Page:The Dial (Volume 76).djvu/269

Rh invention is not extraordinary; more of the quality of Le Chant du Rossignol than of the Sacre. And still, the work is Strawinsky. It is an idea. The material has a uniform and appropriate colouration. The music is robust, rough to threadbareness, homely. The trumpet and drum begin it, and one hears the village band; and throughout, the musical background has the quality of peasant improvisation, sardonic, humorous, and dramatic, quite in keeping with the spirit of the ancient animal fable which it sets off. It may be the cock's little self-caressful refrain would not have been written had not another cock crowed from off the battlements in Le Coq d'Or. And still, Strawinsky's pattern, in its simplicity, its platitude, and unapparent subtlety, sets one in the bamyard, and into the atmosphere of birch bark shoes and red grinning peasant faces and the cruel and comic tale of primitive life. And it is improbable that any of the flavour of the bright little score failed to manifest itself that Sunday night. The audience saw the living spirit of a composition taken to themselves by instrumentalists and singers and tossed and caught and tossed again with verve and enjoyment. The singers remained stationary; there was very trifling mimetic play. After the "animals" had finished yelling their huzzas normal and falsetto, and while the old fable was enrolling itself, one saw an action as though a ballet were in progress upon the stage where singers and players in evening black sat about and stood. The self-complacency of the cock sunning himself upon his perch and priding himself that he was guarding the house; the hypocritical attitudes of mother fox disguised as a nun and entreating master cock to come down and be confessed; the writhing of poor cock in the hands of the crafty wretch and the fatal curiosity of the latter when cat and goat began their serenading, were there, somehow. One saw them through the ear.

But if Renard is not the greatest Strawinsky, there remains enough of relentless truthfulness to self in the writing to force a new equilibrium on the hearer. The relative brittleness, shrillness, threadbareness of the tonal flow startles; it is somewhat like a flower from which one turns at first, and to which, driven by some inexplicable curiosity, one returns again, to breathe a little less uncomfortably. And still, the International's audience made the grade perfectly. It seems the style of Strawinsky has become "nature." There is a time when every new style seems dissonant