Renard (Stravinsky)

In April 1915, Winnaretta Singer, Princesse Edmond de Polignac, commissioned Stravinsky to write a piece that could be played in her salon. She paid the composer 2,500 Swiss francs. The work was completed in Morges, Switzerland in 1916, and Stravinsky himself made a staging plan, trying to avoid any resemblance to conventional operatic staging . He created, rather, a new form of theatre in which the acrobatic dance is connected with singing, and the declamation comments on the musical action. However, the piece was never performed in the salon of the princess. It was not in fact staged until 1922.

The premiere, a double bill with Mavra, was given on 18 May 1922 by the Ballets Russes at the Théâtre de l’Opéra, Paris. Other sources indicate 2 June as the date of the premiere.[1] It was conducted by Ernest Ansermet with choreography by Bronislava Nijinska and decorations and costumes by Mikhail Larionov. Stravinsky remained pleased with Nijinska's "acrobatic Renard, which coincided with my ideas... Renard was also a real Russian satire. The animals saluted very like the Russian Army (Orwell would have liked this), and there was always an underlying significance to their movements."

In 1929, Sergei Diaghilev staged a revival with the Ballets Russes with choreographed by Michel Fokine. Stravinsky was not happy with the revival, saying, "[it] was ruined chiefly by some jugglers Diaghilev had borrowed from a circus."[2] Stravinsky regretted Chagall's refusal of a commission to do the sets.[3]

This is a moralizing story, a farmyard fairy tale about Reynard the Fox, who deceives the Cock, the Cat and the Goat; but in the end they catch and punish him. The Cock is twice tricked and captured by the Fox, only to be rescued each time by the Cat and the Goat. After the Cock's second rescue, the Cat and the Goat strangle the Fox, and the three friends dance and sing. It also contains a slight irony relating to religion and the church – to be invulnerable the Fox wears the black gown of the nun (nuns used the privilege of inviolability in Russia).

As in his later ballet Les noces, Stravinsky employs here the singers as part of the orchestra, and the vocal parts are not identified with specific characters.

Stravinsky first developed here an original technique of composition that was almost unknown in the European classical tradition, though quite typical of folk music. The main features of this are the repetition of small, simple melodic phrases (called in Russian попевки – popevki), often in syncopated rhythm, with an irregular meter (changing the time signature almost in every bar); the multi-voiced texture is not a real polyphony, but rather a heterophony, representing monophony or a “ragged unison”, where the melody of one instrument is accompanied and embellished with the fragments of the same melody. For example:

The first bars of the opening "March"

key: conductor – coq (tenor 1)/renard (tenor 2)/chat (bass 1)/chèvre (bass 2) – year recorded – first label

• Craft – Hess/Harmon/Galjour/Lishner – 1950 – Dial
• Ansermet – Sénéchal/Cuénod/Depraz/Rehfuss – 1956 – Decca
• Boulez – Giraudeau/Devos/Rondeleux/Depraz – 1961 – Disques Adès
• Stravinsky – Shirley/Driscoll/Murphy/Gramm – 1962 – Columbia
• Ansermet – English/Mitchinson/Glossop/Rouleau – 1964 – Decca
• Dutoit – Blazer/Tappy/Huttenlocher/Bastin – 1973 – Erato
• Mihály – Keönch/Gulyás/Polgár/Bordás – 1979 – Hungaroton
• Dunand – Marchisio/Blazer/Brodard/Loup – 1982 – Rencontre
• Chailly – Jenkins-N/Langridge/Hammond-Stroud/Lloyd – 1985 – Decca
• Salonen – Aler/Robson/Wilson-Johnson/Tomlinson – 1990 – Sony
• Ziegler – Harrhy/Hetherington/Donnelly/Cavallier – 1991 – ASV
• Craft – Baker-T/Martin-D/Evitts/Pauley – 1993 – MusicMasters 67110-2
• Wolff – Aler/Kelley/Opalach/Cheek – 1994 – Teldec
• Conlon – Caley/Grivnov/Naouri/Mikhailov – 1999 – EMI

Notes

Sources

• Stravinsky, Igor. Renard: Histoire burlesque chantée et jouée / The Fox: A burlesque in song and dance / Reinecke: Gesungene und Gespielte Burleske, miniature score, text in Russian, French, and German. London: J. & W. Chester Ltd., 1917.
• Stravinsky, Igor. Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons. English translation by Arthur Knodell and Ingolf Dahl, preface by George Seferis. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1939–40. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1947. Reprinted, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1970, ISBN 0-674-67855-9. Originally published in French, as Poétique musicale sous forme de six leçons. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures for 1939–1940. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1942.
• Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft, Conversations with Stravinsky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980 (©1959). ISBN 0-520-04040-6
• Stravinsky, Igor, An Autobiography. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998 (©1936). ISBN 0-393-31856-7 (Originally published New York: Simon & Schuster). [Ghostwritten by Walter Nouvel]