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Opera Double Bill Offers Insight Into Stravinsky's Evolution By LISA ROBINSON
Arguably the most influential composer of the 20th century, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) was also one of its most opinionated and outspoken. In 1913, after interrupting work on his first opera five years earlier to write three ballets for Diaghilev—The Firebird, Petrushka, and the riot-inciting Le Sacre du Printemps ("The Rite of Spring")—he announced, "I dislike opera. Music can be married to gesture or to words—not to both without bigamy." Later that year, however, Stravinsky reluctantly returned to the project after a lucrative offer from Alexander Sanin, co-founder of the Free Theater of Moscow. Stravinsky completed the opera Le Rossignol ("The Nightingale") in 1914 and, despite his lingering ambivalence, made several further important contributions to the genre with Mavra (1922), Oedipus Rex (1926-27), and The Rake's Progress (1948-51).
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| Miguel Harth-Bedoya is the conductor for the J.O.C.'s Stravinsky double bill. (Photo by Geno Loro Jr.) |
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The Juilliard Opera Center will present a double bill of the two shorter works, Le Rossignol and Oedipus Rex, at the Juilliard Theater on April 20, 22, and 24. Performances will be conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya, music director of the Fort Worth Symphony and a Juilliard alumnus, and directed by Ned Canty. The Juilliard Choral Union (Judith Clurman, director) will join the cast of soloists.The pairing of these two works allows a unique insight into Stravinsky's evolution as a composer—not just from his early efforts to his mature Neo-Classical period but, within Le Rossignol itself, from a gifted young artist still heavily under the influence of Rimsky-Korsakov to one whose unique voice and originality ensured that his stature as an artist would ultimately surpass that of his teacher.The libretto for Le Rossignol was written by the composer's friend Stepan Mitusov. Based on a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, the story takes place in "legendary China" and involves a nightingale whose magical song captivates everyone who hears it. Stravinsky's unaccompanied coloratura passages for the nightingale do a magnificent job of evoking the bird's exquisite song.Gestures such as the ubiquitous parallel fifths of Act 2's "March Chinois" further contribute to the opera's exotic flavor.
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| Ned Canty is the director for the Stravinsky operas. |
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Richard Taruskin, the eminent Russian music scholar, cites an "immense stylistic disparity" between Act 1 and Acts 2 and 3 of the opera, and Stravinsky himself acknowledged a certain degree of incongruence (which he justified by the change in setting from Act 1 to Act 2). Just after its premiere, though, the composer Maurice Ravel observed, "Personally I did not find the difference so enormous. The composer's technique had merely evolved." Whichever the case, the influence of Rimsky-Korsakov is most apparent in Act 1. And though the music in Acts 2 and 3 is, by and large, more boldly orchestrated and harmonically complex, the reuse of material from Act 1 in later acts (most notably, the plaintive berceuse of the Fisherman's song) goes a long way in unifying the work.On the broader topic of Stravinsky's ambivalence about opera, Taruskin proposes that the composer's dismissive quotes about the genre early in his career (especially puzzling given that both his father and brother were opera singers, and opera was a main focus of his teacher) were a result of Stravinsky's "indoctrination" by Diaghilev and the painter and designer Alexandre Benois, who argued that ballet was superior to opera in its aesthetic purity. Ironically, when the Free Theater of Moscow folded before Le Rossignol's scheduled premiere, it was Diaghilev who came to the rescue by programming the work on the Ballets Russes's 1914 season. He was no doubt pleased when Stravinsky later transformed the work into a ballet score, Le Chant du Rossignol (1917). Both versions of the work are still frequently performed, thanks to their charming narrative and evocative scores.Stravinsky's works are often grouped according to three distinct stylistic periods, proceeding from his Russian neo-national period to Neo-Classicism and finally to serialism. Described by the composer as an "opera-oratorio," Oedipus Rex is one of the definitive masterpieces of Stravinsky's Neo-Classical period, which was framed by Mavra at its start and The Rake's Progress at its conclusion. A forerunner of postmodernism, the Neo-Classical movement (of which Stravinsky was the principal originator and representative) arose as a negative reaction to the perceived excesses of late Romanticism. As such, it took as its point of departure the revival of musical forms and processes from the past—but despite the connotations of the term, these were not limited to works of the Classical era. In Oedipus Rex, Stravinsky's main reference to the past is Verdi, with less overt allusions to Bach and Handel.
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Juilliard Opera Center
Stravinsky: Le Rossignol and Oedipus Rex
Juilliard Theater
Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, April 20, 22, and 24, 8 p.m.
For ticket information, please see
the calendar.
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The libretto for the work was written by Jean Cocteau (whose adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone Stravinsky had admired), and then translated from French to Latin by Father Jean Danielou. Stravinsky specified that the work should be presented with a minimum of stage action, with a note in the score indicating that, with the exception of Tiresias, the Shepherd, and the Messenger, the characters should remain in masks and that "Only their arms and heads move. They should give an impression of living statues."Stravinsky also revealed that he chose a Latin text because it "had the great advantage of giving me a medium not dead but turned to stone, and so monumentalized as to have become immune from any risk of vulgarization." Underlining this approach, the Narrator ("Le Speaker"), who relates events before they happen in the language of the audience, states at the outset that the version of Sophocles' tragedy to follow preserves "only certain monumental aspects of his various scenes."Apart from the novel device of using the narrator in this way, the work employs a conventional structure of alternating arias, duets, and choruses. One of the work's noteworthy features is its metrical uniformity, atypical for Stravinsky but used here for dramatic purposes to suggest Fate's inexorable pursuit of Oedipus. Stravinsky simply noted that, "If I have succeeded in freezing the drama in the music, that was accomplished largely by the rhythmic means."As a whole, Oedipus Rex represents the most compelling possible argument that Neo-Classicism could serve as well as any other style for conveying the most potent forms of musical expression (despite Stravinsky's radical pronouncement that "Music is, by its very nature, powerless to express anything at all").In 1948, the Juilliard Opera Theater (a precursor of the Juilliard Opera Center) commissioned E.E. Cummings to prepare an English translation of the Speaker's text for its production of Oedipus Rex that year; a new edition of the work using that translation was published by Boosey & Hawkes in 1949. Other past productions of Stravinsky's stage works at Juilliard included Le Rossignol in 1980 and The Rake's Progress, which opened the Juilliard Theater in 1970. Both Le Rossignol and Oedipus Rex, along with Le Sacre du Printemps, were performed earlier this season at the Metropolitan Opera as a triple-bill titled "Stravinsky."The cast for Le Rossignol, which will be performed in English, includes Hanan Alattar as the Nightingale; Erin Smith as the Cook; Brandon McReynolds as the Fisherman; Weston Hurt as the Emperor of China; Daniel Gross as the Chamberlain; Alvin Crawford as the Bonze; Amy Wallace-Styles as Death; and Steven Spears, Ryan McKinny, and Matthew Garrett as the Three Japanese Envoys. The cast for Oedipus Rex features Richard Cox as Oedipe, Alison Tupay as Jocaste, Brian Mulligan as Creon, Alvin Crawford as Tiresias, Brandon McReynolds as the Shepherd, and Daniel Gross as the Messenger. Lisa Robinson is senior writer for special projects and proposals.
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