Book contents
8 - Stravinsky the serialist
from Part II - The works
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2011
Summary
Introduction
By the spring of 1952, Stravinsky had reached the end of a compositional road he had travelled since Pulcinella in 1920. His brilliant Mozartian opera The Rake's Progress had been premiered the previous year to general acclaim. But, for Stravinsky, it marked not only a culmination of his musical neoclassicism, but a decisive turning-point as well. He had become aware of the low value placed on his music by outspoken members of the younger generation of avant-garde composers and had begun, for the first time, to acquaint himself with the music of Schoenberg and Webern, to whom younger composers were unfavourably comparing him. In the aftermath of those twin shocks, he turned in a new compositional direction.
Robert Craft, Stravinsky's amanuensis throughout his later years, describes the growing sense of strain, the crisis and its immediate consequences:
The Rake's Progress was received by most critics as the work of a master but also a throwback, the last flowering of a genre. After the premiere, conducting concerts in Italy and Germany, Stravinsky found that he and Schoenberg were everywhere categorized as the reactionary and the progressive. What was worse, Stravinsky was acutely aware that the new generation was not interested in the Rake. While in Cologne, he heard tapes of Schoenberg's Violin Concerto … and of ‘The Golden Calf’ (from Moses und Aron); he listened attentively to both, but without any visible reaction In contrast, a few days later, in Baden-Baden, when a recording of Webern’s orchestra Variations was played for him, he asked to hear it three times in succession and showed more enthusiasm than I had ever seen from him about any contemporary music …
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- The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky , pp. 149 - 174Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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