Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone by Tamara Levitz (review)

Igor Stravinsky collaborated with many revolutionary artists and writers throughout his career. One need only think of the Rite of Spring (1913): Nikolay Roerich, Pablo Picasso, and Serge Diaghilev were innovators in their respective fields who worked with Stravinsky to produce one of the most influential works of the twentieth century. Some of Stravinsky's collaborations, however, were not so fortunate. Another ballet about spring, Perséphone (1934), the result of collaboration between Ida Rubin stein (dancer/impresario), André Gide (poet), Jacques Coupeau (director), Kurt Jooss (choreographer), André Barsacq (stage designer), and Stravinsky (composer), resulted in a disaster of creative differences that could have banished the work forever to the archives. Yet it lived on, as Nadia Boulanger praised the music and taught it to her students, and Peter Sellars, George Balanchine, and Frederick Ashton later restaged it. The version that premiered in 1934, however, never resurfaced—until now.

Despite the frequency of Stravinsky's collaborations, studies of the composer and his works tend to ignore external influences by fellow collaborators, or even religious, political, and artistic leaders. Tamara Levitz's Modernist Mysteries, a microhistory of the premiere of Perséphone, thus fills an important gap in the Stravinsky literature while reviving a relatively unknown work. Levitz's focus on a group of collaborators with distinct backgrounds emphasizes the diversity and cosmopolitanism that sometimes is missing in geographically-centered approaches to modernist music. By providing a deep historical look into each collaborator's psyche, aesthetic of art, and intent for the ballet, Levitz provides a more nuanced reading of the performance that highlights discontinuities and disagreements as they were enacted on opening night.

Levitz's approach to the collaborative process illuminates the reasons behind the spectacular failure of this collaboration on all sides: nearly everyone involved had an agenda and aesthetic ideal that was orthogonal to at least one of the other collaborators' views. Drafts of letters and diaries reveal the level of disingenuousness with which the collaborators treated one another, speaking glowingly about another's work in public, while privately holding negative views of that colleague's potential.

This dichotomy between public and private lives, a trait associated with dandyism, was one of few commonalities between the collaborators. Although occasionally Levitz seems to stray too far toward drawing distinctions between them, she finally mentions similarities in the penultimate chapter: all were outsiders who probably were drawn to Perséphone's story because she also was an outsider between worlds (p. 485). Levitz's sensitivity to the ways in which each person involved tried to maintain his/her personal voice and vision results in a fascinating account that sheds an entirely different light on the whole of Stravinsky's career and certainly makes this book an important addition to any Stravinsky scholar's bookshelf. Levitz provides fascinating insight into the minds and lives of artists living in one of the most contentious decades in Paris, useful for anyone studying 1930s Paris.

The book is divided into three main parts that correspond to the themes of the melodrama: "Faith," "Love," and "Hope." Each chapter studies one collaborator's relationship to the section title. The first, "Gide's Anxiousness," describes the poet's deep fascination and long-time engagement with the Perséphone myth, as he struggled with Catholic faith and ethics in light of his engagement with pederasty. Gide's secular intentions conflicted strongly with Stravinsky's highly religious approach, as revealed in "Stravinsky's Dogma." Both Stravinsky and Gide opposed the strongest religious movement in Paris at the time, with which Coupeau was involved, Le Renouveau Catholique.

The "Love" section delves first into the Perséphone myth and its evolution into Gide's personal expression of pédéraste subjectivity. From there, Levitz tackles the subject of "Igor's Duality," focusing on neoclassicism's ability to mask one's subjectivity and the ways in which, even in allegedly autobiographical writings, Stravinsky managed to avoid directly saying anything about what his music meant, or...