Suite from Pulcinella

One sneaky trick for a music history exam would be to play the opening of Igor Stravinsky’s Pulcinella to a group of unsuspecting students. Those without prior knowledge of the work would be hard pressed not only to “name that tune” but even to identify the century in which it was written. The melody sounds Classical, yet there seem to be “wrong notes” here and there, and the orchestra­tion sounds far too removed from the music of the Classical period.

Yet astute members of the class would probably guess from these very features that the author can be no one but Stravinsky. Creative appropriations from music history are central to Stravinsky’s so-called “neoclassical” period, which covers the three middle decades of his career, roughly from 1920 to 1950.

Although we may find occasional nods to the past in some works written before 1919, it is in his ballet Pulcinella that we first hear Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism in full swing. This ostensible return to tradition came as something of a shock from a composer who had earned a reputation as the most radical of all composers only a few years earlier. As the world was soon to learn, however, the essence of Stravinsky’s personality lay not so much in the musical idiom he used as in his uncanny ability to do the unexpected (and to make it work). Certainly, to go back 200 years and co-opt an earlier musical style was almost as unexpected as unleashing the fierce dissonances and wild rhythms of The Rite of Spring.

In his landmark study, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, musicologist Richard Taruskin notes that Pulcinella is not an independent composition but an arrangement and reorchestration of 18th-century originals. While it is true that Stravinsky followed his sources very closely, he differed from most arrangers in that he openly imposed his own personality on the borrowed material.

Just where was the material borrowed from? Although the score names Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–36) as the author of the originals, most of the music is not actually by that com-poser. Recent scholarship has traced the original tunes to a handful of other 18th-century composers, including Domenico Gallo, Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer, and Carlo Ignazio Monza.

Stravinsky discovered this body of music, so remote from him in time and space, through the famous impresario of the Ballets Russes, Sergei Diaghilev. Diaghilev, who had commissioned Stravinsky’s three great ballets (The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring) in the years before World War I, was anxious to renew his collaboration with the composer. He had recently produced a ballet based on music by Scarlatti (The Good-Humored Ladies) and wanted to continue his exploration of Italian Baroque music. At first, this music seemed to hold little interest for Stravinsky, but he, too, was eager to work with Diaghilev again and happily accepted the great impresario’s proposal.

The plot of the one-act ballet — which also calls for soprano, tenor, and bass soloists — was adapted from an old manuscript containing humorous anecdotes about Pulcinella, a traditional commedia dell’arte character from 18th-century Italy. All the girls in the village are in love with Pulcinella, and their fiancés conspire to kill him. A light-hearted comedy of errors ensures that eventually ends without any bloodshed (a few fistfights, at most); in the end, everyone, including Pulcinella, marries their appropriate partner and all live happily ever after.

Pulcinella premiered at the Paris Opera in May 1920 — with choreography by Léonide Massine and sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso — and was generally well received by the public. Though most critics praised Stravinsky’s ingenious reworking of 18th-century music, others were disappointed in the composer’s stylistic detour from the radicalism of The Rite of Spring. Two years later, Stravinsky arranged an instrumen­tal suite from the ballet, excising several movements and eliminating the need for vocal soloists.

— adapted from a note by Peter Laki

Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent lecturer on classical music. He is a visiting associate professor of music, emeritus, at Bard College and was The Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator from 1990 to 2007.