Customer Reviews

Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra, Two-volume set

5 star:		(1)
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3 star:		(1)
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This is an extraordinary book which will re-define Stravinsky scholarship. It is by far the best book published on Stravinsky, with perhaps one exception (The Apollonian Clockwork by Andriessen and Schoenberger). Taruskin's scholarship is of the highest quality, his knowledge of Russian music awe-inspiring, and the revelations he uncovers simply by being a Russian-speaker investigating the sources first-hand make this book a watershed in the way we think about Stravinsky. This book only takes the story to 1923 - I can only hope Mr Taruskin is working on the next volume as I write.

Taruskin's 2 volume set into Stravinsky's "Russian" period is still the MOST comprehensive investigation for those wanting a more discernible picture of the gestation of works from that period, including the Firebird, Petrushka, the Rite and Les Noces. For example Taruskin compares wedding laments used by Russian brides with those found in the opening of Les Noces. This link becomes significant when one is trying to resolve how much Stravinsky knew about his Russian heritage during the composition of these works. In his conversation books with Robert Craft, several inconsistencies emerge as to the influence of Russian music on Stravinsky's own music. For an interesting read, check out Taruskin's article, "Stravinsky and the traditions: Why the memory hole?" in Opus Magazine 1987. Getting back to the books, of particular significance is a "thematic" catalog of folk materials in which Taruskin attempts to reconstruct the origins of Stravinsky's Russian masterpieces.

I did not give the book 5 stars because I reserve that for the rarest of rarities which are reserved for books/movies/cds which provoke thought in the most unexpected of ways and are unlike anything else like the movie "Being John Malkovich". Another insightful and recent book on early Stravinsky (purely biographical) is Stephen Walsh's "Stravinsky : A Creative Spring : Russia and France, 1882-1934".

"The Rite of Spring" is a work of a Russian composer on a Russian sujet. But that a serious musicologist tries to tell me that, due to a few vague allusions to traditional folk tunes, it is a pure product of the Russian musical tradition. Please!

No doubt, it is work of genius, a great dark musical vision, but, conceding that in its spirit it is a "authentic" Russian composition, in its composing strategies it owes Debussy and Ravel much more than any Russian composer.

Frankly, I don't understand why Taruskin tries so hard to hide this vital influence on Stravinsky in this book. Though Stravinsky emancipated from these influences in later years, the impact on his early ballet music was tremendous. And Stravinsky was the last one to deny it.

Surely it is worth to discuss the influences in detail, since there are a lot of interferences. Debussy and Ravel themselves were strongly influenced by Russian composers like Mussorgsky and Borodin.

But to blind this part out of the composer biography is just not possible if you want to give a comprehensive picture. The plenty musical examples that Taruskin offers documenting the sources of Stravinsky's compositions are too selective in this respect. It might though be admitted that the impressionistic influences are harder to describe since they refer less to thematic references but much more to matters of technique. There would have been a great opportunity in these extensive volumes to look at all this in detail. Instead of this Taruskin simplifies things or makes awkward derivations. The bitonal Petrouschka chord-combination c major/f-sharp major for example happens to be already accidentally in Wagners "Siegfried" and happens even literally in the cadenza-like part of Ravel's "Jeux d'eau" where Stravinky most likely took his inspiration from. It's just strange and exerted to derive it from Rimsky's system of "octatonic" chord-combinations. Apropos "octatonic", even to claim this system, that Rimsky theoretically fixated for his teaching, as a Russian specific is strange enough, since it is well known that those harmonic influences came to Russian music through Berlioz, Liszt and especially Wagner.

Despite this serious objections, Taruskin deserves a lot of praise for his great research. I never read such a brilliant report about the history of Russian music between Glinka and Stravinsky and the circle around Diaghilev with all its paradoxes.

An enormously interesting book despite the fact that its main thesis, i.e. that Stravinsky is rooted mainly in the Russian tradition, stays on very shaky ground.