Apollo

Igor Stravinsky composed his ballet Apollon musagète (“Apollo, Leader of the Muses”) in Nice between July 1927 and January 1928; he made a few revisions in 1947. The work was first performed at the Library of Congress in Washington on April 27, 1928. Serge Koussevitzky introduced it to the Boston Symphony Orchestra repertory that same year with concerts in Cambridge (October 11) and at Symphony Hall (October 12 and 13).

Early in April 1927 Stravinsky received a commission from the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation at the Library of Congress to compose a work for a festival of new music to be held at the library the following April. The piece was to be a small ballet, with not more than a half-dozen dancers, on a subject of his own choosing, which would last about half an hour. The music librarian at the Library of Congress, Carl Engel, wrote to him in July with further information about the place of performance: 

Our hall is not equipped with a regular theater fitted with wings. The present setting is permanent. (I am enclosing a view of it.) Therefore any scenery required will have to be specially adapted and should be technically as simple as possible. 

All his life Stravinsky welcomed stipulations and restrictions as a challenge and as a means of limiting the infinite number of possibilities that the composer faces at the outset of any new work. In this case, the limitations of decor and number of dancers probably played a large role in his decision to write a ballet blanc, in homage to the classical ballet tradition he loved so well, so different from the colorful multiplicity of scene and costume in his early large ballets for Diaghilev. He later wrote of finding that “the absence of many-colored effects and of all superfluities produced a wonderful freshness.” This same necessity for something grandly simple no doubt led to his adoption of a classical subject and even suggested the scoring—for a single orchestral family, thus reducing the range of orchestral color by analogy with the basic white of his visual conception. 

His theme was Apollo, the leader of the Muses. The limitation on the number of dancers forced a reduction from the traditional nine Muses to the three most closely associated with the dance: Calliope (personifying poetry and rhythm), Polyhymnia (mime), and Terpsichore (gesture and eloquent movement). With Apollo himself and two unnamed goddesses, they made up the maximum of six dancers allowed for the performance. The “plot” was almost nonexistent: In the first tableau, a prologue to the main work, the birth of Apollo is shown. This is followed by a series of allegorical dances featuring Apollo himself, Apollo with the Muses, and each of the three Muses individually. In the final apotheosis, Apollo leads the Muses to Parnassus. 

With a score deliberately limited to strings alone to accompany a ballet in white presenting a sequence of formal dances, Stravinsky knew that Apollo ran the risk of too much sameness throughout. This danger was a positive attraction for the composer. As he wrote in his Poetics of Music (delivered as the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1939 and 1940): 

Contrast produces an immediate effect. Similarity satisfies us only in the long run. Contrast is an element of variety, but divides our attention. Similarity is born of a striving for unity…. Variety surrounds me on every hand. So I need not fear that I shall be lacking in it, since I am constantly confronted by it…. Similarity is hidden; it must be sought out, and it is found only after the most exhaustive efforts. When variety tempts me, I am uneasy about the facile solutions it offers me. Similarity, on the other hand, poses more difficult problems but also offers results that are more solid and hence more valuable to me. 

Perhaps it was the subject matter that brought to Stravinsky’s score an Apollonian serenity rarely encountered in his work before. The work is conceived melodically almost throughout, and the writing is mostly diatonic. In several of the movements the first sketches consisted of rhythmic scansion, as if he were writing verse. Indeed, one dance (the variation of Calliope) is explicitly based on the rhythm of French Alexandrine verse. All of this rather astonished the first listeners, who knew Stravinsky most recently as the composer of Oedipus Rex and the Concerto for Piano and Winds. The evident reflections of classical ballet scores told against Stravinsky’s work in the eyes of some beholders. Prokofiev, never a generous spirit in any case, wrote to Miaskovsky: 

I am disappointed in Apollo. The material is poor, taken from all the miserable pockets of Gounod, Delibes, Wagner, and even Minkus. All of this is presented adroitly and skillfully…. Stravinsky missed the most important thing, and the work’s a terrible bore. Yet on the last page he shines and makes his disgusting theme sound convincing. 

Other commentators have referred to the influence of Tchaikovsky or Delibes, the two bulwarks of the repertory of the Russian ballet companies of Stravinsky’s youth (to say nothing of the considerably less worthy composer Minkus). But Robert Craft points out that before beginning the work on Apollo Stravinsky was most interested in studying the quartets of Mozart and Beethoven (in four-hand piano reductions) and the Passions of Bach, as well as the early symphonies—though not the ballets—of Tchaikovsky. Moreover, the frequent use of dotted rhythms—which at times become almost a mannerism in this score—recall the melodic gestures of the eighteenth century more than that of the nineteenth. And it is worth remembering the comments of George Balanchine, who choreographed the first European production of Apollo in 1928, a production that established his reputation; though he is speaking of the dance element here, his remarks apply equally well to Stravinsky’s music: 

Apollon I look back on as the turning point of my life. In its discipline and restraint, in its sustained oneness of tone and feeling the score was a revelation. It seemed to tell me that I could dare not to use everything, that I, too, could eliminate…. It was in studying Apollon that I came first to understand how gestures, like tones in music and shades in painting, have certain family relations. As groups they impose their own laws. The more conscious an artist is, the more he comes to understand these laws, and to respond to them. 

The Prologue of Apollo is shaped like the French overture of the Baroque era, with a slow section of sharply dotted rhythms (which culminates in the rise of the curtain and the birth of Apollo), followed by an Allegro (the appearance of the two goddesses), and closing with a return to the tempo and material of the opening. 

The much longer second tableau begins the series of dances. The first variation for Apollo (the term “variation” in this context refers to dance steps rather than musical material, though that is sometimes varied as well) begins with a cadenza for solo violin that soon turns into a duet for two violins with a plucked accompaniment in the lower strings. At its end, the three Muses appear and there begins a lively pas d’action (an ensemble dance) for the four of them, culminating in a contrapuntal tour de force, with the melody presented in canon in the violas followed a bar later by second violins and first cellos, while first violins play the same tune in stretched-out notes and the second cellos play it much faster. Calliope’s variation is based on Alexandrine verse, with twelve syllables to the fine, presented in six iambic feet divided by a caesura in the middle; Stravinsky’s melody reflects the rhythm of the poetic form. 

Polyhymnia’s variation is almost a perpetual motion exercise of running sixteenth notes, while Terpsichore’s is gentler and more graceful, with a melody of characteristic dotted notes. Now it is Apollo’s turn again, and he has a slower dance characterized by pompous resonant chords alternating with varied passages for solo instruments. He dances a pas de deux with Terpsichore, an expressive movement of singing melody for muted strings. The coda of these dance variations is a lively movement laid out in a series of progressively faster basic tempos. 

Finally, in the tranquil Apotheosis, Apollo leads the Muses towards Parnassus. Stravinsky provides music of great breadth, recalling parts of the Prologue, in a passage that even critics of the score hailed as reflecting “a new style of majestic simplicity, the justification of the whole work.” It is also, perhaps, the most purely Stravinskyan music in the score, the kind of sustained and hushed music that he often found to end a large work; whether it was the Symphonies of Wind Instruments or the Symphony of Psalms, Stravinsky found a way to take the listener, finally, to another world. 

STEVEN LEDBETTER

Steven Ledbetter, a freelance writer and lecturer on music, was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998.