What's On / Programme Notes

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)

Les noces (1914–17; orch. 1923)

Part One

Scene 1: At the Bride’s House

Scene 2: At the Groom’s House

Scene 3: The Bride’s Departure

Part Two

Scene 4: The Wedding Feast

Stravinsky’s first idea for a ballet about a peasant wedding dates back at least to the autumn of 1912, when he was still at work on The Rite of Spring. The following March, the Moscow journal Muzïka printed an announcement that actually gave the ballet its eventual Russian title, Svadebka (‘Little Wedding’). Nobody could have guessed that it would be another 10 years before the work reached the stage, or have predicted the circumstances – political and artistic – that would stand in its way. Stravinsky spent much of the year following the riotous premiere of The Rite of Spring in May 1913 finishing off his pre-Firebird opera, The Nightingale, to a commission from the newly established Moscow Free Theatre; and it was only in the summer of 1914 that he was able to turn his attention properly to what he must have known would be a complicated and perhaps long-drawn-out project.

The problem was that, unlike its predecessors, Svadebka (or to give it the French title, Les noces, which has clung to it since its first performance) was from the start planned as a sung ballet, to be based on authentic Russian wedding texts – its actual generic title is ‘Russian Choreographic Scenes with Singing and Music’. There was nothing particularly new about the stage presentation of folk weddings, and Stravinsky’s own ballets had made fertile use of folk music and pagan ritual – an obsession also of his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov and of Russian Silver Age art in general. But this wedding ballet would be subtly different. Early sketches show that Stravinsky quickly became preoccupied with intricate details of the Russian texts, their peculiar rhythmic and prosodic character, and above all their musical potential in relation to the complex rhythmic idiom he had evolved in Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. More or less trapped in Switzerland at the outbreak of war in August 1914, he buried his head in the textual and musical materials he had managed to rescue from his house in the Ukraine the previous month, and for the next three years he worked intensively on settings that richly exploit the strong but mobile accentuations of Russian folk poetry. They include a number of brilliant little songs, which seem to invent a completely new kind of modernistic folk music out of oddities in the poetry and distilled elements of Stravinsky’s own recent music; and they include two stage masterpieces, the so-called burlesque, Renard, and Les noces itself, both of them built up through extensions and elaborations of the same essential ingredients.

Musically, Les noces was virtually complete by 1917. But Diaghilev, who had adored the work from the moment he first heard about it, was in no position to stage so unusual and complex a ballet under wartime conditions, and in any case he was soon engaged in a blood row with Stravinsky over royalties. Meanwhile the composer’s orchestral image of the work underwent drastic change. Having originally accompanied the voices with a large chamber orchestra with attributes of a peasant band, in 1919 he came up with a new orchestration involving his current mechanical craze, the pianola, plus harmonium and a pair of cimbaloms – to the understandable despair of Diaghilev, who grumbled to Ernest Ansermet that it ‘leaves idle the musicians I’ve got, and asks me for only four, one of whom, however, I have to get from Honolulu, another from Budapest, and the others from God knows where’. The eventual scoring, for four pianos with percussion, reflects the preoccupations of Stravinsky’s music around 1920, much of which is (or was first intended) for piano. In this form, Les noces at last reached the stage of the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris in June 1923, in a production by Bronislava Nijinska which itself brilliantly reflected the constructivist tendencies of art in the young Soviet Union, where she had recently been working. The conductor was Ansermet, and the work was sung in its original language by the Russian Choir of Vasily Kibalchich.

Stravinsky’s texts, chosen mainly from a 19th-century anthology of wedding rituals edited by Pyotr Kireyevsky, deal exclusively with the pagan aspects of a wedding that is, nevertheless, clearly understood to be Christian. They invoke the saints Cosmo and Damien (the patron saints of weddings), and in particular the Virgin Mary. But the church ceremony as such is excluded. In the first of the four tableaux (or scenes), the weeping bride has her hair braided, as a symbol of the loss of her virginity and her entrapment in marriage; her mother and the bridesmaids call on the Blessed Virgin to attend and help prepare the bride. In scene 2 the bridegroom also invokes the Mother of God as his hair, too, is combed for what he calls the assault ‘against the strong wall of stone’ (one of many more or less overt sexual images in the old Russian text). The saints Luke, Cosmo and Damien are summoned to the wedding. At the end of scene 3, after the bride has been seen off to the church, the two mothers – not permitted by custom to attend the wedding – sing a ritual lament for their lost children. Finally the wedding feast (scene 4: the title translates literally as ‘The Beautiful Table’) concludes, after a good deal of ribaldry usually much softened in translation, with the ceremonial bedding of the newly-wed couple. The Svat (Marriage-Broker) invokes the act of procreation while bells (inspired, it may be, by those of St Paul’s in London, of which Stravinsky made notations in the summer of 1914) clinch this moment of greatest tribal solemnity, the sacrifice which, like the more violent one in The Rite of Spring, guarantees the continuity of life.

Programme note © Stephen Walsh

Stephen Walsh is the author of a major recent two-volume biography of Stravinsky and holds a Chair in Music at Cardiff University.

Return to Prom 33

Radio 3 live

Listen: Radio 3
Hear every Prom live

Watch & Listen

BBC Proms 2009
All Proms broadcasts - available for 7 days

2009 Calendar

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
July
					17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31
August
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	31
September
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12

What's On / Programme Notes

Radio 3 live

Watch & Listen

2009 Calendar

See also

On Radio 3

On TV and Radio

Online

bbc.co.uk navigation

BBC links