Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/187

Rh thing different. "La musique est trop bete," he said once ironically, "pour exprimer autre chose que la musique". In such an extraordinary work as The Nightingale we find him making little or no attempt at representation. The bird does not sing like the little brown warbler; instead Stravinsky has endeavored to write music which would give the feeling of the bird's song and the effect it made on the people in his lyric drama to the auditors in the stalls of the opera house. As for Strauss's use of orchestral color the German is the merest tyro when compared to the Russian. There is some use of the whole-tone scale in The Firebird, and elsewhere in Stravinsky, but it is not a predominant use of it. In this "conte danse" he also suggests the Pelleas et Melisande of Debussy in his continent use of sound and the mystery and esotericism of his effect. Stravinsky is more of an expert than Moussorgsky; he handles his medium more freely (has anyone ever handled it better?) but he still preaches the older Russian's doctrine of truth of expression, a doctrine which implies the curt dismissal of all idea of padding.

But all these composers and their contemporaries, and the composers who came before them, have one quality in common; they all use the orchestra of their time, or a bigger one. Strauss, to be sure, increases the number of instruments, but he still utilizes a vast number of violins and violas massed against the otfcer instruments, diminishing in number according to the volume of sound each makes. He divides his strings constantly, of course; they do not all play alike as the violins, say, in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, but they often all play at once.

Stravinsky experimented at first with the full orchestra and he even utilized it in such late works as Petrouchka and The Nightingale. However, in his search for "pure tone" he used it in a new way. In Petrouchka, for example, infrequently you will hear more than one of each instrument at a time and frequently two, or at most three, instruments playing simultaneously will be sufficient to give his idea form. The entire second scene of this mimed drama, is written for solo piano, occasionally combined with a single other instrument. At other times in the action the bassoon or the cornet, even the triangle has the stage. And when he wishes to achieve his most complete effects he is careful not to use more than seven or eight instruments, and only one of each.

He experimented still further with this principle in his Japanese songs, for voice and small orchestra (1912). The words are by Akahito, Mazatsumi, and Tsaraiuki. The orchestra, to