The Soldier’s Tale

The Soldier’s March

The Soldier’s Violin

The Little Concert

Tango-Waltz-Ragtime

The Devil’s Dance

Stravinsky compiled two suites from The Soldier’s Tale, one in eight movements scored as in the original staged version for a mixed ensemble of seven instruments (which was first performed under the direction of Ernest Ansermet at the Wigmore Hall in 1920) and one in five movements arranged for violin, clarinet and piano in 1919. The trio version was made for the dedicatee of The Soldier’s Tale, Werner Reinhart, who was not only an accomplished amateur clarinettist but also very rich - which might well explain why, although it is regarded as a serious lapse of taste by one eminent authority, the composer was prepared to risk compromising the distinctive sound of the original score by transcribing much of it for piano.

Actually, the essential item in The Soldier’s Tale is the fiddle which the Soldier is carrying in his haversack as he tramps down “the hot and dusty road” on his way home on leave in the opening March and which he takes out to play as he rests by a stream. “It didn’t cost much,” he says, “the tone’s not rich, you have to keep screwing it up to pitch” - which is precisely the impression Stravinsky gives in the inspired roughness of his fiddle writing in The Soldier’s Violin. The violin part is the same here as in the original, while the piano fills in mainly for the double bass accompaniment and the clarinet supplies the wind parts.

The Little Concert - in which the Soldier celebrates the recovery of his fiddle from the Devil who, much as Mephistopheles buys Faust’s soul, has bought it from him - is also primarily violin music with a prominent part for clarinet in the original too. The three dances, including the charmingly uncomprehending Ragtime, are played by the Soldier on his fiddle to rouse the sick Princess and win her hand in marriage. Once again, although the piano has to imitate percussion instruments in the opening Tango, the scoring is not very different from the original. The Devil’s Dance, in which the Soldier fiddles the Devil into exhaustion, is a brilliant display of rhythmic energy in any version.

libretto by C.F. Ramuz

English version by Michael Flanders and Kitty Black???

The Soldier’s March

Airs by a Stream

Pastorale

Airs by a Stream (reprise)

The Soldier’s March (reprise)

Royal March

Little Concert

Three Dances: Tango - Valse - Ragtime

The Devil’s Dance

Little Chorale

The Devil’s Song

Great Chorale

Triumphal March of the Devil

Music theatre starts here. When Stravinsky and his Swiss writer friend C.F. Ramuz collaborated on The Soldier’s Tale in 1918 they did not deliberately set out to create a new form. Their first aim was to write a theatre piece which wouldbe neither too expensive nor too difficult to perform in war-time conditions. They even hoped to make money out of it by touring the production to Geneva and other places in Switzerland after the opening in Lausanne.

As it happened, most of the actors and musicians succumbed to the Spanish flu epidemic raging round Europe at the time and the tour had to be cancelled. But that one performance in a tiny theatre in Lausanne had proved that it was possible to create a great piece of musical theatre with very limited means. The composer required no more than two each of woodwind, brass and strings – clarinet and bassoon, cornet and trombone, violin and double bass –together with a percussionist to manage three or four drums, a cymbal, tambourine, and triangle. Given a narrator to set the scene, the librettist required very little in the way of staging and no more than two actors and a dancer.

The Soldier’s Tale had little effect on Stravinsky’s own generation of composers since it was not much performed in the 1920s and 1930s and it took another war to create the conditions in which it would flourish. In the last forty years or so, however, it has been an inspiration to the music theatre movement, partly because of its economy but for other reasons too. Foremost among them is its informality, the deliberately illogical way in which the Narrator takes the words out of the Soldier’s mouth and speaks for him or steps into the action and gives him advice. The Princess, the dancing part in a fully staged version, speaks only through the Narrator.

As for the music, its greatest quality is that it has set the story of the Soldier and the Devil in its own very distinctive sound world. Of course, certain Stravinsky scores - particularly those written in Switzerland during or just after the war, like the Three Pieces for String Quartet and Ragtime - have something in common with it but nothing like the same atmosphere. Not even    two other stage works, based on Afanasiev’s collection of Russian texts, Renard and Les Noces, share more than a little of the same ground. The composer’s aim seem to have been a popular sound liberated from all opera-house and concert-hall associations and drawing instead on various folk, church, dance-hall and jazz sources to achieve it. The violin, the instrument representing the soul the Soldier sells to the Devil, plays a prominent part but in an unschooled style peculiar to this particular fiddler (Stravinsky recalled some of it from a dream he had had of a young gypsy girl playing a violin at the roadside).

The music is tinged moreover by a harmonic or rhythmic irony so that it seems to present a cynical commentary on much of the story. No soldier, for example, could march with dignity to the opening Soldier’s March, which keeps tripping up on odd bars of 3/4 or 3/8 unpredictably distributed among the prevailing 2/4. The Soldier is treated with more affection when he plays the violin - nearly always in double stops and with not much respect for conventional harmony, usually in dance rhythms but thoughtfully, as if he was used to improvising alone. There is genuine sympathy for him, too, when he discovers he has been tricked by the Devil and clarinet and bassoon echoes his loneliness in the Pastorale. The Royal March which begins in 5/8 and incorporates a paso doble Stravinsky once heard in a street in Seville, is another ironic episode.

The most brilliant violin playing is in the Little Concert where the Soldier, having won his violin back from the Devil, plays it to arouse the sick Princess and restore her to health. He retains his distinctive style and even some of his favourite motifs when he accompanies her in three dances - Tango, Waltz, Ragtime - the last derived by Stravinsky not from the real thing, which he had never heard, but from printed examples shown to him by Ernest Ansermet (who was to conduct the first performance of The Soldier’s Tale).

The Devil’s Dance, in which the Soldier fiddles his rival to exhaustion, is his last musical word, however. The ironic treatment of the Lutheran chorales indicates what little use there is in moralising in the face of the realities of human weakness and devilish cunning. Although the Soldier’s violin music is recalled in the Triumphal March of the Devil, it is the demonic element that prevails in the virtuoso drumming of the final bars.