Ed Zubrow:

>I found this curious because its two parts don't seem to connect.  I
>view the "Latin tradition" as a largely melodic one; certainly Verdi's
>music is full of memorable melody.  And I can appreciate the assault on
>such a tradition from the harmonically dense music of Wagner.  And I can
>see where Stravinsky would be coming from in his statement given the
>rhythmic emphasis and short units in his music.  What I can't see is how
>they all fit together.  Where am I wrong in my assumptions, or what am I
>missing?

Both Strawinsky and Milhaud reacted against romanticism, properly,
against the german romantic aesthetics of music, which survived in
his times at the audiences tastes and thinking (fortunately, it survives
today also).  Debusy was his nearer antecessor in this polemique.However,
that "latin tradition" is more imaginary than real, and it was perhaps a
literary extrapolation, you know:  the ancient classics, the "Mediterranean
clarity" opposed to the "gothic barbarism".  That opposed pair (similar
to Wolfflin's "categories") comes from the early Renaissance.  In fact,
Strawinsky's "Musical Poetics" is nearer to Horatius' "Ars Poetica" rather
than to any manifesto.  However, it's very difficult to find a true musical
counterpart of this "Latin tradition", since one can't think of two
composers more different than Gounod and Verdi.  Everybody knows that
French and Italian musicians have been quite different since the Middle
Ages.  Or would someone find solid similarities between Donizetti and
Berlioz?.  The argument that both Italian and French have in common the
monopoly of the "melodic sense" is not true at all.  Strawinsky wrote, for
example, that Beethoven hadn't the "melodic gift", whereas Bellini had it
in the highest level.  This can't be read seriously, except "pour epater
les bourgeois".  He wrote also that Verdi's worst works were "Otello",
"Macbeth", "Falstaff", in which he thought that the "poison of musical
drama" was infiltered.  All these are just polemical statements about
aesthetics, and in my opinion, they have not much to do with he vast and
eclectical work of Strawinsky himself (and Milhaud).

Pablo Massa
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