Tom Service on classical musicClassical musicWhat Stravinsky and Picasso do have in common
Picasso and Stravinsky each had only one great contemporary rival – who had to die before they could become an inspirationI've never much bought the parallels that are sometimes made between Picasso and Stravinsky. For all their chameleon-like stylistic change and range, the fact that they became the most famous and most influential creators in their respective fields, their vaunting egos, voracious sexuality, and the eerie synchronicity of their life spans – Picasso, 1881-1973, frames Stravinsky, who was born in 1882 and died in 1971 (actually, come to think of it, that's quite a lot of connections, isn't it?) – it's nevertheless too simplistic to imagine Stravinsky as a musical cubist and Picasso as a painterly neo-classicist.
But at the National Gallery's Picasso blockbuster, Challenging the Past, I was struck by something they really do share. Stravinsky's musical conversations were with the past – with Bach, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Monteverdi, Pergolesi, Mozart and Russian folk music – and it was the way he refracted these models through the prism of his thick, modernist glasses that defines so much of his music. Similarly, the National Gallery's exhibition makes clear that Picasso's main source of inspiration was the great traditions of El Greco, Velázquez, Delacroix, Manet, Poussin and Van Gogh, precisely the styles of painting that many of his contemporaries thought he was so violently rupturing.
That was never true for either Stravinsky or Picasso: instead of doing violence to the past, they wanted to be thought of as part of the musical and artistic canon. There's a hubris in this as well, as if the only people who could measure up to them were the old masters rather than any of their contemporaries. Both of them knew how good they were, and both self-consciously positioned themselves as the ne plus ultra of modernity.
And yet, for both, there was one living painter and musician they really did respect and who they felt as a challenge, or even a threat. For Stravinsky, it was Schoenberg; for Picasso, Matisse. In the biggest room of the National Gallery's show, there's a suite of paintings Picasso made in response to Delacroix's Women of Algiers. One of them (version E) is dominated by a large, blue, reclining nude. More than a reference, it's a clear transformation of Matisse's Blue Nude of 1907, and the other Blue Nudes that he made towards the end of his life. Matisse died in 1954, just before Picasso started his Delacroix sequence. Picasso said at the time: "When Matisse died, he left me his odalisques as a legacy." Now that Matisse was in the past, Picasso felt free to use him, to honour him and to measure himself against him, just as he did with Goya or Van Gogh.
Stravinsky needed Schoenberg to become part of the past, too, before he felt able to explore his own take on the latter's serialism. Schoenberg died in 1951, and it's arguable that if he hadn't, Stravinsky's ego would have prevented him using serialism as a compositional technique, and we would never have heard those miraculous 12-note jewels of Stravinsky's last years. Only once Schoenberg had become, like Mozart or Verdi, someone to objectively measure himself against could Stravinsky become a serialist. For both Picasso and Stravinsky, one of the wellsprings of their art was the presentness they found in the past.
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