The Rite of Chess
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2
On 2nd September, I attended a performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at the Royal Albert Hall’s Proms season. The performance was remarkable for a number of reasons, the first of which was that the Aurora Orchestra, conducted by Nicholas Collon, performed this difficult work entirely from memory. As co-founder with Tony Buzan of the World Memory Championship, now in its 32nd year, this feat was of particular interest to me.
Secondly, I had been previously unaware of the fact that Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947), Stravinsky’s collaborator on the story and his set designer, had originally proposed two scenarios to the great composer: either ancient Russian folk history, combined with pagan human sacrifice of a young virgin, or a chess-based theme, chess being very much the Russian national game. Stravinsky chose the former, so we may never know how close we were to being presented with the alternative version, Le Sacre des Échecs.
Thirdly, the riot and furore caused by the premiere on May 31, 1913 in the Théatre des Champs Elysées in Paris, brought to mind my PhD work on pre- and post-First World War artistic consciousness, while I was at Trinity College Cambridge, back in the Cretaceous period.
My endeavour at that time was to analyse the German novel, refracted through the lens of Barthesian structuralism (Roland Barthes, Elements de Semiologie, 1964, for example), and to detect what I perceived as the progressive decline of realism in the works of, chronologically:
Theodore Fontane
Thomas Mann
Franz Kafka
Hermann Hesse.
In the novels of Balzac, Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Flaubert, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Conan Doyle, Tolstoy and even Dostoyevsky, a rich social milieu is described, full of detail about contemporary life. By contrast, social embeddedness gradually recedes, dwindles and finally vanishes in German literature, ending up in Hesse’s Castalian ivory tower, where the devotees focus on their Glass Bead Game, or in Kafka’s Castle, which exists in no recognisable social milieu and cannot even be entered. Surrounding society has withered away and vanished.
Art, of course, mirrors this and the interesting thing is that non-German art and music also participated in the evanescence of the human, pre-1914.
Take for example the dehumanisation and mechanisation of the human in the sharp rectangular edges of Cubism, Boccione’s sculptures, or the dire warnings of Gustav Mahler’s Third and Sixth Symphonies and especially Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase #2, is an extreme form of the genre in visual arts form, while Mahler’s Third includes Nietzsche’s prophetic words: O Mensch! Gib Acht! The first movement of his Sixth resembles a juggernaut or train, hurtling towards an uncertain fate.
The striking aspect of Stravinsky’s Rite is the utter break with and rejection of precedent. One can easily detect a progression whereby Haydn leads to Mozart, Mozart to Beethoven, then Schubert, Schumann, even on to Wagner, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler. But where did the Rite of Spring come from? Mahler’s Sixth is muted in comparison, though the first movement is by far the closest musical precedent. In my opinion, the Rite originated from the same dark place as Thomas Mann’s Tod in Venedig, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, Boccione’s depiction of dehumanised speed demons or Kafka’s Prozess!
I was, therefore, delighted to find in the Proms programme notes: “ …in the noises of The Rite a foreshadowing of the first mechanised global war, which was only a year away, interpreting the ritual sacrifice of a young girl as a prophecy of the coming slaughter of a generation of young people.”
Ferdinand Leger, The Card Players
It is my firm opinion that great artists, consciously or otherwise, are acutely attuned to the tenor of the Zeitgeist, and “there is no denying the unprecedented violence in the music.”
(Gillian Moore, author of The Rite of Spring, 2019)
Had I attended the world première in Paris of Stravinsky’s Rite in 1913, my first reaction would have been to book a ticket on the first available liner to New York. Prime Directive: Get out of Europe, while there is still time!
There is no evidence of Stravinsky being a chess enthusiast, as Roerich evidently was, but there are examples of other composers and musicians, notably Sergei Prokofiev, being addicted to and gifted at chess.
Consistent with the above, we feature a commentary about two games this week. Should one just require the games alone without the commentary, they follow:
The first is a win for Prokofiev over the great Capablanca and the second a draw between Prokofiev and the great violinist David Oistrakh.
The latter game is notable for two things. Prokofiev’s repeated failure to seize control of the vital blockading square c5 by playing Na4, a resource available to White on numerous occasions.
Secondly the final position, which is, remarkably a draw, in spite of Prokofiev’s extra knight. If ever the White king approaches, he allows stalemate by defending his passed pawn. If he moves the knight first, then he loses the pawn, when king plus extra knight do not constitute a mating force.
What these games prove is that Prokofiev was a cunning and resourceful tactician, but that his grasp of strategy was rudimentary. He should have studied the books of his contemporary, the great Latvian-born grandmaster Aron Nimzowitsch!
Raymond Keene’s book “Fifty Shades of Ray: Chess in the year of the Coronavirus”, containing some of his best pieces from TheArticle, is now available from Blackwell’s . Meanwhile, Ray’s 206th book, “Chess in the Year of the King”, with a foreword by TheArticle contributor Patrick Heren, and written in collaboration with former Reuters chess correspondent, Adam Black, has just appeared and is also available from the same source or from Amazon
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