Musical Portraits : Interpretations of Twenty Modern ComposersRosenfeld, Paul
History
Musical Portraits : Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers
Rosenfeld, Paul
Composers; Music -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Music -- 20th century -- History and criticism
But if they reveal Rimsky's keenness, they reveal his limitations as
well. They bring into sharpest relief the difference between poetic and
superficial expressiveness. For Strawinsky has in many instances
successfully handled materials which Rimsky not quite satisfactorily
employed. The former's early works, in particular "L'Oiseau de feu," and
the first act of the opera "Le Rossignol," related to Rimsky's in style
as they are, have yet a faery and wonder and flittergold that the master
never succeeded in attaining. The music of "L'Oiseau de feu" is really a
fantastic dream-bird. "Petrouchka" has a brilliance and vivacity and
madness that makes Rimsky's scenes from popular life, his utilizations
of vulgar tunes and dances scarcely comparable to it. Nowhere in any of
Rimsky's reconstructions of ethnological dances and rites, neither in
"Mlada" nor in "Sniegourochka," is there anything at all comparable to
the naked power manifest in "Le Sacre du printemps." But it is
particularly in his science of orchestration, the sense of the
instruments that makes him appear to defer to them rather than to impose
his will on them, that Strawinsky has achieved the thing that his
teacher failed of achieving. For Rimsky, despite all his remarkable
sense of the chemistry of timbres, despite his fine intention to develop
further the science which Berlioz brought so far, was prevented from
minting a really new significant orchestral speech through the poverty
of his invention. His orchestration is full of tricks and mannerisms
that pall. One hears the whistling parabolas of the flutes and clarinets
of "Scheherazade" in "Mlada," in "Sadko," in a half-dozen works. The
orchestra that paints the night-sky of "Mlada" rolls dangerously like
that which paints the sea of "Scheherazade" and "Tsar Saltan." The
famous "Chanson indou" seems to float vaguely through half his Oriental
evocations. But the originality and fecundity and inventiveness that he
lacked, Strawinsky to great degree possesses. And so it was given to the
pupil to enter the chamber outside of which the master stood all his
life, and could not enter, and saw only by peering furtively through the
chinks of the door.
Rachmaninoff
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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