‘I am no more academic than I am modern, no more modern than I am conservative.’Footnote ¹ Thus spake Stravinsky, via the ghostwriters of his manifesto of neoclassicism, the Poetics of Music, first delivered in French in 1939/40 as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. It was, quite clearly, a defence strategy in front of an audience of high-powered academics. Nonetheless, under attack throughout his career from many and varied quarters as not being academic enough, or being too modern or too conservative, Stravinsky's consistent tactic was simply to dismiss all such tags and get on with the job in hand. ‘“Neoclassicism?” he once scoffed. “A label that means nothing whatever. I will show you where you should put it” – and he gave his derriere a firm pat.’Footnote ²

Such is the creative artist's prerogative. After all, why should composers want or need to engage with the a posteriori categories into which critics and musicologists choose to place their work? Debussy objected to being called an ‘impressionist’; Grisey rejected the description ‘spectralist’. They rightly recognized that any label constrains and excludes as much as it informs. This situation is exaggerated in the case of Stravinsky's ‘neoclassicism’, which was in any case never just one thing. That his musical persona was in a continual state of flux was a conscious strategy on his part – in large measure, argues Tamara Levitz in Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone, a consequence of his struggles as an émigré. As she sums up:

Enlightenment models of modernity demand a unity of purpose and identity; change needs to be read against an assumption of progress (or decline). Stravinsky's slipperiness seriously challenged such attitudes, and in this regard he adopted a position that one might argue was genuinely modernist. It certainly had a commercial usefulness for him. As early as 1927 Leonid Sabaneyev had observed that Stravinsky was ‘a clever merchant of musical goods, no stranger to any, even crude forms of advertisement’ (quoted in Levitz, 310). He ‘molded his persona to please his public’ (293), in dress and manners as much as in music, which, as Levitz points outs, befitted this dandyesque poseur. After the Second World War Stravinsky even became an extremely valuable piece of Cold War capital, such that he could miraculously be fêted at the very centres of the opposed regimes, being welcomed in the same year, 1962, by both US President Kennedy in the White House and Soviet Minster of Culture Furtseva in Moscow. Little wonder, then, that he resisted the desire of others to place him and his work in neat boxes. And yet, in seeming contradiction, he was generally happy to adopt the public mantle of the neoclassicist in order to perpetuate a sense of neutrality or universality that permitted his music to be read in multiple ways. Boris de Schloezer had first proposed in 1923 that Stravinsky's neoclassical music should be understood as autonomous and objective, that it embodied ‘universal, humanist European values’ (303); Stravinsky and his chosen apologists continued to echo this position across the 1920s and 1930s, in such places as his essay on the Octet of 1924 (‘My Octuor is a musical object . . . This sort of music has no other aim than to be sufficient in itself’Footnote ³), in the Autobiography (‘music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all’Footnote ⁴), and everywhere in the Poetics, with its rhetoric of craft, order, and discipline. On her husband's death in 1971, Stravinsky's widow Vera received a letter from Richard Nixon, which went so far as to proclaim that ‘the power and force of his genius help to make all men brothers and the magnitude of his loss transcends all national boundaries’.Footnote ⁵ The neoclassical myth of Stravinsky had succeeded in duping even the President of the United States.

The major problem with the reception of Stravinsky's neoclassicism, Levitz contends, can be laid squarely at the door of Theodor Adorno. In setting the regressive Stravinsky against the progressive Schoenberg in Philosophy of New Music of 1949, ‘Adorno's arguments had remarkable staying power, scaring people away from the topic of neoclassicism for decades and distorting many strains of its original history’ (18). Subsequent approaches tended to replicate Stravinsky's own avowed position by forcing ‘modernist classicism into a formalist straightjacket that erased its broader cultural history’ (20). Scott Messing was the first to begin a reconsideration of the concept,Footnote ⁶ while Richard Taruskin's review of that book in 1993 radically changed the terms of the debate by teasing out its underlying ideology.Footnote ⁷ The crucial issue, however, remained the complex and problematic one of the relationship between a neoclassicism couched in retrospective terms and the project of a prospective modernism. To put it at its crudest, was it possible to be both a neoclassicist and a modernist simultaneously? It all depended, of course, on how one chose to define those terms. The great achievement of Levitz in Modernist Mysteries is that she firmly resists the temptation to demolish old definitions of these categories and simply replace them with new, equally myopic ones; rather, taking her inspiration from Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and others, she blows open the terms by proposing (and demonstrating) a contingent approach. Levitz insists that her focus is the performance of neoclassicism and modernism, that is, an effort to move away from formalist and stylistic analysis, and towards ‘a microhistorical investigation of music as performed historical event’ (21).

The specific performed historical event from which the entire book springs is the first play-through of Stravinsky's Perséphone on the evening of 20 October 1933 in the grand apartment of the dancer and commissioner of the work, Ida Rubenstein. Stravinsky and his son Soulima were at the piano, the writer and critic Pyotr Suvchinksy took the role of the narrator Eumolpus, and listening in front of the fire were the librettist André Gide, the director-designate Jacques Copeau, as well as, among others, the poets Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel. The aging Rubinstein was herself to dance the title role, and in due course the designer André Barsacq and choreographer Kurt Joos were added to the production team. However, far from representing a happy coming together of powerful creative figures with unanimity of vision, this gathering only served to highlight the differences between them – differences not only of age and nationality but also of faith, sexuality, and politics. The story of the dispute between Gide and Stravinsky is well known, but Levitz also shows how ‘within months of their initial encounters they [all] began feuding, disagreeing on everything from who should be involved in the project to its staging, music, and setting of texts’ (9). It is in these fault lines that she constructs her history. The picture that emerges is not just a more nuanced understanding of the melodrama Perséphone than has been available to date but, more broadly, also a much fuller picture both of the culture of Paris in the 1930s and of neoclassical modernism. Levitz keeps these latter categories in play throughout, as lenses through which to view the work and its creators, but in problematizing them at every turn, she continually prompts the reader towards a reconsideration of their hitherto generally crude and monolithic application.

To try to summarise Levitz's argument would be as impertinent as it would be impossible. The detail is everything: this is how microhistory works. I urge anyone with an interest in this period of musical history to read the book slowly and carefully in all its meticulously researched detail, and it will surely reap rewards. Apart from anything else, it is beautifully written and Levitz tells an engaging story. In a nice conceit, she provides a framework for the reader by mapping the three parts of the melodrama onto the (reordered) Pauline trilogy of Faith, Love, and Hope – both her and the myth's three central themes. But this should in no way be understood to imply a chronological or teleological account of work and events; the richness of the microhistorical reading is achieved through multiple revisitation of issues and protagonists from different perspectives. Levitz revels in the contradictions this throws up, in the fact that, as she paraphrases the position of Gide, ‘[m]ost truths reveal themselves only through a heterophony of voices, or differences of opinion’ (57).

Such heterophony, such varied readings of the Perséphone myth, are perhaps most apparent in relation to issues of faith. For Gide, the communist, the pédéraste, religious and sexual exploration went hand in hand. Rooted in the Protestant teachings of his youth, yet critical of all organized religion and its dogmas, including that of the Catholic Church, Gide developed his own moral code: he was ‘someone who expressed his faith by vigorously pursuing questions of moral good in his writing and helping the oppressed in his personal life’ (95). (This concern, unfortunately, did not seem to extend to the North African boys he exploited sexually.) Thus, in the opening lines of Perséphone, as Levitz reads them, ‘Gide expresses powerful feelings and articulates homoerotic desire as he pantheistically experiences it’ (114). Stravinsky's approach to the myth could not have been more different. His reconversion to Russian Orthodoxy within the context of the broader Catholic renewal in France at the time led him to approach the Perséphone project with a degree of religious zeal, though even here, Levitz suggests, this may have been motivated by guilt over his affair with Vera. Stravinsky's faith had by the 1930s become central to his compositional process, and was also intimately linked to his existence as an émigré: ‘Ever since reconverting to that religion in 1926 Stravinsky had found that the Orthodox Church provided him with a metaphysical homeland of Christian dogma to replace the physical home he had lost’ (331). Most fascinating in this context are the ideas of sacred formalism and divine sound, which offer new perspectives on neoclassicism. Stravinsky's ‘rejoicing discovery’ of being free to set Russian texts as syllables (separate from their conventional pronunciation and versification) has long been recognized; Levitz now proposes that syllables functioned for Stravinsky ‘as physical objects whose ontological splendour he believed he could intuit’ (151). In other words, they pulsated with divine energy. It should hardly be surprising that Gide so disagreed with Stravinsky's setting of his French text. Then add into the mix the recent Catholic convert Copeau, and the Jewish–Russian Orthodox–Catholic Rubenstein, and the project acquires still further layers of contradictory complexity. Taking her cue from Gide himself, who ‘did not feel that the different parts of his life had to be synthesized into a coherent whole . . . they coexisted, were related yet not joined’ (103), Levitz proposes that the different approaches to Perséphone result in a bricolage of meanings. Rightly, she does not attempt to resolve these elements; they simply remain in three-dimensional play. I find this immensely attractive, not least because it suggests the possibility for a more plural way of thinking about modernism.

Many other threads run through the text, intersecting, colliding, melding, scattering, in a kaleidoscope of ideas that shows just how varied were the collaborators’ responses to the Perséphone myth. Contradictory attitudes emerge to love, sex, gender and sexuality (brought into sharp focus by the narcissus-plucking scene), subjectivity and objectivity, the politics of left and right, French colonialism, emigration, and much else besides. For me, the most revelatory chapter is that entitled ‘Voices from the Crypt’, which, in the context of the melancholic air of the work, teases out the themes of loss and grief, emotions shared by all six collaborators but which manifested themselves in very different ways. Stravinsky was haunted by the rituals of death, shaped profoundly by his parents’ traumatic grief over the death of their son Roman in 1897. But, rather than expressing grief directly (Stravinsky was always at pains to conceal the ‘I’ from everything he said or did), he ‘recreated the alienated theatrical experience of death’ (521) across so many of his works, from the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, via the Symphony in C and Orpheus, to the Requiem Canticles. The attraction to Stravinsky of the melancholic subject matter of Perséphone should, then, be obvious. In a moving discussion of his response to the moment when Persephone gazes into the narcissus, Levitz writes of a rare instance of Stravinsky lifting his mask and speaking personally: ‘Having held in his tears for most of his adult compositional life, the torrent now released has the impact of a hurricane and the emotional immediacy of popular music’ (559). The tragedy of the losses of loved ones, friends, and homeland is focused on this moment. It here becomes audible. Further, Levitz argues that the wider losses and injuries of modernism can be recognized and acknowledged here, and in Perséphone at large. The consequences of such a reading are indeed profound for a richer understanding of neoclassicism and modernism:

Perséphone ended in failure, if the confused critics who attended the premiere are anything to go by. This splintered work and performance, with all its contradictions, was not easily grasped by the public either. And yet Levitz ends with Hope, with the ‘promise of irreconcilable difference’, as she titles the final chapter. The multiple, multidirectional, fractured, ruinous work prompts in Levitz thoughts of a new account of neoclassicism's backward gaze as ‘a way of seeing the world and seeking justice’ (621), more in tune with Benjamin and Derrida than with Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School. Simple modernist narratives are disrupted. Heterogeneity is embraced. Conclusions are evaded. By the end, the reader is left with a dizzying appreciation of Perséphone, whose meaning is left open, and which will be understood afresh on each occasion the viewer-listener encounters it, as she or he reweaves its competing threads in new ways. Indeed, one might even say that the viewer-listener performs the meanings of the work for her- or himself on each occasion. And so it should be for modernism too. Modernism, Levitz contends, is not a fixed set of categories, techniques, and interpretative strategies, but an attitude, a way of seeing the world, a way of understanding the ever-changing relationship between a fractured present and a lost past. In so doing, she spectacularly resets the agenda for the understanding of modernism well into the twenty-first century.