5 - Russian rites: Petrushka, The Rite of Spring and Les Noces

Summary

The development of Stravinsky's musical language from Petrushka through The Rite of Spring to Les Noces represents Stravinsky's emergence as a modernist composer. In these three works, definitive Russian subject-matter and content is articulated in an increasingly radical language. The expression of Stravinsky's Russian inheritance within the context of modernism – common ground shared by these three works – is the subject of this chapter.

Petrushka

Petrushka, as is well known, was conceived in the aftermath of the success of The Firebird and repeated the earlier work's collaborative context: it was written for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Following the public success of The Firebird, Petrushka provides what Richard Taruskin describes as ‘Stravinsky's process of self-discovery’. This self-discovery takes the form of a recently acquired technical confidence in conjunction with a new-found modernism. Stephen Walsh has written that ‘the emergence of Stravinsky as a modernist, with an individual manner unlike any other, can be dated with some precision to his early work on Petrushka’. This ‘individual manner’ consists largely in the adaptation of borrowed materials, a process which immediately suggests a relationship between past and present and sets up points of reference.