore. All the tangled chaos that the musical periodicals vomit thick and fast about the music of today has come to weigh heavily on me: the watchwords, linear, horizontal, vertical, objective, impersonal, polyphonic, homophonic, tonal, polytonal, atonal, and the rest …” Stravinsky let out a howl of disgust in a letter to Ansermet in 1922: “Here I am the head of modern music, as they say and so I believe, here I am forty years old—here I am being passed over in the grand prizes of the ‘great international congress’ in Salzburg … The committee reserved places of great importance on the program for Darius Milhaud, Ernest Blook [sic], Richard Strauss (probably Corngold [sic], Casella, Varese [sic], too)—all the musicians of ‘international’ stature … Oh, the cons.”

Ravel’s moment of crisis came when he played his new ballet score La Valse for Diaghilev in 1920. “Ravel, it’s a masterpiece, but it isn’t a ballet,” the impresario told him. “It’s a portrait of a ballet, a painting of a ballet.” Evidently, Diaghilev was saying that Ravel’s score lacked the pitiless spirit that the postwar era required.

The verdict was bizarre, for La Valse is both a dazzling incarnation of the twenties and a dazzling satire of it. It begins as a nostalgic journey in three-quarter time, Old Europe waltzing in the twilight. A stepwise intensification of dissonance and dynamics suggests the fury of the war just past, the wedding of aristocratic pride to the machinery of destruction. In the last moments, with trombones snarling and percussion rattling, the music becomes brassy, sassy, and fierce. Suddenly we seem to be in the middle of a flapper gin party—and there is no reason to feel any jolt of transition, since the Roaring Twenties were underwritten by the same fortunes that had financed the prewar balls. This is a society spinning out of control, reeling from the horrors of the recent past toward those of the near future.

Bartók’s confusion went deeper than matters of style: his personal history had been largely obliterated by the cartographic fiats of the peace treaties. The reduction of Hungarian territory after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire meant that Nagyszentmiklós, the composer’s birthplace, went to Romania, and that Pozsony, where his mother still lived, became Czechoslovak.

Nonetheless, Bartók remained loyal to the landscape of his dreams—that hidden empire of peasant music, which stretched as far as Turkey and North Africa. As Hungary moved toward fascism under the authoritarian government of Miklós Horthy, such multi-culturalism attracted suspicion; nationalists perceived Bartók as lacking in true Hungarian spirit. At the same time, his allegiance to folklore made him a quaint, anachronistic figure on the international new-music circuit. He was too cosmopolitan at home, too nationalist abroad. He was, however, finding the balance he had always sought, between the local and the universal. Less concerned with policing the boundaries between genres, he stopped agitating against the supposed contaminations of Gypsy music; Hungarian Gypsy fiddling appears all over his two Rhapsodies for violin and his Second Violin Concerto. Occasionally, he even indulged in a bit of jazz. As Julie Brown has pointed out, Bartók responded to the rise of genocidal racism by extolling “racial impurity”—the migration of styles, the intermingling of cultures.

In the first years of the postwar period Bartók strove to establish his modernist credentials. When the Danish composer Carl Nielsen came to Budapest in 1920, Bartók asked him whether he thought his Second Quartet was “sufficiently modern.” The ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, finished the previous year, matched the polytonal violence of the Rite, with a hint of Futurism in the honking cityscape of the prelude (“ ‘stylized’ noise,” Bartók called it). The strutting harshness of the two violin sonatas, the Piano Sonata, the piano suite Out of Doors, the First Piano Concerto, and the Third Quartet, all composed in the early and mid-twenties, won respect from the Schoenberg camp. But Bartók’s melodies retained a folkish shape, and the harmony again stopped short of full atonality. These works use symmetrical scales that revolve around a “tonal center,” a single pitch that sounds somehow “right” whenever it appears. In the wide-ranging Fourth Quartet, written in 1928, dissonant dances frame an ethereal slow movement that glides around the key of E major without quite touching it. In the final tranquillo section, the violin plays a sweet folkish melody, akin to the “Peacock Melody” of Magyar tradition. The composer has returned to first principles.

In several masterpieces of Bartók’s last years—the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936), the Second Violin Concerto (1937–38), and the Concerto for Orchestra (1943)—the ceremony of homecoming is repeated. The final movement of each work brings a palpable feeling of release, as if the composer, who had observed peasants with shy detachment, were finally throwing away his notebook and entering the fray. Strings whip up dust clouds around manic dancing feet. Brass play secular chorales, as if seated on the dented steps of a tilting little church. Winds squawk like excited children. Drums bang the drunken lust of young men at the center of the crowd. There are no sacrificial victims in these neoprimitive scenes, even if some walk away with bruises. The ritual of return is most poignant in the Concerto for Orchestra, which Bartók wrote in American exile. Transylvania was by then a purely mental space that he could dance across from end to end, even as his final illness immobilized him.

Bartók and Janáček met twice in the twenties. The second time, in 1927, Janáček is said to have grabbed Bartók by the shoulders and dragged him into a quiet corner. Posterity would love to have a precise record of that conversation, but the eyewitness report is frustratingly impressionistic: “fascinating exchange … a fireworks of personalities …” Did Janáček urge Bartók to be true to his national, folkish self, as Debussy had urged Stravinsky?

By now well into his seventies, the Moravian master was more bemused than intimidated by the culture of the festivals; he liked to tell the story that when he tried to find his way to the stage to take a bow at the ISCM festival of 1925, he opened the wrong door and found himself out on the street. The belated international success of Jenůfa gave him the confidence to stay on the path that he had marked out before the turn of the century.

Janáček’s creative Indian summer is often attributed to his infatuation with Kamila Stösslová, a young married woman whom he met in 1917. Richly imagined female characters populate his last works: the “dark-skinned Gypsy girl” who seduces a farmer’s son in the song cycle The Diary of One Who Disappeared; Katerina, the tragic heroine of the opera Katya Kabanova, who throws herself into the Volga River to escape the tormenting rectitude of her mother-in-law; the female fox at the heart of the animal fable The Cunning Little Vixen, who finds love in the forest and then falls to the gun of a poacher; and the unlikely protagonist of The Makropoulos Affair, a 337-year-old opera singer who has achieved immortality at the price of being “cold as ice.”

Janáček’s late style is lean and strong. Melodies are whittled down but do not lose their grace. Rhythms move like a needle on a gramo-phone, skipping as if stuck in a rut or slowing down as if someone were fiddling with the speed. One signature sound is a raw pealing of trumpets, which ushers in both the rustic military Sinfonietta and the Glagolitic Mass, a setting of the Old Slavonic liturgy. In the mass, liturgical phrases such as “Lord have mercy,” “Crucified for us,” “I believe,” and “Lamb of God” are linked to changing phases of rural weather: lashing rain, lightning, a clearing sky, a spell of moonlight, a pale sun the following day. Christianity and paganism are reconciled.

The Cunning Little Vixen, at once a charming children’s tale and a profound allegory of modern life, may be Janáček’s greatest achievement. It begins innocuously, as a folksy old forester—as a child Janáček dreamed of being a forester—captures a fox cub and brings her to his home. She runs amok, slaughters the chickens, and is banished to the woods. There she finds a handsome lover and woos him to music that parodies post-Wagnerian opera, notably Strauss in his kitschier moods. In Act III, the vixen is felled by a rifle shot, and the opera takes on an altogether different tone. In the final scene the forester steps out of his folk-tale role and meditates on the passage of time. He seems to be musing about the very opera that he’s in: “Is this fairy tale or reality? Reality or fairy tale?” The forester falls asleep, and when he wakes the animals of the woods surround him. He sees fox cubs at play and realizes that they are the vixen’s children. He then catches a little frog in his hand, thinking he’s seeing the same “clammy little monster” whom he met in the first scene of the opera:

FORESTER: Where have you come from?

FROG: That wasn’t me, that was grandpa! They told me all about you.

In other words, the animals of the forest have been telling stories about the forester over the course of their brief lives, as if he were a hero from long ago. In the disjuncture between human and animal time we see him—and ourselves—across an immense space. “Good and evil turn around in life afresh,” Janáček wrote in his own synopsis.

The forester smiles and goes back to sleep. His gun slips from his hands. The vixen’s music returns, raised to extraordinary vehemence by pealing brass and pounding timpani. A circular motif plays twice over chords of D-flat major, then modulates to E major; finally, as the harmony returns to D-flat, the melody clings to its E-major pitches, producing a rich modal sonority, a bluesy seventh chord. It recalls the ending of Jenůfa, the walk into paradise. “You must play this for me when I die,” Janáček said to his producer. Which they did, in August 1928.

Stravinsky’s moment of high anxiety arrived when he performed his Piano Sonata at the 1925 ISCM festival in Venice. Janáček was there; so, too, were Diaghilev, Honegger, the Princesse de Polignac, Cole Porter, Arturo Toscanini, and Schoenberg, with his red gaze. Many questioned Stravinsky’s new neoclassical style; the rumor went around that he was no longer “serious,” that he had become a pasticheur. Schoenberg reportedly walked out. Stravinsky must have been aware of the skepticism all around; insecurity, writes his biographer Stephen Walsh, was “the demon that lurked permanently in the inner regions of Stravinsky’s consciousness.” Emotional tensions preyed on him as well. Yekaterina Stravinsky, his wife, had suffered a breakdown, the result of a tubercular condition. Yekaterina’s devotion to Russian Orthodoxy seemed a silent rebuke of her husband’s dandyish lifestyle, not to mention his ongoing affair with Vera Sudeykina.

A few days before the concert, an abscess appeared on Stravinsky’s right hand. Somewhat to his own surprise, he went to a church, got on his knees, and asked for divine aid. Just before sitting down to play, he checked under the bandage and saw that the abscess was gone. This sudden cure struck Stravinsky as a miracle, and he began to experience a religious reawakening. His official “return to sacraments” took place almost a year later, during Holy Week of 1926, when he reported to Diaghilev that he was fasting “out of extreme mental and spiritual need.” Around the same time, Stravinsky wrote a brief, pungent setting of the Lord’s Prayer in Old Slavonic. Over the next five years he wrote a trilogy of solemn-toned or explicitly sacred works: Oedipus Rex, Apollo, Symphony of Psalms. Religion was his new “reality,” his new foundation; it gave substance to his devotion to the past and, not incidentally, direction to his mildly dissolute life.

In rediscovering religion, Stravinsky was, paradoxically, following fashion. The year 1925 was one of newfound sobriety in French culture. Many were pondering a valedictory essay by the recently deceased Jacques Rivière on the “crisis of the concept of literature”; the critic had proposed that the arts were becoming too disinterested, too “inhuman,” and he listed Stravinsky’s “music of objects” among the symptoms of an ethical and spiritual decline. Cocteau, having suffered the loss of his underage lover Raymond Radiguet, fallen into opium addiction, and experienced a hallucinatory epiphany in Picasso’s elevator, returned to Catholicism in June of the same year. Cocteau’s guru was the neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, who believed that modern art could purify itself into an image of God’s truth, into something “well made, complete, proper, durable, honest.”

Stravinsky, too, fell under Maritain’s influence, perhaps chastened when the philosopher criticized the notion of “art for nothing, for nothing else but itself.” After considering the idea of an opera or oratorio on the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, Stravinsky elected to pursue a topic from ancient tragedy, and asked Cocteau to write a French-language adaptation of the story of Oedipus. He then had Cocteau’s text translated into Latin. “The choice [of Latin],” Stravinsky later wrote, “had the great advantage of giving me a medium not dead, but turned to stone and so monumentalized as to have become immune from all risk of vulgarization.” The score instructed: “Only their arms and heads move. They should give the impression of living statues.” This marked a commitment to Rivière’s project of spiritual rehabilitation, to Maritain’s philosophy of art as sacred work.

Cocteau’s involvement meant that Oedipus could go only so far in the direction of solemnity. The Latin declamations were strung together with a self-consciously, satirically pompous French-language narration. Cocteau’s Speaker is so wrapped up in his literary dignity that he sometimes fails to notice what is happening onstage. “And now you will hear the famous monologue, ‘The Divine Jocasta is dead,’ ” he proclaims—but no monologue ensues.

Such self-conscious gestures might have turned Oedipus into another panoply of camp. But Stravinsky was in earnest. “Kaedit nos pestis”—“Plague is upon us”—the chorus chants at the opening, over five booming chords in the key of B-flat minor. On its own, the core progression would sound a bit creaky and clichéd. What adds drama is the bass line, which sticks to the notes of the B-flat-minor triad but gnashes against the changing chords above. The impression, here and throughout the work, is of damaged, decaying grandeur—like acid streaks on cathedral marble. Yet Oedipus is a living statue, as the score instructs. Stravinsky’s alertness to the rhythm of words puts bounce and thrust into the archaic Latin text. The word “moritur,” coming at the end of the three opening gestures, sets in motion a purring triplet figure that propels the work to the end.

The ballet Apollon musagète, the second panel in Stravinsky’s sacred triptych, is a serene spectacle of art in contemplation of itself: the young god Apollo matures and achieves mastery in the company of the muses Calliope, Polyhymnia, and Terpsichore. The scoring, for strings alone, reverses the post-Rite trend toward hard sonorities of winds and brass, which, in a typical feat of chutzpah, Stravinsky now chided his contemporaries for overexploiting. (“The swing of the pendulum was too violent,” he wrote in his Autobiography, as if someone else had set the pendulum in motion.) Apollo floats by on straightforward major-key harmonies and draws on a vein of tender melody; collage-like cutting and layering give way to a smooth, unbroken surface.

In a prior Ballets Russes season, the airy conception of a “white ballet” might have been realized in an annoyingly precious way. With the arrival of George Balanchine, though, Stravinsky found his creative other half. Balanchine’s project of recapturing the equipoise of classical dance through modern choreography—sometimes athletic, sometimes abstract—was the mirror image of Stravinsky’s new style. The union of dance and music suggested a higher union of body and spirit. Boris de Schloezer, who earlier in the de cade had attacked the composer for perpetrating musical jokes, grasped the new Stravinsky when he wrote, “Logically, after Apollo, he ought to give us a Mass.”

This Stravinsky more or less did, in an attitude of grief. In August 1929 the composer was stunned by the sudden death of Diaghilev, his discoverer, protector, and substitute father, and his distress was intensified by the fact that he had not had the chance to make proper farewells; the two men had lately bickered and fallen out. Meanwhile, Yekaterina grew sicker and more devout. Icons and candles filled the Stravinsky home, and there was talk of building a private chapel. Out of this fervid atmosphere arose the Symphony of Psalms.

The texts come from the Latin vulgate versions of Psalms 38, 39, and 150, but the music has something intangible in common with Russian Orthodoxy. For the American critic Paul Rosenfeld, it “called to our mind the mosaic-gilded interior of one of the Byzantine domes … from whose vaulting the Christ and his Mother gaze pitilessly down upon the accursed human race.” The first chord fulfills Rosenfeld’s cathedral metaphor: E-minor triads in the bass and treble are arranged around columnar Gs in the middle registers. Throughout, the habitually economical composer enlarges his sense of space. The setting of Psalm 150 (“Praise God in his holy place, praise him in the heavenly vault of his power”) goes on for a relative eternity of twelve minutes.

The Symphony is not all frozen architecture. Stravinsky’s trademark rhythms make subtle appearances. At one point in Psalm 150, the chorus lightly syncopates the phrase “Lau-da-te do-mi-nuumm,” with the “do” falling between the second and the third beats and the last syllable prolonged to fill out the bar—almost like the Charleston. And in the raptly contemplative coda, the timpani repeat a four-note pattern over forty-two bars, the quasi-minimalist ostinato creating an almost imperceptible tension with the prevailing meter of three beats to a bar—a bounce of an ethereal, incorporeal kind.

Almost from the beginning, listeners worried that Stravinsky’s wizardly creations were marred by an inner coldness. Ned Rorem, an American composer firmly committed to the “French” rather than the “German” politics of style, has asked himself: “Do I adore Stravinsky as I adore others who are perhaps less overwhelming—Ravel, for example, or Poulenc? I am dazzled by his intelligence and scared by his force, but my heart is not melted.” If anything by Stravinsky can melt the heart, it is the Symphony of Psalms. The great nonexpresser and maker of objects lets down his guard, giving us a glimpse of his terrors and longings. Notice a telltale repetition of words in the first two psalms that Stravinsky chose to set: “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry … I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry.” William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, wrote that a condition of desperate mental flailing is often the prelude to spiritual renewal: “Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! help!”

Help for what? Stravinsky’s biography provides plentiful fodder for speculation, but the underlying impetus may have been a growing discomfort with modernity itself—panic in the face of speed and noise. Reality, into which so many artists yearned to plunge, turned out to be an engulfing medium. Young aesthetes went off to the trenches of the Great War hoping to acquire a manly finish; the survivors were shattered rather than invigorated by the ordeal. Perhaps for this reason, those who had earlier attempted to escape the temple of “pure music” now tried to find their way back in. In the end, the Germanic philosophy of musical universalism, according to which a few set forms and procedures would serve the composers of all nations, once more functioned as a bulwark against an increasingly indifferent culture. As in Yeats’s poem, European composers embraced the sublimity of artifice, “to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”