Les Noces Research Articles

Stravinsky's Les Noces

Stravinsky's first ideas for Les Noces date from 1913, when mention of the ballet first appears in his correspondence, yet they did not come to fruition until the ballet's premiere in 1923. This protracted gestation, the longest for any of his compositions, was largely caused by the impositions and consequences of World War I and the revolution in Russa. Both Stravinsky and the Ballet Russes, the company he had been associated with since 1909, experienced economic difficulties. Without any promised performance of Les Noces, Stravinsky concentrated his efforts on other compositions.During the genesis of the ballet, Stravinsky reformulated his musical philosophy. Before the war; Stravinsky was composing large-scale works for sizable orchestras, with plots derived from Russian folktales and customs, and melodies borrowed from Russian folk music; a few years after the war, he began composing works for smaller forces that borrowed features from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European music, rather than Russian elements. Both styles — “Russian” and “neoclassical” — are present in Les Noces.

Ritual and abstraction in Nijinska'sLes Noces

When the Diaghilev company premiered Les Noces in 1923, the sorrowful mystery of a Russian peasant wedding became a subject of modern art. Les Noces (Svadebka, or The Wedding) was a collaboration among three of the age's most important Russian avantgarde artists: the composer Igor Stravinsky, the painter Natalia Goncharova, and the choreographer Bronislava Nijinska. Although Stravinsky had initiated the project, it was Nijinska who determined the character of the original mise en scene. Because of Nijinska, Stravinsky's plan to present his work as a masquerade was discarded. Instead, the production reflected the composer's interest in psychology, without ignoring the spirituality of his score, or the pathos inherent in his libretto. Nijinska's vision, austerely spiritual, has been the basis of virtually all subsequent interpretations of Stravinsky's score. Her innovative, abstract approach to the ballet's staging made Les Noces a monument of twentieth-century dance as well as music. The idea for a work about a Russian peasant wedding first came to Igor Stravinsky in 1912.1 At that time, Stravinsky was finishing Le Sacre du printemps, a composition he claimed had

Les Noces: the American Premiere

More than fifty years have passed since the American premiere of Stravinsky's Les Noces, which opened on April 25, 1929 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. Generally overshadowed by the Bronislava Nijinska version (Paris, 1923) and by the later Jerome Robbins version (New York, 1965), the 1929 production presented a significantly different interpretation of the Stravinsky piece. The choreographer was Elizaveta Anderson-Ivantzova (1890–1973), former prima ballerina at the Bolshoi, whose life span parallels almost exactly that of Nijinska (1891–1972) and whose career intersects with that of Nijinska by virtue of her choreographing the second version. Of concommitant interest is that the first two versions of Les Noces were choreographed by women in an age when women were less than likely to be engaged as choreographers, a fact not unnoticed in 1929. Yet, little is known of this and other aspects of the production today. An examination, therefore, of the background, the production itself, and the choreography in particular is needed to describe, as clearly as the evidence will allow, what the 1929 production was like and how it differed from the better known version of 1923.The little attention given to the New York premiere seems to have had less to do with its original performance than with a subsequent indifference to it.

Correction: The Metamorphoses of the Ballet 'Les Noces'

Correction: The Metamorphoses of the Ballet 'Les Noces'

The Metamorphoses of the Ballet 'Les Noces'

The Metamorphoses of the Ballet 'Les Noces'

Waiting for Diaghilev

There has never been a comprehensive critical study of Diaghilev's life and artistic accomplishment, or even a serious one. Diaghilev: His Artistic and Private Life by Arnold Haskell (in collaboration with Walter Nouvel), published in 1935, only six years after its subject's death, is both too cursory and too imperceptive to be of more than passing interest. Of the book's three hundred fifty-odd pages, eight suffice to deal with the post-Sleeping Princess years, a period that saw the creation of works as significant for one reason or another as Le Renard, Mercure, Les Noces, Les Biches, The Triumph of Neptune, Ode, Apollo and Prodigal Son. But, then, it was Haskell who in this and numerous other volumes gave currency to the still widely held view of Diaghilev's career as divisible into three phases, one glad, one sad, one bad: Artistic Triumph and the Conquest of the West (1909-1920); The Sleeping Princess (1921); The Search for Lost Youth, leading to Artistic Decline (1922-29). To the highly suspect judgments implicit in this formulation of growth and decay Serge Lifar's Serge Diaghilev. His Life, His Work, His Legend, published in 1940, lend inadvertent support by treating Diaghilev's biography and career up to 1922 as history, and the years after 1923 (at which time Lifar joined the Russian Ballet and almost simultaneously entered Diaghilev's private life) as the

The Rake's Progress: Some thoughts on the Libretto

No two works of Stravinsky are alike, but The Rake's Progress is more different than most.As we look back over that amazing list of masterpieces, what strikes us now is the unity of the entire canon. From Le Sacre du Printemps to Abraham and Isaac half a century later the ‘feel’ of a Stravinsky work is unmistakable: that combination of a hieratic, ritualistic style with a wonderfully lively and witty texture. (The only comparable achievement is the work of the late Yeats.) This is particularly evident in the stage works. ‘Les Noces’, Stravinsky said, ‘presents rather than tells’. Here, as in Oedipus, the music and the stage action show a ritual unfolding, much as a priest might show an icon to the crowd, in André Boucourechlev's apt analogy. These works eschew expressivity, psychology and mimesis; they do not say ‘I am’ or ‘I wish’, but ‘It is’ and ‘It shall be’.