There are a number of music theorists I only know about because of the ranting of Norman Lebrecht to the effect that smart and decent people shouldn’t be reading anything they have to say. Ethan Hein is one and Philip Ewell is another. Even if Lebrecht is taking a Swiftian hand at satire with his recent “myth of Igor Stravinsky as great composer” it is, I’m afraid it must be said, the kind of satire that’s made in bad faith.
That Stravinsky turned out to be a significant and influential composer seems hard to contest, whether you enjoy his music or not. I enjoy a fairly sizable chunk of it but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Stravinsky towers over Bartok or Shostakovich or Messiaen or Ellington or even Scott Joplin so much as to claim that Stravinsky’s influence is unassailably “top drawer”. He was an above-average composer and let’s leave it at that. ;)
But, no, Lebrecht has to try his own variation on the kind of think he took such umbrage at just about nine months ago. In what now seems to be archetypal Lebrechtian spleen he makes a sweeping assertion and pre-emptively insists that we readers not even have any chance to contest the proposition until he bids us raise a cheer for the closure of the canon. Never mind the 1,800 pages Richard Taruskin wrote in two volumes showing how much Stravinsky fabricated claims to not relying on Russian folk traditions after his star was cemented, never mind recent scholarship to the effect that the riot that allegedly happened at the premiere of Rite of Spring never happened, Lebrecht wants to assure us that no critic has ever dared to deflate Stravinsky’s reputation until just now.
https://slippedisc.com/2021/03/what-if-stravinsky-was-not-that-great/
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/april-2021/myth-of-igor-the-great-composer/
Igor Stravinsky cast such a huge shadow over the cultural estate that when he died, 50 years ago this month, his publisher said that music would be as art was after Michelangelo. We can now confirm that he was right. In half a century, no composer has attained the fame and stature of Stravinsky, none has dined with ease at the Elysée and the White House. Stravinsky was the last of the Great Composers. Once he was gone, they locked the canon and threw away the key.
Before you contest that proposition, let’s raise a cheer for the closure of the canon. Across the world right now, from the BBC to the Boston Symphony, dead white male composers are being replaced with diverse unknowns amid a confessional wave of collective guilt at our colonial worship of the Great Composers cult. Stravinsky will have his privilege checked at this summer’s music festivals, and about time, too. But I still see newspaper critics saluting him as the “greatest” of his century.
It’s about time we took down Great Igor, at least a peg or two. Luck played a part in his ascendance. As a Rimsky-Korsakov student in St Petersburg he was recruited by Serge Diaghilev to his ballet renaissance project. Stravinsky’s first two Paris ballets — Firebird and Petrushka — were spectacularly popular. His third, The Rite of Spring, was spectacularly notorious. Stravinsky dined out on the May 1913 riots for the rest of his life. Had he written nothing more, he would be no less famous today.
Drawing on the rhythmic propulsion of Petrushka, he employed thunderous noise as the driving force of the Rite. The ensuing ructions established Igor as the angry young musician of modernism, the Picasso of percussion. He mixed cocktails with Cocteau and aphorisms with Apollinaire until war broke out, when he found there was not much left in his toolkit.
Removal from Russia dried up his sources, throwing him back on touristy folklore in Les Noces. When communism perpetuated his exile, he invented a “neo-classical” style, which was essentially pseudo-Mozart or Rossini with a twist of lemon and lime. His middle period was mostly pastiche. Were it not for the 1930 Symphony of Psalms, one could write it off as a slump. A ballet or three kept him in the spotlight and an affair with the fashion queen Coco Chanel did his PR, and hers, no harm at all. Everybody had heard of Stravinsky.
Moving to America, he wrote a jazz clarinet concerto for Woody Herman and two unimposing symphonies for orchestral millionaires. In 1951 his libidinous opera The Rake’s Progress made all the right world headlines without changing the weather.
The game-changer for Stravinsky was his conversion — through the aptly-named Robert Craft — to the serial atonality of the lately-deceased Arnold Schoenberg. This leap of calculating faith in “progress” enshrined Stravinsky as the Moses of post-modernism, patron saint to the nihilism of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and supreme arbiter of musical correctness. No composer could make a career from the 1960s on without a nod to godfather Stravinsky. No critic has, up to now, dared to take a pin to his balloon, and it’s really not that hard to burst.
Let’s subject him to comparison, for argument’s sake, with Serge Prokofiev, a Russian nine years his junior who rose by the same route, through the Diaghilev talent machine. Prokofiev announced his arrival with a ballistic piano concerto and Scythian Suite, mellowing into a 1918 Classical Symphony. In Bolshevik exile, he wrote The Love of Three Oranges for Chicago, a couple of symphonies for Serge Koussevitsky and an unstageable 1927 opera about libidinous nuns, The Fiery Angel.
America’s depression and Europe’s political gloom led to a nail-bitten decision to return to Russia in 1936. The move cost his first wife a long sentence in Siberia, among other inconveniences, but Prokofiev never ran dry of music no matter how harrowing his circumstances.
From Peter and the Wolf for a Moscow children’s theatre to War and Peace for the Bolshoi, every score that left his desk was polished to perfection and each was Prokofiev in every line, paying no dues to current doctrines. His fifth symphony is one of the defining works of the Second World War and the three sonatas he wrote for Richter and Gilels are summits of the piano repertoire.Stalin brought him to his knees with threats and deprivations and his death in March 1953 on the same day as the dictator brought Russians out in tears. His music has never gone out of fashion or needed immense — seven symphonies, five piano concertos, six Stalin Prizes and a score for Ivan the Terrible. He wrote works of art, for art’s sake. At least a dozen scores — the violin concertos, the Cinderella ballet, Romeo and Juliet — are part of our common culture, meaningful to people of all ages, boomed out in football stadia and fitness gyms.
[needed immense what? That’s not a faulty transcription, that’s a cut-and-paste. Anyway, that’s as of 8:30pm PST in the US]
Blessed with a Mozartian gift for melody, Prokofiev was a citizen of his century. Nobody ever nominated him as its “greatest composer” — in part, because he did not need brand inflation and, in equal part, because the Great Composer is a construct of a music establishment that claims to know best what is good for music, what politicians and the public will pay for. Prokofiev was never a man they could send to the White House. He could not eat fish without spattering his shirt.
Examine Stravinsky’s manuscripts and you’ll see neatness in several colours, each note minutely in its place. With Prokofiev, chords wobble all over the staves, bursting to get off the page and into our ears. Great Composer that he is, Stravinsky’s music has not worn well. Much of it is aloof, elusive, strategic, cerebral and cold. Most is generally unplayed. This year’s roll-out might well be his last.
If complying, when necessary, with socialist realist standards for the arts constitutes art for art’s sake then we might want to step back and ask what Norman Lebrecht think that phrase even means.
If Prokofiev didn’t need brand inflation from critics he doesn’t need any posthumous help that Norman Lebrecht probably cannot provide. My point is not so much that either Stravinsky is bad or Prokofiev is good, or vice versa, of course, my point is that Lebrecht seems unable to help ranting in bad faith against his own earlier outrage at Ewell’s decision to take down Heinrich Schenker just one peg or two by pointing out what a virulently white supremacist man he was. And what was Lebrecht’s response?
https://slippedisc.com/2020/07/lets-kick-that-racist-schenker-out-of-musicology/
https://slippedisc.com/2020/12/it-may-be-time-to-cancel-musicology/
It’s almost as if double-standards are his trademark.
Canons change and different groups can have different interpretive takes on shared canonical works. Jews and Christians have known about this for literally thousands of years, for instance. Some works that were regarded as maybe inspired didn’t make the cut as canonical works in the long-run.
But the thing I have said for years and will say again is this, for those of us who have no problem making a full-frontal assault on Romantic era art-religion and the critical and scholarly instruments of formulating that Matthew Arnold/Richard Wagner style art-religion Beethoven won’t come out the other side of that assault with zero performances. Just because I don’t think he had as direct a hotline to the infinite divine as he thought he did doesn’t mean I won’t ever listen to Beethoven again, it just means I don’t regard the post-Romantic scholarly and critical consensus in Anglo-American music theory and musicology as seriously as people like Norman Lebrecht seem to. The loss of art-religion won’t mean the death of the arts. If anything, after two centuries of the nonsense the loss of Romantic era ideologies of art for art’s sake might be a boon to music as an art.
As I have also been saying for a few years, one of the core problems of Western art-religion is that, precisely as Norman Lebrecht has informally conceded the point, the canon is closed and there’s no room for further revelation. He’ll posture as though take-downs of the canon are actually against the canon for the sake of his clickbaitery but I’ve read just enough people in the New Musicology scene to recognize that nobody is actually proposing to get rid of Beethoven. They just want to take him down a peg or two as Norman Lebrecht has claimed to do about Stravinsky … only Beethoven and Schenkerian theory may be cows too sacred for Lebrecht to stand by while they are slain.
I like reading Lebrecht more when he gets off his duff and suggests people listen to, say, string quartets by Grazyna Bacewicz than acting like he's going to take Stravinsky down a peg or two. But this is the man who said too many people are making too many CDs that he'll never review. I like Shostakovich but we don't need yet more box sets of Shostakovich in the time of covid-19. What I'd like, instead, if possible, is the second half of Nikita Koshkin's 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo guitar to get recorded on Naxos as soon as possible.
POSTSCRIPT 3-26-21 6:40 AM ish
As Pliable has noted at On an Overgrown Path, the clickbait style of music coverage Lebrecht does clearly does get readers and pays.
https://www.overgrownpath.com/2021/03/classical-music-must-face-facts-click.html
With respect to my own comments above, double standardized testing on what constitutes legitimate outrage is part of that deal.
POSTSCRIPT 3-26- 2021 5.06 PM
As if to prove the point, Lebrecht has posted again about Ewell.
1 comment:
Thanks for a well written, well thought out post.
As you point out with your reference to Pliable's Overgrown Path observations, the true measure of value is not clicks.
Thank you for giving your audience some substantial food for thought. If we need empty calories every now and then we can always check out Slippedisc. Of course a small serving of broccoli will always be better for you than gobbling a whole bag of potato chips.
Keep up the good work.
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