Rake's Progress Thoughts (in brief)
Listening to John Eliot Gardiner's recording of Stravinsky's longest and in many ways most problematic work renews some of my enthusiasms and some of my doubts. It helps to have such a crisp ensemble under Gardiner's thoughtful and lively hand. The somewhat uneven dramatic material is helped, if not totally saved from inevitable death, by Terfel, Bostridge, Otter et. al.
The two main problems:
-Said uneven dramatic material. Auden and Kallman's libretto is very smart, and especially towards the end, very beautiful. As pure verse, it more often-than-not reads well, if a tad show-offy. Dramatically, it's hard to become attached to such flat characters as Anne and Tom. They are merely neo-classical stock puppets that Auden draws from 18th century England for Stravinsky to hang his neo-classical cravat and quasi-fan tuttes onto.
-Much of the music is, for Stravinsky, rhymically dull. It is a curse of many of the most uninspired pages of his post-Persephone work (Ode, Scenes de Ballet, Symphony in C etc.), and it plagues the Rake. Much of the blame can be blamed on Stravinsky's (at this juncture) scant knowledge of English, and the supra-wordy brilliance of the libretto. Much of the music sounds like mere accompiniament for the words; the orchestra hammers ostinato patterns of Stravinskified Mozart for the singers to sing their long-breathed melodies of oddly-accented English. Many times I feel like I am listening to a recording of a sketch of music that hasn't been fleshed out, as if Stravinsky hadn't the energy to avoid simply getting the words out as fast as possible. This was a trait he lamented himself in his criticisms of the work.
The goodnesses:
-The music is not as bad as Benjamin Britten said, and indeed it's greatest moments, the 'Lanterloo' chorus, Baba the Turk's heroic entrance, the graveyard, Auction and Bedlam scenes, and several other pages here and there surpass the greatest moments of most of Britten's operas (the most notable exception being Turn of the Screw).
The 'Lanterloo' chorus is constantly running through my head, musically and lyrically, and partially due to the exquisite wind music that bubbles and froths in pandiatonic cantilenas (the wind writing being the great feature of the opera and of course Mozart's Cosi). It's wonderful ending, where Nick Shadow warns his master of the fleeting nature of all that lives over the slowly unweaving web of mysterious wind figurations, with each passing phrase becoming quieter, more dissonant and more disjointed, is haunting to me beyond words.
The work is also full of some fine melodies and orchestral touches. The slow, mournful and simple Miles Davis muted trumpet melody over the nervously swaying strings of Anne's 'waiting' music in Act Two is, as that eternal favorite phrase of music critics has it, 'achingly beautiful'.
Baba the Turk's music as she unveils herself before her endlessly cynical and bored London admirers, a jazzy, Lully-like gavotte for strings, is so superb in its characterization that the wildly theatric Thomas Ades quotes it in Powder Her Face.
Sure, it's not perfect. But it's worthy of a Stravinsky and an Auden in many places, and as Music Critic Eternal says three times a day, 'rewards repeated listenings.'
Listening to John Eliot Gardiner's recording of Stravinsky's longest and in many ways most problematic work renews some of my enthusiasms and some of my doubts. It helps to have such a crisp ensemble under Gardiner's thoughtful and lively hand. The somewhat uneven dramatic material is helped, if not totally saved from inevitable death, by Terfel, Bostridge, Otter et. al.
The two main problems:
-Said uneven dramatic material. Auden and Kallman's libretto is very smart, and especially towards the end, very beautiful. As pure verse, it more often-than-not reads well, if a tad show-offy. Dramatically, it's hard to become attached to such flat characters as Anne and Tom. They are merely neo-classical stock puppets that Auden draws from 18th century England for Stravinsky to hang his neo-classical cravat and quasi-fan tuttes onto.
-Much of the music is, for Stravinsky, rhymically dull. It is a curse of many of the most uninspired pages of his post-Persephone work (Ode, Scenes de Ballet, Symphony in C etc.), and it plagues the Rake. Much of the blame can be blamed on Stravinsky's (at this juncture) scant knowledge of English, and the supra-wordy brilliance of the libretto. Much of the music sounds like mere accompiniament for the words; the orchestra hammers ostinato patterns of Stravinskified Mozart for the singers to sing their long-breathed melodies of oddly-accented English. Many times I feel like I am listening to a recording of a sketch of music that hasn't been fleshed out, as if Stravinsky hadn't the energy to avoid simply getting the words out as fast as possible. This was a trait he lamented himself in his criticisms of the work.
The goodnesses:
-The music is not as bad as Benjamin Britten said, and indeed it's greatest moments, the 'Lanterloo' chorus, Baba the Turk's heroic entrance, the graveyard, Auction and Bedlam scenes, and several other pages here and there surpass the greatest moments of most of Britten's operas (the most notable exception being Turn of the Screw).
The 'Lanterloo' chorus is constantly running through my head, musically and lyrically, and partially due to the exquisite wind music that bubbles and froths in pandiatonic cantilenas (the wind writing being the great feature of the opera and of course Mozart's Cosi). It's wonderful ending, where Nick Shadow warns his master of the fleeting nature of all that lives over the slowly unweaving web of mysterious wind figurations, with each passing phrase becoming quieter, more dissonant and more disjointed, is haunting to me beyond words.
The work is also full of some fine melodies and orchestral touches. The slow, mournful and simple Miles Davis muted trumpet melody over the nervously swaying strings of Anne's 'waiting' music in Act Two is, as that eternal favorite phrase of music critics has it, 'achingly beautiful'.
Baba the Turk's music as she unveils herself before her endlessly cynical and bored London admirers, a jazzy, Lully-like gavotte for strings, is so superb in its characterization that the wildly theatric Thomas Ades quotes it in Powder Her Face.
Sure, it's not perfect. But it's worthy of a Stravinsky and an Auden in many places, and as Music Critic Eternal says three times a day, 'rewards repeated listenings.'
posted by PWS at 7:27 PM
3 Comments:
Wonderfully written, Patrick. :)
I hope you're well.
Happy Friday!
Love,
~ Ash
Your observations about rhythm in the Rake are spot on. I've been playing the Serenade in A and the Sonata, and the fairly static motor rhythms in these pieces have got me puzzled. Two things could be going on: either he's turned down the rhythmic variety to call attention to other elements, or he is using monotony itself as a trope. The first doesn't quite work, in that the other elements -- pitch collection, dynamics -- tend themselves to be flat, themselves. The second seems more likely, as working through a flat texture is certainly a modernist tradition, from the Satie of the Cold Pieces to La Monte Young. In Stravinky's case, this becomes ironic, through the creative misreading of the classical opera style.
I quite like the Serenade about which you bring up some good points. The Sonata I'm not so keen on. In both however, the rhythms are indeed static and motor, and those left hand runs in the Hymne, deep in the bass, make the piece nearly impossible to play without muddying. It's a un-Stravinskian trait which seems to come up a lot in these neo-classical works. Their textures often come out as limp rather than sharp, which might be blamed on the often subpar orchestras that play them, and also to some creative deficiancy in Stravinsky's musical inspiration at the time. With a few exceptions, it seems that Stravinsky was very much bogged down in the late 30s and 40s with lots of hack work ("Circus Polka", "Scerzo a'la Russe", "Tango") and few true masterpieces of high order. His style simply does not evolve during this period like it had before. The exceptions are obviously the Symphony in Three Movements, The Concerto for Two Pianos (another strangely muddy piece at times) and the sublime "Orpheus" which I often consider as my favorite piece of music ever. There are other great neo-classical works from before this barren period, as for instance the Serenade and the Duo Concertant, which is an interesting and beautiful piece I think.
It is not until the Cantata and Septet that Stravinsky becomes Stravinsky at his best once more, as his serial work embraces rhythm again in fascinating ways. "Agon" is at the height of all of his late work; it more than negates any stagnant features of his language in some of the lesser works of the neo-classical period. It's such an innovative masterpiece in every way that I think it negates the lesser works of hundreds of other composers as well.
So yeah, I think it's unfortunately not a trope. It's simply a disease of an uninspired artist. Stravinsky simply does not forget rhythm under any circumstances. If he does he makes it clear he's being cheeky.
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