04 July 2008

All the way through his late 20s and 30s Stravinsky was at work on ballets for Diaghilev's company: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), The Rite of Spring (1913), Chant du rossignal and Pulcinella (1920) and Les Noces (1923).

Thereafter his ballets scores came less frequently, about once a decade, and always for George Balanchine, with whom he had worked for the first time on Diaghilev's 1925 revival of Chant du rossignal. A relationship that continued so long must have had personal groundings, but there was also a close artistic sympathy, based on a shared St Petersburg background and a shared distaste for anything, be it narrative or heedless emotional gesture, to come between technique and expression. That meant a certain amount of revisionism when it came to working on earlier Stravinsky scores (Balanchine's version of The Firebird, for instance, used only half the original music, a suite the composer prepared partly with his purposes in mind), but the works Stravinsky wrote specially for Balanchine were all very much classical ballets from the first.

Two of them have classical subjects: Apollo (1928) and Orpheus (1948): Another, Agon (1957) is entirely abstract. Jeu de cartes, first produced by Balanchine in 1937 as The Card Party, only uses the colour, heraldry and symbolism of the four suits to dress up a game of confrontations, alliances and combats that is quite as depersonalised as that of Agon. There are even musical correspondences, since both works are exuberant displays of creative virtuosity (the notes are on parade as much as the dancers), both flip through diverse sections as through the pages of a book (partly a treatise on instrumentation, partly a dictionary of quotations) and both are punctuated by a bright, fanfaring refrain, this provided a introduction to each of the three 'deals' into which Jeu de cartes is divided, and then a conclusion for the whole piece.

The idea of basing a ballet on a poker game seems to have originated from Stravinsky, who was a keen card player. Cocteau's help was sought -­ and given ­- but apparently discarded, since the eventual scenario is attributed to the composer and M.Malaieff, a friend of his son's.

There are three players (composer, choreographer and scenarist) one of them holding the joker, who, according to the argument printed in the score, 'believes himself invincible because of his ability to become any desired card'.

He arrives in the first deal with an energetic, angular dance abruptly contrasting with the moderate-paced rondo in which it functions as second episode. But the result here is a draw between two of the players. The second deal is dominated by a march with a set of musical variations for the four queens: one for each of them in turn, and then a pas de quatre. The vigorous finale, however, finds them beaten by the four aces on the Joker's side. Then in the third deal the play begins with a waltz-minuet, a parody of parodies in looking back to Ravel, and goes on with a fast battle between spades and hearts where Rossini puts in a surprise appearance. The Joker leads the spades here, but it is the hearts who win.

In Stravinsky's card game the hearts always win. The hero of The Soldiers Tale wins a brief escape from the devil by playing the Queen of Hearts, the same card that 30 years later was to provide a similar respite from hell (similarly illusory) for the hero of The Rake's Progress. And Stravinsky's motto on the score from La Fontaine, about the need for constant vigilance against the forces of evil, is an invitation to accept the ballet as a moral fable.

It is, though an ambiguous one. Stravinsky himself - in this score particularly - had shown his ability to become any desired composer, in that he could imitate anything from Bach to his earlier music. The Joker's pranks are played from within the composer's hand.

John Cranko's version, Card Game, was made for his Stuttgart Ballet in 1965. He simplified the original scenario, creating a dance work filled with comedy. As Stravinsky satirised other composers in his score, so Cranko makes witty references to other ballets, notably the Rose Adagio from The Sleeping Beauty, and also a sly comment upon Balanchine's style. The ballet entered The Royal Ballet repertory on 18 February 1966 with Christopher Gable as the Joker.

PAUL GRIFFITHS

Paul Griffiths writes regularly on music; his book on Stravinsky is published by Dent.