Golden Anniversary Choral Spectacular - The Grant Park Music ...

LES NocES, ScèNES choréGraphIquES ruSSES
(“ThE WEddING, chorEoGraphEd ruSSIaN
ScENES”) (1914-1923)
iGOr STrAVinSKY (1882-1971)
When Stravinsky was immersing himself in Russian lore and
ritual during the composition of The Rite of Spring in 1911-1913,
he had an idea for a new “dance cantata” with soloists and
chorus for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe whose subject would
be a Russian peasant wedding incorporating “actual wedding
material through direct quotations of popular — i.e., non-literary — verse.” The
premieres of The Rite in May 1913 and the opera The Nightingale twelve months later
in Paris precluded any work on Les Noces until July 1914, when he went to his family’s
estate at Ustilug in Ukraine to handle some personal affairs and gather collections of
popular Russian poems and phrases from his father’s library. After making a research
stop at Kiev, he returned to Salvan, Switzerland, thirty miles south of Montreux, where
he had recently moved from Paris in order to find a secluded place to work as well as
a haven from the growing political tensions on the Continent. World War I erupted the
following month and the Russian Revolution three years later, and the visit to Ustilug
proved to be the last time he set foot in his homeland for 48 years.
Stravinsky began to assemble the libretto for Les Noces from his sources and
his imagination as soon as he arrived in Switzerland, and he quickly decided that
he would omit the marriage ceremony itself in favor of four scenes that would show
the traditional rituals and celebration of the wedding outside of the church: the
preparations of the bride and the groom in their respective homes, the departure of
the bride, and the wedding feast. He began composing the music in late summer
1914 and had completed the first two scenes in piano score by the time Diaghilev and
his troupe settled in Switzerland the following spring to wait out the war. He started
scoring Les Noces for a massive orchestra of 150 musicians, but soon realized that such
an ensemble was not only ill-suited to the subject and character of the work but would
also make its performance difficult in war-torn Europe (or almost anywhere else). He
put the score aside to work on Renard (“The Fox”), a “burlesque story” for singers and
small orchestra for Diaghilev, and then suffered some ill health and the deaths of his
beloved childhood nurse and his brother in 1916. When he returned to Les Noces in
1917, he sketched the remaining two scenes and tried scoring the first two scenes for a
smaller orchestra, but then decided that “an electrically driven piano and harmonium,
an ensemble of percussion, two keyed bugles and two Hungarian cimbaloms” might
be more practical and appropriate. That configuration also proved unsatisfactory,
however (Stravinsky recalled that the “mechanical piano was grossly, irremediably and
intolerably out of tune”), so he again shelved the work to compose The Soldier’s Tale,
Pulcinella, Symphonies of Wind Instruments, The Song of the Nightingale and a host of
smaller pieces. By the time he finally took up Les Noces again, in 1921, he had come
up with the definitive solution for its scoring — a unique ensemble of four pianos and
percussion to accompany the four vocal soloists and chorus. The score was completed
in April 1923 and premiered by the Ballet Russe on June 13, 1923 at the Théatre de la
Gaité Lyrique in Paris.
Stravinsky wrote of Les Noces in his 1936 Autobiography, “It was not my intention
to reproduce the ritual of a peasant wedding, and I paid little heed to ethnographical
considerations. My idea was to compose a sort of scenic ceremony, using as I liked
those ritualistic elements so abundantly provided by village customs which had been
established for centuries in the celebration of Russian marriages. I took my inspirations
from those customs, but reserved to myself the right to use them with absolute freedom.”
Though Stravinsky envisioned Les Noces as primarily a work for voices (there is only a
A16 2012 Program Notes, Book 2
Friday, June 29 and Saturday, June 30, 2012