Introduction to Strawinsky's “Orpheus”

Extract

Since Jeux de Cartes a large proportion of the public might have thought that Strawinsky had come to the end of his cycle of “experiments,” of his “trial balloons” in the language of music, and that he had now stabilized on certain formulæ calculated to achieve an easy popular success—clear simplicity of instrumentation, normality of rhythms, sweetness of harmony, condensation of form, a rounding-off of all the corners, greater accessibility of performance, feelings of serenity or gaiety. In sum, it might have been thought that Strawinsky had turned bourgeois, reactionary, with the hand extended to the worldly and complacent audiences of those theatres which are richest and most steeped in tradition. The technicians accused this new Strawinsky of treason in the sacred struggle for the renewal of the language of music; the cultured public accused him of having capitulated in the face of the difficulty of a more austere, hermetic and refined expression in order to abandon himself to expression within a range of feeling altogether easier, more apparent and more immediate. And finally there were those who accused Strawinsky of having quite plainly sold himself to the American taste—uncultured, gross, commercial—for what is striking but easy, preferring, in art as in other things, the standard product to the precious rarity.