Les Noces (“The Wedding”/“Svadebka”) is insane and incredible maximalist work by Igor Stravinsky, the music for a ballet about a Russian peasant wedding. Completed in 1917, first performed in 1923. It is one of the best examples of the nationalist directions music went in before the WWII, where composers dug deep into the roots of their countries, ethnomusicology was established as a discipline, and there was a huge explosion of classical musical creativity as composers tried to synthesize folk and elite traditions. Stravinsky moved from Russia to Paris in 1910, where he wrote Russian themed music for the outfit Ballets Russes.
I like the recording in this album the best. If you haven’t heard of him, Igor Stravinsky is considered to be the most important composer of the 20th century by many. While Les Noces is not his best known work, I think it might be the top one for big fans, and it was apparently his favorite piece he wrote. It’s one of those works that will forever feel new and modern.
It must have been wild to hear it the first time. Imagine what music was like back then, some new stuff, but we’re still coming out of Romanticism.
You’d benefit from first become a little familiar with the genre of Russian sung folk tunes. This and this are beautiful examples. As an aside, the VEK project these recordings originally came from was struck down by YouTube, which is a complete travesty.
Listen to this passage, for about one minute.
I also love this passage from here to the end, capturing the pure singing roots, then expanding on it.
But really listen to all four Tableaus, on youtube here. The whole thing runs just 20 minutes.
Or listen to this recording conducted by Stravinsky. The four pianists are Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, and Roger Sessions. That’s just to give you an idea of how much musicians love this piece.
The piece keeps its feeling of observing something quite ritually mundane and old, a village wedding, while synthesizing it as a completely novel art form. I grew up going to a Shul with my dad on Friday nights, and listening to unrefined participatory singing and chanting from old melodies on ancient poems. Just about any recording of these are tacky and awful with cheesy guitar backings. Stravinsky not only captures the essence of the folk sound, but then injects his own direction. I really wish more folk music could be captured like this. Of course Bartok made his whole career out of this, but the only other time I’ve seen this well done was the treatment of the Vidui confession in The Brutalist which forms the core of the score.
Stravinsky comes up with a new ensemble to suit his project, just singers and percussion. There are 4 pianos, but these are also treated as percussion. It is mechanical and rhythmic, behind something so human and organic, and makes the whole thing sound alien. It’s the kind of piece that makes me love composition, that the human mind could combine all these pieces together and create something so evocative of a specific feeling.
So much has been written about Stravinsky. I find it incredible he was able to create so many genuine masterworks that all feel entirely different. Les Noces is entirely novel and perfectly executed. You listen to Shostakovich or Debussy, and they spend a lifetime refining a new soundscape that they inhabit, and they do it so well. But with Stravinsky, he is all over the place style-wise, but he does it so well, and you can always kind of recognize his sparse, exposed, playful signature. Crazy that he wrote all these radically different pieces in a 10 year span:
- 1910: The Firebird
- 1913: The Rite of Spring
- 1914: Three Pieces for String Quartet
- 1917: Les Noces
- 1918: Histoire du Soldat
- 1920: Pulcinella
At this point he was 38, and he would only die as a cranky old man at 88 having done way more. I think the only other composer I can think of who mastered as many genres is Alfred Schnittke.
For more, I like this video essay.