Music after the Great War

By LCantoni on September 1, 2024

In 1913, Igor Stravinsky's groundbreaking ballet, The Rite of Spring, premiered in Paris. The dissonant music and strange choreography caused near-riots at the first two performances. The young American music critic Carl Van Vechten recalled: "Three ladies sat in front of me [in a box] and a young man occupied the place behind me... The intense excitement under which he was laboring, thanks to the potent force of the music, betrayed itself presently when he began to beat rhythmically on the top of my head with his fists. My emotion was so great that I did not feel the blows for some time. They were perfectly synchronized with the beat of the music... We had both been carried beyond ourselves."

So began Van Vechten's love for Stravinsky's music, as he recounts in Music after the Great War, a collection of seven lively essays on the performing arts scene of the early 20th Century. The book was published in 1915, when World War I was still in full swing, and in the title essay, "Music after the Great War," Van Vechten speculates on which contemporary composers will prove to have the most lasting impact after the war. His picks: Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg - as well as a teenaged prodigy named Erich Korngold, who later became an Oscar-winning film composer.

As the assistant music critic for The New York Times, Van Vechten had the opportunity to travel to Paris and observe the avant-garde cultural scene first hand, and to meet some of its most important proponents. Indeed, two of the ladies in his box at the Rite of Spring performance were none other than Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas. Van Vechten doesn't name them in his book, but Stein recounts in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that Van Vechten, who became a lifelong friend, was there.

The essays in Music after the Great War include not only Van Vechten's predictions in the title essay, but also extended appreciations of Stravinsky and of the Ballets Russes, which produced The Rite of Spring and several other Stravinsky ballets. "The music [of The Rite of Spring] is not descriptive, it is rhythmical," Van Vechten writes. "All rhythms are beaten into the ears, one after another, and sometimes with complexities which seem decidedly unrhythmic on paper, but when carried out in performance assume a regularity of beat which a simple four-four time could not equal."

The first eight bars of the Sacrificial Dance in The Rite of Spring, showing the complex meter changes.

Listen to the audio - 0:09

The remaining essays demonstrate the breadth and depth of Van Vechten's interest in the performing arts. In "Music for Museums?" he decries the "fossilization" of symphonic concerts through constant recycling of familiar works while new music goes unperformed. Surprisingly for one so enamored of new music, however, in another essay Van Vechten expresses a fondness for Jules Massenet's florid and decidedly Romantic operas. The last two essays in the book set forth Van Vechten's well-informed opinions on stage decoration in opera, ballet, and drama.

Thanks to the volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg, this fascinating slice of cultural history is available to all.

This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.