Claude Debussy famously described Richard Wagner’s music as “a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.”
The French composer was not the only one who saw Wagner as the culmination of an old era, rather than the beginning of a new one. Friedrich Nietzsche called Wagner’s music “the song of a dying swan.” And the Austrian critic Eduard Hanslick wrote, “Wagner’s art recognizes only superlatives, and a superlative has no future. It is an end, not a beginning.”
What, then, should we say about Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score The Rite of Spring, a century after it was first performed? Who could deny that this music was the bright glow of a newborn sun on the horizon, three decades after Wagner’s death marked an “end” of musical history? Surely its rhythms were revolutionary and its harmonies were unprecedented, n’est-ce pas?
The events surrounding the Rite’s creation and premiere have become the stuff of legend, making fact and...
Colin Eatock is a Toronto-based writer, critic and composer. Last year his book Remembering Glenn Gould was published by Penumbra Press, and his compact disc Colin Eatock: Chamber Music was released on the Centrediscs label.
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