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I have been producing a musical fund raiser, The Woodstock Beat, for the Woodstock Guild every summer since 1991. This summer is the 100th Anniversary of the Guild’s Byrdcliffe Arts Colony and for such an important milestone, we are producing a very special Beat, a full production of Igor Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat. This spectacular work is rarely done even as the orchestral suite but is almost never done as a full production (chamber orchestra, narrator, actors, stage sets, dancers, costumes, etc.) as notated by Stravinsky and his collaborator Charles Ramuz in 1917. As you will see below, I have assembled the finest musicians and artists anywhere to make this a world-class event. Peter Schickele, (of P.D.Q. Bach and Schickele Mix fame) will be the narrator. We will open the performance with Schickele’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Peter adapted the 1610 work of the same name written by the Elizabethan playwrights, Beaumont and Fletcher. Peter’s musical comedy alone would be reason enough to plan on attending this year’s Woodstock Beat. But coupled with the seminal Stravinsky work, the three performances (yes, you have three chances to attend) are sure to be sell-outs. Please call the Guild now to guarantee your seats. This is our Centennial Celebration fund raiser and, as you can see, the tickets are priced accordingly. Please remember that this is not your typical production and the proceeds go to insure the future of the Guild and Byrdcliffe. Those of you who reserve the best seats for Saturday evening ($100) will be invited to a special cast reception at Allaire Studio (formerly The Pitcairn Estate) on top of Tonche Mountain after the production.
In 1917 the Stravinsky family was virtually destitute. The war and the Russian revolution had cut Stravinsky off completely from his family’s estate and he was receiving no royalties from his music. The novelist C.F. Ramuz, who found himself in a similar situation proposed a solution: a traveling exhibition of a musical play, produced by the two men in collaboration. Stravinsky, who was desperate, and who had come to greatly esteem Ramuz as a personal friend (they had collaborated on the French translation of Les Noces), agreed readily to the plan. Ramuz, who was not a playwright, wrote his libretto as a story, to be narrated and acted along with the music. Scene 1: A soldier, on his way home on leave is accosted by an old man (the devil in disguise) who attempts to push a book on him. The soldier protests that he hasn’t any money to buy the book. The old man assures him that the book will bring him wealth untold and that he will gladly exchange it for the soldier’s cheap old fiddle. Recognizing a good bargain, the Soldier agrees but soon finds he can’t make heads or tails of the book. The devil proposes a simple solution: come stay at my house for a few days (where I have good foods, cigars and drink) and you can teach me to play this fiddle while I teach you the ways of the book. The soldier agrees and soon finds that the old man was as good as his word. Scene 2: Satisfied, the soldier finds himself back on the road, but as soon as he reaches his village, he discovers that he wasn’t at the devil’s house for just three days, three years have passed. His fiancé has married and has children, his friends and family run from him in horror, thinking that he is a ghost. Disgusted, and realizing who the old man really is, he throws the book away, but the devil, disguised as a cattle merchant, appears and convinces him to take up the book again and make his fortune. Scene 3: The soldier is indeed wealthy, but all his wealth can’t please him since he has lost the only things that matter: his family and his fiancé. The devil, this time disguised as an old woman, appears to sell him his fiddle. But when the soldier finds he can no longer play it, he throws the fiddle away again and tears the book to shreds. Scene 4: The Soldier comes to a town where the king’s daughter is ill and a reward of the princesses hand has been offered to whoever can cure her. A fellow soldier in a bar convinces the soldier to give it a shot. The soldier again meets the devil and they play cards. The soldier, in the progress of the game, realizes that the only way to win back his old life is to lose all his money to the devil. The devil falls defeated and the Soldier triumphantly reclaims his fiddle. Scene 5: The Soldier finds he is able to cure the princess of her illness with his music. At the close of the scene he makes the devil dance a jig to his tune. Scene 6: The newlyweds are happy as they have never been. The princess begs to be introduced to the Soldier’s family, but the soldier, who realizes that to leave the kingdom would put him again under the spell of the devil, refuses. But he can’t resist the temptation of his wife’s charms and so agrees. As they cross the frontier, the inevitable happens and the devil dances his triumphant dance.
Program notes for The Knight of the Burning Pestle(Program notes by Peter Schickele.) Beaumont and Fletcher wrote The Knight of the Burning Pestle in the early years of the 17th century; it is a wonderfully silly play about a traveling theatrical troupe that is trying to present a performance of a typical Elizabethan romantic drama, in spite of the fact that the local grocer, a red-neck philistine through whose generosity the play is being presented, insists on having his apprentice injected into the action. The result is that at random intervals throughout the play the oafish Ralph appears for no coherent reason whatsoever and delivers monumentally irrelevant speeches, to the dismay of the professional cast, the delight of the greengrocer and his wife, and the amusement of the audience at large. Actually, by the evening’s end even the professional members of the cast seem to have come around, and they all exit together singing “Hey ho, ’tis naught but mirth that keeps the body from the earth.” The original play was full length and had several songs in it, but the American director Brooks Jones had fashioned a shortened version, and when he decided to present it as half of a double bill, at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven during the fall of 1974, he approached me about writing more songs, in effect turning it into a musical comedy. We had a good time working on it, and now I sometimes have trouble remembering exactly who wrote which lyrics: some of them are by Beaumont and Fletcher, from the original play, some are by Brooks, some we did together, and some I contributed myself. Since the other half of the bill was The Soldier’s Tale, I scored the Pestle songs for the same seven instruments needed for the Stravinsky work (clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, violin, contrabass and percussion) plus harpsichord. It is certainly not necessary to know the specific contexts of the songs to enjoy them, but I would like to offer a brief comment on one of them. The format devised by Brooks Jones for the double bill involved a gypsy thespian troupe called the Tribe of Ahasuerus, who at the beginning of the performance rolled a huge wagon into view, one side of which folded down to become a stage; The Soldier’s Tale and The Knight of the Burning Pestle were presented as being two selections from their extensive repertoire of plays from all over the world. (An entrance march and a meditative, centering round performed by the troupe before, between and after the two plays later became the basis for a concert band piece called The Tribe of Ahasuerus.) One member of the troupe is a young woman who has no major roles; she is a misfit whose jobs are confined to making scene announcements, handling a few bit parts and moving scenery. One doesn’t realize, perhaps, how bitter she is until at the end of one scene she steps forward and, completely disregarding the play she’s supposed to be part of, sings “My Mother Told Me Not To Worry” directly to the audience. Her words (the lyrics are Brooks’s) constitute the only time one of the Tribe breaks ranks and drops the mask. |
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