Apollo (ballet) - The Music

The Music

Stravinsky began Apollo on 16 July 1927, and completed the score on January 9, 1928. He chose to make a ballet blanc, which he composed for a refined instrumental force, manifested as a string orchestra of 34 instrumentalists: 8 first violins, 8 second violins, 6 violas, 4 first cellos, 4 second cellos and 4 double basses. The commission from the Library of Congress and underwritten by Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge paid $1,000 for the piece, which was required to use only six dancers, a small orchestra and last not more than half an hour, but he was given a free choice of subject. Stravinsky had for some while been thinking of writing a ballet on an episode in Greek mythology and decided to centre it on Apollo, leader of the muses, reducing their number from nine to three. Stravinsky explained the originally titled Apollon Musagète as meaning “Apollo, conducteur of the Muses”. These three were Terpsichore, personifying the rhythm of poetry and the eloquence of gesture as embodied in the dance, Calliope, combining poetry and rhythm, Polyhymnia, representing mime.

Stravinsky wrote for a homogeneous ensemble of bowed string instruments, choosing to replace the contrasts in timbre that one hears in Pulcinella with contrasts in dynamics. As much later in Agon, this ballet takes its inspiration from the grand tradition of French 17th- and 18th-century music, in particular that of Lully. The prologue begins with dotted rhythms in the style of a French overture. The composer depends on a basic rhythmic cell, presented at the beginning of the work, which he transforms by subdivisions of successive values which are made increasingly complex. Stravinsky slightly revised the score in 1947. His 1963 book of conversations with Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary, indicates still more desired changes, particularly with respect to double-dotting many of the dotted-rhythm passages in Baroque style. Stravinsky himself conducted the first San Francisco Symphony performances of this music, in April 1958.