Footnotes to Stravinsky Studies: 'Le Sacre du printemps'

Author(s): Lawrence Morton

Source: Tempo, New Series, No. 128 (Mar., 1979), pp. 9-16
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/946060
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FOOTNOTES TO STRAVINSKY
STUDIES:
'Le Sacre du printemps'
LawrenceMorton
One day, when I was finishing the last pages of L'Oiseau
de Feu in St. Petersburg, I had a fleeting vision which came
to me as a complete surprise, my mind at the moment being
full of other things. I saw in imagination a solemn pagan
rite, sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl:
dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to
propitiate the god of spring.1

The idea of Le Sacre du printempscame to me while 1 was

still composing The Firebird. I had dreamed a scene of
pagan ritual in which a sacrificial virgin danced herself to
death.2

STRAVINSKY said that he dreamed regularly,3 that his dreams were 'the ground for
innumerable solutions in my composing activity'.4 But it is just these composerly
dreams about which he has been reticent. Instead, he has recalled the 'time-
dreams and counting dreams [which] are common with me, and . . . dreams in
which people shout, but inaudibly'.5 And again, 'I am forever trying to tell the
time and forever looking at my wrist watch, only to find it isn't there'.6 Then
there was the dream of being a hunchback, which presaged an attack of intercostal
neuralgia brought on by nicotine poisoning;7 another about the scent of Debussy's
Eau de Cologne;8 and one more about his passport, 'very yellow'.9 There are no
musical portents in these dreams; but of the ones that are musical, the most
practical was the one that prescribed the instrumentation of the Octet;10 and the
most bizarre, even Freudian, was the pink dream ('I often dream in colour'),
during the time he was composing Threni, about the two warm, gelatinous,
testicular eggs supporting 'an elastic substance stretching exactly between the
two notes [of an interval] I had composed."' The tension of the stretched sub-
stance assured him that his interval was the right one.
Interesting as these dreams are, they do not strongly support Stravinsky's

? 1979 by Lawrence Morton

I0 TEMPO

statement about their bearing on his composing activity. None of them, in any
case, was as fertile or as complete a surprise as the Sacredream. What could have
generated, at this particular time in the spring of 910o, this particular vision of
pagan Russia? Nothing would seem to have been further from his thoughts. He
had been composing Firebirdsince November of I909. For the preceding year
he had been working on his opera Rossignol, which he had laid aside for the
Diaghilev commission. During the summer of I908 he had composed the
Chantfunebrein memory of Rimsky-Korsakov, who had died on 2 I June, and the
four Etudes for piano. Just before these pieces he had written Fireworks(in May
and June), and the Scherzofantastiquehad been completed in March. Besides, he
was busy with the building of his new home in Ustilug and with his growing family
-his son Theodore was born in I907, his daughter Ludmilla in I908. Indeed,
his mind 'was full of other things'-things that account for, though do not
completely document, the time from the late spring of 910 back to mid- 907.
But for the purposes of this account, 1907 was an important year. It was the
year which there was published in St. Petersburg a book of poems, Yar, Lyric
in
and Lyric-EpicVerse,by Sergei Mitrofanovich Gorodetsky, a poet just two years
Stravinsky's junior, a poet for whom the Russian literary community held the
highest hopes. Mirsky wrote of him:
In Yar(roughly 'vital sap') he displayeda wonderfulgift of rhythmand a curious power of creating
a self-invented-quasi-Russian-mythology . . . Yarremainsas the most interestingmonumentof
its time, when mysticalanarchismwas in the air, when VyacheslavIvanovbelieved in the possibil-
ity of a new mythologicalage, andwhen the belief wasabroadthat the vital forces of man'selemental
naturewere to burst the fetters of civilizationand of the world order.12

Gorodetsky's promise was never fulfilled. Capricious, fickle, inconstant in

his loyalties, he attached himself to the symbolist movement and then attacked
the symbolists in the name of the acmeists. He joined the Guild of Poets with
Gumilev but failed to support him when he was falsely accused of treason and
executed by the Bolsheviks. Already in decline, Gorodetsky wrote jingoist
patriotic verse during the war. At the beginning of the revolution he escaped to
Tiflis where, incidentally, he was 'a good friend' to Stravinsky's future wife,
Vera.13 When the time was ripe, he joined the Bolsheviks and performed the
dubious service of turning Glinka's A Lifefor the Tsar into Ivan Sussanin. But even
before this time his talents had been exhausted and he had degenerated into 'an
easy and insignificant rhymester'.14
But the poet who concerns us here is the promising young Gorodetsky of
1907. His Yaris a book of some 60 poems. Two of them, 'Spring (The Cloister)'
and 'Song of the Dew (The Flagellants)',15 took Stravinsky's fancy and he set them
to music-the first late in the year, the second early in 1908. One can assume
that Stravinsky read the book complete before he selected two of the poems for
song-texts. If so, he certainly read, on pages 23-24, a poem entitled 'Yarila'.
This title is the name of one of the principal gods of Slavonic pre-Christian myth-
ology, a name that has been associated etymologically with Eros and also with
yarovoi, the spring corn-planting. Because celebrations in his honour were often
orgiastic, he has also been linked with Dionysus. But in his principal myth-
ological role he was the god of spring and fecundity. It is as such, as the new-born
god of spring, that Gorodetsky deals with him in 'Yarila'.
First to sharpenthe ax-flint they bent,
On the green they had gathered, unpent,
 'LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS' 1

They had gathered beneath the green tent,

There where whitens a pale tree-trunk, naked,
There where whitens a pale linden trunk,
By the linden tree, by the young linden,
The linden trunk
White and naked.

At the fore, shaggy, lean, hoar of head,

Moves the wizard, as old as his runes;
He has lived over two thousand moons,
And the ax he inhumed.
On the far lakes he loomed
Long ago.
It is his : the first blow
At the trunk.

And two priestesses in their tenth Spring

To the old one they bring.
In their eyes
Terror lies.
Like the trunk their young bodies are bright.
Their wan white
Has she only, the tender young linden.

One he took, one he led,

To the trunk roughly wed,
A white bride.
And the ax rose and hissed-
And na voice was upraised
And then died.
Thus the first blow was dealt to the trunk.

Others followed him, others upraised

The age-old bloody ax,
That keen, flint-bladed ax:
The flesh once,
The tree twice
Fiercely cleaving.

And the trunk reddened fast,

And it took on a face.
Lo,-this notch is a nose,
This-an eye.
The flesh once,
The trunk twice-
Till all red was the rise
And the green crimsoned deep.
On the sod
In the red stains there lies
A new god.16

In these lines, unmistakably, lie the essential elements of Stravinsky's dream of

Le Sacre du printemps: a pagan rite, the sage elders, the sacrifice of a young girl to
propitiate the god of spring. The likeness is too close to be coincidental. This
conjecture has been reinforced by the reaction of both Russian and English
readers to whom the poem has been shown. Recognition occurs inevitably no
later than the third or fourth stanza, and always with an exclamatory, 'It's Le
Sacre!'.
 I2 TEMPO

Without delving into the psychology of dreams, visions, and memory, one
can still conclude that 'Yarila', once read by Stravinsky in I907, was never given
another thought. The subject matter held no interest for him. Discarded, it
nevertheless dropped into that 'deep well of the unconscious' where it remained
for three years, ready to be summoned into consciousness when some external
influence would stimulate its release. 'Dreams are my psychological digestive
system', Stravinsky wrote;17 and the 'Yarila'-Sacrecomplex is a nice example of
how raw material is stored, combined with other elements, and finally put to
use by the creative faculty. Just as Purchas's 'goodly Damosels skilfull in Songs
and Instruments of Musicke and Dancing' became in Coleridge's dream 'A damsel
with a dulcimer',18 so Gorodetsky's white bride, wed to the linden in a bloody
rite, became in Stravinsky's dream the sacrificial virgin of Le Sacre'sdeath-dance.
* * *

The opening bassoon melody in Le Sacre du printemps is

the only folk melody in that work. It came from an anthol-
ogy of Lithuanian folk music I found in Warsaw, and not
from Borodin or Cui, as some critics have suggested; the
anthology was a recent publication.19

Stravinsky's conscious memory having failed him in respect to the literary

source of the Sacredream, one might reasonably, and without disrespect, test his
memory about the source of the famous bassoon melody. The anthology to which
he referred seems to have been first identified by Andre Schaeffner in his book,
Strawinsky.20Schaeffner mentions this source in a footnote21 referring to Plate
XXI in his book, where the tune is quoted directly under the reproduced auto-
graph of the opening measures of Le Sacre.
Ex.1
Lento =so tempo rubato

a
l t f fFfF ff^ffr
3 3
1
1A'7 l-ma
1 119-da

b+# " fr-rr!J r It-r1"-r41r-

r i'I: 1"-1 r IJ rIrt M
But it is only in the descriptive list of the sixty plates (Table des Planches) on
pages I23- 27 that one finds a partial (and tri-lingual!)22 identification: 'Anton
Juszkiewicz, Litauische Volks-Weisen, Cracovie, I900; n? I7'.23
Because the melody is quoted inaccurately,24 one supposes that Schaeffner
obtained his information not directly from the anthology itself but from Strav-
insky who, being consulted a decade or more after culling the tune from the
Juszkiewicz collection, and probably not having it at hand, trusted to his faulty
memory. Nor, at this time, did he have his sketches, having given them to
Misia Sert. If, on the other hand, Schaeffner had indeed seen the anthology, he
missed the opportunity of happening upon some other very interesting and,
even at this late date, surprising material.
Juszkiewicz's No. 57 appears at the very bottom of page 2 . One need
only flip one leaf backwards (as, indeed, Stravinsky might have done) to discover
an unexpected No. 142 at the bottom of page 19:
 'LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS' 3
Ex.2
142

b 1JL| iIIJ ILJ II I IJ U 1 JL 11 ,I III

c -t -i V '- -9i

This is unmistakably Stravinsky's theme for the 'Ritual of Abduction', its rhythm
entirely recomposed and its mode changed to mixolydian by way of the flattened D:
Ex.3
n Presto J-= 132
^ i -

And so 'the only folk melody' in Le Sacre turns out to have a sibling. With this
discovery one's curiosity is aroused: are there any more relatives in this family
of borrowed folk melodies?
The search is indeed tedious. Juszkiewicz's anthology contains 1785 ex-
amples, including variants of both tunes and words. It seems unlikely that
Stravinsky would have examined them all with the thoroughness of his reading of
Gorodetsky's little book of poems. But, as will be seen, he did indeed pluck a
few more flowers from this lush garden. And one wonders if, while gathering
his bouquet, he discovered how abundant was the crop of the two specimens
already plucked-No. I 7 and No. 142.
No. 57, the source of the bassoon melody, begins and ends with a three-
measure motif that occurs very frequently throughout the collection, sometimes
in different modes and keys but almost always in the same rhythmic configuration,
as shown in a few of the variants:

Ex.4
113

a
vrr-!J r1ir?r/I rTrIiJ ri'l Ir' 1
314 . ,
/^ _ ~, ~ ~ ,w~ I~ ~ ~ [l-ma II 2-da I
b

359

I4
rrrl J i1rrrIr virlJ fir ir 11
d 539

d
t5rrr irirj r- phtil r frlTJrI r il
641
tl ui
e Rw#jri
v I?
r rir -iUJrlIr 'lr- llF'l I I
rir 1r !r N-6, is
I . ? . I

1785 I I
t L I x 1l-ma y2-da I

r 1J r f r 'ir 11
L

f
bb i r ilf
Ir Irrf Ir 14 N. B. Repeat marks are probably intended at x and y

Among other variants are Nos.312, 360,473, g38, 773, 843, 1004, 222, 1223,
and 1679; and there are still others so closely related that the motif can be coun-
ted among the principal and most common elements of Lithuanian folk music.
I4 TEMPO

This is no less true of No. 142, at least of the essential pitches forming an
arch:

Ex.5

These are found in Nos. 4, 6g, 167, 170, 527, 529, 531, 583, 653, 859, 898,
956, 1193, 1319, 1344, I424, I503, 1583, I 88, and 1720. Most of these, like
No. I42, are in duple time, though there are enough in triple time to have offered
that suggestion to Stravinsky, provided, of course, that he even noticed the vari-
ants, of which there is no evidence. None of these proceeds to the final gesture
of No. 142, to which Stravinsky put his mark with the flattened D.
Unlike the bassoon melody, versions of No. 142 do appear in the published
Sacre sketches,26 not as Juszkiewicz gives the tune but already subjected to
Stravinskian modifications of pitch and rhythm. The first of these, on page 7 of
the sketches, is at an octave above Juszkiewicz's pitch but given a signature of
five flats which, in Stravinsky's construction of the theme, betrays the flattened D
a measure too soon; the rhythm is notated in signatures of 5/8 and 6/8. The
first entry on page 30 of the sketches merely transposes the version of page 7;
but in the second entry Stravinsky has found the final 9/8 rhythm but not yet the
final key nor the correct place for the revelatory D-flat. It is only on page 26
that the final form is realized, though it must be noted that some of the earlier
versions (rhythms and pitch levels) were utilized in the subsequent development
of the material.
The evolution ofNo. 142 illustrates how creative Stravinsky had become in
his borrowings. In Firebirdand Petrushkathe folk melodies, though richly orches-
trated, retained their identity: they were direct quotations. But now,
in Le Sacre, No. 42 is so completely transformed, has so completely become the
composer's personal property, that it is small wonder how he forgot its origin
and came to think of it as his own creation. After all, he had borrowed only its
intervals-and it is well known that much of his musical thinking (as in the
'pink dream') was in terms of intervals.
And so the search continues in the Juszkiewicz volume. It is not in vain.
No. 34 attracts attention:

Ex.6
34

tr 1I r 4ri'rr Ir ,ir r
tI4 mritrT t11
This melody could quickly be overlooked if the first two measures did not con-
tain intervals that insist on recognition as the source of the cor anglais ostinato in
'Augurs of Spring', a motif forecast by the violins, pizzicato, at the end of the
'Introduction'.

Ex.7
[J = 50] ct = 50]
C. ing. Vln. I pizz.

miL 4 f

nf ? mf
 'LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS' I

If this connection of motif with source seems overstrained, one need only con-
sider how much of the Sacre material is itself fragmentary, and how frequently
Stravinsky works with minute motifs-intervallic cells extended by repetition,
especially ostinati, with rhythmic and harmonic displacements. Evidence is
plentiful: the first page of sketches shows this four-note motif in a trial run, and
the 'Sacrificial Dance' itself is a monument made of tesserae.
If the just preceding demonstration calls for a 'suspension of disbelief', the
next one is surely more convincing--the correspondence between the bassoons'
theme in the same movement and No.787 in the anthology:

Ex.8
[Tempo giusto = 50]

787

irfr ,ir 'I J J r-rr r Ir

r rIr tI
Nor can there be any question at all about the final entry in this exercise in 'tune
detection'. 'Spring Rounds' is framed at beginning and end by six measures
(Tranquillo) of flutes trilling on a dominant while high and low clarinets intone
at a two-octave interval one of the few long-lined melodies in Le Sacre:

Ex.9
Tranquillo J = io

?,~bX5r -r Fr -
I
r--r

Perhaps the simplest and most lyrical passage in the whole score, it turns out to
be a composite of borrowings. Measures three through six are quoted verbatim,
except for Stravinsky's typical grace-notes, from Juszkiewicz's No.27 I:
Ex.10
271

~"f"^jn J ilr If" IIr -? r-,J Ir IrJ ql

Coupled with it is the first phrase of No. 249, to become the beginning of Stravin-
sky's melody:
Ex.11
249

"i--- in1 rfiF " rl i 't- Ir I

The raising of the E to F$ may have been a manoeuver toward the pentatonic
scale that encompasses all but one note of No.271 ; or it may have been intended
to emphasize the dominant-if, that is, the flute trill had already been conceived.
How the coupling of these two tunes occurred to Stravinsky is a nice subject for
conjecture. A common key-signature (four sharps, but sounding B major for
No.249 and G# minor for No.27I) was surely a factor; it is at that pitch that
the melody first appears in the sketches (page 7). At the beginning of 'Spring
16 TEMPO

Rounds' the whole melody is transposed to A-flat / F minor, while for the
repetition at the end of the movement, where no key-signature is indicated, a
mid-point transposition yields A-flat / G minor. (Both versions appear in the sket-
ches, on pages 9 and I respectively.) But perhaps one should not even think
about keys here, for while the flute trill functions harmonically for Stravinsky's
first two measures, it loses its 'dominance' for the next four-and this in both
versions. Also, the first measures are pentatonic while the next four are modal
(Aeolian). In the end, the melody should probably be described as tonally am-
biguous.
Which of the two tunes did Stravinsky find first? Is No. 249 a prelude to 27 ?
Is No. 271 a replacement for the intolerable second part of 249 ? Was the coupling
merely fortuitous? More important: are there pages of lost or still undiscovered
sketches that might reveal more about the Juszkiewicz connection? For the
anthology contains many melodic cells suggesting other Sacre themes, especially
for 'Mystic Circles', but insufficiently convincing to be noticed here. And surely
there was a source, or sources, other than Juszkiewicz's that received Stravinsky's
attention. Remaining unidentified are two melodies quoted in the sketches-
one on page 8 which was apparently not used, the other on page 53 which
evolved into the alto flute solo in 'Mystic Circles'( five measures after figure 93
in the full score). Stravinsky was a follower of Moliere-'Je prends mes biens
ou je les trouve'-but all too quickly and too easily he forgot the sources of his
trouvailles.

NOTES

i. Igor Stravinsky. Chronicleof My Life. London, I936, p.s5-56. [An Autobiography. New York, p.47.]
2. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft. Expositions and Developments. London, I962, p. 140. [New York, 1962,
p-I59].
3. Dialogues and a Diary. London, 1968, p.39 n. [New York, 1963, p.70 n.
4. Expositions and Developments, p. 13 n. [p. 1 54 n. ]
5. Dialogues and a Diary, p.39 n. [p.7o n.]
6. Expositionsand Developments,p. 1 3 n. [p. I 54 n. ]
7. Ibid. p. 35. [p. 54].
8. Retrospectivesand Conclusions. New York, 1969, p. 284-.
9. Ibid. p.2 59.
o. Dialogues and a Diary, p.39. [p.7o]
I . Conversations with Igor Stravinsky. London I959, p. 17-I8. [New York, r199, p. 14.]
12. D. S. Mirsky. A History of Russian Literature. Edited and Abridged by Francis J. Whitfield. New York,
1958, p.473.
I3. Stravinsky and Craft. Memories and Commentaries. London, 1960, p.82 [New York, 1960, p.78.
14. Mirsky, op. cit., p.473.
I5. pp. 40-41 and 47-48, respectively.
i6. Translation by Babette Deutsch and Avraham Yarmolinsky in their RussianPoetry,An Anthology. New York,
1972, p.238.
17. Expositions and Developments, p. 135 n. [p. 1 4 n.]
8. John Livingston Lowes. The Road to Xanadu. Boston and New York, 1927, p. 362.
9. Memoriesand Commentaries,p.98. [p.92.]
20. Paris, 1931.
21. p.43 n.I.
22. In the catalogue of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, the anthologist's name is transliterated as 'Iouch-
kevitch.'
23. The title page is in Polish and, verso, in German. The complete title reads as follows: 'Lithuanian Folk
Melodies/collected by/Anton Juszkiewicz/ and after his death partly 'arranged by/Oskar Kolberg and
Isidor Kopernicki / and after their deaths finally arranged, / edited and published by / Sigmund Noskowski
and Jean Baudouin de Courtenay'. The Foreword and other editorial materials are given in parallel
columns in Polish and German.
24. Schaeffner neglected to enclose the third measure under a prima volta bracket, and the fourth measure
under secondavolta, thus distorting the tune's three-measure phraseology. He also omitted the repeat sign
for the second strain and gave D# rather than C# as the penultimate note.
25. Igor Stravinsky. 'The Rite of Spring' Sketches.London, I969.