Les Noces

The punch of most modern music is in the tickets. Exception: Igor Fedorovitch Stravinsky. He is always "good box-office." Manhattan's League of Composers, with Stravinsky's half-hour ballet, Les Noces, on the program (first U. S. production), preceded only by a 17th Century academic tidbit, last week drew a $25,000 audience to the Metropolitan Opera House, the smartest audience since the opening of the opera season last autumn.

Stravinsky's power of attraction lies in his reputation for being "primitive." He is "primitive" no longer, but Les Noces is a perfect example of what used to be meant by that term. Written for percussion instruments, piano, four soloists and a chorus, it was given last week under the enthusiastic baton of Philadelphia Conductor Leopold Anton Stanislaw Stokowski.

There are four tableaux. On one side of the stage a bride is being prepared for her wedding night, her long hair is being combed. On the other one sees the anointing of the groom. Then comes the blessing and departure of the bride, to the lamenting of her parents. Finally the nuptial celebration, described this way by Conductor Stokowski for the League of Composers' program note:

"Svacha takes off bridal veil and replaces it with kika (headdress of married woman). Father of bride gives away his daughter. Mother of bride leads her daughter to groom's parents. Father of bride strikes bride with whip (ancient ritual, symbol of submission) and then passes whip to groom. Girls and bride dance to ancient folk-song--the whole company becomes increasingly intoxicated. All dance a ronde and sing, while a man and his wife from among the guests enter the bed to warm it with the heat of their bodies. Drushka and Svacha bring dishes of food. The whole company lead the bride and groom near to the bed in preparation. Bride takes off shoes of groom (symbol of submission), guests bring seven sheaves of wheat (symbol of plenitude). Svacha brings white sheet (test of virginity). Groom strikes bride with whip (symbol of possession). Bride and groom embrace. Drushka brings a stall, with calves and lambs painted on it, and chickens carved in wood on top. Svat takes out couple who are warming bed. Drushka puts stall as screen before bed. Bride and groom enter bed. Erotic exaltation of all company. The shadows grow darker. The whole company is immobile as if transfixed. Father of bride sings the final magnificently eloquent phrase, interrupted at irregular intervals by bell-like crashes from the orchestra." Friend or foe, none can deny Stravinsky's fame.

Forty-seven years ago in Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg, little Igor Stravinsky was born, son of an opera singer. He was a child of terrifying musical precocity and an early tendency towards hair-splitting conversation. The law first attracted him and he attended the University. Then, aged 20. he met a wise old man, Rimsky-Korsakov, one of the great five who had founded the Russian National School of Music. Rimsky, steeped in the folklore of his country, taught the youth to put his ear to the ground, to listen to the earth sounds of Muscovy.

First came a symphony in 1907, decent, unoriginal, academic music. Three years later, the Stravinsky talent was revealed in The Fire Bird, written for Ballet-Master Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev. A businessman from the start, Stravinsky realized that opera was dying. Ballet, in Paris at least, was the money-maker of the moment. A Europeanized Russian, tongue in cheek. Stravinsky sold barbarism and Orientalism to a sated Western public, caricaturing his native land, frightening timid musicians with brutal tone-pictures of a country of Cossacks and white bears, wolves and samovars, sexual symbols and fantastic ikons.

After writing Les Noces, in 1923, Stravinsky suddenly, as if fed up with his own excesses, perhaps realizing that the pendulum of public opinion was about to swing backwards, turned classic. Back to Pergolesi he has gone, back to Bach, to Mozart. Since the work by which his widest public knows him, he has written little pieces on five notes, a simple concerto, music in forms of antique simplicity. It is, however, the false simplicity of fashionable Paris couturiers, of Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess, of Matisse's artless drawings. The latest Stravinsky technique reaches back 300 years, touched always with the acid of contemporary life.