Stravinsky must have known from the start that his ballet, Les Noces (The Wedding), was never going to flourish in the concert hall. Even the extravagant orchestration of his three early ballets has a clearer context. A symphony orchestra is more likely to rise to the demands of The Rite of Spring, Petrushka or The Firebird within its regular programming than it is to furnish an audience with the spectacle of a stage showing four pianos, a group of percussion instruments, four vocal soloists and a choir.
The composer must also have known that the percussive sound world, with its ritualised vocal lines and chanting, was as likely to alienate listeners in the 1920s - it was premiered in 1923 - as it was to enthrall them. A division of critical opinion was to be expected and, given the notoriety that had attached to him since the 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring, imitation would almost inevitably follow. The Paris-resident American George Antheil, self-confessed "bad boy of music", wrote a Ballet Mecanique for pianola, pianos and percussion, concentrating with childish glee on Stravinsky's primitivism and glorying in the addition of sirens, electric bells, and aeroplane propellers.
And later, in Carmina Burana, Carl Orff took the opposite route, stripped out the harshness, sweetened the harmony and warmed the result with orchestral colour.
The critics seem to have been, by and large, understanding at the Paris premiere. But when Diaghilev's Ballets Russes took the work to London, the critics there made hay. The Daily Telegraph thought it suggested "a dreadnought kept together with safety pins". Ernest Newman in the Sunday Times reported that: "The totality of the various noises is mostly hideous," and declared "musical Europe is already more than a little tired of the moujik and his half-baked brain".
Such was the abuse heaped on the composer that H.G. Wells rose to his defence, in a letter to the London Times: "I do not know of any other ballet so interesting, so amusing, so fresh or nearly so exciting as Les Noces." He wanted to see "again and again" a ballet he described as "a rendering in sound and vision of the peasant soul, in its gravity, in its deliberate and simple-minded intricacy, in its subtly varied rhythms, in its deep undercurrents of excitement, that will astonish and delight every intelligent man or woman who goes to see it".
The composer himself described the piece as "a suite of typical wedding episodes told through quotations of typical talk". "As a collection of cliches," he suggested, "it might be compared to one of those scenes in Ulysses in which the reader seems to be overhearing scraps of conversation without the connecting thread of discourse." But there's really not much in the realm of words that can accurately suggest the primitive, ritualistic energy which makes Les Noces so special.
It seems highly unlikely that this unique and remarkable work will surface soon as a ballet in this country. So the Wexford Festival is putting everyone in its debt through an adventurous offering of two performances, coupled with a very strange bedfellow, the Durufle Requiem.
The next Wexford Festival performance of Les Noces will be given at Rowe Street Church on Sunday, November 5th by Lada Biriucov (soprano), Agnieszka Zwierko (mezzo soprano), Youri Alexeev (tenor), Andrei Antonov (bass), John Shea, Rosetta Cucchi, Robert Pechanec, Vladimir Slobodian (pianos), with a percussion ensemble, the Wexford Festival Singers, and the Prague Chamber Choir conducted by Lubomir Matl
