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| Stravinsky in his Hollywood studio |
Few things seem further from purple-mountain-majesty America than sacrificial virgins and pagan Russian rituals, two things evoked by Igor Stravinsky’s modernist 1913 powder keg The Rite of Spring. But as BAM raises the curtain next week on A Rite, whose brilliant makers, Bill T. Jones and Anne Bogart, are both decidedly American, it’s good to remember that the émigré iconoclast made his home in the US for over 30 years.
1925 marked Stravinsky’s first visit, and it was an exhilarating, neck-craning affair. “Your skyscrapers impressed me as leading to new visions in art,” he remarked. “What work! What energy there is in your immense country!” In 1939, he returned for good, settling in Boston to deliver his Harvard lectures, where he spoke famously about music as something that could reference only itself, and to conduct the Boston Symphony at the behest of his great champion Serge Koussevitzky.
On at least one of those programs, Stravinsky had included his own arrangement of the “The Star-Spangled Banner,” made, as he put it, out of a “desire to do my bit in these grievous times toward fostering and preserving the spirit of patriotism in this country.” But a police misreading of a law prohibiting national-anthem tampering led to a cease-and-desist, and Stravinsky—who had become a US citizen that same year—begrudgingly withdrew it from the bill.
