Seven of the Most Unruly Audiences in Classical Music History

by Emily E. Hogstad, Interlude

Nowadays, classical music audiences are usually pretty tame. The worst that happens at an average concert is that people glare at someone else for applauding at the wrong time.

It wasn’t always this way, though. Today we’re looking at seven times when classical music audiences became unruly…and what upset them so much!

1. The Barber of Seville by Gioachino Rossini

Rossini’s The Barber of Seville

20 February 1816 in Rome

Nowadays, we aren’t terribly familiar with composer Giovanni Paisiello, but back in the early nineteenth century, he was a respected rival of Gioachino Rossini.

In 1782, Paisiello wrote an opera called Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville). It was based on a libretto by Giuseppe Petrosellini, which in turn was based on a book by famed creative Frenchman Pierre Beaumarchais.

This opera turned out to be the biggest success of Paisiello’s entire career.

In 1815, Gioachino Rossini also looked to Beaumarchais for inspiration and decided to write his own adaptation of The Barber of Seville. (At least he used a different libretto from Paisiello.)

Obviously, audiences raised an eyebrow: it felt like an attack on beloved Paisiello. 

Rossini’s version of Barber premiered in Rome in February 1816, and disaster ensued. There was hissing and jeering through the whole thing (some of it paid for by Paisiello’s allies). To add insult to injury, accidents started happening onstage, too.

However, fortunately for Rossini, the next night’s performance went smoother. Rossini’s Barber of Seville began gaining popularity. (For a long time, though, Paisiello’s was more popular.)

2. Tannhäuser by Richard Wagner

Poster of Tannhäuser performance in Paris

14 March 1861 in Paris

The premiere of Tannhäuser occurred in 1845.

Sixteen years later, in 1861, a performance of Tannhäuser was scheduled in Paris at the Paris Opéra.

This was such an important event that Wagner rewrote the original to conform to Parisian tastes and rules. (For example, operas at the Opéra traditionally had ballet sequences.)

However, instead of inserting the ballet in the second act, as was customary, Wagner wrote it into the story during the first act. 

At the first performance, the audience was restless during various portions of the opera. By the second performance, restlessness had evolved into outright disturbances.

The aristocratic Jockey Club was offended by the placement of the ballet in the first act; they were used to it being in the second act so that they could finish eating dinner and arrive late without missing the dancing. (To be clear, by “missing the dancing”, we mean “missing ogling the women dancers.”)

Wagner compounded the problem by refusing to pay the claque. In France, claques were groups of audience members whose reactions could be bought and used to shape public perception of production, a bit like Instagram influencers today. However, Wagner refused to give into the French claque, with disastrous results for Tannhäuser.

During the second night, the Jockey Club disturbed the performance by blowing whistles. After the same thing happened on the third night, Wagner withdrew the opera.

3. Altenberg Lieder by Alban Berg

31 March 1913 in Vienna

Alban Berg, 1920s

This concert was so unruly that it earned its own name: the Skandalkonzert (Scandal Concert).

It happened on 31 March 1913 in Vienna’s Great Hall of the storied Musikverein. The program included works by Anton Webern, Alexander Zemlinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alban Berg. It was scheduled to conclude with a performance of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, but the event was canceled before it could be played.

Two works provoked audiences’ ire: Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 and Berg’s Five Orchestral Songs on Picture-Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg. 

The crowd was angry at Schoenberg because a few weeks earlier, he had (rudely, people thought) refused to accept applause after a performance of his Gurrelieder in protest of conservative Viennese taste.

However, the work that broke the public was Berg’s discordant Five Orchestral Songs, of which the second and third were played.

Audiences hated the works. They called in loud voices for Berg to be committed to a mental institution. This was an especially cutting criticism since the writer Peter Altenberg (who had written the texts) was in a mental institution himself at the time.

Soon, audience members began assaulting other audience members. Apparently, concert organizer Erhard Buschbeck slapped an audience member in the face (which resulted in this concert getting the secondary nickname Watschenkonzert, or Slap Concert).

4. The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky

Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring © chethamsschoolofmusic.com

29 May 1913 in Paris

In May 1913, the daring, fashionable ballet company Ballets Russes mounted their production of The Rite of Spring.

The Rite of Spring was meant to evoke a kind of barbarous “prehistoric” pagan Russia.

Different classes and cliques reacted to the ballet’s music and choreography in different ways, resulting in scattered disturbances in the theater’s auditorium. 

Over the years, the stories about this premiere got wilder and wilder. Two years after the performance, author Carl van Vechten claimed that a fellow audience member pounded fists on his head. By the 1920s, music critics were hinting at a more extreme audience reaction than had actually occurred, and by the 1940s, commentators were using the word “riot” for the first time to describe what had happened.

In the end, this concert made this list not because of what actually happened, but because of the famous stories that came out about the night.

5. The Awakening of a City, The Meeting of Automobiles and Aeroplanes by Luigi Russolo

Luigi Russolo, ca. 1916

21 April 1914 in Milan

In 1913, avant-garde painter and Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo wrote a manifesto called The Art of Noises.

He believed that the mechanized sounds of modern urban life could revolutionize concert music, if only they could be accurately and reliably reproduced in a hall.

To help him achieve his goal, he created an orchestra of new instruments called intonarumori, or noise instruments.

These instruments replicated everything from a car engine to a spatula scraping a dish. 

On 21 April 1914, the first public concert of the intonarumori was given. People were so upset with his ideas that projectiles were thrown onto the stage even before the curtain opened (Russolo believed that they were students egged on by officials at the Milan Conservatory).

Once the instruments began playing, some of the instrument operators went to physically assault audience members. Apparently, the fights lasted for half an hour, and Russolo continued conducting the ensemble throughout the whole thing.

6. George Antheil Premieres

Berenice Abbott: George Antheil, 1927

4 October 1923 in Paris

American composer George Antheil was known as a bad boy of classical music, unafraid to alienate audiences with his vision of music of the future.

Like many artistic Americans in the 1920s, Antheil moved to Paris and rented an apartment above the famous Shakespeare and Co. bookstore, known as a hub for leading art figures. From there, he got to know and befriend many of the movers and shakers of 1920s Paris.

In 1923, he was asked to make his debut at a performance of the Ballets suédois (Swedish Ballet) in Paris. He performed a handful of works, including his Mechanism, Airplane Sonata, and Sonata Sauvage. 

Apparently the audience wasn’t prepared for such abrasive music. To Antheil’s delight, a hubbub developed.

He described it later: “People were fighting in the aisles, yelling, clapping, hooting! Pandemonium! … the police entered, and any number of surrealists, society personages, and people of all descriptions were arrested.” He noted with satisfaction that “Paris hadn’t had such a good time since the premiere of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps.”

A variety of creative celebrities were present, including Picasso, Cocteau, Milhaud, and Satie (who apparently was heard yelling, “What precision! What precision!”).

The Inhuman Woman 1924

Adding another layer to the fracas is the fact that the riot was staged, as filmmaker Marcel L’Herbier was filming the crowd for his film L’Inhumaine, which required footage of an unruly crowd (starting at around 59:30 in the video above).

7. Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny by Kurt Weill

Kurt Weill

9 March 1930 in Leipzig

In Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s musical theater work Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a truck transporting three fugitive criminals breaks down out of the range of law enforcement.

The three criminals decide to found a city and devote it to fulfilling human desires of all kinds: desires for pleasures like money, good food, alcohol, and sex. 

People can’t make enough money to sustain themselves in Mahagonny, and deflation eventually hits the city. The government shifts from an anything-goes attitude to prohibiting certain behaviors.

After a hurricane that everyone feared would destroy the city misses Mahagonny, the rules revert back to “anything goes”, demonstrating how the city’s morals change on a dime according to the whims of those in power.

In the hubbub, a citizen named Jimmy Mahoney bets all of his money on a prizefight and loses. He cannot pay his bills and is prosecuted and killed by the state for not having enough money.

The satire’s seemingly anti-capitalist message, combined with Brecht’s sympathy for communist thought, combined to make Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny a controversial work.

Nazi sympathizers were especially unhappy. Austrian critic Alfred Polgar described the night of the premiere: “Belligerent shouts, hand-to-hand fighting in some places, hissing, applauding… enthusiastic fury mixed with furious enthusiasm.”

When the work came to Frankfurt, 150 Nazi sympathizers stormed the auditorium and set off fireworks. A Communist sympathizer was killed later that night.

Shortly after the Berlin run of the opera came to a close, the Nazis gained power in the Reichstag elections, paving the way for Hitler. Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was banned by the Nazis in 1933.

Five of the Angriest Classical Music Feuds

 By Emily F. Hogstad, Interlude

Artistic types are famous for their big personalities and the beef and rivalries that result. Over the centuries, classical composers have had more than their fair share of tiffs. Today we’re looking at the stories and personalities behind five of the most famous feuds in classical music history.

Salieri v. Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri © slavicwritings.com

Everyone who saw the 1984 movie “Amadeus” knows the story. Antonio Salieri was a mediocre composer who was blindingly jealous of his young and impish colleague, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In fury, he sabotages his career – and ultimately, his life.

That said… It’s not true. In real life, Salieri was a generally well-liked and well-regarded man, and a prolific and talented composer. He even taught Mozart’s son after Mozart died. And he didn’t poison Mozart.

The core of the legend came from letters that Mozart and his father wrote to each other in the 1780s, positing the existence of an “Italian cabal” that was seeking to block Mozart’s ascendance. The Mozart men were irritated that the Austrian court gave such prominence to the work of Italians; they believed that Austrian artists should reign supreme at court. This wider feud between Italian and Germanic styles of music persisted long after Mozart and Salieri, and perhaps consequentially, a rumor arose after their deaths that Salieri outright poisoned Mozart. So there was indeed a feud between the two composers, but it was a bit one-sided, and it wasn’t as dramatic – or deadly – as Hollywood suggests. 

Brahms v. Wagner

Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner © operalibera.net

After Beethoven’s revolutionary contributions to orchestral music, composers had to make tough decisions about how they would respond. Would they continue to embrace and refine the more instrumental-based genres that Beethoven had embraced, like the symphony or the sonata? Or would they throw out the old rule book and push forward to create new musical concepts and languages, as seen in program music? What genre would win the battle for cultural relevance: symphonies or operas?

This argument grew incredibly heated in the mid-1800s and became known (perhaps a bit melodramatically) as the War of the Romantics. Generally speaking, Johannes Brahms, Felix Mendelssohn, and Robert and Clara Schumann were seen as the “conservatives” in this struggle, while figures like Liszt, Berlioz, and Wagner were seen as the “radicals.” A great deal of ink was spilled delineating the positions of the two camps. In the end, Wagner never wrote a symphony, and Brahms never wrote an opera.

Although their music was very different, Brahms appreciated at least some of Wagner’s music. “I’m the best of Wagnerians,” he told his friends in private. He even collected original Wagner manuscripts (much to Wagner’s irritation). That said, Brahms wasn’t such a fan of the loud extra-musical opinions that Wagner blared in various screeds and pamphlets.

Debussy v. Ravel

Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel © wfmt.com

The music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel is often jammed together on compilation discs with titles like “French Impressionism.” But just because the two men were writing music at the same time in the same city doesn’t mean they were best friends.

They met around 1900 when Debussy’s stepson Raoul Bardac, a classmate of Ravel’s, introduced them. Ravel was thirteen years younger and at a different stage of artistic and professional development than Debussy was, and Ravel admired the older man’s work intensely, to the point where he was criticized in the press for copying Debussy too closely.

In 1903, a hubbub arose when Debussy wrote a piece that seemed to be inspired by the Spanish-sounding strains in Ravel’s music. It was understandable for a younger man to copy an older one, the train of thought went, but should the older one be the composer copying the younger one? Then in 1913 the two – without knowing the other one was embarking on the same project – set some of Stéphane Mallarmé’s new poetry to music, before the poetry had been published. Their mutual distrust grew.

Another scandalous issue closer to home had caused the two composers to drift apart emotionally. Raoul Bardac introduced his (married) mother to (the married) Debussy…and the two fell in love and ran off together. Debussy’s first wife was left without a husband, and Ravel was one of the Parisians who made a financial contribution to her. The feud became official. 

Mendelssohn v. Liszt

Franz Liszt and Felix Mendelssohn

We wrote an entire article about the rivalry between Felix Mendelssohn and Franz Liszt! But to make a long story short, these two men got caught up in the War of the Romantics, just like Brahms and Wagner did. On a more personal note, Liszt once rewrote portions of Mendelssohn’s G-minor piano concerto, which understandably greatly irritated Mendelssohn. They also had an encounter at a salon gathering that could easily have turned into a disaster, when Liszt debuted yet another arrangement that he’d made of one of Mendelssohn’s work, the Capriccio, Op. 5…but Mendelssohn managed to smooth it over by joking afterward and congratulating Liszt on his extraordinary performance. 

Stravinsky v. Prokofiev

Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky, 1920 © History of Music Facebook Page

Stravinsky and Prokofiev are often mentioned in the same sentence simply because they both were Russian composers, born in 1882 and 1891 respectively. But just like in the case of Ravel and Debussy, that didn’t guarantee they got along.

Although Stravinsky once magnanimously praised Prokofiev’s ballet “Chout” as “the single piece of modern music [he] could listen to with pleasure”, the relationship eventually deteriorated. By the following year, when “Chout” was being run through for a possible revival, Stravinsky started an argument with Prokofiev, telling him he was wasting his time writing opera. The younger man retorted that Stravinsky “was in no position to lay down a general artistic direction” since Stravinsky himself “was not immune to error.”

Prokofiev later described what came next: Stravinsky “became incandescent with rage” and “we almost came to blows and were separated only with difficulty.”

Igor Stravinsky - his music and his life

Born: June 17, 1882 Lomonosov Russia

Died: April 6, 1971 (aged 88) New York City New York

Awards And Honors: Grammy Award (1967) Grammy Award (1962) Grammy Award (1961)

Notable Works: string quartet “Oedipus Rex” “Persephone” “Requiem Canticles” “Symphony in C” “Symphony in Three Movements” “The Firebird” “The Flood” “The Rake’s Progress” “The Rite of Spring” “The Song of the Nightingale” “The Wedding” “Threni”

Movement / Style: Neoclassical art

Igor Stravinsky, in full Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky, (born June 5 [June 17, New Style], 1882, Oranienbaum [now Lomonosov], near St. Petersburg, Russia—died April 6, 1971, New York, New York, U.S.), Russian-born composer whose work had a revolutionary impact on musical thought and sensibility just before and after World War I, and whose compositions remained a touchstone of modernism for much of his long working life. He was honoured with the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal in 1954 and the Wihuri Sibelius Prize in 1963.

Life and career

Stravinsky’s father was one of the leading Russian operatic basses of his day, and the mixture of the musical, theatrical, and literary spheres in the Stravinsky family household exerted a lasting influence on the composer. Nevertheless his own musical aptitude emerged quite slowly. As a boy he was given lessons in piano and music theory. But then he studied law and philosophy at St. Petersburg University (graduating in 1905), and only gradually did he become aware of his vocation for musical composition. In 1902 he showed some of his early pieces to the composer Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (whose son Vladimir was a fellow law student), and Rimsky-Korsakov was sufficiently impressed to agree to take Stravinsky as a private pupil, while at the same time advising him not to enter the conservatory for conventional academic training.

Rimsky-Korsakov tutored Stravinsky mainly in orchestration and acted as the budding composer’s mentor, discussing each new work and offering suggestions. He also used his influence to get his pupil’s music performed. Several of Stravinsky’s student works were performed in the weekly gatherings of Rimsky-Korsakov’s class, and two of his works for orchestra—the Symphony in E-flat Major and The Faun and the Shepherdess, a song cycle with words by Aleksandr Pushkin—were played by the Court Orchestra in 1908, the year Rimsky-Korsakov died. In February 1909 a short but brilliant orchestral piece, the Scherzo fantastique was performed in St. Petersburg at a concert attended by the impresario Serge Diaghilev, who was so impressed by Stravinsky’s promise as a composer that he quickly commissioned some orchestral arrangements for the summer season of his Ballets Russes in Paris. For the 1910 ballet season Diaghilev approached Stravinsky again, this time commissioning the musical score for a new full-length ballet on the subject of the Firebird.

The premiere of The Firebird at the Paris Opéra on June 25, 1910, was a dazzling success that made Stravinsky known overnight as one of the most gifted of the younger generation of composers. This work showed how fully he had assimilated the flamboyant Romanticism and orchestral palette of his master. The Firebird was the first of a series of spectacular collaborations between Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s company. The following year saw the Ballets Russes’s premiere on June 13, 1911, of the ballet Petrushka, with Vaslav Nijinsky dancing the title role to Stravinsky’s musical score. Meanwhile, Stravinsky had conceived the idea of writing a kind of symphonic pagan ritual to be called Great Sacrifice. The result was The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps), the composition of which was spread over two years (1911–13). The first performance of The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées on May 29, 1913, provoked one of the more famous first-night riots in the history of musical theatre. Stirred by Nijinsky’s unusual and suggestive choreography and Stravinsky’s creative and daring music, the audience cheered, protested, and argued among themselves during the performance, creating such a clamour that the dancers could not hear the orchestra. This highly original composition, with its shifting and audacious rhythms and its unresolved dissonances, was an early modernist landmark. From this point on, Stravinsky was known as “the composer of The Rite of Spring” and the destructive modernist par excellence. But he himself was already moving away from such post-Romantic extravagances, and world events of the next few years only hastened that process.

Britannica Quiz Music: Fact or Fiction?

Stravinsky’s successes in Paris with the Ballets Russes effectively uprooted him from St. Petersburg. He had married his cousin Catherine Nossenko in 1906, and, after the premiere of The Firebird in 1910, he brought her and their two children to France. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 seriously disrupted the Ballets Russes’s activities in western Europe, however, and Stravinsky found he could no longer rely on that company as a regular outlet for his new compositions. The war also effectively marooned him in Switzerland, where he and his family had regularly spent their winters, and it was there that they spent most of the war. The Russian Revolution of October 1917 finally extinguished any hope Stravinsky may have had of returning to his native land.

By 1914 Stravinsky was exploring a more restrained and austere, though no less vibrantly rhythmic kind of musical composition. His musical production in the following years is dominated by sets of short instrumental and vocal pieces that are based variously on Russian folk texts and idioms and on ragtime and other style models from Western popular or dance music. He expanded some of these experiments into large-scale theatre pieces. The Wedding, a ballet cantata begun by Stravinsky in 1914 but completed only in 1923 after years of uncertainty over its instrumentation, is based on the texts of Russian village wedding songs. The “farmyard burlesque” Renard (1916) is similarly based on Russian folk idioms, while The Soldier’s Tale (1918), a mixed-media piece using speech, mime, and dance accompanied by a seven-piece band, eclectically incorporates ragtime, tango, and other modern musical idioms in a series of highly infectious instrumental movements. After World War I the Russian style in Stravinsky’s music began to fade, but not before it had produced another masterpiece in the Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920).

The compositions of Stravinsky’s first maturity—from The Rite of Spring in 1913 to the Symphonies of Wind Instruments in 1920—make use of a modal idiom based on Russian sources and are characterized by a highly sophisticated feeling for irregular metres and syncopation and by brilliant orchestral mastery. But his voluntary exile from Russia prompted him to reconsider his aesthetic stance, and the result was an important change in his music—he abandoned the Russian features of his early style and instead adopted a Neoclassical idiom. Stravinsky’s Neoclassical works of the next 30 years usually take some point of reference in past European music—a particular composer’s work or the Baroque or some other historical style—as a starting point for a highly personal and unorthodox treatment that nevertheless seems to depend for its full effect on the listener’s experience of the historical model from which Stravinsky borrowed.

The Stravinskys left Switzerland in 1920 and lived in France until 1939, and Stravinsky spent much of this time in Paris. (He took French citizenship in 1934.) Having lost his property in Russia during the revolution, Stravinsky was compelled to earn his living as a performer, and many of the works he composed during the 1920s and ’30s were written for his own use as a concert pianist and conductor. His instrumental works of the early 1920s include the Octet for Wind Instruments (1923), Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (1924), Piano Sonata (1924), and the Serenade in A for piano (1925). These pieces combine a Neoclassical approach to style with what seems a self-conscious severity of line and texture. Though the dry urbanity of this approach is softened in such later instrumental pieces as the Violin Concerto in D Major (1931), Concerto for Two Solo Pianos (1932–35), and the Concerto in E-flat (or Dumbarton Oaks concerto) for 16 wind instruments (1938), a certain cool detachment persists.

In 1926 Stravinsky experienced a religious conversion that had a notable effect on his stage and vocal music. A religious strain can be detected in such major works as the operatic oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927), which uses a libretto in Latin, and the cantata Symphony of Psalms (1930), an overtly sacred work that is based on biblical texts. Religious feeling is also evident in the ballets Apollon musagète (1928) and in Persephone (1934). The Russian element in Stravinsky’s music occasionally reemerged during this period: the ballet The Fairy’s Kiss (1928) is based on music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and the Symphony of Psalms has some of the antique austerity of Russian Orthodox chant, despite its Latin text.

In the years following World War I, Stravinsky’s ties with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes had been renewed, but on a much looser basis, and the only new ballet Diaghilev commissioned from Stravinsky was Pulcinella (1920). Apollon musagète, Stravinsky’s last ballet to be mounted by Diaghilev, premiered in 1928, a year before Diaghilev’s own death and the dissolution of his ballet company.

In 1936 Stravinsky wrote his autobiography. Like his six later collaborations with Robert Craft, a young American conductor and scholar who worked with him after 1948, this work is factually unreliable. In 1938 Stravinsky’s oldest daughter died of tuberculosis, and the deaths of his wife and mother followed in 1939, just months before World War II broke out. Early in 1940 he married Vera de Bosset, whom he had known for many years. In autumn 1939 Stravinsky had visited the United States to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University (later published as the The Poetics of Music, 1942), and in 1940 he and his new wife settled permanently in Hollywood, California. They became U.S. citizens in 1945.

During the years of World War II, Stravinsky composed two important symphonic works, the Symphony in C (1938–40) and the Symphony in Three Movements (1942–45). The Symphony in C represents a summation of Neoclassical principles in symphonic form, while the Symphony in Three Movements successfully combines the essential features of the concerto with the symphony. From 1948 to 1951 Stravinsky worked on his only full-length opera, The Rake’s Progress, a Neoclassical work (with a libretto by W.H. Auden and the American writer Chester Kallman) based on a series of moralistic engravings by the 18th-century English artist William Hogarth. The Rake’s Progress is a mock-serious pastiche of late 18th-century grand opera but is nevertheless typically Stravinskyan in its brilliance, wit, and refinement.

The success of these late works masked a creative crisis in Stravinsky’s music, and his resolution of this crisis was to produce a remarkable body of late compositions. After World War II a new musical avant-garde had emerged in Europe that rejected Neoclassicism and instead claimed allegiance to the serial, or 12-tone, compositional techniques of the Viennese composers Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and especially Anton von Webern. (Serial music is based on the repetition of a series of tones in an arbitrary but fixed pattern without regard for traditional tonality.) According to Craft, who entered Stravinsky’s household in 1948 and remained his intimate associate until the composer’s death, the realization that he was regarded as a spent force threw Stravinsky into a major creative depression, from which he emerged, with Craft’s help, into a phase of serial composition in his own intensely personal manner. A series of cautiously experimental works (the Cantata, the Septet, In Memoriam Dylan Thomas) was followed by a pair of hybrid masterpieces, the ballet Agon (completed 1957) and the choral work Canticum Sacrum (1955), that are only intermittently serial. These in turn led to the choral work Threni (1958), a setting of the biblical Lamentations of Jeremiah in which a strict 12-tone method of composition is applied to chantlike material whose underlying character recalls that of such earlier choral works as The Wedding and the Symphony of Psalms. In his Movements for piano and orchestra (1959) and his orchestral Variations (1964), Stravinsky refined his manner still further, pursuing a variety of arcane serial techniques to support a music of increasing density and economy and possessing a brittle, diamantine brilliance. Stravinsky’s serial works are generally much briefer than his tonal works but have a denser musical content.

Though always in mediocre health (he suffered a stroke in 1956), Stravinsky continued full-scale creative work until 1966. His last major work, Requiem Canticles (1966), is a profoundly moving adaptation of modern serial techniques to a personal imaginative vision that was deeply rooted in his Russian past. This piece is an amazing tribute to the creative vitality of a composer then in his middle 80s.

Like that of so many masters, Stravinsky’s fame rests on only a few works and one or two of his more important achievements. In The Rite of Spring he presented a new concept of music involving constantly changing rhythms and metric imbalances, a brilliantly original orchestration, and drastically dissonant harmonies that have resonated throughout the 20th century. Later Stravinsky was regarded as the typical rootless exile, a creative chameleon who could dart from style to style but who never recaptured the creative depth of his first masterpieces. Yet the more spectacular modernisms of The Rite of Spring belong to the evolution of Russian nationalist music from Modest Mussorgsky to Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, while that work’s feeling of “primitive dynamism” is a period feature that is found in much music of the early 20th century. Nor were the discordant harmonies of The Rite of Spring entirely new in 1913, though Stravinsky was the first to pursue Claude Debussy’s purely sensual approach to chords into a harmony that was not itself obviously beautiful.

The percussive violence and barbaric tone colours of The Rite of Spring did, however, conceal a new kind of rhythmic sensibility and an empirical attitude to sonority that can be traced through all of Stravinsky’s later music, whatever its apparent stylistic allegiance. Stravinsky’s approach was empirical in that he was not prepared to accept established musical practice about development but instead preferred to subject his musical material to a personal system of tests. Working always at the piano, he experimented endlessly with different chord combinations and spacings, explored asymmetrical metrical patterns, and used devices of prolongation and elision to break down the tradition of symmetrical phrasing. Given such sonorities as basic sound objects, rhythm is then regarded as a cumulative process, an adding together of such objects into varied groups, as opposed to the varied subdivision of regular groups that forms the basic method of classical music. Not surprisingly, this procedure tended to work against the past musical styles that Stravinsky used as models in his Neoclassical works, which probably accounts for their intriguing rhythmic obliquity, just as his experimental attitude to chords produced curious distortions of classical harmony. Stravinsky worked in the same way, in fact, throughout his life, and the same basic principles of construction and dynamics inform Threni and the Requiem Canticles as Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. He had immense influence on the way later composers have felt pulse, rhythm, and form.

Stravinsky rejected the Germanic idea that thematic development is the only basis of serious writing. From early on, he preferred a sculptural approach in which the sound object is all-important and large musical structures are achieved cumulatively, with much repetition allied to subtle variations in interior detailing. In his longer works, especially the sacred and theatrical ones, this tends toward an effect of ritual. The power of Oedipus Rex and the Symphony of Psalms, as of The Rite of Spring, is the power of a solemn reenactment, and it was in his sense of the motion and specific gravity of such solemnities that Stravinsky was at his most forceful and inspired.

Russia's Most Influential Composer...

12,699 views Nov 22, 2022

A look at one of Russia's most influential composers - a teacher of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and many others, and composer of such great works as Scheherazade, Antar, and Flight of the Bumblebee.

Who Got It Right and Who Got It Wrong? Critics and Composers

by Maureen Buja

We were looking at a book of musical quotations the other day and found some things that make one so glad to have a sense of perspective.

Here, John Gregory, writing in 1766 in his A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World, had this to say about what composer?

‘[The style of COMPOSER] sometimes pleases by its spirit and a wild luxuriancy … but possesses too little of the elegance and pathetic expression of music to remain long in the public taste.’

Hmmm. So we want a mid-18th century composer who had spirit and a sense of luxury but lacked elegance…. Mozart? Hummel? No, they’re too late. Gregory was referring to the style of the music of Haydn, who, of all composers of his era, has remained in the public taste where so many of his contemporaries have vanished.

Hardy: Joseph Haydn, 1791

We have two composers with two very different views of conductors. The first, a composer, suffered poor performances in the hands of bad conductors:

‘Conducting is a black art.’

The other, a conductor himself, downplayed the difficulties in a letter to his 10-year-old sister:

‘It’s easy. All you have to do is wiggle a stick.’

It was Tchaikovsky who held the first opinion, given in 1909, and Sir Thomas Beecham in the second quote.

Reutlinger: P.I. Tchaikovsky, c. 1888

Sir Thomas Beecham, 1948

Richard Strauss, on the other hand, felt that certain sections of the orchestra needed to be quelled at all times:

‘Never let the horns and woodwinds out of your sight. If you can hear them at all, they are too loud.’

Igor Stravinsky , himself a composer and a conductor, saw danger in the field of conducting:

‘”Great” conductors, like “great” actors, soon become unable to play anything but themselves.’

and

‘Conducting is semaphoring, after all.’

Richard Strauss conducting

Stravinsky conducting

He also viewed conductors as the ‘lapdogs’ of musical life…which poses an interesting question of which side of Stravinsky was making that statement!

Very few composers or performers had anything good to say about critics.

Richard Wagner thought that ‘the immoral profession of musical criticism must be abolished,’ whereas Beecham saw the problem as one of lack of musical feeling, saying ‘…so often they have the score in their hands and not in their heads.’

Aaron Copland thought that ‘if a literary many puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong’.

And the critics strike back:

George Bernard Shaw, when accused of being too critical: ‘No doubt I was unjust; who am I that I should be just?’

Eduard Hanslick, who wielded great power as critic, took an uncritical view of himself: ‘When I wish to annihilate, then I do annihilate.’

Eduard Hanslick

Oscar Wilde found Chopin to be too emotional: ‘After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.’

Sometimes composers are most caustic about their contemporaries. Wagner wondered this about the legacy of Rossini: ‘After Rossini dies, who will there be to promote his music?’

Stravinsky pondered about South American music: ‘Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don’t like, it’s always by Villa-Lobos?’

Some composers write about what they are proudest of. Modest Mussorgsky, known for his songs as much as his symphonic music and opera, said in a letter in 1868 ‘my music must be an artistic reproduction of human speech in all its finest shades’.

Puccini, understating his talents simply said ‘God touched me with His little finger and said “Write for the theatre, only for the theatre.”’

Giacomo Puccini

Rossini, never one to understate his skill, remarked ‘Give me a laundry-list and I’ll set it to music.’

Stravinsky, who was often so far ahead of his contemporaries musically as to be in another world, said ‘Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.’

Elisabeth Luytens, who parlayed her contemporary sound into really effective music for British horror films, called her own style ‘eerie weirdness’.

Elizabeth Lutyens

Opinions, opinions … everyone has opinions. Some of them can make us ponder (‘Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour’ – Rossini), others make us laugh (‘Hell is full of musical amateurs’ – George Bernard Shaw), and others make us angry (‘There are two kinds of music: German music and bad music.’ – H.L. Mencken) – what’s your opinion?

Igor Strawinski, Konzert fuer Klavier und Blaeser 1 Satz Lento Allegro