Stravinsky – Orchestral and Choral Works

“What is important for the lucid ordering of the work – for its crystallisation – is that all the Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist in motion and make the life-sap rise must be properly subjugated before they intoxicate us, and must finally be made to submit to the law: Apollo demands it.”
Impossible to claim, therefore, that Igor Stravinsky is a composer of unrestrained excesses! Stravinsky referred in his revelations on composing, Poetics of Music, to the classical correlation between Dionysos and Apollo, excess and control, emo and ratio. By doing so, Stravinsky endowed his neoclassical writing with a certain philosophical permanence. It goes without saying that this ancient correlation, in which Dionysian drive evaporates into Apollonian control, should be tested out in the finales of Stravinsky’s ‘mythological’ compositions. Stravinsky, in fact, always created a remarkably Apollonian musical catharsis in these works. That is how the ‘operatorium’ Oedipus rex ends, with the literally blinding sense of guilt felt by Oedipus whose slowly fading heartbeat drives him to just within the city boundaries of Thebes.