Stravinsky began composing Le Rossignol when he was just an ambitious and talented 25 year old. The first act of this touching fairy tale is written in a Russian impressionistic style reminiscent of Stravinsky’s teacher, the great composer Rimsky-Korsakov. Stravinsky might have finished the work in this vein had he not been sidetracked by commissions from impressario Serge Diaghelev, whose Ballet Russes was taking Paris by storm.
During his first years with the Ballet Russes, Stravinsky had made the one completed act of Le Rossignol into a tone poem for orchestral performance, and seemed perfectly content to leave it at that. But shortly after Le Sacre’s premiere Stravinsky was invited by operatic stage director Alexander Sanin to compose a full-length opera for the Moscow Free Theatre. The most obvious choice of subject was Le Rossignol; yet Stravinsky’s style, philosophy and technique had altered almost beyond recognition since his first attempt at opera. There was the matter of the new harmonic and rhythmic worlds he had discovered with Le Sacre du Printemps. Then there was his newly adopted disdain for opera, a fashionable pose among the Ballet Russes circle, which considered opera a dead art enjoyed only by the vulgar bourgeoisie. But Sanin was offering a lot of money, and the young composer was eager to finally hear his music performed in Russia. After some hesitation, Stravinsky agreed to complete the opera.
The second and third acts of Le Rossignol differ wildly from the first. After the fact Stravinsky attempted to excuse the work’s disjointed nature by pointing out that the first act takes place in nature, while the second and third are set in the Emperor’s lavish and artificial court. In accordance with Stravinsky’s new bias against opera, the finished work was short on singing and long on pantomime and pageant. At the premiere (with the Ballet Russes, after the untimely closure of the Moscow Free Theatre) the voices of the Nightingale and the Fisherman were actually sung from the orchestra pit. A later incarnation of the work, the ballet Le Chant du Rossignol, has proved to be very popular as a concert piece./ Source |
