The Nightingale 1947

Interesting how nightingales have fallen out of fashion… But not Stravinski’s nightingale, because that small opera inspired by Andersen‘s fable and Chinese tales is concerned with the problem the weight of which we see now: the driving out of live music by artificial one produced by machines. Perhaps this concerns not only music? Stravinski had noticed it already in 1914 and that is why he composed the stylized Nightingale right after the ecstatic Rite of Spring. Because, as he has always believed, that which is alive shall always overcome, that which is dead but at a great price – one needs to, like the Chinese emperor, taste death in order to come alive. After Stravinsky’s death the eminent critic Pawe? Beylin wrote: „Immortality lies at the base of all mortality”. The path to this truth is celebrated by the hieratic spectacle of the Mariinsky Theater as a rite in a peculiar cult where flutes and sopranos flicker like candles.