Igor Stravinsky on Revolution and The Rite of Spring

[11] I am well aware that there is a point of view that regards the period in which The Rite of Spring appeared as one that witnessed a revolution. A revolution whose conquests are said to be in the process of assimilation today. I deny the validity of that opinion. I hold that it was wrong to have considered me a revolutionary. When The Rite appeared, many opinions were advanced concerning it. In the tumult of contradictory opinions my friend Maurice Ravel intervened practically alone to set matters right. He was able to see, and he said, that the novelty of The Rite consisted, not in the "writing," not in the orchestration, not in the technical apparatus of the work, but in the musical entity.

I was made a revolutionary in spite of myself. Now, revolutionary outbreaks are never completely spontaneous. There are clever people who bring about revolutions with malice aforethought . . . It is always necessary to guard against being misrepresented by those who impute to you an intention not your own. For myself, I never hear anyone talk about revolution without thinking of the conversation that G. K. Chesterton tells us he had, on landing in France, with a Calais innkeeper. [12] The innkeeper complained bitterly of the harshness of life and the increasing lack of freedom: "'It's hardly worth while,' concluded the innkeeper, 'to have had three revolutions only to end up every time just where you started.'" Whereupon Chesterton pointed out to him that a revolution, in the true sense of the word, was the movement of an object in motion that described a closed curve, and thus always returned to the point from where it had started . . .

The tone of a work like The Rite may have appeared arrogant, the language that it spoke may have seemed harsh in its newness, but that in no way implies that it is revolutionary in the most subversive sense of the word.

If one only need break a habit to merit being labeled revolutionary, then every musician who has something to say and who in order to say it goes beyond the bounds of established conventions would be known as revolutionary. Why burden the dictionary of the fine arts with this stertorous term, which designates in its most usual acceptation a state of turmoil and violence, when there are so many other words better adapted to designate originality?

In truth, I should be hard pressed to cite for you a single fact in the history of art that might be qualified as revolutionary. Art is by essence constructive. [13] Revolution implies a disruption of equilibrium. To speak of revolution is to speak of a temporary chaos. Now art is the contrary of chaos. It never gives itself up to chaos without immediately finding its living works, its very existence, threatened.

The quality of being revolutionary is generally attributed to artists in our day with a laudatory intent, undoubtedly because we are living in a period when revolution enjoys a kind of prestige among yesterday's elite. Let us understand each other: I am the first to recognize that daring is the motive force of the finest and greatest acts; which is all the more reason for not putting it unthinkingly at the service of disorder and base cravings in a desire to cause sensation at any price. I approve of daring; I set no limits to it. But likewise there are no limits to the mischief wrought by arbitrary acts.

To enjoy to the full the conquests of daring, we must demand that it operate in a pitiless light. We are working in its favor when we denounce the false wares that would usurp its place. Gratuitous excess spoils every substance, every form that it touches. In its blundering it impairs the effectiveness of the most valuable discoveries and at the same time corrupts the taste of its devotees—which explains why their taste often plunges without [14] transition from the wildest complications to the flattest banalities.

A musical complex, however harsh it may be, is legitimate to the extent to which it is genuine. But to recognize genuine values in the midst of the excesses of sham one must be gifted with a sure instinct that our snobs hate all the more intensely for being themselves completely deprived of it.

Our vanguard elite, sworn perpetually to outdo itself, expects and requires that music should satisfy the taste for absurd cacophony.

I say cacophony without fear of being classed with the ranks of conventional pompiers, the laudatores temporis acti. And in using the word I am certain I am not in the least reversing myself. My position in this regard is exactly the same as it was at the time when I composed The Rite and when people saw fit to call me a revolutionary. Today, just as in the past, I am on my guard against counterfeit money and take care not to accept it for the true coin of the realm. Cacophony means bad sound, contraband merchandise, uncoordinated music that will not stand up under serious criticism. Whatever opinion one may hold about the music of Arnold Schoenberg (to take as an example of a composer evolving along lines essentially different from mine, both aesthetically and technically), whose works have frequently given rise to violent [15] reactions or ironic smiles—it is impossible for a self-respecting mind equipped with genuine musical culture not to feel that the composer of Pierrot Lunaire is fully aware of what he is doing and that he is not trying to deceive anyone. He adopted the musical system that suited his needs and, within this system, he is perfectly consistent with himself, perfectly coherent. One cannot dismiss music that he dislikes by labeling it cacophony.

Equally degrading is the vanity of snobs who boast of an embarrassing familiarity with the world of the incomprehensible and who delightedly confess that they find themselves in good company. It is not music they seek, but rather the effect of shock, the sensation that befuddles understanding.

So I confess that I am completely insensitive to the prestige of revolution. All the noise it may make will not call forth the slightest echo in me. For revolution is one thing, innovation another. And even innovation, when not presented in an excessive form, is not always recognized by its contemporaries. Let me take as an example the work of a composer whom I choose purposely because his music, the qualities of which have long been clearly recognized, has become so universally popular that barrel-organs everywhere have made it their own.

I am speaking of Charles Gounod. Don't be surprised at my lingering over Gounod for a moment. [16] It is not so much the composer of Faust who holds my attention as it is the example that Gounod offers us of a work whose most obvious merits were misunderstood when they were still new by the very people whose mission it is to be exactly informed about the realities they have to judge.

Take Faust. The first critics of this famous opera refused to acknowledge in Gounod the melodic inventiveness that today seems to us the dominant trait of his talent. They even went so far as to question whether he had any melodic gift at all. They saw in Gounod "a symphonist astray in the theater," a "severe musician," to use their own terms, and, of course, more "learned" than "inspired." Naturally, they reproached him with having "achieved his effects not through the voices, but through the orchestra."

In 1862, three years after the first performances of Faust, the Gazette musicale of Paris declared quite flatly that Faust, as a whole, "was not the work of a melodist." As for the famous Scudo [Pierre Scudo (1806–1864) was a famous conservative French music critic], whose word was law for the Revue des Deux Mondes, this Scudo in the same year turned out the following historical masterpiece, which I should never forgive myself for not quoting to you in full:

Monsieur Gounod, to his misfortune, admires certain outmoded portions of Beethoven's [17] last quartets. They constitute the muddied wellspring from which issue the bad musicians of modern Germany: the Liszts, the Wagners, the Schumanns, and even Mendelssohn in certain questionable aspects of his style. If Monsieur Gounod has really made his own the doctrine of continuous melody, of the melody of the virgin forest and of the setting sun, that constitutes the charm of Tannhäuser and of Lohengrin, a melody that may be compared to Harlequin's letter: "as for periods and commas, I don't give them a thought, I leave it to you to put them wherever you wish"—Monsieur Gounod in that case, which I should like to believe impossible, will be irrevocably lost.

But even the Germans corroborated the good Scudo after their fashion. As a matter of fact, one could read in the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten that Gounod wasn't French, but Belgian, and that his compositions did not bear the stamp of the contemporary French and Italian schools, but precisely that of the German school in which he had been educated and formed.

Because the literature that springs up on every side of music has not changed in the last [18] seventy years and because, while music is constantly changing, the commentators who refuse to take note of these transformations do not themselves change—we must naturally take up cudgels.

Therefore, I am going to be polemical. I am not afraid to admit this. I shall be polemical not in my own defense, but in order to defend in words all music and its principles, just as I defend them in a different way with my compositions.

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Source: Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (New York: Vintage Books, 1947), 11–18.