In rediscovering religion, Stravinsky was, paradoxically, following fashion. The year 1925 was one of newfound sobriety in French culture. Many were pondering a valedictory essay by the recently deceased Jacques Rivière on the “crisis of the concept of literature”; the critic had proposed that the arts were becoming too disinterested, too “inhuman,” and he listed Stravinsky’s “music of objects” among the symptoms of an ethical and spiritual decline. Cocteau, having suffered the loss of his underage lover Raymond Radiguet, fallen into opium addiction, and experienced a hallucinatory epiphany in Picasso’s elevator, returned to Catholicism in June of the same year. Cocteau’s guru was the neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, who believed that modern art could purify itself into an image of God’s truth, into something “well made, complete, proper, durable, honest.”
Stravinsky, too, fell under Maritain’s influence, perhaps chastened when the philosopher criticized the notion of “art for nothing, for nothing else but itself.” After considering the idea of an opera or oratorio on the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, Stravinsky elected to pursue a topic from ancient tragedy, and asked Cocteau to write a French-language adaptation of the story of Oedipus. He then had Cocteau’s text translated into Latin. “The choice [of Latin],” Stravinsky later wrote, “had the great advantage of giving me a medium not dead, but turned to stone and so monumentalized as to have become immune from all risk of vulgarization.” The score instructed: “Only their arms and heads move. They should give the impression of living statues.” This marked a commitment to Rivière’s project of spiritual rehabilitation, to Maritain’s philosophy of art as sacred work.
Cocteau’s involvement meant that Oedipus could go only so far in the direction of solemnity. The Latin declamations were strung together with a self-consciously, satirically pompous French-language narration. Cocteau’s Speaker is so wrapped up in his literary dignity that he sometimes fails to notice what is happening onstage. “And now you will hear the famous monologue, ‘The Divine Jocasta is dead,’ ” he proclaims—but no monologue ensues.
Such self-conscious gestures might have turned Oedipus into another panoply of camp. But Stravinsky was in earnest. “Kaedit nos pestis”—“Plague is upon us”—the chorus chants at the opening, over five booming chords in the key of B-flat minor. On its own, the core progression would sound a bit creaky and clichéd. What adds drama is the bass line, which sticks to the notes of the B-flat-minor triad but gnashes against the changing chords above. The impression, here and throughout the work, is of damaged, decaying grandeur—like acid streaks on cathedral marble. Yet Oedipus is a living statue, as the score instructs. Stravinsky’s alertness to the rhythm of words puts bounce and thrust into the archaic Latin text. The word “moritur,” coming at the end of the three opening gestures, sets in motion a purring triplet figure that propels the work to the end.
The ballet Apollon musagète, the second panel in Stravinsky’s sacred triptych, is a serene spectacle of art in contemplation of itself: the young god Apollo matures and achieves mastery in the company of the muses Calliope, Polyhymnia, and Terpsichore. The scoring, for strings alone, reverses the post-Rite trend toward hard sonorities of winds and brass, which, in a typical feat of chutzpah, Stravinsky now chided his contemporaries for overexploiting. (“The swing of the pendulum was too violent,” he wrote in his Autobiography, as if someone else had set the pendulum in motion.) Apollo floats by on straightforward major-key harmonies and draws on a vein of tender melody; collage-like cutting and layering give way to a smooth, unbroken surface.
In a prior Ballets Russes season, the airy conception of a “white ballet” might have been realized in an annoyingly precious way. With the arrival of George Balanchine, though, Stravinsky found his creative other half. Balanchine’s project of recapturing the equipoise of classical dance through modern choreography—sometimes athletic, sometimes abstract—was the mirror image of Stravinsky’s new style. The union of dance and music suggested a higher union of body and spirit. Boris de Schloezer, who earlier in the de cade had attacked the composer for perpetrating musical jokes, grasped the new Stravinsky when he wrote, “Logically, after Apollo, he ought to give us a Mass.”
This Stravinsky more or less did, in an attitude of grief. In August 1929 the composer was stunned by the sudden death of Diaghilev, his discoverer, protector, and substitute father, and his distress was intensified by the fact that he had not had the chance to make proper farewells; the two men had lately bickered and fallen out. Meanwhile, Yekaterina grew sicker and more devout. Icons and candles filled the Stravinsky home, and there was talk of building a private chapel. Out of this fervid atmosphere arose the Symphony of Psalms.
The texts come from the Latin vulgate versions of Psalms 38, 39, and 150, but the music has something intangible in common with Russian Orthodoxy. For the American critic Paul Rosenfeld, it “called to our mind the mosaic-gilded interior of one of the Byzantine domes … from whose vaulting the Christ and his Mother gaze pitilessly down upon the accursed human race.” The first chord fulfills Rosenfeld’s cathedral metaphor: E-minor triads in the bass and treble are arranged around columnar Gs in the middle registers. Throughout, the habitually economical composer enlarges his sense of space. The setting of Psalm 150 (“Praise God in his holy place, praise him in the heavenly vault of his power”) goes on for a relative eternity of twelve minutes.
The Symphony is not all frozen architecture. Stravinsky’s trademark rhythms make subtle appearances. At one point in Psalm 150, the chorus lightly syncopates the phrase “Lau-da-te do-mi-nuumm,” with the “do” falling between the second and the third beats and the last syllable prolonged to fill out the bar—almost like the Charleston. And in the raptly contemplative coda, the timpani repeat a four-note pattern over forty-two bars, the quasi-minimalist ostinato creating an almost imperceptible tension with the prevailing meter of three beats to a bar—a bounce of an ethereal, incorporeal kind.
Almost from the beginning, listeners worried that Stravinsky’s wizardly creations were marred by an inner coldness. Ned Rorem, an American composer firmly committed to the “French” rather than the “German” politics of style, has asked himself: “Do I adore Stravinsky as I adore others who are perhaps less overwhelming—Ravel, for example, or Poulenc? I am dazzled by his intelligence and scared by his force, but my heart is not melted.” If anything by Stravinsky can melt the heart, it is the Symphony of Psalms. The great nonexpresser and maker of objects lets down his guard, giving us a glimpse of his terrors and longings. Notice a telltale repetition of words in the first two psalms that Stravinsky chose to set: “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry … I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry.” William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, wrote that a condition of desperate mental flailing is often the prelude to spiritual renewal: “Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! help!”
Help for what? Stravinsky’s biography provides plentiful fodder for speculation, but the underlying impetus may have been a growing discomfort with modernity itself—panic in the face of speed and noise. Reality, into which so many artists yearned to plunge, turned out to be an engulfing medium. Young aesthetes went off to the trenches of the Great War hoping to acquire a manly finish; the survivors were shattered rather than invigorated by the ordeal. Perhaps for this reason, those who had earlier attempted to escape the temple of “pure music” now tried to find their way back in. In the end, the Germanic philosophy of musical universalism, according to which a few set forms and procedures would serve the composers of all nations, once more functioned as a bulwark against an increasingly indifferent culture. As in Yeats’s poem, European composers embraced the sublimity of artifice, “to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”