When you think of Kansas, you think of squares. It’s the most boring shape we have, a pejorative for people who didn’t like jazz in the ‘40’s and cocaine in the ‘80’s. Kansas itself isn’t a square but many of its counties are, especially in the western part of the state. One such county is Haskell, in the southwestern corner of the state, an hour or so drive from the borders of Colorado and Oklahoma. If there isn’t a picture of Haskell County in Urban Dictionary under the term “flyover country,” that’s an oversight on their part.
Despite its current reputation among the New Yorker Tote Bag set, Kansas has an incredible history. Fifty miles east of Haskell County’s seat in Sublette, up the old Santa Fe Trail, is Dodge City, one of the most famous towns in the American West, home of Wyatt Earp and Buffalo Bill Cody and Bat Masterson and the Long Branch Saloon, a gunfighter’s paradise. Across the state, close to the border with Missouri, the fervent abolitionist John Brown rained holy terror on those seeking to make Kansas a slave state and plotted the raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia that presaged the Civil War. The first prohibition laws in America were enacted in Kansas in 1881. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka is one of the most important legal battles in the history of the United States, a great leap towards the Civil Rights era. Yet none of these events would have the global impact of a guy named Dean coming home to Haskell County to see his folks.
It had been quite the few months for Dean Nilson. The 6 September 1917 Santa Fe Monitor reported on Nilson’s joining the Army:
Dean Nilson, the first of the Haskell County boys to answer his country’s call under the draft, left for Wichita this morning for final examination, and if accepted will go from there to Camp Funston to enter the service. Dean is one of our best young men and carries with him the best wishes of a host of friends. There was a goodly number at the train to bid him God speed.
Three months later, the Monitor reported on our man Dean again:
Dean Nilson, Co. E Inf., Camp Funston, came in Saturday morning for a day’s visit at home. Dean was sure out of luck. He had a ten days furlough and before he could get to use it he was quarantined [for diptheria] and when he was released he just had one day left for a visit home. He had to take No. 6 at Garden City Sunday morning to get back on time. Dean looked every inch a soldier in his handsome new uniform. His friends were highly pleased to see him even for a few minutes.
The Monitor reported on local goings on with a commitment to the facts that is sorely lacking in today’s journalism. “James Wallace butchered two hogs last week and remembered his friends in town.” “John Wilcox and Alyce Wohlgehagen made a trip to Dodge City last week.” “N.T. Yount and son called at the Derby home Friday.” “Dan Winans was over from Satanta Sunday.” “Everyone is enjoying this fine weather.” But it was not all sunshine and rainbows. “Some lowdown citizen without the fear of God in his heart appropriated a number of fence posts belonging to L.D. Meredith and distributed along the old Rinehart quarter just north of Santa Fe by E.R. Johnson who has the land rented and was getting ready to fence it but as yet had not got to it. It was a dirty Irish trick but if the party will bring the posts back nothing will be said.”
In early 1918, the Monitor began reporting on area residents becoming ill with measles or pneumonia. “A.W. Henley, who recently had the measles, has contracted the pneumonia and is very sick. His father came in Tuesday from Wichita.” “Mr. Earnest Dyerly of south of town is quite sick with pneumonia.” The 14 February 1918 issue added a couple more cases to the tally. “Mrs. Eva VanAlstine and Roy have returned from their visit to Oklahoma. Eva is on the sick list.” “Mertin, the young son of Ernest Elliott, is sick with pneumonia but is getting along very nicely.” Another item from the same issue is of greater significance to our story. “Dean Nilson returned to Camp Funston after a five day furlough at home.”
Something about the volume of sick people caught the attention of a local doctor named Loring Miner. After graduating from Ohio University in 1885, Dr. Miner made his way to Haskell County to practice medicine and, while he was at it, serve as the county’s health officer and coroner, this in addition to the grocery and drug stores that he owned and operated when he was not otherwise occupied by his position as the chair of the county’s Democratic Party. Meanwhile, 135 years later, I can barely hold down a job and work on this story at the same time. The territory that Dr. Miner covered was vast, encompassing hundreds of miles of frontier and demanding enough of his energy that he would sleep on his way home from rounds being pulled by the world’s smartest and most trustworthy horse. Dr. Miner roamed those Plains for decades, presumably giving people access to the finest healthcare available at the time, which I can only assume included tinctures of heroin and anesthesia in the form of biting down on sticks.
The viral outbreak concerned Dr. Miner enough that he reported it to the US Public Health Service as “influenza of a severe type.” Public Health Reports were published in April 1918, but by then it was too late. Dean Nilson and at least two other men, Ernest Elliott (little Mertin’s father) and John Bottom, traveled from Haskell County to Camp Funston in February. Camp Funston had its first confirmed case of influenza reported on March 4 and by month’s end thousands of men were stricken. The demands of troop movement during wartime allowed the virus to spread like wildfire, first to camps in Georgia, then to a number of large cities throughout the United States (most of which were adjacent to army camps), and finally on to Brest, which was “the largest port of disembarkation for American troops” in France.
As Dean Nilson was returning to Camp Funston, half a world away Stravinsky and Ramuz were discussing The Soldier’s Tale in earnest. Ernest Ansermet, in an essay describing the genesis of the piece, says that the topic was first broached over meetings at his home during tea time when Ramuz lived in Treytorrens, Ansermet’s home serving as a halfway point between Ramuz and Stravinsky, who had already settled in Morges. If this is indeed the case, then the idea may have been broached as early as 1915 as Ramuz moved to Lausanne at the end of that year. As Ansermet tells it, “[t]his is where one day the whimsical idea arises of a traveling show, very simple, very direct, which can therefore be presented in any city or village, which would stage the poet and the musician, the one to tell a story, the other to illustrate it with music, a painter being able to join them in decorating their trestles with suitable decor.” That timeline seems a bit suspect given that the first mention of the piece in correspondence between the two principal contributors is from a letter Ramuz sent to Stravinsky on 28 February 1918, but it clearly suggests that the matter had been previously discussed. “I have put a lot of thought into Histoire, which I hope is evolving in your mind, too. At the end, the Devil will lead the Soldier to The Soldier’s March (as in the beginning).” To paraphrase everyone from Cab Calloway to Steve Harvey to basketball announcer Mark Jackson: Mama, there goes That Man.
The Soldier’s Tale was next in the long and proud lineage of works showing off the The Devil’s fiddle chops. A young soldier on leave stops on a roadside to play his violin and is overheard by The Devil, who offers him a trade: the violin for a book that contains stock prices FROM THE FUTURE. The trade is to last three days but, thanks to The Devil’s deception, is actually three years. Upon returning to his home village, the soldier is shocked to find everyone terrified of him as they believe him to be a ghost. The Devil, disguised as an old woman, agrees to sell the violin back to the soldier, but it does not play. The soldier casts the violin aside and tears up the book. The end.
Just kidding! There is a whole second half of the story that is almost entirely unrelated to the first beyond the characters of the soldier and The Devil. The soldier learns of a sleeping princess who is promised by the king to whoever can awaken her. Because he is still beholden to The Devil after the whole thing with the book from before, the soldier must figure out a way to break from his clutches, which he does by losing all the riches he gained from the book to The Devil in The Devil’s other favorite pastime, a game of cards. The soldier awakens the princess with his violin (which works now, I guess?) and decides to find his mother so that she can share in his newfound wealth and royalty. The Devil warns him that he cannot leave the castle without forfeiting his soul, but the soldier attempts to do so anyway. The Devil dances triumphantly and we all learn a valuable lesson in appreciating that which we have.
Exactly where the finer points of the story originate is a bit of a mystery. The Helmut Kirchmeyer catalog of Stravinsky’s works indicates that the story is from one of the Afanasyev volumes that Stravinsky had been using as source material for other works during this period. From there, just who gets credit for the story itself is anyone’s guess. Stravinsky himself generally deflected credit onto Ramuz in Expositions and Developments, one of his series of interviews with Robert Craft. Many Stravinsky biographers, however, seem to stake the claim that it is almost entirely Stravinsky who deserves credit, with Paul Griffiths providing a suitable example:
The nature of Stravinsky’s collaboration with Ramuz is unclear, though the composer would seem to have been the senior partner, given that he had earlier been using Ramuz as the translator of his Russian texts, that Ramuz’s few letters from this period contain suggestions that were not in fact carried through, that the final version abbreviated the spoken material, and that the roots of the work were Russian rather than Franco-Swiss.
This view seems awfully one-sided. Some have gone even further, like this note from the director of a Chicago Symphony production in 2012: “The Soldier’s Tale is a Faust story written in Switzerland in 1917 by a Russian who knew he could never go “home” and that the very idea of home was changing forever all across Europe and the near east. It was created in exile, and it is particularly poignant, as Stravinsky forges a new musical and theatrical style out of many aspects of his past.” The story is indeed a quintessential Faust tale mixed with a splash of the Orpheus myth, moralistic and not-so-slightly idiotic, however Russian it may have been claimed to be. Ramuz, for his part, claims that the early discussions involved “writing a piece which could do without a big hall, a huge public; a piece with, for example, music for only a few instruments and only two or three characters…All that remained was to leaf together through one of the volumes of the enormous compilation of a distinguished Russian folklorist whose name I forget.”
As we’ve already established, Ramuz was neck deep in writing devil stuff by the time this project began to take shape but Griffiths and his ilk deign only to credit Ramuz with “the juggling of tenses and viewpoints in his lines for the narrator, who remains outside the play except at its crucial juncture.” Stravinsky later contended that Ramuz had taken the idea from Georges Pitöeff, the original production’s Devil, who himself had taken it from the playwright Luigi Pirandello. “The narrator device was adopted to satisfy the need for a two-way go-between; that is, for someone who is an illusionist interpreter between the characters themselves, as well as a commentator between the stage and the audience. The intercession of the narrator in the action of the play was a later development, an idea borrowed from Pirandello. I was attracted by this idea, but then I am always attracted by new conditions and those of the theatre are, to me, a great part of its appeal.” Whether or not this idea was taken from Pirandello is questionable. Stephen Walsh suggests that it was more likely taken from Vsevolod Meyerhold, another colleague of Pitöeff who had done something similar in a 1906 production of Alexander Blok’s The Fairground Booth. This notion of the narrator’s role in the action seems to be universally acknowledged as integral to the play. As it turns out, this is one of Ramuz’s greatest skills as an author.
From the very beginning, Ramuz utilized a syntactical device that Michelle Bailat-Jones, who has translated some of Ramuz’s work into English, describes as a “sliding scale of he or she and you and we.” What this device creates is a sort of unofficial narrator, whose job it to juggle tenses and viewpoints, a constantly shifting perspective between subjective and objective, intimate and universal. It places the reader squarely within the story:
That was all, he shut up again. And Seraphin shut up too, at that moment, both of them having become aware of something inhuman expanding around them, something that couldn’t be endured for long: silence. The silence of the high mountains, the silence of those human deserts where man appears only fleetingly. You cock an ear on the offchance that it’s you in fact who is silent, but you hear only that you hear nothing.
This device was present in Ramuz’s first novel, Aline:
…and then she waited to die in her turn, for God is just, and we mustn’t go against his will.
The only person who I have yet to see receive any credit for the inspiration of this idea is Ramuz himself. Considering his work of the period and the genius behind the narrator character, this seems like revisionist history. To be crystal God damned clear, the dynamic role of the narrator is the only literary achievement in The Soldier’s Tale beyond some occasionally clever wordplay, and Ramuz gets full and complete marks for it.
Stravinsky’s efforts require no such background examination.
The Soldier’s Tale is perhaps most notable for its orchestration. Stravinsky claims to have taken his influence from jazz, which music he discovered after Ansermet brought some sheet music back from America after a Ballet Russes tour. “The Histoire ensemble resembles the jazz band in that each instrumental category – strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion – is represented by both treble and bass components. The instruments themselves are jazz legitimates, too, except the bassoon, which is my substitution for the saxophone.” Ernest Ansermet describes the discussions over the orchestration with delight:
[T]he funniest thing was the growing progression of musical demands or rather Ramuz's amazement at these demands. The violin alone was not enough; the piano had been excluded from the start as too bulky and not rustic enough. But Ramuz had imagined that it would be enough to add to the violin an accordion or a guitar – why not a harmonica? – we were at the time keen on the harmonica that Alexandre Blanchet, who played it tastily, had introduced in our meetings. When Stravinsky explained to him that he needed a bass on his violin – and he had chosen the double bass straight – that he had to fill the space between the violin and the double bass by two. "Wood" – clarinet and bassoon – "Why two?" said Ramuz. "Because you need at least two voices in each family of instruments," Stravinsky replied. And when another day he announced that he would still need a trumpet and a trombone – always two – Ramuz opened his frightened eyes and seemed to fall from the clouds, but you never knew if his astonishment was real or feigned. Finally, Stravinsky declared triumphantly that he would be content with only one drummer, but he did not say that this man would be responsible for a whole store of instruments.
The jazz influence is also found in the score’s rhythms. “My knowledge of jazz was derived exclusively from copies of sheet music, and as I had never actually heard any of the music performed, I borrowed its rhythmic style not as played but as written.” Rhythmic style, at this point in classical music history, mostly just meant “syncopated.” Stephen Walsh disputes Stravinsky’s claim: “By 1918 this so-called jazz was an established part of the chic Parisian scene, and the claim that at that time he knew jazz only from printed copies of the music and had never physically heard it played may perhaps be regarded as one of Stravinsky’s more implausible reminiscences of this period.” Whatever the case, Stravinsky uses these tools to create music of impeccable craftsmanship, a complex stew of mixed meters, instrumental virtuosity, and evocative tone-painting.
Right out of the gate, the tone of the work is established with “The Soldier’s March,” ponderously trudging along, somehow keeping a steady pace throughout the, if I may channel legendary boxing promoter Don King, rhythmic syncopations and metric machinations. Next comes the rollicking double stops of “Airs by a Stream,” our soldier’s attention-grabbing violin showcase, followed by a sleepy dialogue between clarinet and bassoon in the “Pastorale.” “The Soldier’s March” and “Airs by a Stream” are reprised a couple times, but that’s it for music in the first part of the story, maybe six minutes total.
The spoken word to music ratio is turned on its head in the second part of the story. “The Soldier’s March” again leads off, journeying away from home and towards the kingdom with the sleeping princess. “The Royal March” takes us to the king, the slithering trumpet figures and prominent trombone slide creating a slightly demented circus vibe. Stealing his violin back from The Devil after the card game, our soldier treats us to “The Little Concert,” another display of his fiddle prowess, and proceeds to the princess’s room to awaken her with a mini suite of dances: a sultry tango, a bubbly waltz, and a bouncy ragtime. The Devil returns with the furious “Devil’s Dance,” all manic energy and frantic dissonances, dancing himself to collapse. The miniature “Little Chorale” finds our soldier and the princess embracing, but it is quickly followed by the equally miniature “Devil’s Song,” a distorted version of “The Soldier’s March” in which The Devil spells out the risk of our soldier leaving the castle. The “Great Chorale,” a modern spin on Bach, accompanies the Narrator’s explanation of the moral of the story, our soldier seeming to have learned a valuable life lesson. The princess, convincing him to violate The Devil’s terms, leads us to the end, “The Triumphal March of The Devil,” the music reducing to angry violin and drum kit, the drums ultimately winning out, growing louder and ending with a flourishing thump.
Bits and pieces of the music had been sketched going as far back as 1915, but significant portions were completed between June and December 1917. Stravinsky spent that summer in Les Diablerets, on the border of Vaud and Valais, with the author André Gide. Their days were spent conversing, reading, and carousing with young college students, Stravinsky drinking “punch” and possibly smoking that shit: “I'm like a samovar, I smoke through my nostrils, like in Wagner …” There are no reports of Stravinsky taking part in some of the more disturbing aspects of these interactions with young people, but the same likely cannot be said for his associate, a self-described pederast who had been having sex with teenage boys since he and Oscar Wilde traveled to Algiers together in 1895. Gide was particularly drawn to the young Arab boys in the French colonies, so perhaps this trip to Switzerland was a celibate one, but I wouldn’t put money on that. I’m pretty willing to empathize with a lot of human behaviors throughout history, understanding the power of societal forces and that the evolution of human knowledge and wisdom moves in unforgiving fits and starts, but the colonial pedophilia tourism thing is not one of those behaviors. God damn, people.
The fraternizing was at least in part about business. Gide, Leon Bakst, and the famed dancer Ida Rubinstein had approached Stravinsky about composing incidental music for a staging of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Stravinsky spent a fair amount of 1917 working on the music, his reticence palpable the entire time. A letter to Bakst dated 11 July 1917: “Since I am definitely not in a position to take a direct part in your Antony and Cleopatra, my role will naturally amount to composing a certain quantity of musical numbers. Here I must talk with either your or Gide, for I want to find out how you intend to present Shakespeare. If you are going to put him on in the way I suppose, in the light spirit and sumptuous settings of Saint-Sebastien or Helen of Sparta, then I definitely cannot imagine a link between such a treatment of Shakespeare and the music I would be interested in writing.” Antony and Cleopatra was unable to move forward due to the chronic disease of ambitious art projects, “financial difficulties,” though it was eventually staged in 1920 production in Paris, a six-hour affair with Stravinsky-adjacent music composed by our “bitches of the sixteenth” friend Florent Schmitt. Stravinsky was able to rescue some of his work for The Soldier’s Tale. The salvage operation began in earnest in mid-March 1918, his recently acquired pianola being put to good use according to Ramuz’s Journal. “The musician, on his piano, produces the sound of a hammer-pestle. The rhythm of the machine tool does not pass to be musical. I know that the musician in question is inspired by it anyway. He's a good musician.”
Stravinsky’s wasn’t the only salvaging project undertaken during this time. Within weeks of the October Revolution, Lenin and the Soviets had been engaged with the Central Powers on a peace treaty, withdrawal from the war a key part of the Bolshevik appeal. For two months the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Leon Trotsky, dragged his feet hoping to negotiate an end to hostilities without conceding any territory, gambling on the spread of Bolshevism to Germany and Austria. Spread it did not (yet!). The Germans warned Lenin and Co. that they would resume fighting on 17 February 1918 if their conditions were not met, a deadline which Lenin ignored. Troops advanced immediately, and by the evening of the 18th, the Soviets contacted the Germans to accept their terms. Respond they did not (yet!). For three days the Central Powers pressed on, occupying Belarus, the Baltic states, and most of Ukraine. The German terms became even harsher, nasty enough that Lenin contemplated continuing the fight. Coming to his senses, Lenin sent Trotsky back to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ceding Poland and the Baltic states and recognizing the independence of Ukraine, Georgia, and Finland. It was as lopsided as it sounds: a million square miles of land, 55 million people, and a litany of natural resources. Lenin’s description of the treaty, “that abyss of defeat, dismemberment, enslavement and humiliation,” is wholly accurate.
For Stravinsky and other White Russians, ethnic Russians who lived in the area between Poland and Russia and obviously The Dude’s preferred beverage, the treaty effectively rendered them stateless. Stravinsky’s break from Russia was accompanied by Russia’s break from Stravinsky, The Soldier’s Tale his first and perhaps sharpest stake in the heart. Having lived in Switzerland for four years, home never seemed further away, musically and spiritually. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk would be annulled by year’s end, but Stravinsky’s home was gone forever. He wouldn’t set foot on Russian soil again until 1962, as a citizen of Russia’s enemy in the distant Cold War.
I like your writing but don't quite follow the various jarring and contradictory references. What is the purpose of the American soldier episode? There's no Faustian bargain that I can see, or the same level of contempt by Ramuz and Stravinsky for their soldier. While Stravinsky used some jazz motifs what does Don King have to do with that? You seem eager to unit Stravinsky with current political hysteria but he doesn't come off as someone who would last more than a minute or two heavily guarded at that in a "vibrant" American locale. He'd be banned at a university. You are mixing high art with real life political stuff and it doesn't work in my opinion. You may also be canceled for writing about too much whiteness anyway. Maybe that's why the political stuff is a cover? Won't work. Otherwise, your overall content and style are pretty good.