mikrokosmos:

Stravinsky – L’Histoire du Soldat

This is an…interesting work, to say the least. Part ballet, part spoken melodrama, it is a setting of a Russian folktale. The story follows a soldier who is tricked by the devil to sell his fiddle for three years of his life, and a book that can tell the future. After he finds out he’s been cheated out of time, the devil encourages him to use the book to gain a fortune. Which he does, but no amount of money can bring back the joy he had in life with his family and friends, who are all convinced he’s died. He comes across the devil, and buys back his old fiddle, only to find he’s forgotten how to play. He tears up the book, and now he has no family, no wealth, and no joy. He later learns that a nearby princess is looking for a man to marry. When he gets to the castle to offer for her hand, he finds the devil has disguised himself as a great fiddle player. The narrator tells the soldier that the devil still has his hold on him because he still has the devil’s money. So the soldier challenges the devil to a card game, and loses, and the devil is happy at first until he realizes the soldier is the real winner now that he is free of the devil’s grasp. Now that he has his violin skills back, the soldier wards off the devil by challenging him to a violin contest and playing better and more aggressively than the devil could even try. He marries the princess. But it isn’t a happy ending, because the devil promises that if the soldier ever leaves the castle, then the devil will take his soul again. He lives with the princess, but still misses his first girlfriend, and his mother, since he was taken away from both at the beginning of this mess. He is tricked by this temptation to leave the castle, and the devil wins. The moral is that the soldier’s downfall has everything to do with his greed, the inability to satisfy the desire to have more. Musically, the work is pretty intense. Bitonality, chamber orchestration, and time signatures that seem to change with each bar…it has every Stravinsky-ism one could wish for. Personally, I wish this tale had less…”tale”, but the suite feels a bit empty without the voices rhythmically telling the story over the music. Like anything by Stravinsky, it’s a bit of a shock on the ears, something that is a good hundred years old yet sounds as fresh as ever.