Spring Rite

(See front cover) While Yaqui Indians performed their vernal rites in desert Arizona, and Christians the world over celebrated Easter Sunday (with fire from heaven at Jerusalem), Spring came to the people who follow music in Philadelphia and Manhattan and set them to discussing a musical event-of-the-year: the stage presentation, first in Philadelphia, then in Manhattan, of the most controversial composition; of the age, Igor Stravinsky's savage Sacre du Printemps (" Rite of Spring" ). Executors of the event were the League of Composers, prime promoters of modern music, and Conductor Leopold Anton Stanislaw Boleslaw Stokowski who, with his Philadelphia Orchestra, is an institution unto himself. As companion piece or curtain-raiser was given Composer Arnold Schoenberg's Die Glueckliche Hand (" Hand of Fate" ).

Talking about Sacre du Printemps and what it means, what one is supposed to feel about it, was vastly facilitated by these performances. It was the first time the music had been visually translated in the U. S. by choreography. Music lovers whose inner selves had before this leapt up in convulsions of inarticulate joy or horror at Stravinsky's colossal strains, were supplied with a concrete ideology for their raptures or protests. No patience for the average soul's necessity to articulate has Composer Stravinsky. A poet of barbarism, he describes his outpourings as abstract sound; scorns, protests all attempts to translate him, to fit him into patterns of human thought. In deference to this idea the ballet directed by Leonide Massine, the setting and costumes by Nicholas Roerich, all aimed at abstraction of movement and form. But there was a libretto for nonabstract minds to follow. Many a humble spectator welcomed this crutch to keep up with " The Hand of Fate" as well as with " Rite of Spring."

Sacre. The curtain went up on some 40 Russian peasants, all adolescent youths and girls, dancing in a turbid wheel-like formation to woodwind music which was restive, foreboding. A haggish old woman interrupts, one who knows the secrets of Nature, of Spring. The adolescents whom she comes to enlighten are still of undetermined sex. They mix happily, spontaneously, but Spring is the season for fertility, for recreation. The groups seperate, quarrel, play self-consciously for the first time. A sage appears, the eldest the clan. Face down he asks the bless of the earth and new energy comes seizes the adolescents, sets them to a surging crescendo of relent tom-tom rhythms. T

his first tableau is called by Stravinsky " The Adoration of the Earth." The tableau is " The Sacrifice," for to primitive custom a virgin be sacrificed before new birth is possible. A pagan prelude introduces it and the young girls encircle, glorify the one. Ancestors are invoked who around her as she starts the propitiatory dance. Fearfully, madly she moves to crazy cross-grained rhythms, falls dead finally across a human pyre built hastily that her body may not touch the sacred soil.

Magnificently gaunt last week was Stokowski's translation of Stravinsky's primitive, pornographic music -- music which in its finale is tremendous enough truly to suggest an upheaval of the brutal earth. Lean, sallow Martha Graham did the sacrificial dance in accordance with the spirit of the whole production--jerking, stamping, lunging in the manner which seems to some beholders insane, to others sublime. Many seeing and hearing understood for the first time why the Paris production, put on by the late great Sergei Pavlovitch Diaghilev in 1913, was greeted by a riot, the audience shouting so that the dancers, unable to hear the music, continued only by watching the master's beat in the wings. Some even reacted like the Londoner who said it was a "threat against the foundations of our tonal institutions . . . [standing for] all the unnamable horrors of revolution, murder and rapine, and should have been dedicated to Dr. Crippen, the dentist who murdered seven wives in their baths."*

Die Gluckliche Hand. Nerves were so atingle from the sheer physical force of Le Sacre that when the brief perform-ance was over many had almost forgotten Die Glueckliche Hand, the curtain raiser. Yet like the Sacre the Schoenberg piece can be counted as experimental music. It is pantomime opera, takes only a little more than 15 minutes to perform. Its subject is a simple one: a man in the pursuit of happiness is constantly thwarted by fate in the person of an elusive woman. Schoenberg created only one singing character--the Man, harrowingly played last week by Baritone Ivan Ivantzoff. The woman and the handsome stranger who taunt him were mimes. For the rest there was a chorus (17 artist-students from the Curtis Institute of Music) which chanted and wailed in Greek fashion. And important as either principals or chorus were lights. For Arnold Schoenberg, being a painter as well as a composer, has a passion for color. He conceived his score with fading and blazing lights in mind. In the beginning the Man lies prostrate in the darkness with a monstrous batlike creature crouched on top of him. Then at the climax a piercing yellow fills the stage as the storm comes up, symbolic of the Man's premonition of impending doom. Despite the complex, sometimes shrill chromatic combinations, Schoenberg seemed subdued and civilized compared afterward with naked, uncouth Stravinsky. The stage production was directed by Rouben Mamoulian. The settings and costumes were designed by famed Robert Edmond Jones.

Stokowski. It was fitting for Stokowski to be the first conductor in the U. S. to undertake the difficult stage productions of Le Sacre and Die Glueckliche Hand. The unfurbished music of Le Sacre had its U. S. introduction by him in 1922. Schoenberg's dissonances have fascinated Stokowski so strongly that he has persisted in presenting them despite the boos and hisses of audiences rarely given to such frank demonstration.

There is nothing in Stokowski's back-ground to explain his penchant for the new. He was conventionally raised in London, son of a Polish father and an Irish mother. He went to Queen's College, Oxford, thence to London where he became organist in St. James's Church in Piccadilly. It was as an organist that he came to the U. S. in 1905, 23 then and looking much as he does now--slender, pale-blue-eyed, seraphically blond. He played for three years at St. Bartholomew's Church, Manhattan, saved his money, returned to Europe. His ambition was, and always had been, to conduct. So he hired orchestras, got his experience that way. In Paris a group of Cincinnatians heard one of his concerts, marked his magnetic energy, his romantic appearance. They decided that he was the man to reorganize the Cincinnati Symphony. To Cincinnati he went in 1909, built up a first-rate orchestra (and a baseball team among the players). While there he married Pianist Olga Samaroff who bore him a daughter, Sonia Maria Noel. His work as conductor soon attracted the attention of Philadelphians, particularly of the late Andrew Wheeler, blue-blooded secretary of the Orchestra. Wheeler felt that Philadelphia also needed some one young, energetic, pliable.

In the 18 years he has been in Philadelphia, Stokowski has stayed just that --young, energetic, pliable. There have been changes in the man himself. He has laid aside Pianist Samaroff, taken to wife instead Evangeline Brewster Johnson, Manhattan socialite and mother of a second Stokowski daughter, Luba. From a simple, naive person he has changed to one who is autocratic, imperiously sure of his countless opinions on acoustics, lighting, radio, printing, painting, the habit of applause (TIME, Nov. 18). At a recent rehearsal he and Pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff almost came to blows over the tempo of a Rachmaninoff concerto concerning which Stokowski felt he knew better than the composer. Indicative, too, is the feeling of his men, changed now from one of adoration to respect. The Philadelphia Orchestra has no baseball team.

Stokowski has permitted himself to develop prima donna tendencies but the public at large continues to encourage them --perhaps because, like a shrewd prima donna, he has stayed picturesque: preserved his figure by exercise and a strict raw-vegetable diet, his fluffy golden hair by washing it every day himself. He is (with Boston's Koussevitzky a close second) the best-groomed conductor in the U. S., although it has often pleased him to shock fastidious gatherings by appearing in golf clothes. In public places it takes him an impressive length of time to remove his coat and arrange it over the "back of the chair, standing so that the whole audience may know that Stokowski has arrived.

But no amount of posing could have built and maintained for Stokowski the sound prestige which he has everywhere. This he owes to the great mental energy which years ago made him learn German, unaided, from a grammar; which on his recent Oriental tour led him to travel for weeks under the most primitive conditions to listen to native music unadorned; which enables him so to concentrate on his music that in his concerts he never needs a score. In matters musical no one can exceed Stokowski's capacity for work. Nor has anyone maintained toward music a more open mind. For, although Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner have stayed his first loves, he has had time and bursts of enthusiasm for Stravinsky, Schoenberg. Sibelius, Skriabin. He has been willing to experiment with a Thereminophone in his orchestra (TIME, Dec. 30), to encourage Hans Earth in his pioneering with the quarter-tone piano (TIME, March 3). His interest and energy have made him one of the world's great conductors. He may offend friends and audiences by his increasing arrogance but few have denied his tremendous musical genius.

* Incorrect. Dr. Crippen murdered one wife, buried her in a cellar. England's famed brides-in-the-bath (3) murderer was the late George Joseph Smith.

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