Stravinsky: Octet for Wind Instruments

The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) wrote his Octet between 1922 and 1923, at the start of what came to be known as his “neoclassical” period—a term he himself detested. It belongs to a group of works that reject both the emotional ostentation of pre-World War I Romanticism and the folklore basis of his own work from the previous decade, in favor of a cool, objective manner that seems to refer to the forms and idioms of earlier Western music.

Introduction

The Octet’s “classicism” lies in superficial features. Its three movements (fast-slow-fast) suggest the form of an 18th-century concerto, and its crisp, dry wind scoring (flute, clarinet, and two each of bassoons, trumpets and trombones) loosely recalls the wind divertimenti of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his contemporaries. Its harmonic language similarly implies a return to mainstream tonal procedures, in place of the folksong scales from Stravinsky’s Russian period. But these procedures are more symbolic than organic. They are pegs on which to hang music that is made, essentially, in much the same way as his earlier works, but out of synthetic (as opposed to folkloristic) materials.

History

The Octet was composed partly in the French resort town of Biarritz, where Stravinsky had settled with his wife and four children, and partly in Paris, where he worked in a studio provided by the Pleyel piano company—and where he had begun an affair with Vera Sudeikina, the artist wife of a stage designer for ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. The Stravinskys had spent the war years in Switzerland, having left Russia after the successful Paris premiere of the composer’s ballet The Firebird in 1910. Stravinsky had since written a series of ballets for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: Petrushka (1911), The Rite of Spring (1913), and, most recently, Les Noces (Svadebka, or The Wedding, 1923), some other theatre works, and a number of vocal miniatures, mostly based on Russian folktales and materials. 

There is a sense that in Paris, where the family settled briefly in 1920, the Russian inspiration began to dry up and Stravinsky started to cast around for a fresh—perhaps more relevant—basis for his music. Russia was remote and exotic; the atmosphere in postwar Paris was materialistic, functional, cosmopolitan, but also to some extent irrational: it was the time of Surrealism and Dada, and of assorted artistic manifestos. It was also a very confusing time. The first performance of the Octet took place, absurdly, on the stage of the Paris Opera House in October 1923, with Stravinsky himself conducting an ensemble framed by acoustic screening. But it was barely four months since the long-delayed premiere of Les Noces—perhaps the most deeply ethnic of all his Russian ballets. It required a shrewd critic, the expatriate Russian Boris de Schloezer, to perceive that the apparent inconsistency was, in reality, a tribute to the composer’s “extraordinary power of renewal.” For the majority of listeners, the apparent contradiction was simply bewildering.

Form

Stravinsky’s first idea had been to compose a piano concerto with wind and timpani. (His next work would indeed turn out to be just such a concerto.) The three-movement form of the Octet is essentially that of a Classical concerto: a quasi-sonata-form first movement (“Sinfonia”), with a slow introduction; a variation-form slow movement; and a quick finale that might be (but isn’t quite) a rondo. This is the first multimovement instrumental work Stravinsky had composed (apart from solo instrumental miniatures) since a symphony of 1905–07 (when he was still a student), and the implication is clear. We are meant to hear a revived Classical design. It’s interesting to compare the Octet with his Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920)—a single-movement, nine-minute piece, constructed as a sequence of brief, alternating gestures of a strongly ritualistic, Russian solemnity. The quarter-hour Octet, by comparison, is jaunty, sociable, even fun. Yet both works take ideas from the same sketchbook of 1918–19, and both express the composer’s preference for a restrained, measured, non-expressive language.

Analysis

In bald terms, the form of the Octet is straightforward, if by no means as Classical as it wants us to think. The slow introduction begins and ends in orthodox fashion, on the dominant chord (B-flat) of the home key of E-flat major, which is then announced, with Haydnesque clarity, by the march-like main theme of the following Allegro moderato section. But the introduction proceeds in somewhat deviant fashion, meandering through a variety of unrelated keys, and constantly disrupting its supposed 3/4 meter with irregular, shortened bar lengths—much as Stravinsky had notoriously done in The Rite of Spring. In a similar way, the Allegro’s sonata form is, in reality, no more than a series of musical labels, rather than a genuine sonata form: first theme (E-flat major), second theme in solo trumpet (G major), a kind of transition from one to the other, an episode masquerading as development, and a recapitulation, with the subjects in reverse order and separated by a brief fugal episode.

The second movement is a set of variations on a long, embellished 33-note theme—started off by flute and clarinet, and continued by trumpet then trombone. A peculiarity of this theme, apart from its length, is that it derives all its notes from a single, symmetrical eight-note (octatonic) scale, made up of alternating tones and semitones (unlike the normal major and minor scales, whose asymmetrical structure is what gives them their sense of key). There are five variations, the first of which is repeated (in the manner of a ritornello) after variation 2, and again after variation 4. Variation 5 passes without a break into the finale. This is by far the most intricate music in the Octet, harmonically denser and more chromatic than the outer movements, and more genuinely polyphonic. 

By contrast, the quick, jazzy finale revives the feeling of symbolic deference to classical behavior, albeit now in the “wrong” key of C major. (The piece opens in E-flat major.) It starts with what sounds like two-part counterpoint between the two bassoons, though in fact the second bassoon is simply running, mechanically, up and down a C-major scale. There is a hint of rondo form: a contrasting, more lyrical second theme (in trumpet) and a repeat of the first theme. But the movement then dissolves into a brilliantly witty discussion of a new, syncopated theme—interspersed with earlier fragments, and ending with an irresistible, throwaway C-major chord.

Critical Thoughts

Stravinsky offered his own critique of the Octet, in an article that appeared, bizarrely, in English in the Brooklyn journal The Arts, one year before anyone in the US had heard a note of the music. “Some Ideas About My Octuor” is in some ways as much an evasion as the work itself. In a word, it is a manifesto of the 1920s idea of objective art: an art devoid of passion and the unkempt, an art that rejects what the Catholic philosopher-theologian Jacques Maritain called “the immense intellectual disarray inherited from the 19th century.” In the Octet, Stravinsky claims, there is no room for interpretation. All the players have to do is play exactly what is written. Wind instruments, he says, have been chosen “in order to render a certain rigidity of the form I had in mind… because the difference in the volume of these instruments renders more evident the musical architecture.” It’s true that he had suffered in the past from bad performances (most recently an atrocious, uncomprehending premiere of his Symphonies of Wind Instruments, conducted by Serge Koussevitzky in London in 1921). But his idea of ruling out any expressive contribution from his players was clearly an abstract idea, remote from the reality of musical notation and performance. The Octet may, as he claimed, be a “musical object.” Objective—in the sense of a sculpture or painting—it could not be, because musical notation is imprecise and performing musicians are human beings.

Legacy

The Octet was the beginning of a major change of direction in Stravinsky’s own work. But “neoclassical,” the label usually attached to this phase (which lasted until about 1951), is misleading in some respects. What Jean Cocteau called the “Rappel à l’ordre” (“Recall to Order”) was a widespread tendency in the 1920s, which took various forms but in general meant the restoration of the balance and clarity of 18th-century art, with or without any stylistic allusions as such. For Stravinsky, however, the referential (or modelling) aspect was crucial, presumably because, having lost touch with his Russian roots, he was in constant need of new materials—fresh ideas to adapt to his own way of composing. The Octet revealed to him how he could write Stravinskian music while thinking himself into other composers’ idioms. But it didn’t lay down what those idioms had to be. In subsequent works he would draw on models as far apart as George Frideric Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach, Mozart, Giuseppe Verdi, Leo Delibes, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and popular dance music. The incredible versatility of these three decades of his work, and the brilliant consistency of compositional technique he brought to it, were major factors in the huge influence he has continued to exert on younger composers.

________

Article by Stephen Walsh