{"id":3129,"date":"2024-07-09T22:47:29","date_gmt":"2024-07-10T02:47:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=3129"},"modified":"2024-07-09T22:47:31","modified_gmt":"2024-07-10T02:47:31","slug":"stravinsky-in-exile-a-new-view","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2024\/07\/stravinsky-in-exile-a-new-view.html","title":{"rendered":"Stravinsky in Exile — A New View"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The current issue of the New School\u2019s quarterly journal \u201cSocial Research\u201d is dedicated to the topic \u201cExile.\u201d I\u2019m pleased to have contributed something on Igor Stravinsky \u2013 suggesting that his Symphony in Three Movements, composed in Los Angeles in response (sort of) to World War II, \u201ccomplexly monograms its composer\u2019s layer upon layer of identity,\u201d disclosing \u201ca condition of exile equally challenged and resourceful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I add: \u201cHad Stravinsky less cause for resilience\u2014had there been no Bolshevik Revolution, no world upheaval\u2014he might have left a musical legacy less intriguingly textured with self-denial and reinvention, less mediated by rationalization, more sustained in the elemental energies powering his initial creative surge [i.e., <\/em>The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of <\/em>Spring, Les noces.]\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can access the full article<\/em> <\/a>here<\/strong>.<\/a> You can access the full issue (I recommend Jacques Rupnik on \u201cMilan Kundera\u2019s Liberating Exile\u201d in Paris) here<\/a><\/strong>. What follows is a sizable chunk of my article (which I wrote as a sequel to my book \u201cThe<\/strong> Propaganda of Freedom<\/strong><\/a>: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the Cultural Cold War\u201d) if you\u2019d like an overview:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the decades after World War I, Stravinsky was considered by many the supreme contemporary composer, transcending nationalism, articulating or adapting to changing aesthetic fashions. But the waning of modernism invites new perspectives on Stravinsky, on the effects of exile. . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his polemics, Stravinsky in exile insisted on the liberating autonomy of the creative act. But the tangled history of the Symphony in Three Movements suggests a composition process that was less than fluent. The [New York] Philharmonic\u2019s \u201cvictory symphony\u201d commission . . . proved surprisingly (if secretly) inspirational. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It would not be a stretch to treat Ingolf Dahl\u2019s program note for the Symphony in Three Movements as one in a series of \u201cassisted\u201d Stravinsky writings, alongside the autobiography, the Poetics<\/em>, and the conversations with [Robert] Craft. The combative, defensive tone is all too familiar. A pregnant example is Dahl\u2019s insistence that it will \u201cone day be universally recognized\u201d that Stravinsky\u2019s Hollywood home, \u201cregarded by some as an ivory tower,\u201d was \u201cclose to the core of a world at war.\u201d And yet if the Symphony in Three Movements is partly to be regarded as an engaged response to World War II, its ivory-tower impersonality becomes an incongruously defining trait. The wartime output of others\u2014think of Prokofiev\u2019s Seventh Piano Sonata (1942), Schoenberg\u2019s Ode to Napoleon<\/em> (1942), Arthur Honegger\u2019s Third Symphony (1946)\u2014is enraged, mournful, consoling. Stravinsky\u2019s militancy, however stirring, is merely descriptive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shostakovich is the obvious antipode<\/strong>. He directly experienced the horror of the siege of Leningrad. His musical response, in the Seventh Symphony, was exigent, driven, tidal\u2014and fundamentally interior. . . . Shostakovich himself insisted\u2014pace<\/em> Stravinsky\u2014upon the moral properties of music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This reading of Shostakovich as a moral beacon was little heard in the West during the ensuing Cold War decades, when Russia again became the enemy. The Cold War cultural mantra emanating from the White House and the State Department\u2014what I have termed the \u201cpropaganda of freedom\u201d\u2014was that only \u201cfree artists\u201d in \u201cfree societies\u201d could produce lasting artistic achievements. Shostakovich, accordingly, was dismissed as a Soviet stooge, a shackled musical anachronism. Stravinsky, concomitantly, became a free-world icon. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1954 Shostakovich was afforded a rare opportunity to share his own view of artistic \u201cfreedom\u201d with the New York Times<\/em>. As he was speaking directly to Harrison Salisbury, the Times<\/em>\u2019s Moscow bureau chief, the words were his\u2014as \u201cpassed by Soviet censors.\u201d He said: \u201cThe artist in Russia has more \u2018freedom\u2019 than the artist in the West.\u201d The reason? He enjoys, Salisbury paraphrased, \u201cwhat might be described as a \u2018principled\u2019 relationship to society and to the party,\u201d versus a \u201chaphazard\u201d relationship to society, as in Western nations. He is accorded \u201cstatus\u201d and \u201ca defined role.\u201d . . . <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Salisbury was impressed by Shostakovich\u2019s \u201chonesty and sincerity.\u201d It was too much for his editors, who published a \u201ccontrasting view\u201d alongside Salisbury\u2019s \u201cVisit with Dmitri Shostakovich.\u201d This was \u201cMusic in a Cage\u201d by one Julie Whitney, who proposed as a \u201cvery serious question\u201d whether Soviet composers \u201cmight not use their talent more successfully if they were out of the \u2018gilded\u2019 cage in which Shostakovich declares they are so content.\u201d Doubtless there were many occasions when Shostakovich found \u201ctoo much attention\u201d being paid to his music. And there were times when it was not \u201cplayed all over Russia.\u201d Conversely, \u201ctoo little attention\u201d is plainly something Stravinsky sometimes experienced in the United States. If he had no one telling him what to do, and why, he was susceptible to feeling ignored, unappreciated, misunderstood. In truth, whether or not an \u201civory tower,\u201d his fastidiously self-contained Los Angeles study at times conferred \u201ctoo much freedom\u201d\u2014a freedom not to matter. . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of the prominent Russian artists who wound up in the United States, two who \u201cbecame Americans\u201d were the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who established Tanglewood as an indispensable laboratory for American music, and the choreographer George Balanchine, who Americanized Russian classical ballet. At the opposite extreme was the pianist and composer Sergey Rachmaninoff, who (notwithstanding an affinity for the jazz genius Art Tatum) remained incorrigibly Russian in his habits and musical predilections. More than Koussevitzky or Balanchine, more than Rachmaninoff, more than was readily apparent, Stravinsky was at all times pulled in multiple directions. Responding to an invitation from the New York Philharmonic\u2014an invitation irresistible yet confounding, even obtuse\u2014he first culled musical pages from a drawer. Then\u2014as he would eventually disclose with tortured caveats\u2014he resorted for inspiration to newsreels of World War II. The resulting \u201csymphony,\u201d not really a symphony, proved both exhilarating and curious, evasive and emphatic, elusive and visceral. It complexly monograms its composer\u2019s layer upon layer of identity. It discloses a condition of exile equally challenged and resourceful.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Had Stravinsky less cause for resilience\u2014had there been no Bolshevik Revolution, no world upheaval\u2014he might have left a musical legacy less intriguingly textured with self-denial and reinvention, less mediated by rationalization, more sustained in the elemental energies powering his initial creative surge.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The current issue of the New School\u2019s quarterly journal \u201cSocial Research\u201d is dedicated to the topic \u201cExile.\u201d I\u2019m pleased to have contributed something on Igor Stravinsky \u2013 suggesting that his Symphony in Three Movements, composed in Los Angeles in response (sort of) to World War II, \u201ccomplexly monograms its composer\u2019s layer upon layer of identity,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3129","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-Ot","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3129"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3132,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3129\/revisions\/3132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}