When news circulates of a previously unknown work by a canonical composer, the best response is often to pay no heed. The hype that surrounds such discoveries routinely exaggerates the value of whatever manuscript has surfaced in a dusty attic or musty basement. Often, it means that someone is peddling a speculative reconstruction of fragmentary sketches, as happened in 2012, when the appearance of an alleged piano sonata by Beethoven prompted accusations of scholarly shenanigans. In the case of a 1785 cantata entitled “Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia,” the story behind the music—it was a joint effort by Mozart and his supposed archenemy, Antonio Salieri—holds more interest than the music itself, which is uniformly dull. The past remains the past, and rarely generates headline news.
An exception should be made for Igor Stravinsky’s 1908 work “Pogrebal’naya Pesnya,” or “Funeral Song,” which Esa-Pekka Salonen and the New York Philharmonic perform this week. It is a modestly shattering discovery, one that alters our view of the twentieth century’s musical colossus. “Funeral Song” comes from the end of Stravinsky’s apprenticeship in Russia, before he found fame with the Ballets Russes, in Paris. Written in memory of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, his teacher, it disappeared in the wake of the Russian Revolution, when Stravinsky, having immigrated to the West, lost track of manuscripts that he had left at his family estate. Then, in 2014, a librarian at the St. Petersburg Conservatory found, at the back of a shelf, a set of orchestral parts belonging to the vanished score. It had its modern première last December, in St. Petersburg. According to Boosey and Hawkes, Stravinsky’s publisher, more than forty performances will have taken place by the end of 2017, from Norway to New Zealand.
Like thousands of other Stravinsky fans, I listened to a live stream of the première, my anticipation heightened by descriptions that the composer had supplied later in life. (He called it “the best of my works before ‘The Firebird,’ and the most advanced in chromatic harmony.”) Like many others, I felt mild disappointment. “Funeral Song” contains no thrilling premonitions of the Stravinsky to come. Portentous in tone and ponderous in movement, it is a less distinctive and adventurous creation than the quicksilver miniature “Feu d’artifice,” which has long been the most popular of Stravinsky’s pre-“Firebird” compositions. Yet, after spending more time with the piece—Boosey sent me a score and two recordings, one with Salonen conducting—I felt a growing fascination. The music has a veiled power, and hints at otherwise hidden sources of inspiration. A spectre haunts the scene: the spectre of Wagner.
To understand the world from which this music emerged, one must perform suitable preparatory stretches and take down from the shelf “Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions,” Richard Taruskin’s monumental two-volume study of the early works of Stravinsky, which was published in 1996. (It remained the most imposing music text in my library until the arrival, a decade later, of Taruskin’s five-volume “Oxford History of Western Music,” which is likely to remain the “Ring of the Nibelung” of American musicology.) Taruskin devotes twelve pages to a discussion of “Funeral Song”—an analysis that holds up remarkably well, given that when he wrote it he had not seen the score.
Rimsky-Korsakov, a master of harmonic fantasy and orchestral color, died in June, 1908. Stravinsky, seldom given to gushing sentiment, was distraught by his teacher’s passing: he not only venerated the man but felt intense gratitude for the attention that Rimsky-Korsakov had given to him. Stravinsky was no child prodigy, and had taken up composition relatively late. Student pieces like the Sonata in F-Sharp Minor display a veneer of skill but little originality. Rimsky-Korsakov, teaching Stravinsky in private, oversaw rapid progress. As Taruskin shows, some of the most startling ideas in “The Firebird,” “Petrushka,” and “The Rite of Spring” arise from Rimsky-Korsakov’s inventions.
The pivotal chapter in “Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions” is entitled “Chernomor to Kashchey: Harmonic Sorcery”; it drastically revises the standard narrative of harmonic developments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The usual story highlights the increasing chromaticism of music from Liszt and Wagner onward—the stress upon classical tonality produced by the sort of sliding movement that is most famously heard in the prelude to “Tristan und Isolde.” That stress leads eventually to a break, in the form of Schoenberg’s atonality. Taruskin traces an alternative revolution, one that involves not the collapse of the tonal system but a radical rearrangement of its familiar building blocks. Early signs of this shift are seen in the eerie idylls of Schubert: in the “Sanctus” from the Mass in E-Flat, a sequence of E-flat major, B minor, and G minor induces shivers. Other scholars have explored the peculiar properties of such juxtaposed harmonies: the theorist Richard Cohn calls them “uncanny” chords, and speaks of “audacious euphony” in music from Schubert to Wagner and beyond. Rimsky-Korsakov’s scores are rife with such effects: a classical example occurs in Act I of “Sadko,” where the harmony floats through zones of C, E-flat, F-sharp, and A.
The beginning of “Funeral Song,” courtesy of the Philharmonia Orchestra and BBC Radio 3
“Funeral Song” begins in an atmosphere of lugubrious expectation, with harmonies hovering like coastal mist. One has the sense of a wide-open musical space: deep tuba notes on the one hand, high shrill winds on the other. Where Stravinsky’s inspiration seems to fail him—at first encounter, at least—is with the entrance of a nobly sorrowful principal theme, which is first heard in the solo horn and then migrates to the strings and elsewhere in the orchestra. Stravinsky, in his memoirs, describes it thus: “All the solo instruments of the orchestra filed past the tomb of the master in succession, each laying down its own melody as its wreath against a deep background of tremolo murmurings simulating the vibrations of bass voices singing in chorus.” He fails to mention—or perhaps forgot—that this procession consists, for the most part, of the same theme, over and over, in various keys, phrasings, and instrumental guises.
In the final section of the piece, the procession past the tomb breaks off, and the cellos and double-basses return to the chromatic motif with which the work began—an idea that looks ahead to “The Firebird,” as Taruskin notes in a short commentary on the rediscovered score. The orchestra resumes its dissemination of the horn theme, but the effort soon tapers off, with a held flute note and a timpani roll. Then Stravinsky delivers his coup de théâtre. Trembling strings repeat the introductory phrase, and then a chasm of spooky harmony opens: loud, bleak A-minor chords in the winds and strings alternate with ominous brass sonorities of C minor, E-flat minor, and F-sharp minor. Underlying this scheme is the octatonic scale, one of alternating whole and half-steps, which Rimsky-Korsakov had thoroughly investigated and passed along to Stravinsky. (A latter-day example of that scale can be found in Radiohead’s song “Just.”) The harmonic rotation bears a certain resemblance to that of “Sadko,” though in a tragic mode.
The climax of “Funeral Song,” courtesy of the Philharmonia Orchestra and BBC Radio 3
Such uncanny chords go back to Schubert and before, but they make some of their most memorable appearances in the music of Wagner, where they signify, variously, the magic of the Tarnhelm, Wotan’s contemplation of the abyss (“Das Ende!”), and Tristan’s death, among other moments of awe and dread. A young Russian composer could hardly have avoided Wagner’s influence: in the years before the First World War, the wizard of Bayreuth had an enormous vogue, causing excitement not only among musicians but also among Symbolists, mystics, and revolutionaries. (Wagner’s 1849 essay “Art and Revolution” was not translated into Russian until after the Revolution of 1905, when the tsar’s censors loosened their grip.) Vyacheslav Ivanov hailed Wagner as the “first forerunner of universal myth creation.” Alexander Blok named him the “summoner and invoker of ancient chaos.” Andrei Bely included Wagnerian motifs in his great novel “Petersburg.” Even Lenin fell under the spell. Siegfried’s Funeral Music, from “Götterdämmerung,” was played at Lenin’s memorial, in 1924—a moment captured to staggering effect in Dziga Vertov’s “Three Songs About Lenin.”
In later years, Stravinsky made a show of loathing Wagner. He declared that the experience of attending “Parsifal” in Bayreuth—he made a visit in 1912, in the company of Serge Diaghilev, a lifelong Wagnerian—had caused him physical pain, and that he had gone away revolted by the “unseemly and sacrilegious conception of art as religion.” At the time, though, he sang a different tune. “Parsifal” interested him sufficiently that he went to see the opera again when it was done in Monte Carlo, and in a subsequent letter he wrote of the “great art of Wagner.” When Stravinsky was studying with Rimsky-Korsakov, Wagner was a constant topic of conversation: the two regularly attended performances of the “Ring” operas in St. Petersburg, including a “Götterdämmerung” two months before Rimsky-Korsakov’s death.
It is to Siegfried’s Funeral Music that “Funeral Song” audibly refers, with those guttural utterances of the cellos and basses, first creeping up by chromatic steps and then shuffling back down. Was Stravinsky recalling that “Götterdämmerung” of April, 1908? Certainly, Rimsky-Korsakov receives a hero’s burial, replete with Valhalla flourishes. Listening again to the piece and contemplating this web of references, I had the sense that Stravinsky was eulogizing his teacher not in his own emergent voice but in a dutiful, almost impersonal ritual of remembrance. The formulaic quality of the music becomes strangely touching. Then, with “The Firebird,” the great transformation begins. Stravinsky invents a sorcery of his own, one that will culminate in the “Rite,” just four years later. “Funeral Song” is no missing link in that astonishing evolution; instead, it only heightens the daring of Stravinsky’s leap into the unknown.
