Igor Stravinsky with the choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky; image: Wikimedia commons
This past Tuesday at Morse Recital Hall in New Haven, a number of artists affiliated with Yale University, including alumni and students of the Schools of Drama and Music, put on a production of The Soldier’s Tale in New Haven that sought to stay true to Stravinsky’s “fairground theatre” conception. In so doing, they have given the piece its full due, interweaving the balletic, the musical, and the theatrical without unduly emphasizing or downplaying any one of these elements. Now, the production comes to New York, where it can be seen at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall on Sunday evening.
The inspiration for The Soldier’s Tale came to Igor Stravinsky at a curious moment in his career. Completed in 1918, the fantasia of musical theater and ballet was composed long after his radical Rite of Spring, but antedates his so-called “neoclassical” later period. Lesser known than Petrushka or The Rite, Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale begins with a soldier named Joe (Tom Pecinka), who strides onstage in uniform, announced by a brass flourish. The narrator (Michael Cerveris) tells us of poor Joe’s circumstances—a soldier on leave with an old fiddle and little else—while the as-yet unhampered protagonist marches on.
Moments later Joe is no longer in uniform; he is wearing underclothes, suspenders, and a worn-out pair of trousers; the hard edges and military green of his outfit have disappeared to reveal a body of touching softness and frailty.
Between these two episodes he has met the Devil (James Cusati-Moyer) and become ensnared by temptations of luxury and plenty. Giving in, he joins Satan, who strips him of his military regalia and saps him of his vitality.
For the rest of the ballet, Joe struggles to escape from the Devil’s clutches. Satan appears in various guises, all played with panache by Cusati-Moyer, who is splendidly spindly and sly, creeping about like a spider even after he takes on the shape of a woman. A balance is struck between the comic image of Satan—a cross-dressing, over-the-top deceiver—and a far more sinister one.
The role of Joe demands a similar balancing act, albeit one less extreme. For him, the struggle is not between laughable grotesqueness and pure evil—it is between vulnerability and the desperate desire to redeem himself. Pecinka’s Joe shifts between hapless innocence and seduced torpor, without over-committing to either one. The choreographer Emily Coates’s dance steps, which comfortably range through multiple modes, including jazz, classical, and Nijinskian, give the show’s performers the breadth they need to let the drama of the play ripen.
This synthesis of multiple genres—one of the work’s great advantages—surfaces in the story as well. Based on a Russian fairytale, The Soldier’s Tale also recalls Western myths, a resonance strengthened by Cerveris’s animated storybook-style narration. Joe is an amalgam of familiar characters, all of whom we know and love—the Faust figure, played more unwitting than ambitious; the hot-blooded Romantic, chasing after his beloved with rushed footsteps, knees knocking together; and finally the automaton, sucked lifeless by the hardships of industrial life (though the production deftly avoids the pitfall of drab and overdetermined industrial set design). The libretto, translated from the French by stage director Liz Diamond, redoubles the feeling of familiarity with its loose-limbed American idiom and its rhymes, which pass metrical muster without feeling forced.
Stravinsky may very well have intended these resemblances. His characters stand at the crossroads of several histories and forms, much as he himself did when he composed this musical theater–ballet fusion while living in Switzerland in 1918.
That The Soldier’s Tale is coming to Carnegie Hall this Sunday is no surprise. The music Stravinsky composed is as remarkably fresh and startling as it was in 1918, and the choreography, lighting, and costumes are all done with such attention to their mutual influence that the ballet seems to have tumbled out whole. If any one part of the production were to be removed, the loss would be self-evident, and the work would suffer. The show pulls so much together so seamlessly that it offers a respite to the viewer—and a remonstrance to opera and ballet directors who fail to do the same.
L’Histoire du Soldat will be performed at 7:30 PM on Sunday in Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall. For information and tickets, visit carnegiehall.org