And the courtiers who come into the
imperial bedchamber expecting to find the monarch dead, find him well
and glad in the morning sunshine.
And in his two major works, "Petruchka" and "Le Sacre du printemps,"
Strawinsky makes the machine represent his own person. For the actions
of machinery woke first in the human organism, and Strawinsky
intensifies consciousness of the body by referring these motions to
their origin. "Petruchka" is the man-machine seen from without, seen
unsympathetically, in its comic aspect. Countless poets before
Strawinsky have attempted to portray the puppet-like activities of the
human being, and "Petruchka" is but one of the recent of innumerable
stage-shows that expose the automaton in the human soul. But the
puppet-show of Strawinsky is singular because of its musical
accompaniment. For more than even the mimes on the stage, the orchestra
is full of the spirit of the automaton. The angular, wooden gestures of
the dolls, their smudged faces, their entrails of sawdust, are in the
music ten times as intensely as they are upon the stage. In the score of
"Petruchka" music itself has become a little mannikin in parti-colored
clothes, at which Strawinsky gazes and laughs as a child laughs at a
funny doll, and makes dance and tosses in the air, and sends sprawling.
Pages:
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206