Volume 19, Number 10 · December 14, 1972
Stravinsky's Svadebka (Les Noces)
By Robert Craft, William E. Harkins
Svadebka[1] (Les Noces) ranks high in the by no means crowded company of indisputable contemporary master-pieces. That it does not immediately come to mind as such is attributable to cultural and linguistic barriers and to the inadequacy, partly from the same cause, of performances. For Svadebka can be sung only in Russian, both because the sounds of the words are part of the music, and because their rhythms are inseparable from the musical design. A 'translation' that satisfied the quantitative and accentual formulas of the original could retain no approximation of its literal sense. Which is the reason that Stravinsky, who was not rigidly averse to changing sense for sound's sake, abandoned an English version on which he had labored himself in the fall of 1959 and again in December, 1965.
Feature, 6912 words
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