On Sunday, March 17th, I attended the L’Histoire du soldat by Stravinsky. It was one of the music on the point concerts with personality. I did not have any background knowledge of L’Histoire du solat. To be frank, I was excited to attend a concert with my Music on the Point season pass. After attending this concert, I am very glad that I was able to see this masterful work by Stravinsky which is considered one of the most famous and significant chamber works of the early twentieth century.
The story is about a young solider making a deal with a devil in the first synopsis. On the road to his home after being dismissed from his duty, the young soldier stops to play his fiddle and encounters the devil. The devil offers him a trade: the fiddle for a book that can tell the future. Joseph accepts the deal and stays at the devil’s place for four days. When the young soldier returns to his home, he finds that actually three years has passed during his four day stay at the devil’s place and his finance is now married to a different guy. The devil tricked the young soldier. The young solider becomes rich with the future-telling book. But soon he realizes that he cannot buy happiness he has lost, and he falls into despair and sorrow. The devil in disguise again approaches the young solider and sells him his old instrument but the young soldier realizes the fiddle no longer plays. He throws the fiddle away and tears up the book into pieces.
In the second synopsis, the young solider hears about a sleeping princess: the king has offered her hand in marriage to the one who can awaken her. The young solider lies to the king that he is a doctor and gets an opportunity to awaken the princess but encounters the devil there again. There, the young soldier breaks the spell held over him by the devil and awakens the princess by playing his fiddle. After the happy marriage between the young solider and the princess, they decide to visit the soldier’s old town to reunite with his mother, ignoring the warning by the devil that his soul will be taken away once he leaves the castle. The moment the soldier steps outside of the castle, his soul gets taken away by the devil.
The story reminded of the story of Faust, a German folktale, where the protagonist Faust trades his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures which leads Faust to a tragic fate eventually. I think the story is certainly well dramatized by accompanying instruments such as violin, contrabass, clarinet, bassoon, cornet and trombones creating asymmetrical meters, composite syncopation, and multiple rhythms that adds a disarticulated and astonishingly interesting sense of time to the animated performance. In the scene where the soldier returns to the village after three years and people think he is a ghost, clarinet and bassoon play a sorrowful tone. When the solider marches to the kingdom of the sleeping princess he is accompanied with trombones fanfare and a circus music. I was also able to recognize components of military music, jazz, Russian folk music and chorale throughout the concert.
The concert was genuinely enjoyable and being able to recognize the instruments and musical components and interpreting them with what I learned in this class added another layer of pleasure.