Three Stravinsky Analyses:Petrushka, Scene 1 (to Rehearsal No. 8);The Rake’s Progress, Act III, Scene 3 (“In a foolish dream”);Requiem Canticles, “Exaudi”

Most published work in our field privileges theory over analysis, with analysis acting as a subordinate testing ground and exemplification for a theory. Reversing that customary polarity, this article analyzes three works by Stravinsky (Petrushka, The Rake’s Progress, Requiem Canticles) with a relative minimum of theoretical preconceptions and with the simple aim, in David Lewin’s words, of “hearing the piece[s] better.”

Disability and ““Late Style”” in Music

““Late style”” is a longstanding aesthetic category in all the arts. Late-style music is presumed to have certain internal qualities (such as fragmentation, intimacy, nostalgia, or concision) and to be associated with certain external factors (such as the age of the composer, his or her proximity to and foreknowledge of death, lateness within a historical period, or a sense of authorial belatedness with respect to significant predecessors). Upon closer inspection, it appears that many of these external factors are unreliably correlated with a musical style that might be described as late. Late style is often better correlated with the bodily or mental condition of the composer: most composers who write in what is recognized as a late style have shared experiences of non-normative bodily or mental function, that is, of impairment and disability. Composers inscribe their disabilities in their music, and the result is often correlated with what is generally called late style. Close readings of four modernist works serve to illuminate the concept: Stravinsky, Requiem Canticles; Schoenberg, String Trio; Bartóók, Third Piano Concerto; and Copland, Night Thoughts. In each case, I contend that the features of these works generally understood as markers of lateness are better understood in relation to the disabled bodies of their composers.

1964: Abraham and Isaac

Stravinsky's ‘Sacred Ballad for Baritone and Chamber Orchestra’ is his only setting of Hebrew, his only work for solo voice on a religious text, and, indeed, his only ‘ballad’. Completed in 1963 and dedicated to the people of the State of Israel, it is the fifth in the late series of major religious works which began with the Canticum Sacrum of 1956. Its other predecessors are Threni (1958), A Sermon, A Narrative and A Prayer (1961), and The Flood (1962); its solitary successor is the Requiem Canticles of 1966.

Thoughts on Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles

These Canticles (1965–1966) do not make up a liturgical Requiem and are not designed to be played and sung in the course of a funeral service. As Stravinsky himself has said, they form a ‘Monumentum Spirituale’ (to the memory of Helen Buchanan Seeger, according to its inscription; but perhaps, too, for another, for a different ritual of the imagination …)

Requiem Canticles

As its title implies, Stravinsky's latest work is by no means comprehensive in its choice of texts from the Mass for the Dead, and clearly shows an idiosyncratic and personal attitude. Of the seven main sections of the Mass as set by, say, Verdi, Stravinsky taps only three, the Introit, Dies Irae and Responsory (Libera Me), extracting from them six short vocal movements which are symmetrically framed and divided by three sections for the orchestra. Significantly, four of these settings use the Dies Irae text, a thirteenth-century Latin hymn whose persistently dramatic and memorable poetic imagery thus dominates the canticles and produces the groundplan: Prelude—Exaudi. Dies Irae. Tuba Mirum—Interlude—Rex Tremendae. Lacrimosa. Libera Me—Postlude. It will be seen that there is no use made of the Requiem Aeternam sections which colour most settings, and the impression is that the cautionary aspects of the Mass have cast their aura over the concept of the work as a whole. While providing suitable material for an essay in dramatic ritual, this choice also presents something of the composer's personal attitude to life and the hereafter.