(The Fox:
burlesque
A burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects. tale sung and played) is a one-act chamber opera-ballet by
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (6 April 1971) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor, later of French (from 1934) and American (from 1945) citizenship. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the ...
, written in 1916. The Russian text by the composer was based on Russian folk tales from the collection by
Alexander Afanasyev
Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev (Afanasief, Afanasiev or Afanas'ev, russian: link=no, Александр Николаевич Афанасьев) ( — ) was a Russian Slavist and ethnographer who published nearly 600 Russian fairy and folk ta ...
.
The full
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
name of the piece is (– The
Fable
Fable is a literary genre: a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particular mo ...
of the Vixen, the Cock, the Cat and the Goat. A burlesque for the stage with singing and music).
History
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
Morges (; la, Morgiis, plural, probably ablative, else dative; frp, Môrges) is a municipality in the Swiss canton of Vaud and the seat of the district of Morges. It is located on Lake Geneva.
History
Morges is first mentioned in 1288 as ' ...
,
Switzerland
). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...
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
''Mavra'' is a one-act comic opera composed by Igor Stravinsky, and one of the earliest works of Stravinsky's neo-classical period. The libretto, by Boris Kochno, is based on Alexander Pushkin's ''The Little House in Kolomna''. Mavra is about ...
'', was given on 18 May 1922 by the
Ballets Russes
The Ballets Russes () was an itinerant ballet company begun in Paris that performed between 1909 and 1929 throughout Europe and on tours to North and South America. The company never performed in Russia, where the Revolution disrupted society. A ...
at the
Théâtre de l’Opéra, Paris. Other sources indicate 2 June as the date of the premiere. It was conducted by
Ernest Ansermet
Ernest Alexandre Ansermet (; 11 November 1883 – 20 February 1969)"Ansermet, Ernest" in ''The New Encyclopædia Britannica''. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 15th edn., 1992, Vol. 1, p. 435. was a Swiss conductor.
Biography
Ansermet ...
with choreography by
Bronislava Nijinska
Bronislava Nijinska (; pl, Bronisława Niżyńska ; russian: Бронисла́ва Фоми́нична Нижи́нская, Bronisláva Fomínična Nižínskaja; be, Браніслава Ніжынская, Branislava Nižynskaja; – Febr ...
and decorations and costumes by
Mikhail Larionov
Mikhail Fyodorovich Larionov ( Russian: Михаи́л Фёдорович Ларио́нов; June 3, 1881 – May 10, 1964) was a Russian avant-garde painter who worked with radical exhibitors and pioneered the first approach to abstract Ru ...
. 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
Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev ( ; rus, Серге́й Па́влович Дя́гилев, , sʲɪˈrɡʲej ˈpavləvʲɪdʑ ˈdʲæɡʲɪlʲɪf; 19 August 1929), usually referred to outside Russia as Serge Diaghilev, was a Russian art critic, pat ...
staged a revival with the
Ballets Russes
The Ballets Russes () was an itinerant ballet company begun in Paris that performed between 1909 and 1929 throughout Europe and on tours to North and South America. The company never performed in Russia, where the Revolution disrupted society. A ...
with choreographed by
Michel Fokine
Michael Fokine, ''Mikhail Mikhaylovich Fokin'', group=lower-alpha ( – 22 August 1942) was a groundbreaking Imperial Russian choreographer and dancer.
Career Early years
Fokine was born in Saint Petersburg to a prosperous merchant and a ...
. Stravinsky was not happy with the revival, saying, "
twas ruined chiefly by some jugglers Diaghilev had borrowed from a circus." Stravinsky regretted
Chagall
Marc Chagall; russian: link=no, Марк Заха́рович Шага́л ; be, Марк Захаравіч Шагал . (born Moishe Shagal; 28 March 1985) was a Russian-French artist. An early modernism, modernist, he was associated with se ...
's refusal of a commission to do the sets.
Synopsis
This is a moralizing story, a farmyard fairy tale about
Reynard the Fox
Reynard the Fox is a literary cycle of medieval allegorical Dutch, English, French and German fables. The first extant versions of the cycle date from the second half of the 12th century. The genre was popular throughout the Late Middle Ages, a ...
, 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 , Stravinsky employs here the singers as part of the orchestra, and the vocal parts are not identified with specific characters.
Details about the score
Publication
Geneva
Geneva ( ; french: Genève ) frp, Genèva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevra ; rm, Genevra is the List of cities in Switzerland, second-most populous city in Switzerland (after Zürich) and the most populous city of Romandy, the French-speaki ...
: A. Henn, 1917;
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
: J. & W. Chester, 1917;
Vienna
en, Viennese
, iso_code = AT-9
, registration_plate = W
, postal_code_type = Postal code
, postal_code =
, timezone = CET
, utc_offset = +1
, timezone_DST ...
: . 1917; (as )
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...
: Muzyka, 1973.
Duration c. 15–20 minutes.
Dedication: ""
Scoring
Singers: 2
tenors
A tenor is a type of classical male singing voice whose vocal range lies between the countertenor and baritone voice types. It is the highest male chest voice type. The tenor's vocal range extends up to C5. The low extreme for tenors is wid ...
, 2
basses
Bass or Basses may refer to:
Fish
* Bass (fish), various saltwater and freshwater species
Music
* Bass (sound), describing low-frequency sound or one of several instruments in the bass range:
** Bass (instrument), including:
** Acoustic bass ...
Ensemble:
flute
The flute is a family of classical music instrument in the woodwind group. Like all woodwinds, flutes are aerophones, meaning they make sound by vibrating a column of air. However, unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is a reedless ...
(doubling
piccolo
The piccolo ( ; Italian for 'small') is a half-size flute and a member of the woodwind family of musical instruments. Sometimes referred to as a "baby flute" the modern piccolo has similar fingerings as the standard transverse flute, but the so ...
),
oboe
The oboe ( ) is a type of double reed woodwind instrument. Oboes are usually made of wood, but may also be made of synthetic materials, such as plastic, resin, or hybrid composites. The most common oboe plays in the treble or soprano range.
A ...
(doubling
cor anglais
The cor anglais (, or original ; plural: ''cors anglais''), or English horn in North America, is a double-reed woodwind instrument in the oboe family. It is approximately one and a half times the length of an oboe, making it essentially an alto ...
),
clarinet
The clarinet is a musical instrument in the woodwind family. The instrument has a nearly cylindrical bore and a flared bell, and uses a single reed to produce sound.
Clarinets comprise a family of instruments of differing sizes and pitches ...
(doubling E clarinet),
bassoon
The bassoon is a woodwind instrument in the double reed family, which plays in the tenor and bass ranges. It is composed of six pieces, and is usually made of wood. It is known for its distinctive tone color, wide range, versatility, and virtuo ...
, 2
horns Horns or The Horns may refer to:
* Plural of Horn (instrument), a group of musical instruments all with a horn-shaped bells
* The Horns (Colorado), a summit on Cheyenne Mountain
* ''Horns'' (novel), a dark fantasy novel written in 2010 by Joe Hill ...
,
trumpet
The trumpet is a brass instrument commonly used in classical and jazz ensembles. The trumpet group ranges from the piccolo trumpet—with the highest register in the brass family—to the bass trumpet, pitched one octave below the standard ...
, percussion (
timpani
Timpani (; ) or kettledrums (also informally called timps) are musical instruments in the percussion family. A type of drum categorised as a hemispherical drum, they consist of a membrane called a head stretched over a large bowl traditionall ...
,
triangle
A triangle is a polygon with three Edge (geometry), edges and three Vertex (geometry), vertices. It is one of the basic shapes in geometry. A triangle with vertices ''A'', ''B'', and ''C'' is denoted \triangle ABC.
In Euclidean geometry, an ...
,
tambourine
The tambourine is a musical instrument in the percussion family consisting of a frame, often of wood or plastic, with pairs of small metal jingles, called "zills". Classically the term tambourine denotes an instrument with a drumhead, though ...
with
bells,
tambourine
The tambourine is a musical instrument in the percussion family consisting of a frame, often of wood or plastic, with pairs of small metal jingles, called "zills". Classically the term tambourine denotes an instrument with a drumhead, though ...
without bells, cylindrical
drum
The drum is a member of the percussion group of musical instruments. In the Hornbostel-Sachs classification system, it is a membranophone. Drums consist of at least one membrane, called a drumhead or drum skin, that is stretched over a she ...
,
cymbal
A cymbal is a common percussion instrument. Often used in pairs, cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various alloys. The majority of cymbals are of indefinite pitch, although small disc-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs soun ...
s,
bass drum
The bass drum is a large drum that produces a note of low definite or indefinite pitch. The instrument is typically cylindrical, with the drum's diameter much greater than the drum's depth, with a struck head at both ends of the cylinder. Th ...
),
cimbalom
The cimbalom (; ) or concert cimbalom is a type of chordophone composed of a large, trapezoidal box on legs with metal strings stretched across its top and a damping pedal underneath. It was designed and created by V. Josef Schunda in 1874 in ...
(or
piano
The piano is a stringed keyboard instrument in which the strings are struck by wooden hammers that are coated with a softer material (modern hammers are covered with dense wool felt; some early pianos used leather). It is played using a keyboa ...
), 2
violin
The violin, sometimes known as a ''fiddle'', is a wooden chordophone (string instrument) in the violin family. Most violins have a hollow wooden body. It is the smallest and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in the family in regular ...
s,
viola
The viola ( , also , ) is a string instrument that is bow (music), bowed, plucked, or played with varying techniques. Slightly larger than a violin, it has a lower and deeper sound. Since the 18th century, it has been the middle or alto voice of ...
,
cello
The cello ( ; plural ''celli'' or ''cellos'') or violoncello ( ; ) is a Bow (music), bowed (sometimes pizzicato, plucked and occasionally col legno, hit) string instrument of the violin family. Its four strings are usually intonation (music), t ...
and
double-bass
The double bass (), also known simply as the bass () (or by other names), is the largest and lowest-pitched bowed (or plucked) string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra (excluding unorthodox additions such as the octobass). Similar i ...
.
Translations
The French translation by
C. F. Ramuz appears in the original
vocal score
The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound production i ...
. A German translation by Rupert Koller is in the Chester study score and an English translation by Rollo H. Myers in the current vocal score bears the copyright date 1956. It is somewhat modified on the ''Stravinsky conducts Stravinsky'' recording; a more though-going revision heard on
Robert Craft
Robert Lawson Craft (October 20, 1923 – November 10, 2015) was an American conductor and writer. He is best known for his intimate professional relationship with Igor Stravinsky, on which Craft drew in producing numerous recordings and books.
...
's 2005 recording is offered as the composer's own. Later, however, he told Craft: "I prefer to hear
tin Russian or not at all."
Discrepancies
There are many discrepancies between full and vocal scores, particularly the PV's extra bass drum beat at the beginning, the study score's downbeat at the start of the allegro (not heard on Stravinsky's recording), the rebarring between figures 21 and 22, and the PV's missing third beat of the bassoon before figure 24.
Score and music sample
Stravinsky first developed here an original technique of
composition
Composition or Compositions may refer to:
Arts and literature
*Composition (dance), practice and teaching of choreography
*Composition (language), in literature and rhetoric, producing a work in spoken tradition and written discourse, to include v ...
that was almost unknown in the European classical tradition, though quite typical of
folk music
Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be called world music. Traditional folk music has b ...
. The main features of this are the repetition of small, simple melodic phrases (called in
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
), often in
syncopated rhythm, with an irregular
meter
The metre (British spelling) or meter (American spelling; see spelling differences) (from the French unit , from the Greek noun , "measure"), symbol m, is the primary unit of length in the International System of Units (SI), though its prefi ...
(changing the
time signature
The time signature (also known as meter signature, metre signature, or measure signature) is a notational convention used in Western musical notation to specify how many beats (pulses) are contained in each measure (bar), and which note value ...
almost in every bar); the multi-voiced texture is not a real
polyphony
Polyphony ( ) is a type of musical texture consisting of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody, as opposed to a musical texture with just one voice, monophony, or a texture with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords, h ...
, but rather a
heterophony
In music, heterophony is a type of texture characterized by the simultaneous variation of a single melodic line. Such a texture can be regarded as a kind of complex monophony in which there is only one basic melody, but realized at the same time ...
, representing
monophony or a “ragged
unison
In music, unison is two or more musical parts that sound either the same pitch or pitches separated by intervals of one or more octaves, usually at the same time. ''Rhythmic unison'' is another term for homorhythm.
Definition
Unison or per ...
”, where the
melody
A melody (from Greek language, Greek μελῳδία, ''melōidía'', "singing, chanting"), also tune, voice or line, is a Linearity#Music, linear succession of musical tones that the listener perceives as a single entity. In its most liter ...
of one instrument is accompanied and embellished with the fragments of the same melody. For example:
Recordings
''key: conductor – coq (tenor 1)/renard (tenor 2)/chat (bass 1)/chèvre (bass 2) – year recorded – first label''
*Craft – Harmon/Hess/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
References
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, . 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
Robert Lawson Craft (October 20, 1923 – November 10, 2015) was an American conductor and writer. He is best known for his intimate professional relationship with Igor Stravinsky, on which Craft drew in producing numerous recordings and books.
...
, ''Conversations with Stravinsky''. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980 (©1959).
* Stravinsky, Igor, ''An Autobiography''. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998 (©1936). (Originally published New York: Simon & Schuster).
hostwritten by Walter Nouvel
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Russian-language operas
Operas by Igor Stravinsky
Operas
One-act operas
Ballets by Bronislava Nijinska
Ballets Russes productions
1922 operas
1922 ballet premieres