Igor Stravinsky’s Symphonic Poem “The Song of the Nightingale”

Abstract

The symphonic poem “The Song of the Nightingale” or “Le chant du rossignol” (1917) was written by Igor Stravinsky on the basis of his opera “Le rossignol” (“The Nightingale”). In his version for orchestra the composer concentrated his attention on the leading thematicism and was able to present the music in purely instrumental timbres in a more colorful and relief manner, and for this reason the composition turned into a more significant one from the point of view of artistry. The determinant quality of the symphonic poem “The Song of the Nightingale” is the world and man in the primordial state of their manifestation. In a relatively compact musical space the composer was able to recreate numerous diverse planes of the initial musical idea. The primordial spirit is not so apparent in the genre-related characteristic sphere. But Stravinsky seems not to aestheticize the living material from the positions of academic art, but pours it out in all of its naturalness, passing it onto the score “alive,” – from hence comes the acerbic sappiness of the colors of the bazaar. The “Scythian” quality as the most important expression of the initial musical element obtained an unexpected and sharp turn here. When composing the opera based on the motives of Hans Christian Andersen’s well-known fairytale, naturally, Stravinsky developed the urge to correlate its color with the geography of the plot. Notwithstanding all of its conventionality, the sound solution of a number of episodes is rather unambiguously associated with the trite perception of the East, however the most essential element consisted in replication a special plane of the Russian national nature in its juxtapositions with the Scythian and Central Asian elements, as well as what was inherited from the Mongol-Tatar yoke. The most direct relation to the initial sides of existence is born by the life of the subconscious recreated in the symphonic poem “The Song of the Nightingale.” For the sake of immersion into this sphere, the composer chose as his prerequisites the stages of dream, forgetfulness, slumberous reverie, which turn into an impulse for a turnabout of the life of instincts, carried out in the depths of the psyche. And the whole presents itself in motion from dynamism of a festive motion, of military processions and the vivacity of fairytale images to the staticity of reverie and oblivion. And behind the motion from dynamism to staticity there is a certain semantic implication present, reflecting the local historical-artistic situation of the second half of the 1910s: after the avant-garde boom of bold initiatives and a burst of innovations of the first half of that decade there was a temporary departure from the extremities of “storm and stress.” Keywords: Stravinsky’s early music, the symphonic poem “The Song of the Nightingale,” 20th century music.