The score is full of the revolutions of wheels, of delicate clockwork
movements, of screws and turbines. Beneath the music one hears always
the regular, insistent, maniacal breathing of a concertina. And what in
it is not purely mechanistic nevertheless completes the picture of the
world as it appears to one who has seen the man-machine in all its
comedy. The stage pictures, the trumpery little fair, the tinsel and
pathetic finery of the crowds, the dancing of the human ephemeridae a
moment before the snow begins to fall, are stained marvelously deeply by
the music. The score has the colors of crudely dyed, faded bunting. It
has indeed a servant girl grace, a coachman ardor, a barrel-organ,
tintype, popcorn, fortune-teller flavor.
"Le Sacre," on the other hand, is the man-machine viewed not from
without, and unsympathetically, but from within. So far, it is
Strawinsky's masterwork, the completest and purest expression of his
genius. For the elements that make for the originality of style of
"Petruchka" and the other of Strawinsky's representative compositions,
in this work attain a signal largeness and powerfulness. The rhythmic
element, already fresh and free in the scherzo of "L'Oiseau de feu" and
throughout "Petruchka," attains virile and magistral might in it, surges
and thunders with giant vigor.
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