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Markevitch: The Early Works and Beyond
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
Extract
The subject has suddenly become volatile, and even the simplest facts have a heady aroma. Let us nevertheless begin with a few that may, without evaporating altogether, help place Markevitch in his context.
Should posterity number him among the historically essential composers of our century, his nearest contemporaries in that sense would be Britten and René Leibowitz, who were born a year later, in 1913; the next nearest, Messiaen and Carter, who are four years his senior.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980
References
* Point d'Orgue, Paris, 1959 Google Scholar
* quoted in Stravinsky, Vera and Craft, Robert, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, London, 1979, p. 166 Google Scholar. The letter is dated 24 December 1930 in the list of sources. It must, of course, have been 1931. The première was on 15 December.
* Pierre Souvtchinsky, ‘Igor Markevitch’; La Revue musicale, July–August 1932, pp.95–100.
† The Galop is an exception that proves two rules. First, it is the only informal and ostensibly light-hearted piece in Markevitch's output. (Written, very much off–the–cuff, for an evening chez Noailles, it may give some idea of what Markevitch's lost film score of 1931 would have sounded like; in its skeletal textures and sinister jocundity it already suggests Satie's Entr'acte recomposed by the miraculous mandarin.) Secondly and relatedly, it is the one piece which provides a basis—the slenderest imaginable—for the statement in Musih im Geschichte und Gegenwart that ‘in his compositions Markevitch is closely connected with the aesthetic of Les Six’.
* Among the ‘spectacles exotiques’ in that exhibition were the Annamite theatre, and music and dancing from Cambodia, Thailand, and Bali.
† See Picken, Laurence, ‘The Music of Far-Eastern Asia’, in The New Oxford History of Music, volume I (London, 1957) pp. 165–176 Google Scholar.
* The ‘Icarus chord’ is first heard in bar 4 of L'Envol d'Icare. Its function in that work is pivotal. In most of the subsequent works up to and including Stefan le poète of 1940 it recurs in various harmonic contexts, and clearly has a symbolic significance.
† Scherchen counselled ‘the study of either Communism or Nietszche’. It would have been characteristic of Markevitch to have studied both.
†† de Schloezer, reviewed the Cantique d'amour in the Nouvelle revue Jrancaise of 1 08 1938 Google Scholar.
* Fragmentary sketches exist for a final theme and variations, culminating in a triple fugue.
* ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; in Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, translated by Zohn, Harry, edited and with an introduction by Arendt, Hannah, New York, 1969 Google Scholar.
† I.M. to Alex de Graeff, 3 December 1934.