For his return to Montreal this week, Kent Nagano will conduct the symphony “ Heroic” by Beethoven and The wedding by Stravinsky. This score does not enjoy the popularity of the three great ballets by the composer of Russian origin. However, it is one of the jewels of his production.
The wedding was a headache for Stravinsky. The composer, who had shaken up the musical cage in France with Fire Bird, Petrushka And The Rite of Springs between 1910 and 1913, had gone to and around kyiv in 1914 in search of popular melodies that could inspire a new score. He spent the war years in Morges, Switzerland, where he composed, between 1914 and 1917, these “Russian choreographic scenes with song and music”, duly dedicated to Serge de Diaghilev, the director of the Ballets Russes troupe. in Paris.
So far so good. But the salt of the matter is that it was not until April 6, 1923 that Stravinsky finally completed the orchestration of the Wedding and that this orchestration is revolutionary.
It would have been logical for Igor Stravinsky to continue his momentum, he, such a brilliant orchestrator. If he gets stuck, it’s because he’s looking for another formula. And it will be radical: the soloists and the mixed choir face four pianos, timpani and percussion (antique cymbals, bass drum, chimes, cymbals, snare drums, tambourine, triangle, xylophone)! The time taken to “find the solution” marks the longest period of development of all of Stravinsky’s works.
Mechanical ballet
The logical path was to go even beyond the Rite of Spring with an instrumental debauchery. Stravinsky would have thought of it, but there is no record of it. More concretely, we find sketches of versions opposing two string quintets (one used pizzicatothe other arco) and nine winds. There is a real, complete “principles version” from 1917 for 27 winds and brass, 8 strings, harp, piano, harpsichord and cimbalum.
But at that time, Stravinsky was working with reduced staff and returned (1919) to a version for two cimbaloms, a harmonium, a pianola and percussion. This unfinished version (two paintings out of four), which has been called the “original version”, was directed for the first time in 1981 by Pierre Boulez in Paris. A version completed by René Bosq for vocal quartet, choir, two cimbaloms, player piano, digital harmonium and six percussion instruments was heard in Montreal at the Société de musique contemporain du Québec in 2005.
The reasons for the failure of the path explored in 1919 are clearly described by Stravinsky in Chronicles of my life. “I began a score comprising entire polyphonic blocks: mechanical piano and harmonium driven by electricity, a set of percussions and Hungarian cimbaloms. But there, I encountered the great difficulty for the conductor to synchronize the parts performed by the musicians and singers with those of the mechanical instruments. As well, this made me give up this idea, although I had instrumented the first two paintings in this way, work which took a lot of strength from me and required great patience, and all that was a complete waste. »
These difficulties in synchronizing mechanical instruments led in 1923 to the definitive version that we know: a “struck” sound that was itself “perfectly mechanical” from four pianos and percussionists.
Influences
The subject of Weddingwhich comes in the wake of Rite of Spring, that is to say a look at old Russian traditions or ceremonies, is a peasant wedding based around popular Russian poems. The work is divided into two parts. The first has three scenes, the first taking place in the house of the future bride, the second in the house of the future groom, the third illustrating the departure of the future bride from her house and the lamentations of the mothers. The second part is the wedding meal and the party.
The wedding and its unique “orchestral” device radiated throughout the 20the century, until Svadba (Marriage), Ana Sokolović’s chamber opera, 90 years later, the supreme step in audacity: Wedding, but twice as long, with twice as many scenes, a choir replaced by six individual voices and the eradication of all orchestral accompaniment! A challenge for singers, since everything relies on the magic of the union of voices, on the accuracy and precision of the rhythms.
The creation of Wedding took place on June 13, 1923 in Paris under the direction of Ernest Ansermet in a choreography by Bronislava Nijinska, then director of the Ballets Russes. The interpretations sometimes use the original Russian text, sometimes the French translation by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz. As a ballet, a recent trend, in Russia as in the West, has been to rework Nijinska’s original choreography. In the United States, this was done by Ballet West of Salt Lake City, which traveled the United States with its show The Wedding.