Humanizing Stravinsky

To my ears, the most sublime music Igor Stravinsky ever composed is “The Land of Eternal Dwelling” — the Epilogue to The Fairy’s Kiss. #

The 1928 ballet itself, possibly Stravinsky’s most emotionally naked music, is a confessional love letter to the homeland he excoriated in his Norton lectures and elsewhere as “anarchic” and inimical to artistic fulfillment. That he protested too much is self-evident; as I argue in my book Artists in Exile, Stravinsky’s ostensible estrangement from Mother Russia manifested a “psychology of exile.” #

The Fairy’s Kiss is a loving homage to Tchaikovsky, whose songs and piano pieces furnish the exquisite musical materials. The two Tchaikovsky works most tellingly cited say it all: “Lullaby in a Storm” and “None but the Lonely Heart.” The Fairy’s Kiss is Stravinsky revisiting his own childhood, confiding his emotional roots. And the six-minute Epilogue – in which the first of these plaintive songs is distilled to a timeless echo, frozen in time — is a remembrance of Stravinsky’s own childhood innocence. #

The Pacific Symphony, an orchestra that does things differently, celebrated the centenary of The Rite of Spring last week by exploring two Russias: the rural Russia of primal ceremony, where Stravinsky and Nicolas Roerich observed the ritual sacrifice of a straw effigy; and the St. Petersburg of the elegant Mariinsky Theatre, where Stravinsky’s father sang in the operas of Tchaikovsky. #

The concert included two film clips: an excerpt from Tony Palmer’s classic 1982 Stravinsky documentary, in which Stravinsky recalled introducing The Rite of Spring to Diaghilev, and a film I created with Jeff Sells, of the Pacific Symphony staff, that combined “The Land of Eternal Dwelling” with a biographical sequence (clips culled from Palmer’s film) reviewing in retrograde the events of Stravinsky’s long life – so that music and film ended in tandem with the bliss of infancy. It looked like this. #

As the concert had begun with danced excerpts from The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, the Fairy’s Kiss Epilogue (prefaced by “Lullaby in a Storm”) was the linchpin of the evening, setting the stage for a terrific Rite of Spring performance conducted by Carl St. Clair. The program as a whole aspired to humanize Stravinsky in surprising and extraordinary ways. #