Divertimento (1928/1934)

Sinfonia -

Danses suisses

Scherzo

Pas de deux: Adagio - Variation - Coda

Before he got to know Samuel Dushkin, Stravinsky had no trust in virtuoso instrumentalists. What is more, as he said, he “took no pleasure in the blend of strings struck in the piano with strings set in vibration with the bow.” So it is an extraordinary tribute to the taste, tact, musical wisdom and technical accomplishment of the Polish-born American violinist    – an Auer pupil the composer first met in Wiesbaden in 1931 – that Stravinsky was persuaded to collaborate with Dushkin not only on the Violin Concerto but also on the Duo Concertant for violin and piano and a series of arrangements for the same two allegedly incompatible instruments, including the Divertimento, the Suite Italienne and six or seven shorter pieces.

The violin-and-piano Divertimento and the very much more familiar orchestral Divertimento are both drawn from Stravinsky’s 1928 ballet Le Baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss) and were put together at much the same time in 1934. Although the material is not quite the same – the violin-and-piano version omits the Valse at the end of Danses suisses and the introduction to the following Scherzo –    the reduction of the orchestral score to a duo was accomplished with surprisingly little loss in terms of authenticity in sound. This could well be because the source of the Baiser de la fée ballet music, a dozen piano pieces and half a dozen songs by Tchaikovsky, is itself small in scale. Obviously, in a ballet based on Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Ice Maiden and set in the Swiss mountains there are dramatic episodes but few of them are heavily orchestrated and violin and piano are equal to most of them.

Stravinsky’s tribute to Tchaikovsky was not restricted to giving new life and a new identity to some of his less familiar tunes. There are other, more or less subtle allusions. The Sinfonia, for example, opens with a distant echo of the frosty octaves at the beginning of the First Symphony, “Winter Dreams” – which is entirely appropriate to music based on a scene where the Boy, lost in the snow with his Mother, receives his first chilling kiss from the ice-maiden Fairy. Although the warmer melody presented as the main theme of the movement is more natural violin material perhaps than the two stormy episodes, the characteristically muscular Stravinsky-Dushkin sound of double-stopped lower strings, the fiercely penetrative use of the upper register and a percussive pizzicato all contribute to the vividly suggestive fate-laden atmosphere.

Danses suisses is based on an episode in the ballet which takes place eighteen years later, at a Swiss village fête where the Boy and his Fiancée join in the country dances. Obviously, Tchaikovsky’s tunes are more Russian than Swiss but the rustic violin writing, much of it reminiscent of that of The Soldier’s Tale (written in Switzerland more than ten years earlier), sets the scene effectively enough. While it cannot have been easy to find a violin-and-piano parallel to the horn and trombone lines which are such a prominent feature in the orchestral version of the Danses suisses, the capricious Scherzo – taken from the scene in the mill where the Boy and his Fiancée have been lured by the Fairy – might almost have been conceived for violin and piano in the first place.

The Pas de deux, danced in the ballet by the Boy and his Fiancée at the mill, clearly presented Stravinsky with a problem. His policy of awarding the melodic line more or less exclusively to the violin obscures the duet element, which is clear enough in the dialogue between solo cello and clarinet in the ballet, and there is no piano equivalent of the pinched harp sound that accompanies them. The clarinet line and the flute cadenza transfer to the violin quite naturally, however, and the brilliant fantasy of the quicker Variation inspires the most imaginative violin scoring of all. As for the emphatically bowed and yet mischievously witty Coda, with its grotesque allusion to None but the Lonely Heart, it gives little idea of the dreadful fate awaiting the Boy as the Fairy carries him off to deliver the second and last icy kiss.