"Rigoroso (♪ = 126)": "The Rite of Spring" and the Forging of a Modernist Performing Style

"Rigoroso (♪ = 126)": "The Rite of Spring" and the Forging of a Modernist Performing StyleAuthor(s): Robert FinkSource: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp.299-362Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/832000 .

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"Rigoroso ( = 126)": The Rite of Spring and the Forging of a Modernist Performing Style ROBERT FINK

re we ready to start talking about an "authentic" Rite of Spring? In the

world of dance, such a Rite-talked about for over twenty years-was achieved a decade ago. Of course, for dance historians The Rite of

Spring is not Igor Stravinsky's concert evergreen, but the steps and stage action of Vaslav Nijinsky's ballet as danced in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees on 29 May 1913. The "lost" original staging of the Rite has been the subject of perhaps the most extensive and careful historical reconstruction ever attempted in the world of classical dance; dance historian Millicent Hodson and her husband Kenneth Archer together spent well over two decades tracking down remnants of Nicholas Roerich's sets and costumes, and the even more fleeting traces of Nijinsky's choreography.' Hodson and Archer collected the existing physical evidence, interviewed surviving members of the Ballets russes, and assembled unpublished eyewitness sketches and descriptions. By 1987 they had succeeded in reconstructing almost all of Roerich's decor and about 80 percent of Nijinsky's movements. When the Joffrey Ballet began to stage the reconstructed Nijinsky Rite to general astonishment and mixed

1. Hodson has recently published her reconstruction; see Millicent Hodson, Nifinsky's Crime Against Grace: Reconstruction Score of the Original Choreography for "Le Sacre du Printemps" (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1996). For details of the search see also Millicent Hodson, "Nijinsky's Choreographic Method: Visual Sources from Roerich for Le Sacre du Printemps," Dance Research Journal 18, no. 2 (1986-87): 7-16; Millicent Hodson, "Puzzles chor o- graphiques: Reconstitution du Sacre de Nijinsky," in Le Sacre du Printemps de Nijinsky, ed. Etienne Souriau et al. (Paris: Editions Cicero, 1990), 45-74; and Joan Acocella and Lynn Garafola, "Rites of Spring," Ballet Review 20, no. 2 (1992). For a dissenting view, see Robert Craft, "The Rite at Seventy-Five," in his Stravinsky (New York: St. Martin's, 1992), 233-48. This negative review of the 1987 Joffrey production alleges flaws in Hodson's choreographic reconstruction of the 1913 Rite, backing up its argument by reproducing in facsimile the complex choreographic annotations in Stravinsky's copy of the four-hand piano score (a source not available to Hodson, since it was in Craft's personal possession until recently). But to jump from those notes to the conclusion that "Stravinsky had composed the choreography at the same time as the music" (p. 243) seems to stretch the documentary evidence too far.

[ Journal of the American Musicological Society 1999, vol. 52, no. 2 ] @ 1999 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. 0003-0139/99/5202-0003$2.00



300 Journal of the American Musicological Society

reviews, the revisionist impact of this achievement on the historiography of modern dance was made clear.2

When Modern Music Becomes Early Music

Restaging Nijinsky's Rite was a triumph of what musicologists would recog- nize as historically informed performance: sets, costumes, and choreography were as close to those of the 1913 premiere as decades of painstaking scholarship could guarantee. But the 1987 performances also showed that Hodson, Archer, and the Joffrey had a strange collective blind spot-or, more precisely, a deaf ear-when it came to reconstructing the sonic aspects of that premiere with similar care. Nowhere in Hodson's accounts of her long search for the "authentic" Rite does she demonstrate the slightest concern for establishing a definitive text for the music that accompanied Nijinsky's choreography; nor does she seem aware that a present-day conductor might interpret such a text quite differently than Pierre Monteux did in 1913. After all, the music of the Rite, though mostly unheard that fateful night, had at least been written down, and the score was later published, revised, and performed numerous times by the composer before his death in 1971. One might easily assume that Stravinsky's music, unlike the scenery and choreography of his unfortunate collaborators, had been unproblematically preserved. It is evident from broadcast performances of the Joffrey production that the conductor was simply allowed to use his standard score of the Rite, and that he performed it in a standard, late twentieth-century manner.

But in fact, as the painstaking detective work of Louis Cyr has shown, the score that Monteux used in 1913, which I will discuss in some detail below, differs considerably from the standard texts in use today. One would hardly want the many corrected misprints reimposed, nor would it matter much to the overall spectacle if the conductor went back to Stravinsky's original bar- rings of the score's most complex rhythmic passages. Even the fact that the 1913 autograph full score used at the premiere preserves some discarded- and strikingly different-orchestrations of key moments in the Rite might well be of interest only to musicological purists.3

2. The reconstruction was broadcast in 1989 as "The Search for Nijinsky's Rite of Spring," produced by Judy Kinberg and Thomas Grimm for WNET/New York. This broadcast has not been made commercially available.

3. The key source study of the Rite, still unsurpassed, is Louis Cyr, "Le Sacre du printemps- Petite histoire d'un grande partition," in Stravinsky: Etudes et timoqignages, ed. Franqois Lesure (Paris: Editions Jean-Claude Latt6s, 1982), 89-148. For a shorter account of some of the variants see Cyr, "Writing The Rite Right," in Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, and Modernist, ed. Jann Pasler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 157-73. Of course, the rebarrings are of paramount interest to the theorist of rhythmic structure (see Pieter C. van den Toorn, "Stravinsky Re-barred," Music Analysis 7 [1988]: 165-95). As for the changes in



The Forging of a Modernist Performing Style 301

On the other hand, going back to the original performing materials would have helped answer the one basic musical question that seems absolutely critical if one is to recapture Nijinsky's choreographic conception, so inextricably tied to the Rite's complex patterns of beats: What tempos did the conductor take that night? Did he adhere to the metronome marks that we know from later printed scores? Perhaps even more crucial, to what extent did he indulge in expressive modifications of those tempos? That no one worried about any of these questions is clear from the brisk, unyielding tempos of the 1987 performances, a path of least resistance through late twentieth-century orchestral routine that often destroyed the effect of the Joffrey's meticulous reconstruc- tions.

One can hardly fault Hodson for assuming that the issue of vintage-1913 tempos was moot. After all, she had the score. Recreating the details of a particular performance of a famous musical work enshrined in a printed text seems-at least at first glance-a completely different type of problem than reimagining a "lost" ballet from scraps of costume, sketchbook drawings, and fleeting memory traces. Hodson had several authoritative printed editions of Stravinsky's Rite in which the composer consistently specified the same, precise metronome markings for each dance. She also had the composer's famous and oft-repeated dictum that a performer had absolutely no liberty to make tempo modifications in his music for expressive or theatrical effect-a stance backed up by his "authoritative" 1960 recording of the work, a sonic document of unyielding, metronomic precision. Case closed.

And so it would have been, if the composer had had his way. Of course, if Stravinsky had truly had his way, Nijinsky's choreography for the Rite would by now be nothing more than a melancholy footnote. Ironically, the fast, light, and bouncy playing that accompanied this reconstruction of the Rite as ballet comes out of a performing tradition-explicitly sanctioned by the composer-that takes as its starting point the erasure of the very choreography Hodson was trying to recapture and then colludes in the conversion of the Rite into "absolute music." Stravinsky, though he recanted very late in life, spent the better part of fifty years loudly proclaiming that Nijinsky's Rite was the work of a talented but fatally inexperienced choreographer, that it vitiated much of his original scenic inspiration for the piece, and that, in any case, he preferred it "as a concert piece." As early as 1914, he was cannily convincing Monteux to reprogram the Rite at the Salle Pleyel by arguing that "Le Sacre was more symphonic, more of a concert piece, than Petroushka."4 By 1920, he

orchestration, most immediately striking to the ear would be the restoration of the complex alter- nation of pizzicatos and arco string chords that dominated Stravinsky's original conception of the "Danse sacrale." Cyr compares the various versions in "Writing The Rite Right," 165-73.

4. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 144.




was claiming in the press that his first inspiration for the Rite had not been a vision, but a "purely musical" theme; it was the brutal character of the ham- mered chords opening the "Augures printanieres" that led him to the vision of the "Great Sacrifice," and not the other way around. The Rite was thus "not an anecdotal, but an architectonic work."'5 In the Autobiography of 1936 and in his conversations with Robert Craft during the 1950s and 1960s, Stravinsky kept up the refrain: The Rite of Spring is not a representational ballet. It is a sonorous and scenic object, an abstract piece of musico-spatial geometry.

Surely no one believes this anymore. Richard Taruskin distilled his hun- dreds of pages of research on the genesis and reception of the Rite into a dev- astating cruise missile of an argument whose portmanteau title says it all: "A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and 'Music Itself.' He claims that the Stravinsky-led charge to revamp the Rite into a piece of modernist symphonic abstraction is always aboutforgetting something unpleasant: in Stravinsky's case, the humiliating failure of the Rite as ethnographic ballet and the eclipse of his music by the notoriety of Nijinsky's dance; for the rest of us, the actual content of the ballet's proto-fascist scenario, containing "the darker aspects of primitivism-biologism, sacrifice of the individual to the community, absence of compassion, submission to com- pulsion, all within a context defined by Russian or Slavic national folklore."6

Egged on by Stravinsky himself, music theorists have thus placed a cordon sanitaire of extreme formalist discourse around the subject matter so power- fully and disturbingly presented in the Rite. But it is conductors who truly do Stravinsky's whitewashing: "One senses the same sort of evasion in recent performances of the Rite-one might even say, in its contemporary performance practice-where emphasis is placed on fleet precision and on an athletic virtu- osity that defies or ignores the crushing strain the music was meant to evoke."7 That fleet precision was on conspicuous display in the pit during the 1987 Joffrey reconstruction, as the music busily and athletically canceled out

5. Michel Georges-Michel, "Les Deux Sacres du printemps," Comoedia (11 December 1920); quoted in Truman Bullard, "The First Performance of Igor Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps" (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1971), 1:3.

6. Richard Taruskin, "A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and 'Music Itself,"'" Modernism/Modernity 2, no. 1 (1995): 21. Taruskin is reacting here to much recent discourse in music theory, in particular the work of Pieter C. van den Toorn, who, even after surveying the mass of historical evidence that shows Stravinsky collaborating on a multimedia Gesamtkunstwerk, dismisses the balletic Rite as irrelevant to what really counts, formal analysis. See the first chapter, "Point of Order," of his monograph on the work, Stravinsky and the "Rite of Spring": The Beginnings of a Musical Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987). On the Rite as "total work of art," see Jann Pasler, "Music and Spectacle in Petrushka and The Rite of Spring," in Confronting Stravinsky, ed. Pasler, 53-81.

7. Taruskin, "A Myth of the Twentieth Century," 21.




any significance that the enactment of ritual human sacrifice on stage might still have had.8

Presumably, then, the sound of the orchestra accompanying Nijinsky's Rite was quite different from the contemporary performance practice we are used to. Do we want to go back to that sound-even if Stravinsky emphatically did not? The case of Nijinsky v. Stravinsky poses in uniquely bald form a more general question of historical reconstruction: Is what we are "restoring" a material phenomenon ("the way it actually sounded") or an ideal one ("what the composer actually wanted")? There can be no comforting fantasy here that we can harmonize what we know about the conditions for which the Rite was composed and what we know of the composer's intentions for the Rite's realization. (The composer's intention was clearly that we try to forget those first ballet performances ever happened.) This is a major problem, for the fiunda- mental assumption of most twentieth-century musicological reconstruction is that the material and ideal truth of a work in performance are one and the same-and that, in fact, the only reliable guideposts to the composer's intentions are the material facts of contemporary (preferably the very first) performances.9

8. One might friuiffully inflect (or infect!) Taruskin's moral cautionary tale with the more general poststructuralist fatalism of Jacques Attali. Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music (trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985]) takes as its premise that music arose as a way of controlling noise, that noise is a sign of violence, and that music is thus on the deepest sociological level a simulacrum of ritual human sacrifice. (The relevance to the scenario of Le Sacre du printemps is total, although, amazingly, Attali never mentions the piece.) Attali identi- fies three "codes" of music: sacrificing, representing, and repeating; the Rite sits precisely in the transition between the last two. The dissonance of the Rite is a reversion to noise, and the scenario explicitly represents ritual murder on stage. This signals the collapse of the code of representation (the code of tonality) in which the sound of harmony attempted to represent the channeling of ritual violence into the harmonious social relations imagined by post-Enlightenment political philosophy. The next code is repetition: the spectacle collapses not into barbarism, but into the dull, commodified, meaningless routines of mass production. Attali would not be surprised that in the twentieth century the Rite was stripped of its violent spectacle and allowed to proliferate through multiple, repetitive, and ultimately faceless recordings. That is what the society of repetition does. And the fact that the Rite was retroactively inscribed within the discourse of "theoretical music"? As he points out in a truly mordant portrait of postwar high modernist compositional ideology, "An elite, bureaucratic music desires to be universal, [and] in order to be universal, it diminishes its specificity, reduces the syntax of its codes. It does not create meaning ... [for] the absence of meaning is the necessary condition for the legitimacy of a technocracy's power" (pp. 112-13). We can assume that this "absence of meaning" is the defining trait of the empty polemical construct Taruskin anathematizes as "the music itself."

9. This was, predictably enough, Stravinsky's own position. See his comments on Bach's St. Matthew Passion in chapter 6 of the Poetics, where "its first performance in Bach's lifetime" and "the composer's wishes" are unproblematically assumed to be identical (Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl [New York: Vintage, 1956], 135).




In fact, this essay will argue forthrightly the material against the ideal. Attention to the actual sound of the first performances of the Rite will prove an effective antidote to the kind of sanitized, sterilized performances the composer demanded and even disseminated himself. This does not imply a maniacal positivism, with overwhelming audience noise piped into the concert hall and wrong notes reintroduced for effect (though a little more "crushing strain" might do wonders); nor does it make the untenable claim that the piece can ever have the effect on late twentieth-century ears that it did in 1913-14. What we are attempting to understand is how the Rite as compositional breakthrough interacts with an independently evolving history of performance. Exhaustive research has laid to rest the absurd claim that the Rite was created ex nihilo (Stravinsky in 1962: "Very little immediate tradition lies behind Le Sacre du printemps").10 We are even less likely to find that it was re- created in the Theatre des Champs-Elys&es out of nothing but the composer's intentions. The Nijinsky-Stravinsky Rite, which received only seven performances (four in Paris, three in London), never had time to create its own performing tradition. (Obviously Stravinsky worked indefatigably to create a new modernist tradition of performance for "his" Rite of Spring-thus the "forging" of my title, which we will trace below-but that was a different work, more abstract and symphonic.) At its premiere, regardless of the composer's intentions, the Rite ballet would have to be inserted into an existing tradition, one quite at odds with modernist ideas of the "authentic" performance.

Stravinsky might well have wanted the same brisk, rigid performances of the Rite at its premiere that he demanded in the 1930s and demonstrated in the 1960s, but in 1913 he was hardly the conductor-celebrity-oracle he later became. Early conductors like Pierre Monteux routinely disregarded Stravinsky's tempo indications and metronome marks, going so far as to cross them out and write new ones directly onto his autograph. They persistently "romanticized" the Rite, at least with regard to long-range tempo relations: they took large sections of the music mostly slower, but sometimes much faster, than the written tempos; they also planned and executed unwritten tempo modifications for dramatic (and perhaps choreographic) effect, in what probably was direct contradiction of Stravinsky's wishes. Even the composer himself has left documents-in particular a set of Pleyela piano rolls punched under his direct supervision in 1921-that seem to enshrine tempos and tempo shifts that do not appear in any printed score.

Before we can really see Nijinsky's Rite, we must reconstruct that of Pierre Monteux, lost as irrevocably as Nijinsky's choreography and subsumed into

10. Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, 147. The research is, of course, the massive achievement of Richard Taruskin. This essay is at every moment indebted to that work; my review-essay on Taruskin's Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through "Mavra" (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996) appeared in Modernism/Modernity 4, no. 3 (1997): 147-54.




the only Rite that turned out to matter, Stravinsky's. We are used to late twentieth-century Rites, executed with careful fidelity to what is, for most conductors, a late twentieth-century text. (Stravinsky was still revising performance directions in the work as late as 1967.) Monteux's 1913 interpretation, though it possesses the material "authenticity" of the first performance, might well sound quite strange if resurrected for contemporary ears. As strange, perhaps, as "authentic" Bach once did.

The birth-trauma of historical performance

The question is startling and yet somehow inevitable: Are we ready to treat the Rite, still the great masterpiece of modern music, as if it were early music? Hodson had no reason to ask this in 1987. The great controversy then was whether the early music ethos might apply to the canonical masterworks of the nineteenth century; musicologists and critics were hotly debating the propriety of Roger Norrington's readings of Beethoven on what were still unblushingly called "authentic period instruments." Ten years later, after historically informed Brahms, Wagner, Bruckner, and even Debussy, we wait with bemusement-and some trepidation-for Early Music to rendezvous with Modern Music. Many agree that it is precisely over Stravinsky's most famous ballet score that they will shake hands. Paul Griffiths has gone so far as to announce in the New York Times, "The erstwhile early music movement is on the threshold of the twentieth century: soon we may expect thoroughly documented interpretations of The Rite ofSpring or of early Cage.""'

The extension of "authentic" performance practice to modernist music does seem historically (and commercially) inevitable, and The Rite of Spring is a particularly tempting target. But before plunging into the documentary and recorded evidence, we might do well to get our ideological bearings. I would argue that attempting to look at the Rite through the lens of historically informed performance means stepping behind the looking glass into an aesthetic space rife with contradiction and paradox. The visionary claim of the early music movement-that there is such a thing as "authenticity" in musical performance, and that it can be found through a simple congruence of linked imperatives (knowing the historical record, respecting the composer's will, and invigorating contemporary music making)-turns out to be untenable. What feels "authentic" will not be historically accurate; conversely, the practice that accords with historical documentation will contravene modern assump- tions about the relation between composer and performer that underpin the very notion of "authenticity" in performance. An "authentic" performance of the Rite may well be at the same time troublingly different from the way it was originally done and, even worse, disappointingly identical to the

11. Griffiths, "For Early Music, It's About Face! Forward March!" New York Times, 11 June 1997.




way everybody is already doing it. The reason? The different perspective on canonical music that historical performance has come to represent disappears when it encounters early modernism, for the historical performance movement itself is one of the consequences, intended or not, of modernism in music. In tackling The Rite of Spring, Early Music is revisiting the traumatic scene of its own birth.

The claim that authenticity in performance cannot be understood except in relation to the modernist "break" is the common thread that binds the three key attempts to theorize the early music movement historically that have appeared since the early 1980s, those of Laurence Dreyfus, Robert Morgan, and Richard Taruskin.

The sense of trauma comes through most clearly when Dreyfus bitterly up- dates Adorno's critique of the pre-war early music movement and its crowd of "resentment listeners." Both critics see historical performance as a reflexive shying away from the open wound of modernist expressionism. The search for "authenticity" is no more than regression into a fantasized presubjective Past:

To maintain equilibrium in a mythical kingdom of the past, replete with courtly values and (palpably) harmonious relations, Early Music paid a price: it forcibly repressed every sign of the present.

... To the same extent ... that "modern music" circa 1890-1914 exposed

the raw nerve of social disharmony in the form of the neurotic utterance, Early Music redressed the imbalance by repressing the nightmarish present and mounting a grand restoration of the glorious past. Whereas the Mainstream had said "no" to modernism, Early Music forgot it was traumatized.12

Robert Morgan sees the turn-of-the-century break in almost diametrically opposite terms: the early music movement was, he argues, not a recoil from the modernist present, a merging back into the false consciousness of organic tradition, but a pragmatic reaction to modernism's implacable denial of all tradition. Being Modern meant accepting a total break with history, and the price for the immense freedom gained was equally immense anxiety about engaging the newly distanced past. Authenticity came not from a fantasized identification with "our" past, but in a detached (modern) investigation of what everyone now saw as "not ours": multiple independent traditions, equally close and yet all equally distant. Morgan sees this modernist objectivity and detachment leading to a strangely postmodern collapse of meaning. Like the cynic in the proverb, we appear to know the price of every tradition and the value of none: "One might even say that we no longer have a culture of our own at all. By way of compensation, we attempt to assimilate everyone

12. Laurence Dreyfus, "Early Music Defended Against Its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century," Musical Quarterly 69 (1983): 305. Dreyfus's title (as well as large sections of his argument) is indebted to Adorno's 1951 essay in Merkur, "Bach Defended Against His Devotees." See Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 133-46. On the "resentment listener," see Adorno's Intro- duction to the Sociology ofMusic, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1976), 9-12.




else's, including the fragmentary remains of our own, creating in the process a sort of all-world, all-time, cultural bazaar where one traffics freely."'13

Thus far the early music movement emerges as either a neurotic failure to deal with the modernist break or a pragmatic attempt to make the best of it. (The choice depends on whose modernism is under discussion. Dreyfus takes Schoenberg as the forbidding avatar of modernism-as-trauma, while Morgan sees Stravinsky as the paradigmatic modern-deracinated, cosmopolitan, es- pousing a detached view of history and tradition as freely circulating cultural capital.) In either case, the triumph of modernism in composition at the turn of the twentieth century leads to a strategic retreat in performance: a long, bad-faith search through the musical Past for the authenticity lacking in the musical Present. Now, having ransacked all of Western music history, early music has turned around (hence the title of Griffith's New York Times article: "For Early Music, It's About Face! Forward March!") and stands at the threshold of the very music that launched it on its Long March.

For Dreyfus and Morgan, the phrase "authentic modernist performance" thus contains an unacknowledged (and ethically dangerous) contradiction. According to Richard Taruskin, on the other hand, it is simply redundant. The crux of Taruskin's extended consideration of the relation of the historical performance movement to modernism, his 1988 article "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past," is that behind this seeming oxymoron are two names for the same thing: "We have come at last to the nub and essence of authentistic performance, as I see it. It is modern performance."'14

Like Morgan, Taruskin sees modernism as programmatically detached and objective. Surveying the cultural ground, he adds worship of scientific ratio- nality and materialism (Ezra Pound); a valorization of the impersonal over the subjective (T. S. Eliot, Ortega y Gasset); a visceral loathing of romantic senti- mentality (Pound, T. E. Hulme); and, most crucially, a turn away from the revolutionary "flux" of nineteenth-century vitalism to an art that was fixed, hieratic, and geometric (Wilhelm Worringer, Hulme, Pound, Yeats, et al.). Igor Stravinsky is at the center of this icy constellation. In an extended and vir- tuosic argument, Taruskin surveys Stravinsky's pronouncements on musical composition and musical performance, his compositions themselves, and even the rare recorded documentation of the composer's own performances of earlier music-and finds a modernist aesthetic ideology and performance style in- distinguishable from the so-called historical authenticity of the early music movement (that is why he consistently calls its position the "authentistic" one).

The rage against flux and impermanence, the same refuge in fixity and neces- sity, the same fear of melting into air. I would go so far as to suggest that all

13. Robert P. Morgan, "Tradition, Anxiety, and the Current Musical Scene," in Authenticity and Early Music, ed. Nicholas Kenyon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 67.

14. In Authenticity and Early Music, ed. Nicholas Kenyon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 152.




truly modern musical performance (and of course that includes the authentistic variety) essentially treats the music performed as if it were composed-or at least performed-by Stravinsky.'5

Taruskin's take on the modernist break is by far the most usefull for recon- sidering the performance practice of the Rite, especially the critical question of tempo. Eschewing twentieth-century exceptionalism, he presents us not with an irrevocable authenticity-destroying split between Past and Present, but with a contrast between two equally authentic performing traditions, the nineteenth-century vitalist and the modern geometric, each with its own distinct idea of how to manage musical time.

Geometric performing practice brings with it a self-consciously objective stylistic ideology based on metronomic, unyielding tempos and a horror of expressive rubato. To use the terms of Stravinsky's Poetics of Music, the ideal modernist performer is an executor who voluntarily submerges his or her per- sonality and adds nothing to the composer's intentions. The executor ignores spurious emotional or "spiritual" promptings, keeps the scenic or program- matic element firmly in its place, and remains aloof from all hermeneutics, preferring to base performance decisions on purely musical, purely material considerations. Form is everything, and any mannerism in performance that tends to distort formal structure must be ruthlessly purged. Most critically for structure, one must adhere strictly to the score, and most especially to its carefiully notated tempos; temporal rigidity gives the impression of an ideal music ruled by what Stravinsky-or rather Pierre Souvtchinsky, ghostwriting for Stravinsky and cribbing shamelessly himself from Henri Bergson-called "ontological" or "clock" time. Once schooled in this style by assiduous practice in contemporary music, the conscientious executor would naturally apply this scientific, impersonal, objective performance technique to earlier music as well. (And, as Taruskin wryly points out, scholars have been happy to manufacture plenty of factitious "historical evidence" for the desired fast, rigid tempos.)16

The Romantic interpreter, on the other hand, was thought to interpose the striving for personal expression or theatrical effect between composer and listener. Secure within a living tradition of performance, interpreters scorned

15. Taruskin, "The Pastness of the Present," 166. 16. Thus Stravinsky's praise for Ernest Ansermet in the Autobiography: "Ansermet's merit lies

precisely in his ability to reveal the relationship between the music of today and that of the past by purely musical methods. Knowing, as he does to perfection, the musical language of our own times, and, on the other hand, playing a large number of old, classical scores, he soon perceived that the authors of all periods were confronted by the solutions of problems which were, above all, specifically musical" (Stravinsky, An Autobiography [New York, M and J Steuer, 1958]; reprint of anonymous 1936 English translation of Chroniques de ma vie, 2 vols. [Paris, 1935-36], 76). See also Taruskin, "The Pastness of the Present," as well as Stravinsky, Autobiography, 74-75 and 150-51; and Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, 125-42. Stravinsky defines ontological time in the Poetics, 31-33; Taruskin's take on the historical evidence for geometric tempo relations can be sampled at "The Pastness of the Present," 167-69.




mere fidelity to the text and instead stressed an imagined communion with the composer, refusing to reduce the scope of creative intention to material issues of "pure" sound. A successful performance transmitted not the notes but what was between and behind them: the sense of a living, feeling consciousness at work. The most powerful interpretive weapon in achieving this "vitalism" in performance was tempo fluctuation. Sensitive performers marshaled both local and long-range tempo shifts to mimic the subjective flux of what Stravinsky later denigrated as "psychological" time.

Between vitalism and geometry

We will have occasion to reengage this vitalist tradition below, so it might be well to go a little more deeply into its ramifications. What Taruskin called simply "vitalism" appears to encompass two quite separate performance strate- gies, which we might distinguish functionally as the expressive versus the structural use of tempo modulation in performance. The former involves micro-management of phrase beginnings, endings, and accents by means of a suite of interpretive tools-agogics, luftpausen, dynamic stresses, and coordi- nated accelerando-crescendos and ritardando-decrescendos-that we have tended to lump together under the generic name of rubato.17 Expressive rubato, the painstaking sculpting in time of individual melodic phrases, got its most powerful nineteenth-century advocacy from Wagner's famous 1869 treatise On Conducting. A generation later, it was associated with such virtu- osos of the baton as Artur Nikisch and Hans von Billow. Writing his own On Conducting in 1895, Felix Weingartner used "tempo-rubato conductor" as an epithet in a famous attack-which is also a capsule description of the practice in its fullest flower:

The tempo-rubato conductors ... sought to make the clearest passages ob- scure by hunting out insignificant details. Now an inner part of minor impor- tance would be given a significance that by no means belonged to it; now an accent that should have been just lightly marked came out in a sharp 4forzato; often a so-called "breath pause" would be inserted, particularly in the case of a crescendo immediately followed by a piano, as if the music were sprinkled with fermate. These little tricks were helped out by continual alterations and disloca- tions of the tempo. Where a gradual animation or a gentle and delicate slowing- off is required-often however without even that pretext,--a violent, spasmodic accelerando or ritenuto was made....

17. The definitive treatment of tempo rubato is Richard Hudson's Stolen Time: The History of Tempo Rubato (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). Hudson sees a succession of two types of rubato, with the looser right hand over steady left hand of eighteenth-century keyboard players giving way to the wholesale bending of time in the later nineteenth century. He does not discuss larger-scale structural issues. For those see the computer-aided study of tempo fluctuation in David Epstein, Shaping Time: Music, the Brain, and Performance (New York: Schirmer, 1995).




The rhythmic distortions ... were in no way justified by any marks of the composer, but always originated with the conductor.18

Weingartner saw tempo rubato already decadent and in eclipse. The pen- dulum was beginning to swing away from "pure" vitalism toward a more modern style: less individual flamboyance; less obtrusive and less idiosyncratic interpretations; more conscious submission to the composer's will; more fidelity to the text; and, underpinning all these reforms, more attention to keeping tempos steady.19

By 1906, in his third edition, Weingartner could claim to have stemmed the growth of tempo-rubato music making; more performances, he noted, were being acclaimed as "simple" and "grand." (Stravinsky later volunteered that Weingartner was a "near idol" of his youth.)20 By the time of The Rite of Spring and the first stirrings of historical perspective on the performance of canonic works, expressive rubato was seen as a specialized technique for deal- ing with contemporary (i.e., late Romantic) music. So while Dionysian performances of Mahler and Strauss built the reputations of latter-day rubato specialists like Willem Mengelberg, Mozart and Beethoven were thought to demand a more sedate, more classical approach. But not even Weingartner es- poused giving up modifications of tempo altogether. In music with a strong pulse, he consistently attacked anything that gave the impression of tempo shifts from bar to bar, but he just as consistently allowed for larger-scale modifications of tempo, as long as the organic unity of the whole was not compro- mised. If subtle shifting of tempos would bring out the character of different sections of a work and thus help uncover its organic structure, the conductor got no points for hiding behind a metronome mark.21

We might call this manipulation of long-range tempo relations structural rubato, as opposed to the mercurial shifts of expressive rubato. This is not to say that structural rubato does not result in sudden speed-ups and slow-downs,

18. Weingarmtner, On Conducting, trans. Ernest Newman (London: Breitkopf and Hirtel, 1906), 28-29.

19. There are moments, particularly when Beethoven is under discussion, when Weingartner -no one's idea of a modernist-anticipates some of Stravinsky's most acerbic attacks on conductorial arrogance. Here is Weingartner in 1906: "So much attention was directed to the person of the conductor that the audience even came to regard the composers as the creatures, as it were, of their interpreters, and in conjunction with the name of a conductor people spoke of 'his' BEETHOVEN, 'his' BRAHMs, or 'his' WAGNER" (On Conducting, 29). Compare Stravinsky in 1939: "Perched on his sibylline tripod, [the conductor] imposes his own movements, his own particular shadings upon the compositions he conducts, and he even reaches the point of talking with a naive impudence of his specialities, of his fifth, of his seventh, the way a chef boasts of a dish of his own concoction" (Poetics ofMusic, 131).

20. Weingarmtner, On Conducting, 40. "Felix Weingarmtner ... was a near idol of mine in my youth, and a Beethoven cycle I heard him direct in Berlin in 1900 was a very great event in my life" (Igor Stravinsky, "On Conductors and Conducting," in his Themes and Conclusions [London: Faber and Faber, 1972], 225).

21. See Weingartner, On Conducting, 40-42.




but they come at the turning points of the form, to accommodate the changing character of the music's thematic material. Wagner declared in On Conducting: "The right comprehension of the MELOS is the sole guide to the right tempo"; comprehending the melos meant knowing to what extent individual melodic periods partook of the lyrical "pure" adagio and the rhythmic "pure" allegro.22 The relative strength of these two temporal archetypes-not the written tempo indication or metronome mark-determined the correct tempo. In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century practice that took Wagner's treatise as gospel, tempos tended toward the extreme: allegros were faster and adagios slower, since no pretense was made that a single moderated tempo should work for all the melodic characters in a movement.

A classic opportunity for structural rubato in the Wagnerian vein is provided by the contrasting themes of the typical nineteenth-century sonata- allegro movement: the rhythmic character of the first theme group usually demanded a brisker tempo than was appropriate for the lyrical second theme. In the absence of specific direction from the score, it was the conductor's respon- sibility to plan the necessary tempo modulations. Structural rubato thus artic- ulates large sections with uniform thematic character: as the melos shifts, there are moments of sudden flexibility, but wherever the music maintains a single character, the perception of a single, basic tempo is never allowed to dis- integrate. Wagner's conducting treatise specifically warns against "arbitrary nuances of tempo" applied simply for effect. He does take great pride in re- counting his success at leading an orchestra through the tricky (and unwritten) tempo shifts in his interpretation of Weber's Freischiitz overture, but in every case the accelerando or ritardando is planned and then negotiated not for its own sake, but to prepare the correct tempo for the melos that follows.23

The articulating function of structural rubato remained attractive to performers long after the more mercurial expressive rubato had become unfash- ionable. Well into the 1950s, Wilhelm Furtwaingler (Taruskin's paragon of vitalism) was turning andantes into ultraslow pure adagios, pushing pure allegros into overdrive, and using tempo shifts within movements to articulate Schenkerian prolongation spans. His performances of Beethoven's Fifth completely abandon the nervous flexibility ofArtur Nikisch's famous 1912 recording, in which not a single bar of the Allegro is in the same tempo. On the other hand, Furtwingler, whose moment-to-moment beat is monumentally steady, always slows down quite deliberately for the second theme.

22. Wagner, On Conducting: A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music, trans. Edward Dannreuther (London: W. Reeves, 1887; reprint, New York: Dover, 1989), 18, 34-48; emphasis in original.

23. On sonata forms: "Evidently the greater number, if not all modern Allegro movements, consist of a combination of two essentially different constituent parts: in contrast with the older naive unmixed Allegro, the construction is enriched by the combination of the pure Allegro with the thematic peculiarities of the vocal Adagio in all its gradations" (Wagner, On Conducting, 52-53). On "arbitrary nuances of tempo," see On Conducting, 67.




As if it were composed by Stravinsky

But what is the point of splitting hairs over the typology of vitalism? What could it possibly have to do with the Rite? The ultimate triumph of Stra- vinskian geometric performance practice is well documented both in print and on recordings. Early music that is actually early is now being performed with a certain degree of freedom again, but in the mainstream of performance the geometric has become the norm, and more rigidly so the closer in the repertory one gets to Stravinsky.24 Given the present-day hegemony of Stravinsky's own modernist aesthetic, performing the "authentic" Rite now seems trivial rather than quixotic. Make it brisk, geometric, faithful to the letter of the score: that is, do exactly what the composer explicitly demanded, which is what everybody is already doing. Well, of course. As far as the Rite is con- cerned, it seems we have all been authenticists avant la lettre.

After threading its way through the interlocking paradoxes outlined above, musicology finds itself in the unfamiliar position of having to argue history against historical "authenticity." The goal is not-as in Taruskin's numerous demolishments of self-serving record-jacket scholarship-to force spuriously historical performers to unmask themselves as modern. Rather it is to seek to understand an instance of the historical process by which modernist-historical performance constituted itself in the first half of our century. We will do well to remember that performance styles are not constructed in a day, nor are they ultimately enforced by unilateral shifts in compositional style or the apodicti- cism of a composer's aesthetic pronouncements. Since the time of Beethoven, performance practices have been the result of prolonged cultural negotiations between composers and performers. Tracing a performance practice means excavating the documentary traces of a long, intense, ongoing conversation about the interpretation and control of musical texts.25

24. For brief surveys of the recorded evidence see Taruskin, "The Pastness of the Present," 163-64, 187-88; and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's contribution to "The Limits of Authenticity: A Discussion," in Early Music 12 (1984): 13-16. For a prescient discussion of the "reverse discrimi- nation" whereby early music performers are allowed the vitalism that modern mainstream players have abandoned, see Michelle Dullak, "The Quiet Metamorphosis of 'Early Music,"'" Repercus- sions2, no. 2 (1993): 31-61. For the most extreme statement of the modernist conservatory position (from a past president of the New England Conservatory, no less) see Gunther Schuller, The Compleat Conductor (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

25. This type of performance history, with particular attention paid to the recorded evidence, has been the principal interest of Jos6 Bowen, director until recently of the Center for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) at the University of Southampton. See his "Tempo, Duration, and Flexibility: Techniques in the Analysis of Performance," Journal of Musicological Research 16 (1996): 111-56. For a longer discussion that touches on some of the same critical and historical issues broached here, see Bowen, "The History of Remembered Innovation: Tradition and Its Role in the Relationship Between Musical Works and Their Performances," Journal ofMusicology 11 (1993): 139-73. Less relevant to the present discussion-though still a pioneering study-is Robert Philip's Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance, 1900-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).




As it turns out, The Rite of Spring is the perfect text upon which to trace the complex forging of modernist performance practice in the first half of the twentieth century. The negotiations were unusually personal, and they often turned ugly: Stravinsky's irritation with conductors who got in the way of his music is legendary.26 It took sustained work with the pen and the baton-and multiple revisions of the text-before Stravinsky could rely on hearing even his own most famous piece played "as if it were composed by Stravinsky."

To get some idea of the distance he had to traverse we can return, not to the 1913 ballet premiere so painstakingly researched by Hodson and company-we have almost no testimony from qualified witnesses about how that sounded-but to the St. Petersburg concert premiere the following February. This is the earliest Rite for which we have critical discussion of the musical performance by a trained, disinterested observer familiar with the score. The composer Nicolai Myaskovsky, in 1914 still considered an important journalis- tic ally of Stravinsky, had been furnished with a score of the Rite so that he could soften the ground a little before the first Russian performances. His as- sessment of the piece itself was guardedly positive, but at the actual premiere, as a composer in possession of the score and its metronome markings, he had only scorn for Serge Koussevitsky's "interpretation"-and I use the word in its Stravinskian, pejorative sense. According to Myaskovsky, Koussevitsky made a hash of the piece (the review refers to "sonic porridge" and "the mess called forth by Mr. Koussevitsky's magic wand"); most of the themes were simply in- audible. Even worse, the conductor used cheap sound effects in an attempt to compensate for his inability to control the orchestra: "The end [of the piece] was beyond Mr. Koussevitsky's powers. In general the music went at exaggerated tempi, with the brass bellowing and the percussion crackling the way Mr. Koussevitsky loves it."27

Evidently playing the Rite was not always as serenely geometric an affair as at present. In the absence of any surviving recording of Koussevitsky's Rite (I will propose a substitute below) one can only imagine a highly theatrical but sloppy performance in which appropriate tempos, geometric regularity of pulse, and careful orchestral balance were ruthlessly sacrificed for dramatic and expressive effect. The following study of source materials and recordings attempts to outline the path from this putative vitalist performance-not an atypical one, as I'll try to show-to the grimly geometric Rite embalmed in the composer's 1960 Columbia recording. I will begin with a brief consideration of the extant performing materials for the Rite and the shifting timings and tempo markings in various scores. The question of the "correct" tempo

26. Thus the famous failings out with even his most trusted executants: Monteux, who took understandable offense at Stravinsky's advertisements that his own messy performances were, ex officio, more definitive than Monteux's; and Ansermet, a trusted ally banished for making a few unauthorized cuts in ballet scores.

27. Review in Muzika, no. 171 (1 March 1914); quoted and translated in Taruskin, Stravin- sky and the Russian Traditions 2:1023.




for the "Danse sacrale" will lead to a more detailed discussion of expressive tempo modifications in that final movement. As I pointed out above, whatever Stravinsky's 1913 intentions might have been (and as usual we will have to be skeptical about his ex postfacto claims), historically important recordings of the "Danse sacrale" betray an underground, mostly unwritten tradition of vitalist tempo fluctuation. I will survey, through published and primary sources, the fugitive documentary justification for this recorded practice. Finally, I will trace the process by which Stravinsky later imposed modernist geometry onto the Rite in his attempt to wipe out not only this one conductorial inspiration but unauthorized tempo modifications in general.

The Performing Materials of the Rite

Let me say at the outset that I have not found any "new" sources for the Rite; I am simply reexamining some well-canvassed documents, the most important of these being the autograph full score (hereafter Partitur) currently housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel.28 (The boldface terms in the following description of sources are keyed to the texts which are listed as primary sources in Works Cited and whose markings are collated in Tables 1-3 of the Appendix. The German nomenclature follows that of the Paul Sacher Stiftung, where most of these sources reside.) Before 1922, when a printed full score became generally available, the four manuscript orchestral scores of the Rite in exis- tence were regularly lent out to conductors for performances. Stravinsky's autograph, although not the primary lending score,29 was among these, and it now carries extensive performance markings, a fact that the composer's alter ego Robert Craft deplores: "Every page of the original manuscript [is] marred by [conductors'] reminders to give cues, by large redrawings of the meters, and by such expressions as 'tris tranquille'-where Stravinsky merely gives a change of tempo."30 Most commentators on the Partitur follow Craft in giving relatively short shrift to these "inauthentic" markings. Even Volker Scherliess, who has published the most extended description of this closely held source to date, was mostly interested in compositional variants (of which there are many) and what the autograph reveals of Stravinsky's early revision process. Conductors' marks in the score engage him only briefly and in pass- ing, though he does at least list the places where Stravinsky's metronome marks are crossed out and replaced.31

28. The key reference to all the sources for the Rite is still Cyr, "Le Sacre du printemps- Petite histoire d'un grande partition." The following catalogue is indebted to his painstaking and pioneering work.

29. See ibid., 109-10. 30. Craft, "Le Sacre du printemps: A Chronology of the Revisions," in Stravinsky: Selected

Correspondence, ed. and trans. Robert Craft (New York: Knopf, 1982-85), 1:399 n. 4. 31. Scherliess, "Bemerkungen zum Autograph des 'Sacre du printemps,"'" Musikforschung 35

(1982): 244-45.




Considered as a performing document, the Partitur forms the first link in a chain of primary sources, all now resident in Basel, that together justify some startling inferences about performances of the Rite over the years. The most important supplementary sources are Stravinsky's personal copies of the 1922 and 1948 conductor's scores (RMV 197; B&H 16333); the composer quite clearly conducted from these full-size scores for decades, and they are heavily encrusted with corrections, cues, rebarrings, and all the practical jot- tings of the podium. Stravinsky's thickly annotated copy of the 1913 four- hand piano score (RMV 196), whose choreographic notes on the original production were described in print by Robert Craft, also contains a few key musical corrections.32 Stravinsky had two personal copies of the 1922 pocket score (RMV 197b), and though he of course never conducted from these, he did write in corrections, particularly of tempos. In addition, tempo markings in Stravinsky's Sketchbook, available in facsimile, and his draft short score (hereafter Particell) can be brought to bear. Finally, there are the printed editions of 1922, 1948, and 1967 (B&H 19441) themselves, along with the 1943 revised version of the "Danse sacrale" (Associated Music Publishers, unnumbered). When added to the acoustic evidence-the 1921 Pleyela piano rolls and various historic recordings-they outline a contested performance practice that is as fascinating as it was fundamentally unresolved.

Before turning to the specific question of what the conductors' marks in the Partitur and other significant early scores suggest about tempos and tempo shifts in early Rite performances, it will be useful to give a general overview of the performance markings in these unpublished sources. First, the Partitur: Volker Scherliess assumes that most of the performers' annotations in the autograph are by Pierre Monteux.33 This is logical, since Monteux rehearsed and performed the score more than anyone else in the crucial period (1913-21) before the first printed edition. (A definitive identification of the handwriting is difficult, however, for most of the annotations are isolated numerals in crayon, lines and circles, and the like, and even the few complete words seem scrawled in haste. While the matter is by no means closed, for eu- phony's sake I will refer to "Monteux" below rather than "the conductor or conductors who marked the Partitur at this spot.") The conductor's performance notes are written in a large hand across the score, mainly in red and blue crayon. They are easily distinguishable from Stravinsky's text corrections, most of which are small, neat, and in pencil or dark ink. (The composer does not appear ever to have conducted from this score; by the time he took up the baton in 1926, he owned several printed copies of the Rite.) Though Craft gives the impression that Stravinsky's autograph was heavily defaced, Monteux's markings are in general quite discreet. It seems that unlike many

32. Igor Stravinsky, The Rite ofSpring: Sketches 1911-1913 (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), appendix 3. See also Craft, "The Rite at Seventy-Five," for reproductions of several key pages.

33. Scherliess, "Bemerkungen," 244.




modern conductors, who use complex systems of score marking to ease (or substitute for) analyzing and internalizing a tricky score, Monteux knew the Rite so well that he needed only the most fleeting aides memoires during actual performance.34

Most of the markings highlight complex metric changes: Monteux is likely to write the number of beats per bar in quickly changing passages in large roman numerals at the center of the score, though often he simply enlarges the actual meters as they change. Where there are compound uneven meters in fast tempos he usually writes out the division of the bar he will beat (more on this below). There are very few cues. The conductor has circled a few of the trickiest entrances-mostly critical percussion passages like the bass drum hemiola heralding the entrance of the "Cortege du Sage" (three measures before R65) and the irregularly spaced timpani shots that pockmark the opening of the "Danse sacrale." He also reminded himself to encourage exposed woodwind solos like the high-altitude horn melody at R25 of the "Danse des Adolescents." Monteux added slurs or articulation marks extremely rarely (he did clarify some ambiguous mute and pizzicato-arco changes); he altered dynamics more readily, fiddling with the balance of several passages and even changing a doubling or two (for example, he asked the third horn to join the fourth in the growling pedal passage at R31). Significantly, he added no marks of "expressive" phrasing: no hairpins, no breath-marks, and no fermatas that were not already implied by the music. (There are a few character words, but we'll deal with those, along with tempo markings, below.) There are also no indications of the choreography beyond the bare acknowledgment of the raising and lowering of the curtain for the two tableaux.

Interestingly enough, given Craft's hauteur over conductorial defacement of the autograph, Stravinsky's own copy of the 1922 full score is much more thickly encrusted with performance markings than the Partitur. Its elaborate mnemonic annotations seem to suggest that the composer had to learn the Rite quickly, almost from scratch, as he prepared to begin his own conducting career in the mid 1920s. Stravinsky went far beyond redrawing the meters in crayon: he reminded himself of the rapidly shifting beat patterns with the pro- cessions of large vertical strokes, triangles, and squares above the score that are still many a conductor's first step when parsing an unfamiliar score. He delin-

34. Actually, one wonders what score Craft was thinking of, or whether he was working from memory or hearsay when he disparaged those who conducted from the Partitur. The "tris tranquille" that so exercised him seems relatively innocuous: after all, Stravinsky himself used "Tran- quillo" as a tempo marking at R48 and R56. As for large redrawings of the meters, Monteux's markings are just numbers; no new bar lines, vertical ticks for beats, or the big squares (duple) and triangles (triple) favored by modern conductors (like Stravinsky himself) appear anywhere. It is quite possible that Monteux did actually-pace Craft-hesitate to use the composer's autograph as his personal notebook. See Erich Leinsdorf, The Composer's Advocate: A Radical Orthodoxy for Musicians, for a wonderfully acerbic diatribe against using this kind of graphical score parsing as a crutch ([New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981], 2-4).




eated hypermetric groupings of measures by tracing key bar lines in bold blue crayon and drawing brackets above the first violin line, and sometimes actually enclosed a sequence of bars in a large red box spanning the entire height of the score. Important cues are carefiully noted, as are the score's few written- out tempo transitions. Stravinsky transferred most of these markings to his personal copy of the 1948 full score with meticulous precision.

All these annotations make it easy to trace the development of a performance practice. Let us take one striking instance. Having the strings play the famous "Augurs" polychord using nothing but repeated down-bows was an inspiration that struck Stravinsky only in performance during the 1920s. The bowings are not in the autograph Partitur, nor are they in the 1922 first edition. The composer/conductor penciled them into his 1922 full score (and not his pocket score) sometime in the middle 1920s, and they were duly engraved in the 1929 revision of that first printed edition. Why? One practical reason probably struck Stravinsky the conductor the first time he rehearsed the passage: as the string players sawed back and forth, taking his famously irregu- lar accents just as they came, he must have realized it was imperative to specify a bowing to ensure that none of the string accents landed on an weak up- stroke. Demanding all down-bows was a simple solution that combated orchestral routine, avoided fussiness, and guaranteed absolute regularity of accent.

But the decision might also have been a product of Stravinsky the composer's changing conception of the way the Rite should sound. Having the strings retake over and over again forces players to lift the bow after every note, clipping each chord short and thus enforcing automatically the trademark "etched" staccato sound of postwar New Objectivity. One might infer that earlier conductors of the Rite had played the Augurs chords more on the string, more tenuto; later recorded performances by Monteux, Ernest Ansermet, and Stokowski do indeed bear traces of this pre-1929 performance practice. Do the repeated down-bows then imply that every eighth-note beat should be heavily and equally felt? Not if we respect the Fassung letztes Taktstocks. As Example 1 shows, Stravinsky reminded himself in his 1948 score to beat the passage in an easy alla breve, writing in the metrically incorrect pulse of two half notes per bar. At or below the written tempo of J = 50, beating four eighth notes to the bar is just possible, if one wants a heavy, stomping effect; but two beats to the bar implies a faster, lighter feel, like the bouncy j =

60-62 Stravinsky demonstrates in his 1960 Columbia recording. Insofar as conductors' markings represent a kind of rough-and-ready analy-

sis, they are also rich in theoretical and structural implications. For example, comparing the way Monteux and Stravinsky broke up the Rite's complex uneven meters is particularly helpful in unraveling knotty questions of rhythmic scansion. Sometimes the two simply disagree, as in Example 2, which shows how the two conductors parsed the infamous eleven-four bar that begins the "Glorification de l'dlue." It is revealing that both felt the need to split this




Example 1 Stravinsky's performance markings for the "Augurs printanieres" (R13)

Igor Stravinsky, in red pencil, in his personal copy of B & H 16333 (after 1948)

F13

VlnII

_

r

f sempre staccato

Igor Stravinsky, in blue pencil, in his personal copy of RMV 197 (after 1922)

undifferentiated string of quarter-note beats into familiar triple and duple patterns.35

But Stravinsky often worked through several notations of his trickiest rhythms. Knowing how contemporary performers actually subdivided the composer's originals throws new light on the provenance, motivation, and structural implications of his rebarrings. To take a famous instance: in the late 1920s Stravinsky redrew most of the bar lines in the "Danse sacrale"; seven- teen pages of score had to be completely reengraved for the 1929 "revised first edition."36 He arrived at the barring familiar to most of us by splitting almost all of the measures with five or seven sixteenth notes into shorter bars of three or two, and by rewriting all four-sixteenth measures as bars of two-eight. This had the immediate advantage of simplifying the counting-almost everything was either a two or a three-and, more crucially, of allowing the composer to control the way conductors would actually beat (and thus accentuate) the bars of five. Robert Craft and others have noted that this rebarring first appears in

35. I can find no deeper significance in Stravinsky's choice of 4 + 4 + 3 versus Monteux's choice of 3 + 4 + 4. Monteux's division miqht be preferred as closer to the choreography, if Millicent Hodson's restoration work is to be trusted at this level of detail. Her reconstruction has the "amazons" stomping in place for all eleven beats; there is an arm gesture on the fourth beat, the beginning of Monteux's second group; and a clap on the last quarter, which works better if the last group is a group of four as in Monteux rather than a group of three as in Stravinsky. See Hodson, Nijinsky's Crime, 137.

36. The publisher declined to change the plate numbers, so both the 1922 first printing and this 1929 revised score carry the number RMV 197. This has led quite a few libraries to list their very common 1929 scores as the much more rare 1922 printing. See Cyr, "Le sacre du printemps -Petite histoire d'un grande partition," 98-99 and 120-27, for a more detailed discussion of variants between the editions.




Example 2 Stravinsky versus Monteux at the introduction to "Glorification de l'e1ue" (R103 +

1)

Brackets and numbers by Igor Stravinsky, in red pencil, in his personal copy of B & H 16333 (after 1948)

4 4 3

~-

120 3 TimpI Wa

M

I' I I I I I I {

/f colla

bacch.,di

Tamburo

Fermata, slurs, and numbers by Pierre Monteux(?) in crayon on Partitur (1913)

Stravinsky's 1922 conducting score, painstakingly and ingeniously drafted by the composer's own hand over the original text.37 But no one seems to have noticed how closely Stravinsky's rebarring follows Monteux's own rhythmic "analysis" of the "Danse sacrale," recorded on the Partitur in 1913.

Example 3a compares Stravinsky's original barring in the 1913 autograph, Monteux's parsing of those bars into beat patterns, and Stravinsky's revised barring of the 1920s. In almost every case, the division of five that Monteux beat in 1913 is the division that Stravinsky later wrote into his score.38 The only place where Stravinsky's new barring contradicts what was conducted in 1913 is at what is now R148. Monteux opted for consistency (the oom- pah-pah of the low brass is always beaten in three) and followed the percussion (his version keeps all the timpani strokes on the "stronger" beats). Stravinsky, interestingly enough, had something quite different in mind. The composer's new barring disrupts symmetry and displaces percussion accents in order to follow the melody, placing the first leap up to A in metrically stressed relief. The 1943 revision changes the barring yet again, placing both A's on written downbeats and the following B6 on what a conservative listener will almost certainly hear as an unwritten one (see the scansion symbols at the end of Ex. 3a).

Even when Stravinsky didn't split up bars of five, he renotated them to make sure the A's of the melody would always fall on strong beats. Monteux, faced with several bars of five in which every note carried an accent, chose to beat them as 2 + 3-a logical division, but one that in retrospect looks like a

37. Craft, "Le Sacre du printemps: A Chronology of the Revisions," 403-4; van den Toornm, "Stravinsky Re-barred," 188-90.

38. Stravinsky's decision to combine the two measures before what is now R147 into one could not be anticipated.



Example 3a Monteux and Stravinsky rebar the "Danse sacrale"

1913 Partitur

Monteux: 3 3 L f 2 3 3

[142] [143]

1929 "revised first edition"

A? A? 1913 Partittr

Monteux:-

3 2 3 3

2•

3 2 3

!A!

[144] (3 + 2)[[145] (3 + 2) 1929 "revised first edition"

see 3b



Example 3a continued

1913 Partitur

AL -eg- I4If AdII

Monteux: 3

I -"-" '- - 1. l- lA'- . 1

[146] 1929 "revised first edition"/ U--U/

9/ Iu u u u u ?I u?

1913

Partitur 0

. ,

4 all m I - I.. .

Monteux: 32 3 3 2

! t u? / / U / U U U

A Ow 64 l 041 4 64 4l0

[147] [148] 1929 "revised first edition" / u / u u / u / u / u U

[71




Example 3b Stravinsky corrects Monteux's "wrong" divisions of five

1913 PartiturSim.

marc. ff cresc.ff

3 2 3 2 3

Monteux's

divisions

1929 revised first edition

ff marc. -

[3 3 + 2] [3 + 2]

divisions implied by Stravinsky's revision

mistake, an artifact of the beaming (see Ex. 3b). Once aware of Monteux's "error," anyone can see why Stravinsky went back in 1929 and rebeamed the note-heads, thinned out the accents, and added hairpins leading directly to the crucial A's. No conductor could now fail to see what Boris Asaf'yev would call the intonation of the whole passage: the way its coordination of rhythmic and melodic accents creates a perceptibly coherent shape (he would have called it a popevka, a "little melodic cell"), repeatedly leading to the high A and, finally, when enough tension has built up, one scale step higher to Bk.39

The Partitur lets us watch Stravinsky "correcting" Monteux and shows the composer parsing the music to favor middle-ground melodic connections. Abstract melodic structure-at any level of reduction-is not a structural feature of the Rite that has come in for much recent discussion, yet this dispute over accentuation in performance shows that it clearly mattered to the composer. (Such documentary evidence tempts me to undertake an Asaf'yev-style intonational study of the entire work's melodic structure.) Taking the metrically ambiguous Partitur as the text for a historical performance of this passage, one might still choose to follow the interpretation of the composer- as-conductor, enshrined in the 1929 revision of the text ("the composer's intentions"), rather than the interpretation of the actual conductor who used

39. See Boris Asaf'yev, A Book About Stravinsky, trans. Richard F. French (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), 50-59.




the Partitur at the premiere, as recorded on the 1913 text itself ("the sound of the first performance"). But in any case, this "mistake" in beating recorded on the autograph remains crucial for musicologists: it alone makes sense of the traces Stravinsky left in later sources as he clarified his rhythmic (and intonational) intentions.

Furthermore, one can argue that Monteux's "wrong" interpretation has become, if only negatively, part of "the music itself." Stravinsky did not arrive at the revised 1929 barring and accentuation of the "Danse sacrale" by soli- tary approach to a Platonic Ideal; his reading of the text was sharpened in dialectical struggle with another's. The point of dispute between the two interpretations is small, but the philosophical implications are profound. Stravinsky later argued performance aesthetics from the proposition that there were two "moments" of music: "potential music," the fiully realized set of the composer's intentions "fixed on paper," which exists logically prior to any performance; and "actual music," the stuff mortals can actually hear, because mere mortals have actually played it for them.40 As soon as we accept that these two moments are discrete ontological essences and accept the logical pri- ority of the potential (composer's) over the actual (performer's), the entire ideology of modernist-historical performance practice follows with inexorable logic. The move from potential to actual is always a fall from grace, especially if the performers have known Sin, letting their own musical ideas "contaminate" the purity of the composer's original conception. (The only salvation is the in- errant scriptural authority of the Urtext.)

But the little vignette we have just traced on the Partitur shows the absur- dity of subordinating actual to potential music: Monteux's incorrect interpretation of the text was not a betrayal of the composer's prescriptions but the catalyst for them. Actual music, in this case at least, precedes and determines potential-if only dialectically, by contradiction. An ironic, almost deconstruc- tive paradox arises: composer-conductors (Stravinsky, Mahler, Boulez) who intervene in the practice of actual music on behalf of their potential music end up undermining the very texts whose (non)interpretation they are trying so hard to control. Their "intentions" become clear to them only gradually, in retrospect, and the result is a destabilizing proliferation of contradictory texts, each purporting to realize once and for all "the composer's intentions." Every remaking of the score to make it (at last) a perfect document of the composer's will undermines the very idea that a material text alone can guarantee any "authentic" realization at all.

The Rite of Spring provides an extreme example. It is no accident that the most famous work of our most famous "composer's advocate" spreads itself among a bewildering array of contradictory texts, recordings, and anecdotal admonitions. (After almost a hundred years, the idea of a single critical edition

40. Stravinsky, Poetics ofMusic, 125-29. The terms "potential" and "actual" are Stravinsky's own.




of the Rite seems more impossibly utopian than ever.) The only way for the composer and his amanuenses to establish control over the text of the Rite was to produce more texts, which had the paradoxical effect of dissipating the composer's textual authority even further, to the point where he could make a complete revision and reorchestration of the "Danse sacrale" only to have it pointedly ignored by most scholars, nearly all performers, and even his publisher of record. (One does not revise Scripture lightly.)

What, then, can be done? The temptation is to invoke arbitrary closure by privileging either the composer's last text (the musicological default) or the composer's first thoughts (a new performing wrinkle exemplified by "period" recordings of early and even draft versions of canonic works). One might well choose either of these options as the basis for an "authentic" Rite. The Fassung letzter Hand would be the 1967 Boosey and Hawkes score, with the possible substitution of the 1943 revised "Danse sacrale"; the "original version" (to use the authenticist slogan) would be the text of the Partitur as it stands in the Paul Sacher Stiftung, with a few key passages returned to their primal state before rehearsals started in the early spring of 1913.

But neither of these texts guarantees the realization of Stravinsky's "original intentions," the "potential music" that he famously claimed to have heard in 1910 but had been unable to write down. That music seems to me to be, if not an ex post facto fabrication, then a red herring with little relevance to performance practice. Even after he wrote the Rite down, Stravinsky couldn't know the relation of what he had written to what he (didn't yet know he) wanted-what he later would decide he "had always wanted"-until Pierre Monteux tried to give it to him. And it is only that gift in sound-however un- gratefully received-that a "historical performance" can ever hope to reclaim.

General Questions of Tempo

The case is no different with geometric tempo: Stravinsky's vastly influential strictures turn out to be not so much intention as reaction-or overreaction. This is not to say that Stravinsky did not have reason to feel that his "potential" Rite had been betrayed by his early interpreters. Even a cursory glance at the performance markings in the Partitur shows that the first generation of Rite conductors felt free to ignore both Stravinsky's tempo indications and his metronome marks; someone has simply crossed many of them out in blue crayon and written in his own. (These and other changes appear in the columns labeled Partitur in Tables la through lc. Taken together, these three tables should provide an independently useful concordance of tempo markings found in significant primary sources for the Rite, with special attention given to variants and handwritten corrections at the places where performance practice is in dispute.)

The new tempos are almost all slower than the composer's, and most commentators, prodded by Stravinsky's jaundiced recollections, assume that




choreographic demands forced the wholesale abandonment of the composer's original tempos. But Stravinsky's repeated hatchet jobs on Nijinsky and his work are so crude and so transparently self-serving-or, rather, so transparently in the service of the Rite as abstract concert piece-that all of the composer's complaints need to be vetted with particular care. In his 1936 autobiography, Stravinsky did indeed sniff that Nijinsky had, "either through clumsiness or lack of understanding," ruined his "Danse sacrale": "It is undeniably clumsy to slow down the tempo of the music in order to compose complicated steps which cannot be danced in the tempo prescribed."41 But on closer examination that "prescribed tempo" turns out to be something of a chimera. For the "Danse sacrale," there are no tempo markings in the Sketchbook, the Particell, or the Partitur: tempo markings first appear in the printed four-hand score, which came out at the earliest in mid April 1913, well after all the choreography was worked out.42 We do not have any manuscript sources for this score, so there is no way to know whether Stravinsky specified tempos in the piano reduction that he never wrote down either for himself (in the drafts) or for Monteux (in the Partitur). It would be comforting to let the composer convince us that he had an ideal ontological tempo in mind for every dance before the first rehearsal of the Rite, but it is more likely, as Volker Scherliess proposes, that loose tempo ranges were honed collabora- tively during the dance and orchestral preparations.43

Scherliess's hypothesis is borne out by the early manuscript sources. The di- vergence of metronome markings between the Sketchbook, the Particell, and the Partitur (Tables la-c) allows us to see just how variable Stravinsky's early conceptions of tempo were. In several cases, the Partitur's "compromises" return to tempos "pre-scribed" in the Particell. When Monteux decided to pull the "Jeux des Cites Rivales" (R57) back from a breakneck J = 168 to the more manageable J = 146, he came within two metronome clicks of the original tempo for this section (the Particell implies J = 144 at R57, since there is no direction to modify the tempo set at R54). At R72, the beginning of the "Danse de la terre," Monteux crossed out Stravinsky's prestissimo and wrote in "rigoreux," implying a tempo significantly slower than the J = 168 marked; I suspect this "rigorous" tempo was quite close to the "Vivace. J = 138" that Stravinsky's short score originally demanded.

Actually, the damage to Stravinsky's geometric conception is generally less than the casual disregard of his metronome marks in the Partitur might in- dicate. Though obviously offensive to Craft's sensibilities, the verbal tempo indications Monteux wrote in next to his new metronome marks are by no means romantically effusive; in fact, they often imply a conscious preoccupa- tion with maintaining a locally strict (i.e., geometric) tempo. What else can we conclude when "Molto Allegro" is replaced by "Allegro rigoroso" (R57), or,

41. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 48.

42. See Cyr, "Le Sacre du printemps-Petite histoire d'un grande partition," 114-15. Note that the "Danse sacrale" does not even appear in the Particell in possession of the Sacher Institute.

43. Scherliess, "Bemerkungen," 244.




as mentioned above, when Monteux declines to take the "Danse de la terre" prestissimo, but reminds himself that it must still be "rigoreux" (R72)? It is doubtful whether a veteran ballet conductor like Monteux allowed any spon- taneous phrase-level rubato.44 One thing we can say for certain is that he never confessed to this kind of expressive shaping on the score itself. And on a larger scale, the new slower tempos are often carefifully calculated to preserve the interlocking tempo relations written into the score: in Tableau I, for example (see Table la), the 1:2 ratio between the slow and fast sections of the "Rondes printanieres" (R54) is maintained (80:160 becomes 69:138), and the subse- quent addition of exactly eight metronome marks to determine the tempo of the "Jeux des Cit6s Rivales" (R57) is also punctiliously preserved (160:168 becomes 138:146).

Ultimately, all these slower tempos are something of a distraction. If they are Monteux's, he had abandoned them by the time of his 1929 recording, which makes heroic efforts to take all the fast sections of the score at or near the tempos Stravinsky indicated. (Table lId compares the markings in the Partitur with Monteux's recording.) In fact, Monteux's most significant de- parture from the printed text is in the other direction, when he begins the "Danse sacrale" at what Myaskovsky would undoubtedly have called the exaggerated tempo of J = 148-53; this is more than twenty clicks faster than Stravinsky's rather sedate = 126.45

There is no justification for Monteux's blazing tempo in any printed or manuscript score. There is, however, the 1921 piano roll, which starts and fin- ishes the "Danse sacrale" at about that speed (more on that later). And there is a fascinating document in Stravinsky's hand-hitherto unpublished-which I have transcribed as Example 4a. This chart appears pasted into the inside front

44. Monteux had been with the Ballets russes for less than two years when he conducted the Rite; in fact, he had never conducted dance before agreeing to rehearse the orchestra for Petrushka in 1911. (Monteux was at the time the assistant director of the Concerts Colonne and firmly entrenched in the nineteenth-century symphonic repertory.) But as he pointed out when George Gershwin later praised his "marvellous rhythmic sense," he had put in several formative years (age fourteen to sixteen) playing for the acrobats and dancers at the Folies Bergeres: "Oui, my two years at the Folies has a great deal to do with it. There were many dancing and acrobatic acts, in which, as you know, the rhythm is marked and extremely precise. It was excellent training for a young musician." His wife points out the relevance to the Rite: "This experience stood him in good stead later, when as a conductor of the Ballet Russe under Serge Diaghilev, he triumphed in the works of Igor Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel." See Doris G. Monteux, It's All in the Music (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965), 30-31. This is a key source of information about Monteux's training, background, and temperament-though the great man, reminiscing near the end of his life, is not above prevaricating a little, as we shall see below

45. All timings of recorded performances are my own, taken by hand; the difficulty of establishing regular pulsations in this complex metric environment can be taken as a given. All metronome marks given should be understood as having a margin of error of approximately ? 3. On the other hand, where I specify a range of marks, the implication is that the performance itself varies in tempo between the two numbers given.




cover of Stravinsky's personal copy of the 1922 full-size score of the Rite, from which the composer conducted in the 1920s and 1930s. It is thus the score the composer had to hand when he was planning his 1929 recording. Compare Example 4a with the actual disposition of Stravinsky's 1929 recording onto the ten 78-rpm sides of Columbia LX 119-123, given in Example 4b: they are close enough, at least at the beginning, to let us identify the chart as Stravinsky's attempt to map out the best way to fit the Rite onto four- minute record sides.46 Usefully enough, Stravinsky projected timings for each section of the Rite that were, for the most part, accurate to within a few sec- onds (compare them with my timings in Ex. 4b for the actual sides of his 1929 recording). Stravinsky's projected recording has one fewer side than the even- tual 1929 pressing, since he is convinced that he can get the entire "Danse sacrale" on one side. But his timing is wildly optimistic. By my calculations, one would need to maintain the frantic tempo of h = 155-60 to complete the dance in the 3'50" that Stravinsky allows.

The only person who has ever come close to that tempo on records was Pierre Monteux. But Monteux's 1929 recording of the "Danse sacrale" takes well over four minutes and is, like Stravinsky's, split over two sides. This is because-and now we begin to close in on what this investigation is really about -Monteux doesn't maintain any one tempo. Though he blazes through the beginning and ending of the "Danse sacrale," he slows down significantly and dramatically in the middle. He thus introduces at least two major tempo modifications not called for in any orchestral score. It is to the question of these modifications that we now turn.

Modifications of Tempo in the "Danse sacrale"

Let's consider and eliminate two possible practical explanations for the tempo shifts. First, the generic appeal to faulty orchestral technique. In fact, the parts of the "Danse sacrale" that consistently get slowed down in early performances are not the most difficult-they are the easiest to beat and to play. And, as we'll hear, the tempo shifting persists and even proliferates in comfort- able performances from the 1950s. Second, an appeal to the choreography: Although there is evidence that these tempo shifts may go back to 1913, it seems unlikely they were put there solely for the dancers. As anyone who has ever accompanied ballet will attest, dancers hate complex tempo fluctuations in the middle of movements. One could make a case that Nijinsky's original choreography both accommodates and is articulated by the tempo shifts I am discussing here (and I will make that case below), but that would not explain

46. The roman numerals are the actual records; the arabic numbers are the sides (matrixes); the letters are the individual tracks. Matrix numbers and labels in Example 4b are taken from Louis Cyr, liner notes for Pearl GEMM CD 9334.




Example 4a Transcribed from Stravinsky's copy of RMV 197 (1922 cond. score), inside front cover (original orthography)

I 1) prelude I 2) Les augurs printaniers 325"

II 3) a) Jeu de rapt b rondes print. 4) a) Jeux des cites rivales

b) Cortege du sage c) Danse de le terre

III 5) Prelude a II Tableau 350" suppriment la 6ieme mesure du 86- et changent cette qui sort en 5/4, suppriment la 3ieme et 4ieme du8

IV 6) Circles mysterieuses des adolescentes

7) a) Glorification de l'elue (avec les 11 coups) 140" b) L'Evocation [48

V a) Action rituelle des ancestres 3'15"-30"

b) Danse sacrale F 350"9

Example 4b Matrix numbers and disposition of Stravinsky's 1929 recording (Columbia LX

119-123) (after Louis Cyr's liner notes to the 1989 Pearl reissue GEMM CD 9334; side timings are the author's)

LX 119 (1) WLX 1027 (a) Prelude [3'07"] (2) WLX 1028 (b) Les Augurs printaniers [3'38"]

LX 120 (3) WLX 1029 (c) Jeu de rapt (d) Rondes printaniers [3'55"]

(4) WLX 1030 (e) Jeux des Cites Rivales

(f) Corthge du Sage [3'58"] (g) Adoration de la terre Le Sage (h) Danse de la terre

LX 121 (5) WLX 1031 (a) Prelude [3'32"] (6) WLX 1032 (b) Circles mysterieuses des adolescentes [3'05"]

LX 122 (7) WLX 1033 (c) Glorification de l'dlue [1'52"] (d) L'Evocation des anc&tres [56"]

(8) WLX 1034 (e) Action rituelle des anc&tres [3'35"] LX 123 (9) WLX 1035 (f) Danse sacrale-l'1ue [2'38"]a

(10) WLX 1036 (g) Danse sacrale-fin [2'45"]

aThere is a ca. 25-second overlap between sides 9 [R142-74] and 10 [R16--end]; the total timing for the "Danse sacrale" is thus actually 4'58".

their persistence in the face of compositorial attack over several decades of concert performances. It seems to me that we must accept these tempo fluctuations as a considered aesthetic choice on the part of early conductors of the Rite. They enforce a vitalist interpretation of the "Danse sacrale," one that is




firmly based-and I point this out with a certain amount of revisionist glee- in well-established Wagnerian principles.

The vitalist practice

What would a thoroughgoing vitalist performance of the "Danse sacrale" sound like? Not like a Mahler symphony conducted by Mengelberg, to be sure. The elegant techniques of rubato phrasing developed to articulate the complex melodic periods of Classic and Romantic music are simply irrelevant to the Rite. Asaf'yev's 1926 formulation is still unsurpassed:

No mechanical division of the texture of melodies into periods, clauses, phrases, or motives will reveal [the Rite's] structure .... the dynamic view of music sees the melodic texture as a fabric that is alive with melodic cells (popevki) which are constantly changing position and aspect.47

This is not Romantic vitalism but a very different kind of"aliveness." It depends on (and enforces) the consistent, precise interaction of many short melodic gestures with repeated but irregularly spaced metric accents. The overall effect is what Stravinsky and his followers later called "monometric": music that presents a rigid succession of beats without the formation of a complex hierarchy of beats.48 Expressive rubato, the art of the anacrusis and the agogic accent, displaces successive beats to articulate their hierarchy; Stravin- skian monometer eschews that hierarchy and thus gives no space-and no cues-for sensitive sculpting of phrases in time. (At the few spots in the Rite where a melodic period actually needs rounding off, Stravinsky has written in the phrasing himself-hence the "romantic" ritardando-crescendo just before R54 as the E6-minor khorovod comes to its stentorian end.)

On the other hand, The Rite of Spring, like Stravinsky's other essays in neonationalism, is fiundamentally structured by its melos: the basic dialectic of the Rite is between pounding rhythmic ostinatos and the folk-tune fragments (popevki) from which Stravinsky abstracts them. In the composer's Russian period these popevki fimunction like subatomic particles of the Wagnerian melos (Taruskin glosses popevka as "a musical morpheme"): they may not have peri- odic structure or even a single fixed harmonic reference point, but each will have a pronounced melodic character and thus might imply structural rubato to a musician whose interpretive reflexes were those of nineteenth-century vitalism.49 A conductor used to scanning an allegro movement for the shifts

47. Asaf'yev, A Book about Stravinsky, 51. 48. We can thank Richard Taruskin for recovering this useful term ("The Pastness of the

Present," 169); as he reports, Virgil Thomson saw this "modem quantitative scansion" as a general feature of all progressive twentieth-century music.

49. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1678. Taruskin's 1980 discussion of the folk sources in the Rite remains fundamental. See the updated version in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 891-933; or the original "Russian Folk Melodies in The Rite of Spring," this Journal 33 (1980): 501-43.




between periods of propulsive passagework (played as fast as practicable) and singing melody (slowed down to preserve cantabile) might well adjust the tempo of the Rite's monometric dance movements the same way.

Evidence that Pierre Monteux came to the Rite with his Romantic interpretive reflexes intact is not hard to find. Fifty years after the premiere, musing about his life and musical issues to his wife, he comes across as an amiable, open-minded, but still very nineteenth-century musician.50s Who were your early conducting idols? "Another magnetic man was Arthur Nikisch, the marvellous Hungarian conductor.... He was fascinatingly romantic, with burn- ing eyes.... [He] was my ideal as a conductor" (p. 43). "Willem Mengelberg ... [w]e were extremely impressed by this youthfuil Dutchman's conducting of Bach and Beethoven" (p. 44). "I never failed to record everything in the way of interpretation of these great conductors in my scores. At home I would sit for hours, smiling over Arthur Nikisch's interpretations or Felix Wein- gartner's remarks on the works of Beethoven" (p. 44). How did you feel about the nineteenth-century vitalist tradition? "As [Hans Richter and Felix Motti] conducted three times each, I had a wonderful opportunity to hear Wagner ... led by the finest Wagnerian conductors of that period. I absorbed this music into my heart and soul, and became in no time a confirmed Wagner addict, listening to all of the conductors' remarks, watching all they did, and subse- quently writing it into my scores.... I was determined that I would some day be a fine conductor of Wagner also" (p. 49). Were you really a modernist at heart? "[Mahler] was a fine conductor, but very disagreeable. I have never cared for his music, as I feel most of it is contrived" (p. 63). "As a conductor born in France, I have been asked to play certain of Debussy's works too many times over these past fifty years, and I am sometimes weary of them. The eter- nal repetition of measures so prevalent in Les Nuages and other works have disturbed me over the years. I am never weary of Beethoven and Brahms, and consequently I have wondered about the future of these compositions of Debussy" (p. 47). "I must admit I did not understand one note of Le Sacre du Printemps [when Stravinsky first played it for Diaghilev and myself]." "I decided then and there that the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms were the only music for me, not the music of this crazy Russian!" (p. 89).

Monteux could afford this jocular conservatism in 1962, because he had, of course, become one of the world's most respected interpreters of "the music of this crazy Russian." But one wonders how much affinity his 1913 Rite performances had with the vitalist performing tradition in which he had so clearly steeped himself. Did he make the work sound a little like his beloved Beethoven and Brahms? Or even like the Wagner operas to which, like so many of his generation, he had been addicted?

As a defamiliarizing thought-exercise, let us follow Monteux back to the foundational text of his youthful idols Nikisch, Mottl, and Weingartner, the

50. All references in the following discussion are to Doris Monteux, It'sAll in the Music.




bible of nineteenth-century vitalism: Wagner's On Conducting. To get a sense of what structural rubato might do for the Rite, we can apply (misapply, really) what we find there to Stravinsky's "Danse sacrale." Remember, Wagner told us that "the right comprehension of the Melos is the sole guide to the right tempo"; we thus look to the melodic character of the popevki as a guide to tempo modification. As Example 5 shows, this movement intermingles three very different kinds of thematic textures, which I have attempted, not without some irony, to correlate with performance directives gleaned from Wagner's treatise. The opening and closing sections (A) are dominated by "pure" rhythmic figuration and are noticeably devoid of cantilena, or sustained melody. So is the first "episode" of contrasting material (B). It is only the popevka marked (C) that displays a sustained, singing melody.

These irruptions of the sustained tone characteristic of the adagio into a purely rhythmic allegro must be respected by a sensitive conductor. The following tempo plan suggests itself: all A sections are to be taken as fast as hu- manly possible, with little or no slackening for the B section; the two C sections, however, should be articulated by a noticeable slowing down to bring out the melos. When the A material returns after C, it will be with a sudden and dramatic a tempo, and toward the end the fire of the "pure" allegro might well be allowed to take its natural course: a powerful accelerando to the final "Beethovenian" fermata, in which a last snatch of cantilena must surely be given enough space to breathe.

Nothing further from Stravinsky's geometric, ontological ideal of performance can be imagined. A strong misreading along these Wagnerian lines would be strikingly inauthentic (and of course unmodern). It would also be quite typical. To dramatize the issue, I will adduce a recording made in 1958, well after Stravinsky's public pronouncements on performance had achieved wide dissemination and only two years before his own "definitive" 1960 recording. (See Table 2 in the Appendix for a tempo chart of this and all other recorded examples discussed below.)51

The performance in question is that of Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. Here we have Myaskovsky's "exaggerated" tempos, with "the brass bellowing" and "the percussion crackling" all the way. Bernstein came by them honestly; he is standing in here for his old Tanglewood conducting teacher, Serge Koussevitsky, whom Myaskovsky was grumbling about back in 1914. Bernstein begins the "Danse sacrale" at = 138-42, significantly faster than the = 126 marked. This "purer" allegro will not do for the C section, so it is taken much slower both times it appears. The second time is particularly operatic: Bernstein slams on the brakes at R181, delaying the second beat of that bar so he can sink into a huge agogic accent and an instan- taneous drop of 25 metronome marks. Holding the orchestra at j = 112-16,

51. Interested readers are encouraged to direct their browsers to <http://www.humnet. ucla.edu/humnet/musicology/fac/rfink/JAMS99/>. Alternatively, a search engine can be used to locate the page titled "Fink JAMS Sound Examples."



Example 5 Wagner conducts the Rite (a very strong misreading)

A Section (RI42-49; 167-74; 180o-81)

142

sempfre f

8va., .. ..

"Here the purely rhythmical movement, so to speak, cele- brates its orgies; and it is consequently impossible to take these movements too quick" (p. 37).

B Section (RI49-67) Smarc.

5

ten. f> > >

, . J-----1 7,

T V -l "

"The question comes to this: does the sustained tone, the vocal element, the cantilena predominate, or the rhythmical movement? (Figuration). The conductor should lead accordingly" (p. 34).



Example 5 continued

C Section (RI74-8o; 181-186) Vlns.

fff M.S

-0t-

UP I

"I indulge in the fullest, the most sustained tone to express emotions in my Adagio; and I use this firm and full tone when I want it in a passionate Allegro as a rapturous or ter- rible spasm" (p. 34). "In a certain sense it may be said of the pure Adagio that it cannot be taken too slow" (p. 31).

Final (A') Section (R 86-end)

F 4w

"No doubt increase of speed at the close of an overture is frequently demanded by the composers; it is a matter of course in those cases where the true Allegro theme, as it were, remains in possession of the field" (p. 56).

Note: All quotes taken from Wagner, On Conducting (1887).




he indulges the melos, coaxing a truly terrifying orgy of fff cantabile out of the brass and strings. The A material returns at R186 as if it had been shot out of a catapult: Bernstein tries to jump instantly to = 138, but as in most performances of the "Danse sacrale" that use structural rubato, this spot is a melee of failed ensemble. Things finally sort themselves out a few bars later at = 127-30, leaving plenty of room for a race to the end. Bernstein blazes past R201 at well above .b = 140 and then luxuriates in the final bars ad libitum. Vitalism lives!

Stravinsky dismissed Bernstein's hyperactive Symphony of Psalms with a wry monosyllabic put-down that we might transfer to his Rite: "W O W!"52 But a quick survey of the conductors who were associated with the Rite in its earliest days reveals that they all subscribe to this "Wagnerian" interpretation of the "Danse sacrale." Bernstein might well have first heard the Rite in Leopold Stokowski's pioneering 1930 recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Stokowski had conducted the 1922 American premiere of the Rite; his RCA discs, cut less than a year after those of Monteux and Stravinsky, are the earliest documentation we have of how the work sounded when played by a first-rate ensemble under its own music director. Stokowski's 1930 recording, which is far more polished than either of its predecessors, has been unjustly neglected, thanks to a later indiscretion involving an animated mouse and some di- nosaurs.53 In it we can hear the conductor, who begins at = 128, very close to the printed score, slow down even more dramatically than did Bernstein at R181. Stokowski drops to J = 98-100 and gives his beloved Philadelphia strings their one full-bowed, espressivo moment in the sun. After speeding up very slightly, he attempts a dangerous leap to = 137 at R186, carrying only the lower strings with him. (The faltering is particularly noticeable since the strings and horn are not supported, as in the post-1929 Rite, by the low brass. More on the reorchestrations of this passage later.)

Eugene Goossens conducted the 1921 English concert premiere of the Rite. Almost forty years later, in a recording from 1960, he was indulging in a massive agogic slowdown at R181 (.b = 132 to J = 96), turning R181-86 into a broad singing strain, and bounding out of the C section with a sudden a tempo. Years after this recording, Stravinsky took time out from jaundiced gos- siping about famed conductors for uncharacteristic praise of Goossens: "I recall his performance of Le Sacre, in London in 1921, with pleasure."'54 If that

52. Stravinsky, "On Conductors and Conducting," 231; I have preserved the orthography. 53. There is-finally-a serious discussion in print of the Sacre section of Disney's Fantasia

(1940). See Nicholas Cook, "Disney's Dream: The Rite of Spring Sequence from 'Fantasia,'" in his Analysing Musical Multimedia (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 174-214. Cook's discussion of the Rite as "multimedia" (he dismisses the absolute autonomous Rite out of hand and then ingeniously correlates Nijinsky's and Disney's visual counterpoints) is exemplary work--especially coming from a music theorist in the midst of a demonstration of ana- lytical method.

54. Stravinsky, "On Conductors and Conducting," 231.




1921 Rite sounded anything like the one Goossens recorded in 1960, our ex- pectations of a "historically authentic" performance will have to be dramatically revised.

Even the conductors closest to Stravinsky slow down for the cantilena. Ernest Ansermet, who conducted the Parisian ballet revival of 1921 and was perhaps more intimately involved with the score than anyone other than its author, is most discreet at R181-86. In his 1957 recording, he drops back only slightly at R181, accelerates a bit through the section, and makes a relatively smooth transition at R186. But even Ansermet indulges in perceptible structural rubato at the first appearance of the C material. Having held quite close to the written ) = 126, he digs in and drops to = 102-6 as he crosses R174.

Finally, there is Pierre Monteux himself, conductor of the first recorded performance in May 1929 as well as the premiere. His tempo at the climax of the "Danse sacrale," while not quite as exaggeratedly slow as that in some of the later American recordings, is easily the most flexible. After dropping back to J = 116, he accelerates freely between R181 and R186, reaching J = 138; he thus must make a breakneck jump to an almost impossible ? = 152 to preserve the tempo contrast. Monteux thereby privileges a particularly striking fluctuation in "psychological time" above all else-even getting the notes right, as the hair-raising final bars of his 1929 recording attest.

Documentary and choreographic evidence

There are a few fleeting documentary traces of this vitalist practice, allowing us to posit with certainty that it was a feature of at least some interpretations of the Rite as early as 1913. Dover Publications has disseminated one of these far and wide. Example 6 reproduces R174 of the "Danse sacrale" as it appears in Dover's reprint of the original four-hand piano score published by Kous- sevitsky's Russische Musik-Verlag in 1913. Here, for all the world to see, is not only a slower metronome mark but the clear suggestion of a perceptible change in expressive character: "Sostenuto e maestoso. J = 116." The "authenticity" of this marking is dubious. It does not reappear at R181, nor are the implied returns to J = 126 marked. Now we can hypothesize about Anser- met's decision to slow down at R174 and not later: more than any other conductor, he was likely to be punctilious about the composer's wishes, and he had this single written source that authorized slowing down at R174 and not later. But in the absence of any manuscript sources, it is impossible to know where this tempo indication really came from. (What Stravinsky thought about it after the fact will become clear below.)

Whether or not the Sostenuto e maestoso and the slower metronome mark originated with Stravinsky, we have some fragmentary confirmation that the score was danced that way. Millicent Hodson has uncovered an unpublished memoir by Valentine Gross-Hugo, whose real-time sketches of the first four



Example 6 1913 four-hand piano score (RMV 196), R174

8va_------- - Sostenuto e maestoso. = 116

ffsfff -- i

i_

Sostenuto e maestoso. = 116

- -4 w ?w

f pesante 3

8va ---------------8va------------




performances provide the most immediate documentation of the original choreography. Gross-Hugo's verbal description of R174, set down at some later time, reads: "The sostenuto and maestoso led this balanced movement- where the limbs moved more freely--into ever larger movements, all leading toward the final entreaty, all rendered desperate and ecstatic at the same time."5ss Gross-Hugo's account, unlike those of both Marie Rambert and Stravinsky, was not written on a copy of the four-hand score itself, and she was an artist with no special musical training. It seems likely that "the sostenuto and maestoso" was company shorthand for a landmark moment in the "Danse sacrale" which stuck in her memory.

The Gross-Hugo memoir leads us to a consideration of the actual choreography she evokes so poetically. Would the kind of tempo shifting we see in early recordings be appropriate, or even practicable, during the climactic moments of the danced "Danse sacrale"?56 Certain basic facts seem auspicious. As everyone realized even at the premiere, the final solo was the most traditional, familiar, and "expressive" part of the Rite. (The audience, which had been jeering steadily throughout the performance, watched Maria Piltz in silence.) As an extended solo, with a distinctly subordinate role for the men representing the Ancestors, it certainly offered the technical possibility for tempo rubato, if the conductor and the premiere danseuse agreed. And Nijinsky's choreography, as it plays out the scenario of increasing frenzy and exhaustion, calls for dramatic shifts in movement and gesture at all the right places in the score.

It is thus possible, though of course highly speculative, to correlate tempo fluctuations in Monteux's 1929 recording with key choreographic events during the "ultimate paroxysm" (Gross-Hugo) of the "Danse sacrale." We pick up the story at R167: With the return of the dance's opening material (the A section above), the Chosen One returns to her "signature phrase," the quick series of hops followed by a droop that was Nijinsky's precise translation of the opening motivic cells into gesture. Monteux's 1929 tempo here is the same quick J = 148 as at the opening. At R174, the jumps change character, get bigger ("ever larger movements"), and are interspersed with even more violent gestures. The Chosen One drops to the ground and pounds it with her fists; she even takes her "frozen" right leg and slams it down as if to break or

55. Hodson, Nijinsky's Crime, 183. Hodson's bibliographic citation for the Gross-Hugo memoir is on page 201, the "caption reference" for Tableau I, R30, mm. 1-3.

56. Reconstructing the "Danse sacrale" turns out to be uniquely tricky. Marie Rambert, the best witness we have, was not around when Nijinsky set the final solo on his sister (who was originally to dance it before she inopportunely became pregnant). Rambert, a student of Jacques Dalcroze, was called in later to help train the corps de ballet. So, in addition to Gross-Hugo's drawings and recollections, Hodson's reconstruction relies heavily on Nijinskaya's own description of the solo to the Russian dance historian Vera Krassovskaya in 1967, over fifty years after the fact. Krassovskaya then checked Nijinskaya's account with Maria Piltz, the first Chosen One, who was still alive. The following discussion is drawn from Hodson's bar-by-bar account; see Hodson, Nijinsky's Crime, xxiii, 180-93.




waken it. The larger, more violent motions complement the ff maestoso in the orchestra; they may well have demanded in 1913 the same sudden slowing of tempo that Monteux allowed in 1929 (h = 148 drops to J = 124-26). At R180 the signature phrase returns with the A material, as does Monteux's original brisk tempo.

At R181 the jumps change character again. The Chosen One leaps with both arms and legs windmilling in front of her, giving the effect of "a prehis- toric bird whose wings try to raise the body, clumsily, not yet ready" (Krassovskaya). She begins to weaken: in six out of the next eleven bars she does the arm movements but is too tired to leap. (Nijinskaya: "The Chosen One in a frenzy flounders in the repetition of these jumps.") How logical to begin this section under tempo (J = 116 in Monteux's 1929 recording), both to accommodate the extraordinarily awkward jumps and as a response to the soloist's momentary weakening. In 1913 the Chosen One next went into a delirious spin, "the feet almost on the points striking the ground like daggers" (Gross-Hugo). Her whirling intensified as R186 approached: "She releases her neck and arms so that the braids fly erratically with her flailing limbs" (Hodson). Monteux's 1929 recording vividly mimes this uncontrollable cen- trifugal acceleration. As the melodic line ratchets up from D to G, his orchestra races ahead, reaching J = 133 at R184 and nearly J = 138 by R186. (It could hardly have mattered whether this frenzied spinning gesture was synchronized to the musical beat.)

But the most dramatic tempo shift is yet to come. What was happening on- stage in 1913 at R186, the moment when the 1929 recording leaps suddenly and recklessly to = 152? The jaw-dropping answer: absolutely nothing. The Chosen One had frozen into an awkward clutch and then drooped down in preparation for the final return of her signature phrase, but she does not appear to have started jumping again until several bars after R186. All the other dancers on the stage were watching her, motionless. Monteux had total freedom to set any tempo he wanted, because no one was dancing. His later recording suggests that he seized the moment to set a punishingly fast tempo for the last set of signature jumps, literally driving the Chosen One to her death.

I think one can make a case that the tempo shifts in Monteux's 1929 recording of the "Danse sacrale" are the traces of what happened when he accompanied Maria Piltz in May 1913 (though no doubt all the tempos were slower).57 At the very least we can say that nothing we know about the origi-

57. To be fair, Monteux's account of the premiere contradicts this reading. "You may think this strange, chirie, but I have never seen the ballet. The night of the premiere, I kept my eyes on the score, playing the exact tempo Igor had given me and which, I must say, I have never forgot- ten" (Doris Monteux, It's All in the Music, 90). We can dismiss the idea that Monteux had never seen the ballet. However focused he was on opening night, he must have watched the dancers in rehearsal. And earlier in this same memoir, Monteux congratulates himself as a flexible dance ac- companist whose vitalist management of tempo deserved credit for one of Nijinsky's most




nal choreography is incompatible with the later vitalist practice. But any historian of performance practice would be happier with some more immediate, notated trace of this practice. Did Monteux write any of this down on his Partitur in 1913? Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, Stravinsky's autograph Partitur contains no metronome or tempo markings at all for the "Danse sacrale"-the Sostenuto e maestoso marking at R174 does not appear there, for example-and thus there was no opportunity or motivation for conductors to cross any out and write in their own.

Yet there is a single four-letter word marked on the score that speaks vol- umes (see Fig. 1). On page 82 of the 1913 Partitur, exactly on the double bar line of R186, a foreign hand has written, diagonally across the low brass staves, underlined and in bold blue crayon, the one-word instruction "Vivo." This la- conic injunction to "look alive" ratifies by inference the whole vitalist tempo scheme implied by the original choreography and audible on early recordings. We can assume that the entire passage R181-86-and by analogy the previous C section from R174 to R180-was to be taken at a perceptibly slower tempo, and that at this point the conductor is reminding himself of the need to make a sudden leap ahead to recapture the faster tempo of the surrounding A sections.

Forging a geometric Rite

That one word is the extent of the direct textual support for interpretive tempo modification in the "Danse sacrale," since Stravinsky spent quite a bit of time over the next thirty years methodically stamping out as many traces of vitalism in Rite performances as possible. Before we consider his response to this illicit elasticity of tempo, let us look briefly at the one spot in the Danse where Stravinsky explicitly provided for the momentary suspension of ontological time-where he actually wrote the words "ad libitum" into his score.

The bottom row of Table Ic traces the progressive erosion of the temporal freedom allowed to performers of the Rite in its final bars. Stravinsky's original conception, transcribed and reduced from his sketchbook as Example 7, was of a dramatic pause long enough to execute a tricky "fade-out-fade-back-in"

famous dance triumphs: "I have always smiled over the stories of Vaslav Nijinsky's famous elevation, and his leap through the window at the very end of Le Spectre de la Rose. The truth is... he was nobly assisted by Monteux in the pit, who played the chord before the last with a slight point d'orgue, thereby creating the illusion of a prolonged elevation of the dancer. When I played the final chord, you may be sure, the spectre was already reclining on the mattress placed there to receive him. Ha, ha!" (p. 77). What is to prevent us from conjecturing similar subtle but critical adjustments of tempo for Piltz in the Rite? As for Stravinsky's exact tempos, really, what was Monteux to say in 1962? The Partitur doesn't lie--someone did change Stravinsky's tempos. Perhaps we are to infer that the new metronome marks, though not in his hand, came from Stravinsky himself. (I.e., why would Stravinsky need to "give" Monteux the tempos if they were already written in the score?) As I admitted above, the question remains open.




..... . .. ....... . .....................

...... .....

.......... ... . ..... . ..... ..... .. ....... ......

.

. ...... .. ......... .....iiiiiiii

S------- 7 7 , . ... ....... ........ .. .. ..

iiAk1• j wiii

Figure 1 Page 82 (R185-87) of the 1913 Partitur of The Rite of Spring, with performance markings. Reproduced by the kind permission of the Paul Sacher Foundation.




Example 7 A preliminary sketch for the final bars of the Rite

lunga colla parte

Vln I; Cls n

F Horns cui. - -'- + lunga ad lib

Tpts + Tbns a

Cymbalglissando colla

Cymbal -•

bacch. di triangolo

lunga ad lib

lunga ad lib 11f1

Via 6

con sord. sul ponticello

Note: Diplomatically transcribed and reduced from Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring: Sketches, 1911-1913, ed. Robert Craft (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 89

maneuver: thus the fermata, and the instructions to hold the string tremolo lunga ad lib and to play the woodwind scales colla parte. (What could be more vitalist?) By the time of the 1913 four-hand score and the Partitur, the dynamic fade-swell is gone, but the fermata, lunga ad lib, and colla parte instructions remain. In addition, there is an accelerando marked in the previous bar. By 1922, it too has disappeared, and in all scores after 1929, the fermata and lunga ad lib are gone as well, leaving the winds instructed to play colla parte for no apparent reason. Thus all tempo fluctuation has been eliminated, as indeed Stravinsky specifically requested in a 1938 letter to the Italian conductor Alfredo Molinari (who was conducting the Rite in a festival of contemporary music at Venice and was troubled by the discrepancies between the orchestral and piano scores): "There is no need of an accelerando nor of the 'lunga ad libitum'-everything should be played strictly according to the tempo indicated at R186 and at the beginning of the 'Danse sacrale,' a pulsation of 126




to the eighth-note."58 (That would close the matter, except that, confusingly enough, in the 1943 revision the fermata has been reinstated and the colla

parte removed.) Even before all printed license to change tempo had been eliminated,

Stravinsky had begun battling the vernacular performance practice of tempo shifting that was forming around the Rite. The composer was unequivocal in print about the unwritten practice of slowing down for the cantilenas at R174 and R186. His copy of the four-hand score at the Sacher collection carefully corrects the metronome mark at R174 in both the primo and secondo parts, twice changing J = 116 back to j = 126. This alteration may well have been added as early as 1913, since this is the same score on which Stravinsky took copious notes on Nijinsky's choreography. And, later, in self defense, Stravin- sky began to hedge the "Danse sacrale" with metastasizing metronome marks and tempo equivalencies. He had evidently decided that it was the difference in beat unit that made the sections between R174-80 and R181-86 "look slower," so he set out to create a score that would never again lead conductors into temptation. In his 1922 pocket score (the first printed score he pos- sessed), he hand-wrote J = = 126 or = J= 126 in red ink at every change of beat unit. Not all of these markings would appear in print in the 1922 fuill score, but by the 1967 final revision every single sectional transition is defended by both a metronome mark and an explicit tempo equivalence.

Stravinsky also tinkered constantly with the orchestration of R186 over the years (Ex. 8a-c). As soon as he took up the baton to conduct the Rite he became aware of the problem: the herd mentality of orchestral musicians reading an unfamiliar score and the performance practice already forming under Monteux et cie. guaranteed that at this crucial moment the "Danse sacrale" would change tempo, regardless of the conductor's intentions. He would thus risk an unrecoverable collapse of ensemble every time he led an orchestra through it.

Example 8a is a reduction of R186 as it appeared in the 1913 Partitur and 1922 first edition. The scoring is light-in view of the circumstances, danger- ously light: double basses alone carry the bass part, and a weak combination of bassoons and two low horns take the offbeats. The whole complex is marked piano-pianissimo. It's a nice idea to have this dynamic contrast after the sjfffz arrival on the downbeat, and one can instantly appreciate the correlation between this sudden intense pp and the frozen terror of Nijinsky's motionless Chosen One. Unfortunately, it didn't work in performance. The rest of the orchestra couldn't hear the pp offbeats, missed the new tempo, and inevitably

58. Letter to Alfredo Molinari of I August 1938; quoted in Craft, ed., Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence 1:406. Interestingly enough, we have evidence of Molinari's authentistic consci- entiousness: the performance impressed at least one sympathetic observer as being "played with a lightness, perfection, and loyalty to the score that the work has probably never experienced before" (Paul Hindemith, letter to Willy Streker of 20 September 1938, in Selected Letters of Paul Hindemith, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Skelton [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], 120).



Example 8 Stravinsky's reorchestrations of the "Danse sacrale," R186

(a) 1922 first edition (RMV 197)

+ piccolos piccolo trumpet

+ piccolos

piccolo dclarinet +8va

1)-fff 33 sf-ff [ fff con tutta forza]

vins., fls, clars., bsns

' i ~+tbn I -

tpts., oboes, hns. 2 & 4 s-' 6 - If 92- T I =-IF3 rpm T.-n I I JILIN

[fff con tutta forzal] bsns., cbsn., hns. 6 & 8 violas

" hns.,1-3-5-7 P

bass drum tm

mvlns, vias.

cellos sM P

timpan3 3 3

basses, cellos, -

-- -basses -t

tuba, cbsn. divisi

[fff con tutta forzaJ Note: Reductions are my own. In the 1922 and 1929 editions, the extraordinary tutti leading up to R186 is so complex that the actual disposition of parts can only be approximated. (In 1943 Stravinsky lightened and rationalized the scoring, and the reduction succeeds rather better.) After 186, however, I have worked to preserve all relevant orchestrational detail. All articulation markings and performance directions are Stravinsky's.



Example 8 continued (b) 1929 "revised first edition"

+ piccolos piccolo trumpet

+ piccolos 3 piccolo clarinet

+8va3_ .E

[fff con tuttaforzaJ sff

vlns., fls, clars., bsns

;+' " ' • :• q.

J L"i I " ' " +tbn i

tpts., oboes, hns. 2 & 4

basescelosi

base

ll, T •vj. flu

7

s sempre marc. e secco

T: ,/I/I• J- i5- - [fff con

tuttaforza] sn.

smr e ma

vils ,,,,-, -7tb ns.,

b

asstpt .

sempre

tuba

sempre ben marc.

bass drum, 151A

14 ~tam-tam 11

timpani 333

cellos

+vins., vias. fL

b ass s, ellos, 7 basses

sfc Note: Stravinsky adds trombones and tuba, changes prevailing dynamic tof, and adds "sempre marcato," " fsempre, " etc.



Example 8 continued (c) 1943 revision of"Danse sacrale" (Associated Music Publishers, unnumbered) (R45 = R186)

C trumpet, alto flutes, 45 186)

Piccolos

3 3 vins., dclars., bass tpt., tbn I

bass drum 2 12 WWI I 8

+ voboestptss.,

vias

timpani 3 3~ 3 cellos pizz. arco

I-flu w -f

basses, cellos, trbns., tubas, all bsns celempeos

[fff con tuttaforzaJ sf marcsf Note: At 186 Stravinsky rewrites note values eliminating change of beat unit, removes

lows-3-5-7 brass, maintains forte and sf marcato indications, and adds cello pizzicatos

and repeated downbows in other strings.

cbsn " .

"

i sf ma rc b ass d rum 1 2 0I bi- I 2

+ vAns., vlas. timpani 3 3 3 cellos pizz. arco- Lk

-e FA0u dOI I I I I IIi• i• I

/s f

•>

sempre

• basses, cellos, trbns., tubas, all bsns cellos •

4 v'"" " basses -

[fff con tutta forzaI # bse

f

Note: At 186 Stravinsky rewrites note values eliminating change of beat unit, removes low brass, maintains forte adsf marcato indications, and adds cello pizziao and repeated downbows in other strings.




degenerated into the weltering chaos audible on every early recording. (This 1913-22 scoring-and the chaos--can be heard in the Monteux and Stokow- ski pre-1930 recordings discussed above.)

Stravinsky's first solution was of the spit-and-bailing-wire variety. The 1929 revised first edition (Ex. 8b) disseminated the orchestration that evolved through the 1920s, made it into a new set of engraved parts in 1926, and is familiar from most contemporary scores and performances: the dynamic level is raised to forte, and everyone is asked to play marcato, secco, and staccato. Moreover, the composer, taking out a kind of sonic insurance policy, has the heavy brass double everything sempre `forzato e ben marcato. It is quite possible that Stravinsky the composer simply no longer wanted the effect of a sudden sotto voce here, but if his goal as a conductor was to make it easier to keep the passage together, he displayed striking orchestral naivete. Any conductor will tell you that the extra weight of trombones and tubas makes the passage harder to control, especially if the orchestra has slowed down and one desires to return to a strict, geometric J = 126. For proof, one need only listen to the hash that the low brass make of this moment in Stravinsky's own premiere recording in 1929. In 1940, when Stravinsky recorded the Rite with a trucu- lent and uncooperative New York Philharmonic, the problem was, if anything, even worse.

This catastrophic recording experience was undoubtedly the major factor in Stravinsky's decision to undertake another fiull-scale revision of the "Danse sacrale," finished in 1943. In it he decided to solve once and for all the performance problems caused by his original decision to notate the C section "twice as slow" as the other parts of the Danse. He simply doubled the value of all the notes in the A and B sections (compare Exx. 8b and 8c). The composer claimed this made the music easier to read, but it also nicely solves the problem of the music at R174 "looking slower." The effect is to erase all trace of formal division in the "Danse sacrale," disguising (orthographically at least) the moments where the "character of the melos" changes. (The articulating double bars at R174, R180, R181, and R186 that gradually crept into the 1929, 1948, and 1967 editions are all eliminated as unnecessary in the 1943 score.) The global change of beat unit allowed Stravinsky to dispense with the low brass safety net that had been so embarrassingly useless. Though still marked loud and accented, the 1943 orchestration of R186-pizzicato low strings, bassoons, and bass clarinet-is even lighter and crisper than the original 1913 version.

Now the composer needs only to place a single tempo indication and a single metronome mark at the beginning of his rhythmically homogenized score to ensure total geometric regularity. The absolutely characteristic injunction is "Rigoroso ( -= 126)."59 And so it is in his 1960 performance. One has to have

59. This is, of course, incorrect: Stravinsky forgot to change the beat unit of the metronome mark, which should logically be J = 126. Is it too pessimistic to anticipate an informed performance late next century that attempts to respect this absurd, yet undeniably "authentic," marking?




suffered with Stravinsky through his 1929 and 1940 recordings to appreciate the triumphant moments in which, even with the underrehearsed and scrappy "Columbia Symphony Orchestra," nothing happens at R174, R181, and R186. Vitalism is vanquished and strict ontological time is preserved; the "principle of contrast" is replaced by the "principle of similarity."60

Now, finally, Stravinsky sounds like Stravinsky.

Traces of life

And, thanks to that "definitive" 1960 recording, so does everyone else. Listen to any performance of the "Danse sacrale" recorded within the last ten years and you will hear the same unyielding monometer throughout.61 And yet ... the Fassung letzter Aufnahme remains elusive. The composer, reported Robert Craft in 1969, had instructed him that "the accelerando, in the four- hand score, four measures before the end, should be followed, and a outrance, in the orchestra score."62 In the 1938 letter to Molinari that categorically out- laws that same accelerando, Stravinsky-amazingly--told Molinari that the

= 116 at R174 of the four-hand piano score was correct.63 But that might have been a slip. What is harder to explain away is the evi-

dence of the earliest "performance" we have of the Rite. Stravinsky declared in his Autobiography that he transcribed works like the Rite for player piano "to prevent the distortion of my compositions by future interpreters," and in particular to fix "the relationships of the movements (tempi) and the nuances.""64 How strange it is, then, to hear the perfect mechanical executant betray its pa- tron by transmitting a suspiciously vitalist interpretation of the Rite! It is yet another performance that starts much faster than J = 126, slows down dramatically at R181, and leaps ahead at R186 for an exhilarating rush to the final cadence. But this time there is no preening maestro to blame-just a humble pianola playing back the piano roll of the Rite punched under Stravinsky's direct supervision in 1921. Drawing inferences about performance tempos from a piano roll is, of course, fraught with complications; in particular, any attempt

60. Stravinsky, Poetics ofMusic, 33. 61. This is the conclusion reached in the only exhaustive analysis of the recorded Rite, Jerome

Waters, "The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky: A Comparative Performance Critique Based on Sound Recordings from 1929-1993" (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1996). Waters's abstract reports that although timings for the Rite were actually faster overall in the early part of the century (one wonders if this is just Monteux's 1929 recording skewing the data), "in some sections there has been a narrowing of interpretative variety with regard to overall tempo." My personal collection of post-1980 "Danses sacrales" confirms that whatever the absolute tempo taken, by now-at least in this particular section of the Rite-the range of interpretive variety is effec- tively zero.

62. See Robert Craft, "The Performance of the Rite of Spring," in The Rite of Spring: Sketches, 1911-1913, by Igor Stravinsky (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 48.

63. See Craft, ed., Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence 1:406. 64. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 101. By page 151 he is touting his recordings as better than

the piano rolls because they transmit "all his intentions."




to deduce absolute tempos from this 1921 Pleyela roll of the Rite is bound to disappoint us. We don't know for certain either the precise roll speed Stravinsky intended or whether he expected the pianolist to compensate for the built-in acceleration inherent to the pianola mechanism.65

But there is a strong argument to be made from the rolls about relative tempos in the "Danse sacrale" (see Tables 3a-c). Physical examination of roll nine of the Rite (and I am indebted here to the world-renowned pianolist Rex Lawson) shows that the sections beginning at R174 and R186 are actually punched slower on the roll-that is, the number of punches (and thus the actual length of the paper roll) corresponding to a given beat unit increases (Table 3a). This guarantees that whatever the absolute speed of the music at those two points-and, as the rest of the example shows, there are at least four quite different plausible "performances" to be pulled out of this roll-there will be very perceptible slowdowns for the two cantilena sections, and a thrilling jump of at least thirty metronome clicks at R186. The irony is in-

65. The following discussion is deeply indebted to the acknowledged world expert on the pianola and the reproducing piano, Rex Lawson. I have had occasion both to talk extensively with Mr. Lawson and to hear him perform Stravinsky pianola rolls in person. Some key points: (1) Although it is quite easy for the pianolist to introduce tempo shifts when realizing a pianola roll, Lawson says he did not intentionally do so in any of his published recordings. (2) Piano rolls came in different "speeds," usually measured in feet per minute; most pianolas had several roll-speed settings, and unfortunately, the Pleyela rolls Stravinsky made of the Rite are not clearly marked. (3) In any mechanism where a roll is pulled onto a (powered) take-up reel, there will be an inevitable acceleration as more and more of the roll moves onto that reel. In a reproducing or "player" piano, this is of little consequence, since the same acceleration took place when the roll was recorded by the pianist. But a pianola roll, unlike the reproducing piano, was punched by hand and was designed to be controlled during playback by a musically sensitive performer. This performer has constant control over tempo, and many rolls of Classical and Romantic music used a curving line to direct the performer to change tempos (normally a knee lever was used to keep an arrow on the mechanism lined up with the moving line). The performer thus was also respon- sible for equalizing the built-in acceleration of the roll mechanism. As Table 3c shows, Lawson appears not to have done this, but one can easily imagine Stravinsky "riding" the roll to keep its tempo geometrically exact. (Ironically, the pianola-Stravinsky's paradigmatic geometric "performer"-could not keep a steady beat without a human hand to guide it.) (4) There is a growing musicological literature on the pianola; the key reference is The Pianola Journal, founded and edited by Rex Lawson since 1987. Of particular interest is Rex Lawson, "Stravinsky and the Pianola," published in two parts in vol. 1 (1987): 15-26, and vol. 2 (1989): 3-16. An earlier version appears in Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, and Modernist, ed. Jann Pasler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). See also Louis Cyr, "Two Pleyela Recordings of The Rite of Spring: A Review," The Pianola Journal 8 (1995): 41-50. Cyr's extended discussion of tempo and tempo fluctuations in the "Danse sacrale," while not in total ac- cord with the one set forth above, does agree with it on the essential point: "If one looks at the 'Danse sacrale,' it will be obvious how difficult, if not well-nigh impossible it is to maintain in practice the one prescribed tempo throughout the entire scene" (p. 48). Particularly vertiginous from the aesthetic point of view is a short meditation by a listener troubled about the "authenticity" of early piano rolls which feature expressive rubato; see Drue Fergeson, "Ambiance, Musical Style, and Authenticity: Some Thoughts with Respect to Reproducing Piano Rolls," The Pianola Journal 5 (1993): 25-31.




tense: the pianola, Stravinsky's mechanical paragon of geometrically perfect reproduction, does preserve a simulacrum of the composer's 1921 intentions with flawless precision. But it enshrines vitalism, not geometry.66

Conclusion

At one point in The Philosophy of Modern Music, Theodor Adorno taunts Stravinsky with one of his trademark dialectical reversals: regardless of its stance of modernist objectivity, Le Sacre du printemps is actually complicit with the Romanticism it claims to supersede.

The aboriginal Russians bear an uncanny resemblance to Wagner's ancient Germanic Examples-the stage settings for Sacre recall the rocks of the Valkyries. The sound in particular of the work is Romantic in origin; the tutti sound of the orchestra has at times a touch of Strauss-like excessive luxury. Regardless of all theoretical anti-subjectivism, the effect of the whole work is largely a matter of mood, of anxious excitement.67

Adorno holds out no prospect that this covert Romanticism will be ex- pressed by tempo fluctuations in performance. He is too busy taking Stravin- sky's geometric aesthetic at face value ("any subjectively expressive flexibility of the beat [is] absent"), so that he can equate it with fascistic violence: "In the 'sacrificial dance,' ... the most complicated rhythmic patterns restrain the conductor to puppet-like motions. Such rhythmic patterns alternate in the smallest possible units of beat for the sole purpose of impressing upon the bal- lerina and the listeners the immutable rigidity of convulsive blows and shocks." (This all-too-influential argument has played havoc with Frankfurt School-influenced cultural studies of minimalism, jazz, and rock.) By a re- markable coincidence, in a later passage setting up Stravinsky and Mahler as antipodes, he discusses R184-86 of the "Danse sacrale," the climactic passage

66. That is why the only "historically informed" recording of the Rite to date remains an in- teresting but ultimately failed curiosity. Conductor Benjamin Zander thought to achieve "authenticity" by reproducing the exact tempos from the Pleyela piano rolls in performance with the Boston Philharmonic (Innovative Music Masters MCD 25, 1989). What he did was provide a foretaste of the flawed reasoning that is sure to plague authenticist Rites ofSpring. He ignored the issues of roll speed and acceleration discussed above and simply chose the fastest tempo for the "Danse sacrale" he could find. The hypothesis (of course) is that this faster tempo was "what Stravinsky wanted." Never mind that, as I point out above, there is not a shred of documentary evidence that Stravinsky himself ever wanted anything other than ) = 126. Zander has fulfilled the early music movement imperative to Make It New by Making It Faster Even more symptomati- cally, he ignores the actual tempo fluctuations on the roll. Once he has his new fast tempo, he holds to it grimly and geometrically to the end. If we are going to hallow these piano rolls as evidence of the composer's intentions, ought we not listen to them all the way through?

67. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy ofModern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Continuum: 1985), 160-61.




that turned out to be the crux of our argument here. Adomrno holds this "cantilena" (his term) to be a rare "moment of respectability": Stravinsky, normally so incapable of teleological form, for once provides the culminating release of tension that Mahler's symphonies struggle toward so consistently. Except, of course, it is not really, after all, so very satisfying:

There is a tendency to become enthusiastic about a wicked man if he once does something respectable; in like manner, such music is praised for its moments of respectability. In rare exceptional cases of cleverness, [Stravinsky's] music per- mits conclusion-like sections [abgesangihnliche Strophen] which, by contrast- precisely by virtue of their rarity-border on ethereal bliss. An example is the intensive final "cantilena" from the "Danse de l'Elue" (from number 184 to 186), before the last entrance of the rondo theme. But even here, where the vio- lins are permitted to "sing themselves out" for a moment, the same, unchanged rigid ostinato remains in the accompaniment. [Stravinsky's] Abgesang is a fake.68

Adorno, vitalist through and through, scathing critic of the historical performance movement's sewing-machine Bach, cannot conceive of a satisfying release of tension without some kind of agogic accent and thus at least some fluidity in the geometric pulse around R186. Nor can he conceive of the Rite allowing it. Looking at Stravinsky's 1929 score, he sees all too well the unvary- ing monometric pulse of the accompanimental ostinatos, and the minatory tempo equivalencies. The composer's geometric intentions are damningly clear. But Adorno should have listened to some recordings of this spot: he would have heard more than a few Mahlerian Durchbriiche. Searching in Stravinsky's ballet for the temporal fluidity of a post-Wagnerian tone poem, he was in the company of a phalanx of early conductors of the Rite. They all did whatever it took to make the climax of the "Danse sacrale" a real teleological climax, much closer to Mahler than anything Stravinsky ever authorized.

And what of the early music movement, marching resolutely into the ever more recent past? The historical information surrounding the Rite holds out little prospect of the comforting authenticity that comes from being conspicu- ously "historically informed." The documentary evidence shows not only that Stravinsky never sanctioned romantic tempo modification in this music, but that everybody, including even Stravinsky early on, probably did it anyway. And if we want our performances of the Rite to be "historical," we may well have to work to recapture and reproduce the vitalist misreadings of Koussevitsky, Monteux, and their compatriots. We will have to give up once and for all on the idea that we can be authentic-or authenticist.

We will have to play the Rite wrong.

68. Ibid., 154, 155, 195-96 n. 42. The emphasis in Adorno's note 42 is mine, as is the translation of the final sentence ("Der Abgesang is uneigentlich").



Appendix Concordances of Tempos and Tempo Markings

Table la Concordance of Tempo Indications in The Rite ofSpring, First Tableau

Location Particell [B] Partitur [C] IS 1913 piano score [D] IS 1922 full score [F] Printed post 1929 [F2-I]

R13 = 4, no tempo mark Tempogiusto. = 56 Tempogiusto. J = 56; = 56; IS crosses out, Tempogiusto. = 50; IS corrected by IS to 4 = 56 writes 4 = 50 in BH 16333 [H]: beat

alla breve (see Fig. 1) R37 nothing Presto.

. = 132; crossed out Presto.

. = 132 Presto.

. = 132 Presto. J = 132

R48 J = 144 [!] Tranquillo. ~ = 108; crossed out Tranquillo. = 108 Tranquillo. = 108; Tranquillo.~ = 108 and replaced with Andantino. IS confirms

J= 88 R49 J = 108 Sostenuto epesante. = 80; Sostenuto epesante. = 80 Sostenuto epesante. = 80; Sostenuto e pesante. = 80

"80" crossed out and replaced IS confirms with "69-72"

R54 no poco rit.; then no poco rit.; Vivo. = 160; "160" Vivo. = 160 Vivo. = 160; IS confirms Vivo. = 160

Tempo primo (J = 144) crossed out and replaced with "138"

R55 + 2 conductor marks caesura R56 nothing [stays Tranquillo. J = 108; crossed out Tranquillo. J = 108 Tranquillo. J = 108; Tranquillo. J = 108

at = 144] and replaced with Andantino. IS confirms J= 88

R57 nothing[!] Molto Allegro. = 168; "168" Molto Allegro. = 168 Molto Allegro. ~ = 166; Molto Allegro. ~ = 168 crossed out and replaced with IS confirms [BH 19441 (I)] "146"; lower on page in same hand: "Allegro rigoroso"

R59 - 4 nothing ritenutopesante, then a tempo nothing nothing [BH 19441] a tempo; then ritenuto pesante

R71 G.P., then Lento Lento. = 52; "52" crossed out ]= ) (Doppio movimento) Lento. = 42

(no mm) and "42" written in R72 Vivace.

. = 138 Prestissimo. J = 168; conductor Prestissimo.

. = 186; IS Prestissimo.

. = 168; Prestissimo.

. = 168

begins to cross out "Prestissimo"; corrects to "168" IS confirms writes "rigoreux" below on score

Note: In column headings, letters in brackets refer to primary sources listed at the beginning of Works Cited; Particell = autograph short score; Partitur = autograph full score; IS = Stravinsky's annotated copy, used for rehearsal/performance; "IS confirms" indicates that the composer underlined the performance direction in red crayon.



Table lb Concordance of Tempo Indications in The Rite ofSpring, Second Tableau (up to "Danse sacrale")

Location Particell [B] Partitur [C] IS 1913 piano score [D] IS 1922 full score [F] Printed post 1929 [F2-I]

R79 or R86 Lento. J = 56a Largo. J = 48 Largo. J = 48 Largo. J = 48 R89 Poco piu mosso. J =69 Piu mosso. J = 60; "poco" Piu mosso. J =60 Piu mosso. J = 60; Piu mosso. J =60

is inserted in crayon IS confirms R90 Tempo primo L'istesso tempo. J =48 Tempo .L

= 48 (implies J = 56)

R91 Poco piu mosso. J =69 Andante con moto. = 80; Andante con moto. J =60 Andante con moto. J =60 conductor has boxed the "Andante" and written in "trds tranquille"

R93 Allegretto. = 80 Piu mosso. J = 80; "Allegretto Piu mosso. = 80 Piu mosso. = 80; Piu mosso. = 80 tranquille" written in above IS confirms metronome mark

R97 L'istesso tempo. J =69 Tempo I. J =60 R102-3 no accelerando poco a poco crescendo e accelerando; poco a poco crescendo and poco a poco crescendo

marked conductor has boxed "accelerando"; poco a poco accelerando; ed accelerando fermata added over last beat of 103 no fermatas

11/4 bar no tempo mark j= 120; conductor has divided J= 120; IS confirms = 120; IS divides the 11 the 11 beatsas3 + 4 + 4 beats as 4 + 4 + 3 in BH

16333 [H] R104 Vivo-Stringendo; Vivo.J)J = 144; Vivo. JJ = 144

fermata on bar line no fermata R117 - 1 ; no a tempo molto allargando Allarg. molto allargando

in next bar R121 J = ; no G.P. J= ; conductor adds fermata in nothing [!] J = ; G.P.

empty bar R128 molto meno Lento. J = 52 Lento. J = 52 Lento. J = 52

Note: In column headings, letters in brackets refer to primary sources listed at the beginning of Works Cited; Particell = autograph short score; Partitur = autograph full score; IS = Stravinsky's annotated copy, used for rehearsal/performance; "IS confirms" indicates that the composer underlined the performance direction in red crayon. aR86 is the beginning of Tableau II in this draft.



Table Ic Concordance of Ter dications in The Rite of Spring, "Danse sacrale"

Location Sketchbook [A] Partitur [C] IS 1913 piano IS 1922 printed 1929 "revised first 1943 revision [G] 1967 "final score [D] scores [E-F] edition" [F2] edition" [I]

R142 fermata before 1st fermata before 1st fermata before 1st chord, fermata before 1st chord, fermata after 1st chord fermata after 1st chord fermata after 1st chord

chord, not after chord, not after; also not after; also seems to be not after [never after in whole seems to be fermata fermata on b cl. note!

sketchbook]; same in on b cl. note! Particell (this is the end of Particell)

R142 notempomarking notempomarking )= 126 = 126 = 126 Rigoroso(J= 126); J= 126

this is a misprint for j = 126

R149 pocchissimo meno mosso nothing = = = nothing = [p. 84] Luftpause [p. 85]

R161 nothing conductor writes in nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing accel.

R167 - 1 fermata on last sixteenth; nothing crescendo and fermata; accelerando e cresc.; accel. e cresc.; fermata no accel., no cresc., accel. e cresc.; fermata no accel. or cresc. no accel. fermata on last sixteenth; on last sixteenth and no fermata [!] on last sixteenth

Stravinsky's markings confirm fermata; "vw" over accel. bar?

R167 not actually written out nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing = R174 nothing (and the nothing (no Sostenuto e maestoso. J = 126 = = 126 nothing = = 126

beginning is sketched equivalencies written J= 116; IS carefully IS pocket score (RMV out several times) in, but no conductor's corrects this (twice) to 197b; inscribed "Igor

marks either) J = 126 in his copy, but Stravinsky/Paris, 1922) does not cross out has red markings enforcing the performance direction the tempo equivalencies

(J = = J = 126, etc.) written into score, here and everywhere IS's full score (RMV 197) has been reworked to form the basis of the 1929 "standard" version (126 enforced at all junctures)



Table Ic continued

Location Sketchbook [A] Partitur [C] IS 1913 piano IS 1922 printed 1929 "revised first 1943 revision [G] 1967 "final

score [D] scores [E-F] edition" [F2] edition" [I]

R180 nothing (spot is never nothing nothing; fermata J = 126; fermata = ; = 126; fermata fermata = = 126; fermata sketched as such); it IS confirms fermata appears that going back to the A section between the two explosions was not part of original conception [p. 97 bottom]

R181 see above nothing; conductor nothing (no fermata) fermata; J = 126 fermata on bar line; fermata on bar line = J = 126 confirms fermata over IS confirms fermata . = ; J = 126 bar line of R181

R186 nothing conductor writes in nothing; dynamic is pp ) = 126; dynamic is p = = 126; dynamic nothing; dynamic is = = 126; dynamic "Vivo'; dynamic is p [horns, bassoons] is ftofffsempre [ben] sfmarcato, but is fto fffsempre [ben] [horns, bassoons] marcato or sfsempre orchestration is cut marcato or sfsempre

[bassoons, alllow brass] down to bassoons and pizzicato lower strings

R201 trill is already "lunga lunga ad lib in vln 1 accel. then a tempo; no accel.; trill (now a lunga ad lib is removed; tremolo removed, lunga ad lib is ad lib" on p. 87 and part at R201 + 1 in trill is marked lunga tremolo) is marked with but ww colla parte stays replaced with a single removed, but ww colla even more so on p. 89 final chord, bass players ad lib. fermata and lunga ad lib.: solo violin playing f#; parte stays

are told [in ink] to ww are colla parte [no IS bar has a fermata "play the low d on the markings] C-string"

Note: In column headings the bracketed letters refer to primary sources listed in Works Cited; the Particell is lacking the "Danse sacrale"; IS = Stravinsky's annotated copy, used for rehearsal/performance.




Table Id Tempo Marks in 1913 Partitur Compared with Tempos of Monteux's 1929 Recording

Location Partitur Monteux 1929 recording

Tableau I

R13 Tempogiusto.J = 56 J= 50-56 R37 Presto. J = 132; crossed out by conductor = 118-22 R48 Tranquillo. J = 108; crossed out by Monteux and J = 108 slowing to 80

replaced with Andantino. J = 88 R49 Sostenuto epesante. • = 80; "80" is crossed out and = 80

replaced with "69-72" R54 no poco rit.; Vivo. • = 160; "160" crossed out and = 160!

replaced with "138" R55 + 2 conductor marks caesura R56 Tranquillo. J = 108; crossed out by conductor and J = 108 slowing to 80

replaced with Andantino. J = 88 R57 Molto Allegro. J= 168; "168" is crossed out and = 168! but down to 146

replaced with "146"; lower on page in same hand: for Cortege "Allegro rigoroso"

R59 -4 ritenuto pesante, then a tempo yes R71 Lento. J = 52; "52" is crossed out and "42" written in ] =44 R72 Prestissimo. J = 168; conductor begins to cross out = 164-68!

"Prestissimo"; writes "rigoreux" below on score

Tableau II (up to end of "Action rituelle des ancetres")

R89 Piu mosso. = 60; "poco" is inserted in crayon = 66 R91 Andante con moto. J= 80; conductor has boxed = 100

the "Andante" and written in "tris tranquille" R93 Piu mosso. j = 80; conductor has written in = 100

"Allegretto tranquille" above mm R97 =76 R102-3 poco a poco crescendo e accelerando; conductor no fermata!

has boxed "accelerando"; fermata added over last beat of 103

11/4 bar j = 120; conductor has divided the 11 beats = 144! as3+4+4

R104 J = 135-44 R117 - 1 molto allargando accel.! then faster,

J>= 144-50 R121 b = J; conductor adds fermata in empty bar R128 Lento. J = 52 j = 66

Note: See Table 2 for "Danse sacrale."



Table 2 Some Recorded Tempos in the "Danse sacrale"

A B rit.? accel.? A' Cl A C2 A" end Performance R142 R149 R161 befR167 R167 R174 R180 R181 R186 R199-end

Bernstein 1958 138-42 130-32 no rit. no accel. 138-44 122-25; accel to 138 112-16;a wants sudden 140+ [4:27] ca. 1410 at R180! very broad; 138;b gets

no accel. to end 127-30; starts accel.

Stokowski 1930 126-28 115-18 slight rit. accel. only 116-18; 105-8;slight 128 98-100! wants 135-37 no accel.; [4:53] to 126-32 attempted push at R178; very broad; (gets it in ca. 132

accel. (128) sudden accel. R184-86, low strings) collapses to ca. 126 at end speeds up very

slightly 106-8 Goossens 1960 126-32 124-26 slight rit. no 133-35 116-18 132 starts at 96; wants 148-50! bass drum [4:39] stabilizes at gets 136-40 drives accel.

114-16 to 140-44 Ansermet 1957 126 134-36 rit. no 126 102-6; 112 126 116-20; wants 135; bass drum [4:42] at R178; pushes slight accel. settles into 126 drives slight

to 116 at last bar to 122-24 accel. (132?) Monteux 1929 148-53 133-45 no rit. accel. to 157! 146-48 124-26; tries for starts at 116-20, wants 152 [!] accel. to [4:15] slow accel. 145-48 then accel. to and almost gets 155+

to 133c 133 at R184 and it; falls back ca. 138 at R186 to 148

Stravinsky 1929 108-12 119-20 accel. no rit. accel. to 110-13 ca. 99; 116 108-13; wants ca. 120-24 [4:58] to ca. 130 ca. 140 accel. after solid 113 124-26?e

R178 to ca. 116 after R184 falls back to to ca. 113

Stravinsky 1940 113; tries 143-45 [!]; no accel. to 130-32,f 127-33; 126-27 127-31 tries to stay pushes to [4:24] to push pushes to ca. 160! but loses steady at at 127-30; 138?s

(ca. 118-20?) 150-55 atff tempo to 130-32 messy but 122-26 after R178 basically there

Stravinsky 1960 120-22 135-38 no accel. to 145 122-26 124-26; 122-26 130-32 remains a 122-26; [4:31] pushes slightly tempo at 130-32; no accel.

after R178 perfect ensemble Pianola 1921h 140-44 134-39 no accel. to 144 135-40 124-26 135 starts at 108-10, sudden speed no accel. [4:13] then steadies at up to 150-54 except right

ca. 118-20 at R201

aIfone were to calculate tempo from first two quarters, it would be j = 96! Agogic slowdown is noticeable. bAuthor's inference of desired tempo from moments of collapsed ensemble; in this case, calculated from the tuba/bass/contrabassoon part in R186. cAccel. begins with the reiterated offbeat D's at R178; same in 1951 recording. "Very hard to hear; tempo is inferred from bass/tuba part. eExtremely hard to hear (messiest section of recording); tempo inferred from bass figure at R186 and following string sixteenths. fClever! By taking the B section so fast, Stravinsky is able to get the orchestra to take A at a decent speed the second time around. sProblem: bass drum (where one usually gets tempo) is out of time here. hAs realized by Rex Lawson on Innovative Music Masters CD MCD25, 1989.




Table 3 Proportional Analysis of The Rite of Spring, Pleyela Roll Ninea (Pleyela/Oddola 8437, 1921)

a. The roll itself

Location Actual perforations per beat unitb

R142 = 24 punches R174 = 30 punches (-20% deceleration) R180 = 28 punches R181 = 36 punches (-22% deceleration) R186 = 24 punches

b. Approximate metronome marks if roll travels at 7 feet per minute

Location Accelerating (no compensation Metronomic (pianolist for roll speed-up)c compensates for roll speed-up)

R142 = 150 = 148 P174 =125 =116 R180d 138 138 R181 J = 120 J = 107 R186 J= 169 = 149

c. Approximate metronome marks if roll travels at 6.5 feet per minute

Location Acceleratinge ]Metronomic

R142 h=140 J=140 R174 =116 =110 R180 h= 138 h= 115 R181 = 107 = 99 R186 J= 159 J= 139

aActual measurements done by Rex Lawson, London, England, October 1996, on the roll in his possession. The Rite was released on nine Pleyela rolls numbered 8429-8437. (See Lawson, "Stravinsky and the Pianola," in Confronting Stravinsky, ed. Pasler, 299.) bThe relation between punches and tempo is somewhat counterintuitive. Pianola punch holes are of fixed length; the more punches per beat unit, the greater the actual length of roll corresponding to a given stretch of score. Since the roll moves (basically) at fixed speed it will take this longer piece of roll more time to be played. Thus more punches per beat equals a slower relative tempo. CA pianola roll, if left to play on its own, will speed up gradually due to shift in weight as the roll moves onto the take-up reel. If a piece is transcribed directly onto the roll by punching, the accelerando is clearly audible. The pianolist can compensate for the speed-up, using a hand lever and a kind of "speedometer" on the pianola to keep a steady tempo. The columns above marked "Accelerating" show the approximate speeds of the Rite roll if it is left to run on its own; those marked "Metronomic" show the approximate results if the pianolist attempts to use the tempo controls to maintain a steady roll speed. dThis section is too short to get an accurate tempo measurement; all numbers are provisional. eThis column approximates Rex Lawson's 1989 realization on Innovative Music Masters MCD25.




Works Cited

The Rite of Spring:. Primary Sources

Manuscripts and printed scores A. Sketchbook, 1911-13. Available in facsimile as Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of

Spring: Sketches 1911-13, edited and with commentaries by Robert Craft (London: Faber and Faber, 1969).

B. Particell (autograph short score), 1912. Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel. Catalogue 014-0009.

C. Partitur (autograph full score), 1912. Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel. Catalogue 014-0010.

D. 1913 Four-Hand Piano Score. Berlin-Moscow-St. Petersburg: Russische Musik-Verlag RMV 196. Identical with reprint in Igor Stravinsky, "Petrushka" and "The Rite of Spring" for Piano Four Hands or Two Pianos (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1990). Stravinsky's personal copy is owned by the Paul Sacher Stiftung.

E. 1922 Pocket Score. Berlin: Russische Musik-Verlag RMV 197b. Stravinsky's two personal copies are owned by the Paul Sacher Stiftung.

F. 1922 Conductor's Score. Berlin: Russische Musik-Verlag RMV 197. Stravin- sky's personal copy is owned by the Paul Sacher Stiftung.

F2. 1929 "Revised First Editions" of 1922 Pocket and Conductor's Scores. Republished by Russische Musik-Verlag with the same plate numbers as RMV 197/197b. Although these are the texts in which the Rite first achieves its "standard" form, there is no record of Stravinsky having put markings in any copy of this edition.

G. 1943 Revision of the "Danse sacrale." New York: Associated Music Publishers, unnumbered, 1945.

H. 1948 Conductor's Score. London: Boosey and Hawkes B&H 16333. Stravinsky's personal copy is owned by the Paul Sacher Stiftung.

I. 1967 Conductor's Score. London: Boosey and Hawkes B&H 19441.

Recorded performances A. Igor Stravinsky, Piano Roll (Paris, 1921). Pleyela/Odeola Piano Rolls 8429-

37. Performed in 1989 by Rex Lawson, pianolist, on Innovative Music Masters MCD 25.

B. Pierre Monteux, Grand Orchestre Symphonique [de Paris] (Paris, 1929). Gramophone W1016-1019. Rereleased on Pearl GEMM CD 9329. Liner notes by Louis Cyr.

C. Igor Stravinsky, Orchestre Symphonique [de Paris] (Paris, 1929). Columbia LX119-123. Rereleased on Pearl GEMM CD 9334. Liner notes by Louis Cyr.

D. Leopold Stokowski, Philadelphia Orchestra (Philadelphia, 1930). RCA-Victor 7227-30. Rereleased on RCA-Victor 09026-61394-2.

E. Igor Stravinsky, Philharmonic-Symphony of New York (New York, 1940). Columbia 11375-78-D. Rereleased as Pickwick GLRS 107 and as Pearl GEMM CDS 9292.

F. Ernest Ansermet, L'Orchestre de la Suisse-Romande (Geneva, 1957). London LL 1730. Rereleased on London 443 467-2.

G. Leonard Bernstein, New York Philharmonic (New York, 1958). Rereleased on Sony Classical SMK 47629.




H. Sir Eugene Goosens, London Symphony Orchestra (London, 1960). Everest SDBR 3047. Rereleased on Everest EVC 9002.

I. Igor Stravinsky, Columbia Symphony Orchestra (Hollywood, 1960). Rereleased on Columbia Masterworks MK 42433.

J. Benjamin Zander, Boston Philharmonic (Boston, 1989). Innovative Music Masters MCD 25.

Secondary Sources

Acocella, Joan, and Lynn Garafola. "Rites of Spring." Ballet Review 20, no. 2 (1992). Adorno, Theodor W. Philosophy of Modern Music. Translated by Anne G. Mitchell and

Wesley V. Blomster. New York: Continuum, 1985. . "Bach Defended Against His Devotees." In Prisms, by Theodor Adorno, 133-

46. Translated by Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981. . Introduction to the Sociology of Music. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York:

Continuum, 1976. Asaf'yev, Boris. A Book About Stravinsky. Translated by Richard F. French. Ann Arbor:

UMI Research Press, 1982. Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Translated by Brian Massumi.

Theory and History of Literature 16. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

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Abstract

It is only recently that we have begun to consider modernist performing style -especially its brisk, unyielding tempos and abhorrence of "expressive" rubato-as a historical phenomenon. Much of the credit (or blame) for this style has been ascribed to the composer of The Rite of Spring; Richard Taru- skin argues that "all truly modern musical performance ... treats the music performed as if it were composed-or at least performed-by Stravinsky." But the performing history of the Rite shows that the composer struggled might- ily to get his own music played "as if composed by Stravinsky." Early interpretations of the Rite were slower and more elastic-more "romantic"-than the composer wanted.

Focusing on the "Danse sacrale," this paper examines the battles over tempo and rubato evidenced by historic recordings, piano rolls, and published documents. It also considers the unpublished compositional and performing materials for the Rite: Stravinsky's autograph short and fiull scores, and his annotated personal copies of the 1913 piano reduction and the 1922 and 1948 fuil scores. The record indicates (1) that tempo and pacing of many sections of




the Rite were radically rethought between sketch and 1922 printed score; (2) that someone (Pierre Monteux?) indicated rubatos and changed many of

Stravinsky's metronome marks on the autograph; (3) that early performances of the "Danse sacrale" featured unwritten tempo modifications for dramatic effect; and (4) that Stravinsky had to work for decades to fix in his score the rigoroso that has become the characteristic performing tempo of our time.



"Rigoroso (♪ = 126)": "The Rite of Spring" and the Forging of a Modernist Performing Style

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Transcript of "Rigoroso (♪ = 126)": "The Rite of Spring" and the Forging of a Modernist Performing Style