Stravinsky was really fond of literature, and most of the time the texts and the literary sources for his works were the result of his interest in Russian folklore, Latin and Greek authors and finally French and English literature. Stravinsky was also a friend of the American poet Thomas Eliot: it was a relationship that affected their art too.
Two of Stravinsky’s compositions are directly linked to Eliot. The first one is Anthem, a piece for mixed choir a cappella (1962). Stravinsky had been asked to contribute to a new hymn book in English for Cambridge University Press, and Eliot himself suggested that Little Gidding, the fourth part of the last of the Four Quartets, could be suitable. The other composition is Introitus, for tenors, basses and small musical ensemble. Composed early in 1965, soon after Eliot’s death, it was dedicated to his memory and was meant to be, in Stravinsky’s intention, a small processional rite «as the poet would have liked it».
Apart from the actual encounters and collaborative episodes involving the two artists, it is their intellectual affinity which, more than anything else, demands a closer look. In fact, in both of the two artists, we can talk about a specific use of TRADITION in their works: in many of his works, Stravinsky re-uses Russian popular themes, and also Eliot, in the Waste Land, recalls the mythical past through references and quotations from many literary works belonging to different traditions and cultures and religious texts.
In his Tradition and the Individual Talent, Eliot says that tradition cannot be inherited, that it is not something that can be handed down from one generation to the next. On the contrary, it is the outcome of a conscious acquisition process.
Stravinsky’s definition of tradition in his Poetics is strikingly similar: ‘It is like a family possession, something one inherits on the condition that one will make it multiple before handing it down to one’s children’.
Moreover, both Stravinsky and Eliot, point out how tradition differs from ‘habit’. As Stravisky states:
‘Tradition is very different from a habit, however good this habit may be, because a habit is by definition an unconscious acquisition which tends to become mechanical, whereas tradition is defined as something conscious and deliberate.’
According to Eliot, tradition is the repetition of the same events, of ‘classicism’, that is, the ability to see the past as a concrete premise for the present and the poetic culture as a living unity of all the poems written in different periods. ‘Tradition involves the perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence: the historical sense is the feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer to our days has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.’.
As Stravinsky puts it, in perfect accordance with Eliot’s statement:
‘’Far from implying a repetition of what has been, tradition presupposes the permanence of what is lasting.’’
Thus this explains why present and past exist simultaneously in The Waste Land: for Eliot, it is through these two elements that the contrast between present and past has to appear. This ‘mythical method’, according to Eliot, ‘is simply a way of controlling, ordering, giving shapes and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’.
Nevertheless, it is on this issue of consciousness that the first, substantial difference between the two authors can be found. According to Eliot, an awareness of tradition demands, first and foremost, a historical sense. Instead, Stravinsky’s approach to history does not focus on trends or evolutionary developments, but rather on single pieces, works of the composers that came before him, which he appreciates as creative occasions, and not as elements of a larger design providing an explanation for the present. This is evidently very far from Eliot’s conviction that, as I have stated before, possessing the historical sense makes the poet «most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity».
Both authors believe that the opposition between tradition and originality is a false one, and that a close relationship exists between these two concepts. Novelty doesn’t mean breaking with tradition. Eliot says ‘Although the artist feels tradition as an overwhelmingly constricting force, his aspiration is not to break free from history, but rather to capture its deepest soul.’
A first link – first in conceptual, rather than chronological terms – is established by Stravinsky in his Poetics, where he makes a connection between tradition and the life of the present:
‘A real tradition is not the testimony of a faraway past, but a living force that animates and shapes the present.’
As a summary of the two artists' similar ideas, I found two enlightening quotes:
‘Immature poets imitate: mature poets steal’ - THOMAS ELIOT
‘A good composer does not imitate: he steals’ - IGOR STRAVINSKY
