‘Un cadeau très macabre’

university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 4, fall 2003 RICHARD TARUSKIN >Un cadeau très macabre= >Un cadeau très macabre= B a very morbid gift B is what Sergey Diaghilev, the Ballets Russes impresario, called Stravinsky=s Oedipus Rex, on being presented with it in 1927 on the twentieth anniversary of his earliest musical season in Paris (Stravinsky and Craft, 7). Stravinsky had ample reason for celebrating along with Diaghilev, because the Ballets Russes had been the launching pad from which his own spectacular career had taken off. But in its austerity, its asperity, its severity, Oedipus Rex clashed stridently with the gaudy, luxurious ballets that had made Stravinsky=s and Diaghilev=s reputations before the Great War. And a frieze-like operaoratorio , in which the characters in a tragedy stand paralysed like statues by the composer=s express command, is the very last thing one would expect a ballet company to stage. In Oedipus Rex, nobody moves. And yet the Diaghilev company did perform the work B frankly as an oratorio, with no staging at all B on 30 May 1927. It was Stravinsky=s last Ballets Russes premiere. Apollon musagêtes, the next season, was not a world premiere, only a European première, the work having been previously performed in Washington, DC, at the Library of Congress, according to the terms of its commissioning by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. And the season after that, in which there were no Stravinsky premieres, was Diaghilev=s last. He died, in Venice, on 19 August 1929, at the age of fifty-seven, the victim of undiagnosed diabetes. Macabre indeed. But the work itself, not merely its circumstances, was inherently morbid, for it was one of the most prominent early >thematizations,= as we would now say (at least in the classroom, where nobody is listening) of what W.H. Auden, a later Stravinsky collaborator, called >the modern problem= B the problem of being >no longer supported by tradition without being aware of it= (111). Not being able to take tradition and its validating support for granted, modern artists (including those who now prefer to call themselves postmodern) are self-conscious to an unprecedented degree. The failure of unconscious tradition leads to conscious obsession with history B an obsession just as strong in those who flout traditions as it is in those who uphold them, for rejection and advocacy alike are by definition conscious acts, acts of conscience. The roots of >the modern problem= go back to the days of Romanticism, 802 richard taruskin university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 4, fall 2003 when people (and peoples) first became conscious of their unique identities B as something valuable, anyway B and artists came to see the expression of their individuality as their mission. (Remember Rousseau=s Confessions? >If I am not better, at least I am different= B and so worth writing and reading about [3].) Those are the roots. But the >problem= became a problem after the First World War B simply >The Great War= until there was a Second one B the great revolutionary conflagration that doomed the ancient dynasties of Europe. It sheared the past, with all its traditions, off from the present irrevocably, and left the European world in chaos B palpable political and economic chaos that destroyed societies. That, it seemed to many, was the legacy B no, the curse B of Romantic individualism. As Don Alhambra put it in The Gondoliers, when it was still possible to joke about such things, >When everyone is somebodee, / Then no one=s anybody!= We are familiar enough with the political and economic reaction to this great loss of order. Whatever else the totalitarian ideologies of the new Europe may have been, however the proponents of the swastika and the hammer and sickle may have clashed in their rhetoric, they were united in backlash against the arrogant individual, whose hubris had brought disaster. It is less common now to note the parallel with postwar aesthetics, but at the time it was drawn explicitly enough. >It was romanticism that made the revolution,= wrote the English critic T.E. Hulme, who barely lived to see the Russian one (he died...