Archive Item of the Month – April 2021

Igor Stravinsky (Oranienbaum, 17 June [O.S. 5 June] 1882 – New York, 6 April 1971), composer 

Typed letter from the flautist and dulcimer player John Herbert Leach (1931-2014, Member 00815) to the composer Igor Stravinsky regarding an arrangement of Polka, the third of his Trois pièces faciles; annotated by the composer and returned to Leach, dated 22 December 1964. 

Typed letter from the flautist and dulcimer player John Herbert Leach (1931-2014, Member 00815) to the composer Igor Stravinsky regarding an arrangement of Polka, the third of his Trois pièces faciles; annotated by the composer and returned to Leach, dated 22 December 1964.

On occasions thirty years apart, Stravinsky recollected differently two versions of the composition of the Trois pièces faciles (composed 1915 and first published as a group in 1917, although the Polka had appeared by itself in a magazine in 1915). In 1966, his second recollection, Stravinsky related to Robert Craft (1923-2015) that the pieces were composed in 1915 when he was in Morges, and the first composed was the Polka which he described as a caricature of Sergey Diaghilev (1872-1929), apparently the simple secondo part being suited to the choreographer’s abilities. 
 
Various arrangements of this set of works and individual movements from the set were made and published over time. Stravinsky arranged the Polka for the cimbalom player Aladár Rácz (1886-1958), apparently transposing it especially for Rácz’s instrument which otherwise would not have incorporated one note at the end of the movement; intriguingly Stravinsky annotates Leach’s letter emphatically that “No, I never made it”! A facsimile of the transcription was published within a brief memoir of the player by his widow Yvonne Rácz-Barblan entitled ‘Une transcription inédite d’Igor Strawinsky: Polka pour cymbalum (in Feuilles musicales et courier Suisse du disque, vol.XV/2-3 (1962)). Leach’s letter also reveals his own performing connections with both Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) and Heinz Holliger (b.1939) and that he appears to have played in the first performance of Holliger’s Glühende Rätsel in the Donaueschinger Musiktage 1964.

Further literature