The following paragraphs are extracted from Robin Holloway's essay, Customised Goods.

Beginning as a review of Richard Taruskin’s magnum opus (so far!) and extending in inadvertent imitation of its object way beyond the wordspace offered by the New York Review of Books to end up as an essay on Stravinsky himself and his dominant position athwart the twentieth century (and beyond). The NYRB naturally found the length a bit much, but shilly-shallied so many months over reducing it that I lost patience, withdrew the endeavour intact and offered it to the Musical Times, who to my delight took it on without demur, running it over three successive issues like a Victorian novel—hence the cliffhanger endings to the first two parts.

...What Stravinsky could not do and therefore disdained and subverted, was Teutonia at its apex: Wagner and Brahms. It’s true that his immediate cultural enemy is the work of their living descendants, his older contemporaries, Brahms fatty-degenerated into Reger, Wagner dissipated into Mahler and Strauss. But behind them stand the Great-Grandfathers who represented the standard of Germanic music under which he grew up. His comprehensive re-slanting of the way to listen, to hear, the way music ought and ought not to be, the way music intrinsically is, is a rejection of the healthy centre as well as its disintegrating edges. Initially polarised in factitious polemic, Brahms and Wagner were revealed by the end of the old century as a complementary unity; they are equal tributaries in forming the composer who came to be seen, with a different kind of absurdity, for the first half and beyond of the new century, as Stravinsky’s arch-antithesis: Arnold Schoenberg.

Of the two Teutonic giants, Wagner, on the face of it the more immovable impediment, can in fact be disposed of more easily, by the denigration born of genuine artistic distaste. Cutting Bayreuth down to size was as old as Bayreuth itself; the groundswell of hostility was given intellectual thrust in Nietzsche’s polemics of the 1880s, and by 1900 or so, even as the musical world at large, and some of its best practising composers (Strauss, Mahler, Elgar, Delius), remained within the sway, the wave of reaction was almost a commonplace among young Turks as different as Debussy and Sibelius. The fascinating conjunction of ego-type and influence linking Wagner and Stravinsky, making each the composer who gives his voice to the entire epoch they dominate—the swing of the pendulum from the Wagnerian to the Stravinskian age—could make a detailed study on its own.

But Brahms could never be dismissed (like Wagner) as a hyperbolic adulterator of artistic genres who then elevated the poisonous brew into a bogus religion with his own glory inextricably bound in (the substance of Stravinsky’s objections, common currency by the time they reached his Harvard audience in 1939–40). Brahms is less destructible than Wagner because he presents a smaller target. As the most recent embodiment of the Austro-Germanic continuities, he is subtly pervasive rather than crudely invasive. Brahms can represent the Teutonic type at its most normal—a craftsman and grammarian of musical usage at its peaks of culture, learned in a language rich in inherited resonance, affiliated to this heritage with unquestioning loyalty, bringing to it, so late in its life, a conscious consummation and subsumation. He gathers in a ripe harvest whose conspicuous emotional warmth is inextricably fused, by mastery of every technical means, with powerful brainwork. The result was criticised in his lifetime and still is—for lapses into cosiness and sentimentality, over-squareness that can become muscle-bound, lack of gaiety and lightness of touch, an unphysicality of movement, especially in the absence of a dance-element (apart from the glutinous Viennese waltz); and for limits of emotional range born of his very reverence for the past, showing that intensive cultivation can, sometimes, have its disadvantages. But of course Brahms survives such sniping (of which Stravinsky’s own paper dart, deploring the later Schoenberg’s stiffness of rhythm ‘rooted in the most turgid and graceless Brahms’ is a fair specimen), just as Wagner has survived the heftier ammunition turned upon him. Between them they fill out each other’s alleged deficiencies, and the composite, with Brahms as the norm and Wagner the perpetually extraordinary, is impregnable. Together, they are the culmination of a musical language that comes with ‘instructions’ as to how it is to be heard and apprehended; how its listeners are to be moved. This is music as food—nourishment spiritual and ethical, though in a medium of almost carnal richness of textures; aimed at the deepest and highest spaces in the hungry human soul.

So what does Stravinsky provide instead? The nature of his alternative is of course not clear at first. Taruskin has charted the zigzags by which a genius for being different is gradually realised in compositions of equivalent worth. First come laboured attempts to be a dutiful Russian nationalist—Tchaikovsky for sentiment, Rimsky for orchestral magic, Brahmsian grasp of form and procedure dulled into the Petersburg academicism of Glazunov. (Glazunov is another victim of Stravinsky’s long but selective memory. Taruskin unpicks the demonisation at the appropriate point in his first volume.) A whiff of Scriabin proves delusive and so for the moment do savours and scents from Paris (compatible with the vestiges of Russianness because in large part inspired by them). This brings us up to Firebird (1910). With Petrushka the next year comes the dawning of light. The ingredients of this work that so wonderfully dramatises its composer’s fury and frustration remain the same (save only the use of ‘found’ material, for which a royalty had to be paid after every performance!); but the attitude towards them—subversion, mockery, malice, impudence, sarcasm, irony—alters everything; and so do the conjoined techniques of montage and collage, fragmentation and reassembly, dissection and destruction. From being slavishly obedient to his models, Stravinsky is from now on the most tyrannical of slave-drivers, brooking not the slightest impulse in his material to pull out of turn. The difference is at once total, yet oddly minuscule, like a change in the light that transforms all the colours, or the slip of a pen putting plus rather than minus in an equation, a not into a sentence, a nought on the end of a cheque. And of course an enormous talent for music-making is apparent after all, in this simple but drastic shift. It’s like the tiny nick in Peer Gynt’s eye that would enable him to see loveliness and grandeur rather than ugliness and squalor when imprisoned in the Troll-King’s mountain fastness. Writing ‘proper’ music Stravinsky was derivative and weak. But in subversion lie strength, power and the possibilities, rapidly exploited, of a new rationale to substitute for the old.

The results are audibly primitive when placed in juxtaposition to the musical culture they aim to dislodge. Taruskin characterises ‘Turania’ in general when he adduces ‘the tough, aggressive modernity that has not mellowed with age’ for the peasant nonsense-songs of Stravinsky’s Swiss years. ‘It is not their Russian archaism but their belligerent rejection of Europe—the denial of “panromanogermanic” common practice—that has remained their most conspicuous feature’ (p.1167). Ditching the depths and heights of Teutonian expression involves ditching the old-style master, learning, culture of the language which contained it. Yet what is done instead is done with consummate finish, a clarity and accuracy of aim that remain dazzling after eighty years and more. From Petrushka to Svadebka an exact balance of means and ends is restored to music by a barbarian from the East exactly when, at the centre, it seems to have been abandoned for good.

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