Stravinsky and Gesualdo

Stravinsky and Gesualdo Author(s): Colin Mason Source: Tempo, New Series, No. 55/56 (Autumn - Winter, 1960), pp. 39-48 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/944345 . Accessed: 14/06/2011 08:17 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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STRAVINSKY AND GESUALDO

39

1914-I926' (The Years of Development in the Art of B.B.: His Appearance in the Musical Life of Europe). The three parts run to more than 750 pages, leaving the narrative at 1926, i.e., scarcely at the mid-point in Bartok's life. It is hoped that, when finished, the instalments will be published under one cover. I feel I ought not to conclude this survey of Bart6k literature without mentioning the appearance of the first volume of Bart6k's Slovak Folksong Collection, even if this is not the place for a detailed assessment. The volume was published by the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava. From the date given by Bart6k at the end of his Foreword it would seem that 36 years have elapsed before a major achievement of Bart6k's managed to reach the printing press. One cannot speak of publication, since 'Slovenske Ludove Piesne' is not available to the public outside Czechoslovakia, i.e., to readers in the West, presumably for copyright reasons.

STRAVINSKY AND GESUALDO by ColinMason At the Venice Festival this year the first performance was given of Stravinsky's

Monumentumpro Gesualdo Venosaad CD Annum. This consists of three of Gesualdo's

five-part madrigals, 're-composed for instruments' by Stravinsky. The madrigals he has chosen are 'Asciugate i begli occhi' (Book V, No. i ), 'Ma tu, cagion di quella' (Book V, No. i8), and 'Belta poi che t'assenti' (Book VI, No. 2). Stravinsky's full orchestra for the work consists of two oboes, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, and strings without double basses, but he uses no trumpets or trombones in the first madrigal, and no horns or strings in the second. In the second and third madrigals the 're-composition' is less drastic than in the first. The only relatively major change in these two is the insertion of an echo of a two-bar cadence in No. 2. Otherwise there are octave transpositions, exchanges of parts, harmonic doublings, occasional completions of the implied harmony, and one or two inserted passing-notes, but the substance of the two pieces remains essentially as it was. Exx. i and 2 (the beginning of the second madrigal Ex. 1

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and Stravinsky's version of it) illustrate his method of re-spacing the harmony without introducing anything new. In Ex. 4, from Stravinsky's version of the third ma(lrigal, the G and C in the viola part at bar 2 5, and the final crotchet of the Ex.3

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STRAVINSKY AND GESUALDO

41

first horn's held B flat (sounding E flat) in the same bar, are not in Gesualdo's text (Ex. 3), but these added notes are exceptional. In the rest of the piece there are only two others. Stravinsky's alterations of the first madrigal are much more extensive. Where some striking harmony or contrapuntal device in the original has caught his fancy, he has let his imagination work almost as freely as in Pulcinellaand The Fairy's Kiss. The first twenty-one bars of Gesualdo appear fairly straightforwardly transcribed, Ex.5 .Ao1

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(Ex. 6 is continued on the next page. )

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(Ex.6).

From bars 8 to the end Stravinsky entirely re-composes what Gesualdo wrote, to the extent sometimes of discarding it altogether and substituting something of his own. These alterations are well motivated and most of them are conspicuously for the better. Gesualdo's startling Neapolitan cadence in bars 19-20 of Ex. 7 is attractive the first time, but the sequential repetition of it a Ex.7 . 1E8

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fifth lower in bars 2 1-22 is lame. Stravinsky therefore avoids a strict sequence by condensing the cadence the second time, and deliberately robs the second Neapolitan chord of its already stale 'surprise' by preparing for it in the harmony (Ex. 8 bars 26-27). The effect is markedly stronger and smoother than in the original.

STRAVINSKY AND GESUALDO

43

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Stravinsky's leap from the cadential B major chord to a D minor chord (Ex. 8, bar 28), instead of to Gesualdo's G minor (Ex. 7, bar 22), and his thorough re-harmonization of this bar and the next, are similarly motivated by the repetitiveness of Gesualdo's harmonic progression. The expressive force of Gesualdo's descending melodic lines is weakened by the persistence of the chord of G minor and the absence of all accented dissonances except against the suspended D in bar 23. Stravinsky therefore drives out the chord of G minor except on the last half-beat of his own bar 29 (where he takes care to have an A suspended through it), and introduces a series of accented dissonances, preserving only the general descending motion of Gesualdo's progression and the harmonic basis of the cadence. Even here he defers the movement of the bass to D until the last beat, and excludes the B flat of Gesualdo's weak six-four chord above it, sounding the B flat instead over the preceding bass C, as another accented dissonance, or rather as an understood suspension from his two seventh-chords at the beginning of the bar, in which the B flat is implied but not actually sounded. In dispelling the harmonic monotony of the original Stravinsky has done more here than was necessary, and given us a ravishing passage of almost pure Stravinsky. From this point his alterations become less aggressive again, and not so easily accounted for, except as creative 'conceits'. Gesualdo's last two quaver chords in bar 24 of Ex. 9 sound well, and Stravinsky's beautiful added B flat in the first bassoon part (Ex. lo, bar 32) is thrown in out of sheer exuberance of invention and fantasy. In his treatment of the remaining ten bars of Ex. 9, which like bars 22-23 in Ex. 7 suffer from a lack of harmonic movement (and also from

TEMPO

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a slightly monotonous similarity of melodic movement in all the parts) Stravinsky (Ex. I I) has been content to introduce some variation in the part-writing, and some dissonant elisions of the harmony, which do not change the basic progressions and do not cause any harsher clashes than Gesualdo allows himself. Apparently Stravinsky felt that the weakness of harmonic movement here was slight enough to be offset by his variations of instrumental colour. In fact the most conspicuous harmonic change that he has made, the introduction of the E flat in the viola part of his bar 37, still further reduces the force of movement of Gesualdo's harmony by softening the false relation with the previous bar. Simultaneously with the Monumentumanother Gesualdo-Stravinskv work has been published-Tres Sacrae Cantiones,completed by Stravinsky for the 4ooth anniversary of Gesualdo's birth. These are taken from a volume of twenty sacred

STRAVINSKY AND GESUALDO Ex. 11

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songs by Gesualdo which were published in parts in I603 but until recently have never been published in score as the sextus and bassus parts have never been discovered. According to a note in Stravinsky's score an edition by Professor Glenn E. Watkins has now been published by Ugrino Verlag, Ha burg,, and y composed his own version of the taking this edition as a basis, Stravinsk has the three of for Nineteen of the songs are for six voices, and songs. missing parts the remaining one is for seven. Stravinsky completed the seven-voice song 'Illumina Nos,' in 1957, and this was then published separately. In the preface to that edition Robert Craft wrote that Stravinsky had originally hoped to have the piece performed with his CanticumSacrumat the Venice Festival in I 956, but the Venetians would not permit this. Stravinsky has now added two of the sixpart songs, 'Da pacem Domine' and 'Assumpta est Maria', and published the three in one volume. In the additional two songs he has had to compose only

TEMPO

46

the bass part, since the parts that have survived show that the missing sextus part was intened to be in canon with one of the other parts. As with the Monumentum,one of the three pieces is markedly more Stravinskian than the other two. This naturally is 'Illumina Nos', for which Stravinsky has had to compose two missing parts instead of one. According to Craft's preface to the separate edition of this, Stravinsky said that in completing it he had tried 'to make Gesualdo's voice-leading less arrogant', and 'to soften certain malheurs'. As the edition by Professor Watkins is apparently not yet available in this country there is no chance in this article to compare Stravinsky's solution with a less idiosyncratic one, but his sensitiveness to the originality (and to the shortcomings) of Gesualdo's writing is well demonstrated in the Monumentum, and is equally evident here. Curiously, although the harmony in his completion

Ex.12

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STRAVINSKY AND GESUALDO

47

of 'Illumina Nos' is more Stravinskian than in the other two pieces, his two added parts in it are melodically closer in style to Gesualdo's than the added bass parts in 'Da pacem Domine' and 'Assumpta est Maria', where he is slightly more liberal with florid figurations than Gesualdo would probably be, some of them also in unlikely rhythms. He also allows himself what seems to be an excess of melodic sixths and even sevenths, which are scarcely to be found at all in Gesualdo's own parts. Ex. 12 (the final bars of 'Da pacem Domine') shows this clearly, and with it the melodic tritone which he smuggles into the sextus part on the very last note, where the harmony requires a divergence from the strict canon with the tenor. In 'Illumina Nos' he makes less use of these intervals, and conforms generally to the character of Gesualdo's own parts, except again for the occasional use of unlikely syncopations. The harmonic style is rather like that of bars 25-29 of the first madrigal (Ex. 9), as treated by Stravinsky in the Monumentum(Ex. r , bars 33-36), thick with diatonic dissonances. The following quotation from Craft's preface to the Tres Sacrae Cantioneswell defines the relationship of Stravinsky's solution to what Gesualdo might have written: As a whole, andnot forgettingthe chromaticnatureof manyof the Responsoriae, Gesualdo's sacredmusicis morediatonicthanhis secular,butnot lessdissonant.Dissonance in the religious musicis harsherandless voluptuousthanin the madrigals and,becauseof the greaternumberof voicesandthe lowertessitura-thetreblepartsof his madrigals were sungby women,the sacred musicwassungby men andboys-the resultwasa morecomplexharmonictexture. Stravinsky is thereforephilologically justifiedin addingso manysecondsandsevenths,accentedor suspended, eventhoughno examplescanbe foundof so manytogetherin Gesualdo's othermusic. The magnitude of the compositional problem, the general harmonic style of Stravinsky's solution, and its probability and improbability, are well illustrated in Ex. 13, the opening of 'Illumina Nos'. It will be fascinating and instructive to compare this with Professor Watkins's solution when copies of his edition are available here. Ex. 13

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TEMPO

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BOOK A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO THE TECHNIQUE OF TWELVE-TONE COMPOSITION by Leopold Spinner (Boosey & Hawkes, 8/6)

The teaching of serial technique has not yet begun. By which I mean to say that our present concern with its rationale has made us indifferent to the purely intuitive beginnings from which it sprang and which alone continue to give it meaning. To teach the letter without at the same time conveying something of the spirit is to disseminate artistic death. Arnold Schoenberg, the one man who might have given us a lead, preferred to wean his students on classical models. Perhaps this was a lead and we failed to notice it. As it is, the most illuminating piece of literature on serial technique is also the least academic. Schoenberg's own account olf his method in Style and Idea is really a personal document, an autobiographical record of this great man's efforts to rationalize his creative intuitive processes. When we talk about serial technique we ought not to forget that its discoverer worked from the inside out; whereas when we attempt to teach it we are working from the outside in. The rationale of serial technique is dangerously simple. It can be comfortably squeezed on to a post-card and understood by any intelligent student within an hour. While not

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GUIDE quite so austere as this, the present publication is still a model of compression. The author, Leopold Spinner, has managed to confine his remarks to a twelve-page pamphlet. This document, which looks as though it might have emanated from Her Majesty's Stationery Office and reads just as anonymously as any White Paper, accompanies a more substantial book of music examples. It is here that the real interest of this publication lies. Mr. Spinner is himself a composer and a pupil of Webern. He has gathered together a miscellany of examples, some original, some from the serial repertory, and graded them in order of approximate complexity. Mr. Spinner has my unstinted admiration for his ability to construct just the right example to illustrate just the right point. Moreover, his creative powers appear to be such that his examples have the unusual merit of not sounding like examples. I would be happy to leave my own pupils free to work their way through them. But I am not sure that I would let my pupils read the White Paper which provides brief yet detailed analyses. Brevity does not necessarily result in clarity. Mr. Spinner's pamphlet indicates a tendency that is becoming fairly general in serial literature: a leaning towards the worst type of academicism reminiscent of Rockstro on counterpoint or Kitson on harmony. There is a hard crust of dogma forming around the subject which occasionally places it on the dry-as-dust level of