I do not mean to draw a facile parallel between the novel and music, the structural issues of the two arts not being comparable; but the historical situations are similar: like the great novelists, the great modern composers (Stravinsky and Schoenberg both) determined to encompass all the centuries of music, to rethink and remake the scale of values of its whole history; to do this, they had to extricate music from the rut of the second half (by the way: the term "neoclassicism" commonly pinned on Stravinsky is misleading, for his most decisive excursions into the past reach into eras earlier than the Classical); from which comes their reticence: as to composition techniques originating with the sonata; as to the preeminence of melody; as to the sonic demagogy of svmphonic orchestration; but from which comes, above alclass="underline" their refusal to see music's raison d'etre exclusively as an avowal of emotional life, an attitude that during the nineteenth century became as coercive as did the requirement of plausibility for the novel.
Although that inclination to reread and reevaluate the entire history of music is common to all the great modernists (if it is, as I believe, the mark that distinguishes great modern art from modernist trumpery), still, it is Stravinsky who expresses it more clearly than anyone else (and hyperbolically, I would add). That, by the way, is the focus of his detractors' attacks: in his effort to root himself in the whole history of music they see eclecticism; a lack of originality; a failure of invention. His "incredible diversity of stylistic procedures… amounts to an absence of style," says Ansermet. And Adorno, sarcastically: Stravinsky's music is inspired only by music, it is "music about music."
Unfair judgments: for while Stravinsky, like no other composer before or after him, did turn for inspiration to the whole span of music, in no way does that lessen the originality of his art. And I do not merely mean that the same personal traits are always visible beneath the shifts in his style. I mean that it is precisely his vagabondage through musical history-his conscious, purposeful "eclecticism," gigantic and unmatched-that is his total and incomparable originality.
The Third (or Overtime) Period
But what is the significance, in Stravinsky, of this determination to encompass the whole span of music? What is the point?
As a young man, I would answer without hesitation: to me, Stravinsky was one of those figures who had opened the doors onto distances I saw as boundless. I thought he meant to summon up and mobilize all the powers, all the means available to the history of music, for the infinite journey that is modern art.
The infinite journey that is modern art? Since then, I've lost that feeling. The journey was a short one. That is why, for my metaphor of the two game halves of music history, I've imagined modern music as a mere postlude, an epilogue to the history of music, a celebration that marks the end of the adventure, a sky ablaze at the end of the day.
Now I do hesitate: even though it is true that the time of modern music has been so short, even though it has lasted only a generation or two, and has thus really been no more than an epilogue, still, by reason of its enormous beauty, its artistic importance, its entirely new aesthetic, does it not deserve to be considered an era complete unto itself, a third for overtime) period? Should I not revise my metaphor about the histories of music and of the novel? Should I not say that they happened over three periods?
Yes, I do revise my metaphor, and all the more willingly as I am deeply, passionately fond of that third period, that "sky ablaze at the end of the day," fond of that period which I believe I myself am part of, even if I am part of something that is already finished.
But to return to my question: what is the significance of Stravinsky's determination to encompass the whole span of music? What is the point?
An image hounds me: according to a popular belief, at the moment of his death a person sees his
whole life pass before his eyes. In Stravinsky's work, European music recalled its thousand-year history; that was its final dream before setting out for an eternal dreamless sleep.
Playful Transcription
Let us distinguish two things: on the one hand: the general trend for restoring forgotten principles of music of the past, a trend that runs through all Stravinsky's work and that of his great contemporaries; on the other hand: the direct dialogue that Stravinsky carries on with Tchaikovsky, then with Pergolesi, then with Gesualdo, and so on; these "direct dialogues," transcriptions of this or that old work, in this or that particular style, are a procedure of Stravinsky's own that we find in practically no other of his composer contemporaries (we do find it in Picasso).
Adorno interprets Stravinsky's transcriptions thus (I emphasize the key terms): "These notes"-the dissonant notes, alien to the harmony, which Stravinsky uses in Pulcinella, for instance-"become the marks of the violence the composer wreaks against the idiom, and it is that violence we relish about them, that battering, that violation, so to speak, of musical life. Though dissonance may originally have been the expression of subjective suffering, its harshness shifts in value and becomes the sign of a social constraint, whose agent is the style-setting composer. His works have no other material but the emblems of that con-straint, a necessity external to the subject, having nothing in common with it, and which is merely imposed from the outside. It may be that the widespread effect of these works of Stravinsky's is due in large part to the fact that inadvertently, and under color of aestheticism, they in their own way trained men to something that was soon methodically inflicted on them at the political level."
Let us recapitulate: a dissonance is justified if it expresses "subjective suffering," but in Stravinsky (who is morally guilty, as we know, of never discussing his sufferings) that very dissonance is the sign of brutality; a parallel is drawn (by a brilliant short circuit of Adorno thought) with political brutality: thus the dissonant chords added to Pergolesis music prefigure (and thereby prepare) the coming political oppression (which in this particular historical context can mean only one thing: fascism).
I had my own experience with the free transcription of a work from the past when, early in the 1970s, while I was still in Prague, I set about writing a variation for the theater on Jacques le Fataliste. Diderot being for me the embodiment of a free, rational, critical mind, I experienced my affection for him at the time as a kind of yearning for the West (to my eyes, the Russian occupation of my country represented a forced de-Westernization). But the meaning of things keeps changing: today I would say that Diderot embodied for me the first half of the art of the novel and that my play celebrated various principles well known to the novelists of old, and dear to me as welclass="underline" (1) the euphoric freedom of composition; (2) the constant association of libertine stories and philosophical reflections; (3) the nonserious, ironical, parodic, shocking nature of those reflections. The rules of the game were clear: what I did was not an adaptation of Diderot, it was my own play, my variation on Diderot, my homage to Diderot: I completely rewrote his novel; the love stories are taken from him, but the ideas in the dialogue are largely mine; anyone can instantly see lines in it that are unthinkable from Diderot's pen; the eighteenth century was optimistic, my time is not, I myself still less so, and in my play the Master and Jacques characters indulge in dark excesses barely imaginable in the age of Enlightenment.