I hardly spent a moment at home for most of the day. Went for coffee and a stroll with my mother, then accompanied my wife for errands. By the time we returned home, the sun was setting on another unseasonably warm January day in Southern California. As we approached our driveway, an Amazon driver emerged from inside, rounded the corner, and quickly vanished. And when I approached my doorstep, there it was: the new Pentatone CD conducted by Daniel Reuss.
Stravinsky’s late music is among my most cherished. Recordings of this vital, nourishing music are infrequent; live performances in my area even rarer. A few years ago, Salonen devoted a program to some of these late works in a Stravinsky series he conducted with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Disney Hall was filled to around 80% capacity. Did these people know what they were about to listen to?, I wondered. Evidently they didn’t. No sooner did the Requiem Canticles begin than the hall started emptying out — conspicuously. Because the program was played without an intermission. An hour and twenty minutes later, only about 30% of the audience remained.
“Stravinsky, after all these years, is still is not very popular with audiences”, wrote Harold C. Schonberg in 1967. “Everybody will say he is the world's greatest composer, and almost everybody will make enormous detours to avoid his music”.
But Stravinsky is one of the greatest composers and his late music among his finest. That most people don’t think so is irrelevant. (A quick browse at the various quack theories, beliefs, “lifehacks”, sociopathic behaviors, and so on that are amplified by social media is enough to make any rational person permanently skeptical of the vox populi.) It took decades for listeners to begin to come around to late Beethoven. So when Milton Babbitt wrote that he didn’t care if people listened, he had a point. Some people will only ever like that which is instantly gratifying — or vetted by consensus. For a serious composer, why even bother trying to please listeners like that? Artistic creation isn’t a democracy, much though people seem to believe it is. That which is beautiful, great, and enduring simply is. If it goes over their heads or they simply refuse to grapple with it, that’s their loss. Art lives on.
Schonberg concluded his essay by predicting that Stravinsky’s legacy would endure because of his impact on music history rather than on listeners. Even if, that achievement alone is a lot more than most composers can ever dream of. And if someone like myself, who did not come from a musical background and dropped out of high school on top of that, can enjoy works like Threni or the Requiem Canticles, then maybe there’s hope for those listeners for whom these works continue to mystify.
All it takes is the willingness to put your ears to work.