Renard, Histoire burlesque chantée et jouée (The Fox: burlesque tale sung and played) is a one-act chamber opera-ballet by Igor Stravinsky, written in 1916. The Russian text by the composer was based on Russian folk tales from the collection by Alexander Afanasyev.
The full name of the piece is: – The Fable of the Vixen, the Cock, the Cat and the Ram. A burlesque for the stage with singing and music).
History
In April 1915 Winnaretta Singer, aka la Princesse Edmond de Polignac, commissioned Stravinsky to write a piece that could be played in her salon. She paid the composer 2,500 Swiss francs. The work was completed in Morges (Switzerland) in 1916, and Stravinsky himself made a staging plan, trying to avoid any resemblance to the operatic staging or conventions. He created rather a new form of theatre in which the acrobatic dance is connected with singing, and the declamation comments on the musical action. However the piece was never performed in the salon of the princess. It was not staged until 1922.
The premiere (a double bill with Mavra) was given on May 18, 1922 by the Ballets Russes at the Théâtre de l’Opéra, Paris It was conducted by Ernest Ansermet; the choreography was by Bronislava Nijinska and the decorations and costumes were by Mikhail Larionov. Stravinsky remained pleased with Nijinska's "acrobatic Renard, which coincided with my ideas...Renard was also a real Russian satire. The animals saluted very like the Russian Army (Orwell would have liked this), and there was always an underlying significance to their movements."
In 1929 Diaghilev staged a revival with the Ballets Russes, choreographed by Michel Fokine. "[It] was ruined chiefly by some jugglers Diaghilev had borrowed from a circus" Stravinsky regretted Chagall's refusal of a commission to do the sets.
Synopsis
This is a moralizing story, a farmyard fairy tale about Reynard the Fox who deceives the Cock, the Cat and the Ram, but at the end they catch and punish him. The Cock is twice tricked and captured by the Fox, only to be rescued each time by the Cat and the Ram. After the Cock's second rescue, the Cat and the Ram strangle the Fox, and the three friends dance and sing. It also contains a slight irony relating to religion and the church – to be invulnerable the Fox wears the black gown of the nun (nuns used the privilege of inviolability in Russia).
As later in his Les noces Stravinsky employs here the singers as part of the orchestra, and the vocal parts are not identified with specific characters.
Score and music sample
Stravinsky developed here the original technique of composition that was almost unknown in the European classical tradition, however was always typical for the folk music. The main features of this are the stubborn repetition of small and simple melodic phrases (called in Russian «попевки» – popevki), played in a syncopated rhythm, with an irregular meter (changing the time signature almost in every bar); the multi-voiced texture is not a real polyphony, but rather a heterophony, that represents monophony or so to say “ragged unison”, where the melody of one instrument is accompanied and embellished with the fragments of the same melody.
