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‘Le Sacre du Printemps’: The Revisions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2010

Robert Craft
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Extract

The 1921 orchestra score of Le Sacre du printemps, the first to be published, differs greatly from the original (1913) version. In a letter to an unidentified French correspondent, 9 January 1918, Stravinsky says that the printing of the first edition was interrupted by the war, and that he possesses only one copy of the proofs. A year later, answering a request by Felix Delgrange to perform the Sacre, the composer writes says

…105 musicians are required and you have only 80. Also, it is necessary to follow my markings. Furthermore, the only orchestra parts in existence are in my possession. (Letter of April, 1919)

Type
Research Article
Information
Tempo , Issue 122 , September 1977 , pp. 2 - 8
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

Notes

page 2 note 1 The reduction for piano 4-hands (R.M.V. 196) was published even before the first performance of the ballet.

page 2 note 2 ‘If you have the proofs of the Sacre to be corrected, I am at your service’, Ansermet wrote to Stravinsky, 27 July, 1914.

page 2 note 3 French conductor and cellist. In a letter of 2 November, 1916, Delgrange inquires about a cello sonata that Stravinsky apparently promised to compose.

page 2 note 4 The problem of the parts did not seem to concern Stravinsky when he wrote to Ansermet, 14 March, 1916: ‘After the colossal success of Petrushka in Rome, conducted by Toscanini, he has said that he will play the Sacre next year’. Nor does the composer mention the parts as an obstacle when answering a request from the Netherlands Opera, Amsterdam, 23 March, 1917, to give ten performances. But, then, Stravinsky's answer (29 March) is confined to explaining that the Sacre ‘is not an opera but a ballet’. In another instance, too, when Blaise Cendrars wrote to Stravinsky proposing that he negotiate with Abel Gance for a film of the Sacre (letter of 17 August, 1918), the fact of the single set of parts did not enter into Stravinsky's decision.

page 2 note 5 On 14 July 1916, Stravinsky telegraphed Diaghilev in San Sebastian, giving the R.M.V.'s Russian address: ‘Editions Russes de Musique, Pont de Marichaux 6, Moscow’.

page 3 note 1 Frl. M. Eichelberger was apparently related to Stravinsky's nanya, Bertha Essert. Both women came from Königsberg, and on the day of Bertha's death, 28 April, 1917, Stravinsky sent a telegram informing Frl. Eichelberger. She wrote from Königsgberg, the next day, expressing the wish to visit the grave, and indicating that Bertha has sent letters describing events in the Stravinsky household.

page 3 note 2 Massine's name did not replace Nijinsky's in the contract of the Société des Auteurs until 1962, when, on 10 January, at Massine's request, Stravinsky signed two copies of a new ‘Bulletin de Declaration’. This categorizes Massine's version as an ‘adaptation’.

page 3 note 3 ‘Do not forget to give me your proofs of the Sacre score’, Ansermet wrote to Stravinsky on 1 October.

page 4 note 1 The programme notes for the concert quote extensively from Stravinsky's Montjoie! article of May 1914, apparently with his permission.

page 4 note 2 In Amsterdam, 28 February 1926. The Sacre was to have been given in Stravinsky's original programme with the New York Philharmonic in January 1925, but after part of a rehearsal he withdrew the piece for lack of time. Clarence Mackay wrote to him, asking him to re-consider and offering an extra rehearsal, but Stravinsky answered that this would not be sufficient. Rumours circulated to the effect that Stravinsky's conducting technique had not been adequate for the difficulties of the Sacre—which Wilhelm Furtwāngler presented with the Orchestra later in the month.

page 4 note 3 Stravinsky was concurrently composing the opening chorus and first aria of Oedipus Rex.

page 5 note 1 This is a two-stave skeleton score, upper treble line and bass, from /192/ to the end.

page 6 note 1 With the Orchestra Straram, 7, 8, 9 (two sessions), and 10 May.

page 6 note 2 According to a letter from Röder, in Leipzig, to Paitchadze, in Paris, 7 November, 1929, the manuscript was sent to Stravinsky in Talloires, 15 August 1929, together with a corrected proof score. Röder's letter also says that the composer returned the proofs with more corrections and demanded a second set. Writing to Paitchadze, 29 October 1929, Stravinsky says: ‘It is already about two weeks ago, when I was still in Paris, that I sent the second proofs of the Sacre to] Fyodor Vladimirovitch] Weber [the then director of the Berlin branch of the Russischer Musik Verlag]’.

The manuscript full score was in the possession of the Editions Russes de Musique until 1947, when Boosey & Hawkes acquired it from Kussevitzky. It was loaned to the New York Public Library for an exhibition in the spring of 1962, then given by the publisher to the composer for his 80th birthday. (Letter from E. Roth to Stravinsky in Hamburg, 14 June, 1962.) The composer then had it placed in a bank vault in Geneva from which it was removed on at least one occasion in order to make a photocopy. In Zurich, on 11 October, 1968, Stravinsky had the score removed from the Geneva bank and made a gift of it to his wife.

page 7 note 1 ‘Goossens is quite ready to come to Paris for two or three days to see you and to discuss various questions about [the Sacre]. Are the score and parts in your hands at present?’ (Letter from Kling, H., London, 12 January, 1921, to Stravinsky, Hotel Continental, ParisGoogle Scholar). Goossens himself wrote soon after saying that he had attended all of the rehearsals for the Sacre in London in 1913.

page 7 note 2 On 20 November, 1948, Ansermet, in Geneva, wrote to Stravinsky, in Hollywood. ‘I have just given the Sacre with the new Boosey & Hawkes score, in which I have found numerous errors that were in the old one as well. Would you like me to send my errata—which I am taking with me for my performance in Cleveland?’ Stravinsky answered on 27 November thanking Ansermet but asking him to send the list of errors directly to Boosey & Hawkes in New York, ‘In the name of my young friend, Robert Craft, who will be in charge of reviewing the materials with other correctors and with myself when I will be in New York’. Then on 8 February 1949, when Ansermet wrote to ask ‘whether the motive

is ever intended to be

Stravinsky realized that the conductor had never understood the idea of the dialogue, which is that one form of the figure occurs in the trombones, the other in the upper winds.

page 7 note 3 Completed 1 December, 1943. According to Stravinsky's contract, 21 September 1944, this was commissioned by AMP in 1941 for $500·00.

page 7 note 4 Stravinsky repeatedly denied that the orchestra could be reduced, though on 20 April 1945, in an effort to persuade him to make a new version using fewer instruments, the Leeds Music Company went so far as to draft an agreement offering him a tempting sum. On 26 December 1948, he answered a letter from Eugene Ormandy: ‘I never found it possible to arrange the Sacre for a smaller orchestra’. And in a letter to Robert Rudolf, 14 June 1954, Stravinsky says: ‘…I am not interested in furthering the career of the Rite … It is already played out of all proportion to my other works and I do not believe that the large orchestra is an obstacle…” Yet Stravinsky permitted Rudolf to attempt the reduction in fulfillment of a Master of Arts Degree. Ironically, Rudolf's standard orchestra version, which would have'horrified Stravinsky, is now widely played in the United States, where the Sacre is not protected by copyright.

page 8 note 1 Stravinsky wrote to Dr. Julius Alf of the Dusseldorf Opera, July 10, 1953, that the 1943 version ‘improved the sonority and vigor of some chords’.

page 8 note 2 Stravinsky first heard the Sacre with the 1943 Danse sacrale at a rehearsal of the North German Radio Orchestra conducted by this writer, in Venice, September 1958.

page 8 note 3 Made in a single session, 1·30 to 6 p.m., 4 April, 1940, under the supervision of the late Goddard Lieberson. An anecdote told by the late Dagmar Godowsky concerning the events of that afternoon was confirmed by Stravinsky when Miss Godowsky's memoirs appeared. She wrote that ‘(Bruno) Zirato called me. There was a crisis. “Miss Godowsky, Stravinsky has locked himself in the bathroom. You have got to come down and get him out.”’ (From First Person Plural, New York, 1958, p. 239Google ScholarPubMed.) Stravinsky's third and final recording of the Sacra was made with a pick-up orchestra in a ballroom of the St. George Hotel, Brooklyn, 4 January 1960.