Igor Stravinsky

Les noces has an important place in Stravinsky's ballet output: it is a pivotal work, marking the end of his Russian period, and also the beginning of his Neo-Classical period. Les noces comes after the three main Russian-period ballets -- The Firebird, Petroushka, and The Rite of Spring -- and is the obvious result of Stravinsky's years of involvement with Russian folk music idioms. While Les noces has fewer direct borrowings from the folk tradition than its predecessors, it is, as musicologist Richard Taruskin has noted, the work that is perhaps most Russian: Stravinsky, so familiar with Russian folk music by the second decade of the century, was able to create his own generic folk melodies without reference to source materials. The ballet is one of Stravinsky's hybrids, a "dance cantata" that combines dance with instrumental music and solo and choral singing. There is not really a plot to the ballet; instead, it is a series of scenes depicting the ritualized preparations for a Russian peasant wedding. Stravinsky himself wrote the text, drawing on Russian popular texts and songs for his words. The piece is constructed in two parts, with four scenes. Part one consists of scene one, "At the Bride's House," scene two, "At the Bridegroom's House," and scene three, "The Bride's Departure." Part two contains the final and most elaborate scene, "The Wedding Feast." In each scene, simple melodies set texts describing the bride's anxiety, her commiserations with her bridesmaids, the parents' sorrow at the loss of their children, and the groom's anticipation of the wedding night.

Stravinsky began composing Les noces in 1914, and completed the short (piano) score in 1917, but took another four years to decide on the instrumentation. His original plans called for a huge orchestra, but he soon abandoned this impractical idea. He then intended to have a divided orchestra, along with folk instruments, that would perform on stage with the dancers. This plan too was abandoned. Stravinsky then began scoring the work for "mechanical" orchestra, including pianolas and cimbaloms; however, the impracticality of this scoring also became evident as Stravinsky realized the difficulties in coordinating mechanized and non-mechanized instruments, and in finding good cimbalom players. The final instrumentation consists of full percussion and four pianos. The pianos provide the pitched material, but are also blended with the copious amounts of percussion, resulting in Stravinsky's desired percussive, mechanical sound.

The music of Les noces is deceptively simple; Stravinsky often limits melodies to just three or four notes. Les noces also exemplifies Stravinsky's virtuosic manipulation of small melodic fragments or cells. These cells, or "popevki," are fragments of folk tunes -- in many cases folk fragments invented by the composer -- that are repeated, overlapped, juxtaposed, inverted, and reordered throughout the work, resulting in a seamless texture. Rhythms are simple, and the text setting is syllabic, but metric irregularity and shifting barlines create tension and subvert expectation pervasively. In all, Les noces is the apogee of Stravinsky's "Russian" period, representing his sublimation of the folk traditions that had interested him for years. Its austerity and mechanical character are forward looking, pointing towards forthcoming works in Stravinsky's "new," scaled-down Neo-Classical aesthetic.