‘What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ In Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale which we saw last night performed by by Ensemble 10/10, a soldier encounters the devil and trades the violin that represents his soul for the promise of riches. Composed in 1918, with its concluding moral that ‘no one can have it all’, The Soldier’s Tale sends echoes of the Biblical text and the Faust story forward to our own troubled times.
The Soldier’s Tale was composed by Stravinsky when he was short of cash himself. Stranded in Switzerland by the First World war, he was cut off from the income of his Russian estates and publisher royalties. The chances of mounting a production of a major ballet during wartime were slim to non-existent, so he came up with the idea of writing a piece that would be both inexpensive to perform and suitable for small venues.
The result is a work that is pared down to essentials in melody, rhythm and instrumentation. The Soldier’s Tale is scored for just seven instruments: clarinet, bassoon, cornet, trombone, violin, double bass and percussion. So it is ideal for Ensemble 10/10, the contemporary music group formed from members of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Last night, the violinist Anthony Marwood directed the Ensemble in a bright and lively performance, with Walter van Dyk as the narrator, convincingly inhabiting each of the tale’s characters.
The Soldier’s Tale was composed as a ‘pocket theatre’ work to be ‘read, played, and danced’. The libretto was based on an old Russian folk tale, reworked by the Swiss writer C. F. Ramuz into a modern morality story. A soldier returning from the war meets the devil who tricks him into handing over his violin in exchange for a mysterious book that will tell him how to become fabulously rich. Too late he realises that his own soul is bound up with the violin, and though he manages subsequently to outwit the devil, he fails to learn from his first mistake, and finally loses everything he has gained.
The work may be nearly a century old, but in this excellent performance it still sounded fresh and modern, with its angular rhythms and shifting time signatures. There are echoes of eastern European gipsy tunes and of jazz, though Stravinsky had certainly never heard jazz in 1918, the date of its composition predating the age of jazz in Europe by several years.
Having fended off the devil at cards and with his fiddle playing, the soldier marries the Princess. He lives happily until he decides to leave his new town to return to his old home across the border. The work ends with the soldier crossing the frontier after being tempted by the idea of seeing his mother once again. But the devil is waiting, and Joseph turns back to find his wife gone. The final movement, the ‘triumphal march of the devil’, features violin and percussion entwined in a rhythmic duel before the violin fades out to a ghostly echo on percussion.
You must not seek to add
To what you have, what you once had;
You have no right to share
What you are with what you were.
No one can have it all,
That is forbidden.
You must learn to choose between.
One happy thing is every happy thing:
Two, is as if they had never been.
The image at the head of this post is by Martha Visser’t Hooft, one of several production sketches she made for a performance of The Soldier’s Tale in Buffalo in 1951.
