Music: Deliberately Dry

The most familiar complaint of modern composers is that they don’t get a hearing. On that score, Igor Stravinsky has little to complain of. In the past month, packed houses in Manhattan had heard everything from his popular Petrouchka (1911) to his dusty-dry Symphony in C (1940). Even his opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex had been uncovered for the first time in 17 years. Bobbing, crouching and flapping his arms like a grotesque little bird, Composer Stravinsky had conducted several performances of his music himself.

Last week, a Ballet Society audience in Manhattan saw and heard what most Stravinsky fans had been waiting for: Orpheus, a new ballet by Stravinsky and Choreographer George Balanchine.

When 65-year-old Composer Stravinsky jumped briskly to the podium, he got an ovation. When the curtain went up, the audience was at first more taken with the simple blue & white brilliance of the set (by Isamu Noguchi) than with the somber opening chords of Stravinsky’s music. But Orpheus turned out to be a brilliant wedding of score, choreography and setting. It was not, however, an incitement to riot, as its famed predecessor The Rite of Spring had been in Paris, 35 years ago. Composer Stravinsky, in white tie & tails, took his bows onstage with the dancers, his feet crossed in his best Position III.

Stravinsky’s music has, always been as carefully machined as a row of ball bearings, and sometimes no more expressive. But listeners last week found his Orpheus score full of some of the most exciting and dramatic music he has written in the past 30 years. His critics accuse him of writing dry music; he retorts that his favorite composers—the men before Bach —wrote dry music too.

He scorns the 19th Century and its romantics—Berlioz, Schumann, Wagner—and latter-day romantics like Richard Strauss. He once insisted, in a heated moment, that “Music is powerless to express anything whatsoever.” As for writing like a romantic, he says: “I cannot appeal to you as a person with my music; it would embarrass me.”