Neoclassicism
In the wake of the First World War, Neoclassicism emerged as the leading musical trend. It revived various historical musical idioms, but had no interest in pastiche or even in any kind of veneration of musical classics. Instead, it used this classical material for its own purposes, which were modernist and resolutely anti-Romantic.
There had, of course, been much classicisizing music in the past, in France from Saint-Saëns to Ravel, in Germany from Mendelssohn to Busoni, but the approach had been reverential, not ironic. But on the French side, the classicizing impulse was also a part of the anti-Wagnerian movement, and this aspect it shared with post-War Neoclassicism. However, it was Satie's "new simplicity" and consistent irreverence that was to become the biggest influence upon neoclassicism proper.
The defining moment came with Stravinsky's first neoclassical work, the ballet Pulcinella (1920), which took music from relatively obscure 18th-century sources. Stravinsky's score followed the original closely, but with deft additions and repetitions that utterly changed the character of the music and placed it firmly in the present. Three years later he completed the Octet, which now used wholly original material while extending the possibilities of the new Neoclassical style. Composers in France and Italy, such as Poulenc, Milhaud, Casella, were eager to follow Stravinsky's example: it allowed them both to adopt an anti-Wagnerian and anti-expressionist aesthetic of order and objectivity, and at the same time to write commercially viable music that could win over a large public (unlike Schoenberg's serialism). In Germany, Paul Hindemith led the way with his irreverent renditions of past idioms, although he became more sober and serious in the late 20s.
The recipe for producing a neoclassical work would go something like this: take a variety of textures, rhythms and melodies or accompaniments from the past (most often Baroque, rather than what we call Classical today); add some modern popular dance idioms such as ragtime or foxtrot; mix together, bring to the boil, and see what happens. The element of irony or even parody was not easily removed even in the case of a work so high-minded and serious as Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927) based on Jean Cocteau's adaptation of Sophocles. Jocasta, Oedipus's mother, earnestly sings an aria whose vocal line conflates Handel and Verdi, while the orchestra can't help slipping into much more light-hearted Rossini and possibly even a little Johann Strauss.
Neoclassicism in music had its detractors. Prokofiev, whose Classical Symphony appeared three years before Stravinsky's Pulcinella, thought that recycling the past was justifiable for one jeu d'esprit, but he was confounded by the notion that anyone could hope to build a whole career out of this. He notoriously referred to Stravinsky's style as "pock-marked Bach". Another distinguished detractor was the German critic Theodor Adorno, who saw Stravinsky's neoclassicism as a betrayal of modernist ideals and a sell-out to commercial values. Stravinsky himself eventually decided that he had exhausted Neoclassicism's potential, and after the 1951 premiere of his "Mozartean" opera The Rake's Progress, when critics were beginning to dismiss him as old-fashioned, he changed course, embracing atonality and even serialism, while fully retaining his individual voice.
© Dr Marina Frolova-Walker/BBC
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