Jeu de cartes (A Card Game)

First Deal: Introduction - Pas d’action - Dance of the Joker - Waltz-Coda

Second Deal: Introduction - March - Four Solo Variations for the Four Queens, Pas de Quatre Variation for the Four Queens and Coda - March and Ensemble

Third Deal: Introduction - Waltz-Minuet - Presto (Combat between Spades and Hearts) - Final Dance (Triumph of the Hearts)

Stravinsky had always enjoyed playing cards. He liked other games too - Chinese chequers was a regular favourite - but at the time he was getting to work on Jeu de Cartes he was specially fond of poker. That’s one reason why, having been commissioned by American Ballet to write a score on a subject of his own choice, he conceived the notion of basing a scenario on a game of cards. Frivolous inspiration though it was, it coincided very neatly with another, more serious idea, which was a ballet with a malignant character whose ultimate defeat would imply some kind of moral dimension. The Joker would be the villain of the piece. He tried without success to enlist the collaboration of Jean Cocteau - who had furnished the libretto for Oedipus Rex nine years earlier - and ended up by writing the scenario himself in association with M. Malaieff, a friend of his son Theodore.

Most of the score of Jeux de cartes was written in Paris, where Stravinsky was still living at the time, and was completed in December 1936. The work was first performed by American Ballet in New York four months later, after a rehearsal period in which the composer not only made it his business to be in attendance for six hours every day for weeks on end but also insisted on having the costumes re-designed and even on making changes in Balanchine’s choreography - evidently without upsetting the choreographer, who was to devise masterly productions of Orpheus in 1948 and Agon in 1957 as well as several of Stravinsky’s concert works.

The characters in this ballet [according to Stravinsky’s synopsis] are the chief cards in a game of poker, disputed between several players on the green cloth of a card-room. At each deal the situation is complicated by the endless guile of the perfidious Joker, who believes himself invincible because of his ability to become any desired card. There are actually three “deals” each one of which begins with a brisk (Alla breve) introduction based on the same cheerfully noisy tune - derived, it seems, from childhood memories of the stentorian announcement “Ein neues Spiel, ein neues Glück!” (A new game, a new stroke of luck!) that he heard in the casinos of the German spa towns where the Stravinsky family regularly spent its holidays. This grotesque little fanfare is fundamental to the score in several ways. First of all, in its wittily distorted treatment of familiar material, it sets the ironic tone. Then it becomes the source of other themes in the work and, through its several reappearances, it acts as the thread that holds the whole stylistically disparate patchwork together.

During the first deal [the synopsis continues] one of the players is beaten, but the other two remain with even “straights,” although one of them holds the Joker. After the first and longest of the shuffle-and-deal introductions, the card play begins with a friendly pas d’action gently alluding to a variety of classical ballet gestures and featuring a lyrical flute melody presented as a tribute to Charles Lecocq (the amiable composer of Parisian opéra-bouffe in the second half of the nineteenth century). The Joker, however, is rather differently disposed, as he demonstrates in a restlessly vigorous, brilliantly orchestrated solo of runs and leaps. With characteristic self-confidence he appropriates for himself an aggressive version of the dealer’s fanfare, which is introduced by trombones and then taken up by the whole orchestra. The first “deal” ends with a quiet waltz-time echo of the flute melody from the pas d’action.

In the second deal, the hand that holds the Joker is victorious, thanks to four Aces who easily beat four Queens. After the dealer’s fanfare, Hearts and Spades enter to a march based on two themes, the first for trumpets and horns, the second for woodwind and upper strings with a heavy-footed counterpoint on trombones. Securely poised in her faith in her winning powers, each of the four Queens dances a solo variation: the Queen of Hearts is accompanied by a neatly articulated Delibes-style melody which is then taken up in different versions by a fanciful Queen of Diamonds, a Queen of Clubs in turn forceful on woodwind and appealingly graceful on solo strings, and an entertaining Queen of Spades. The fifth variation is an energetic pas de quatre for the Queens together. The March briefly returns before the intervention of an extended coda which gradually thins down the texture to a delicately scored exchange between a solo violin and an oboe and finally relaxes the tension in a melodious horn solo.

Now comes the third deal. The action becomes more and more acute. This time it is a struggle between three “flushes.” Although at first victorious over one adversary, the Joker, strutting at the head of a sequence of Spades, is beaten by a “Royal Flush” in Hearts. This puts and end to his malice and knavery. Once again the dealer’s fanfare follows without a break. Based on a theme that is clearly related to the fanfare, the rhythmically ingenious Waltz-Minuet that follows seems to offer in its more waltz-like episodes a gentle parody of Ravel’s La Valse. There is no doubt, on the other hand, about what popular favourite Stravinsky had in mind for the Presto combat between the Spades and the Hearts, where the violins call on a worryingly altered version of the main theme of the Allegro vivace of Rossini’s Barber of Seville Overture to stress the urgency of the situation. That the Royal Flush in Hearts wins the day is clear enough from the prominence given in a triumphant Final Dance to another variant of the Queen’s theme from the previous “deal.” The violent climax leads into a shortened but conclusive recall of the shuffle fanfare.

The unexpectedly fierce treatment of the Joker at the end of a work which is for the most part so playful in its attitude is perhaps explained by the precarious pre-War context in which it was written. It was in the same spirit that Stravinsky added a warning from the fable of “The Wolves and the Sheep” to his summary of the scenario:

…we must always wage war on evil-doers.

Peace is good in itself,

I agree, but what use is it

With enemies we cannot trust?

Clearly, La Fontaine didn’t believe in appeasement either.