Octet (Stravinsky)
Because of its dry wind sonorities, divertimento character, and open and self-conscious adoption of "classical" forms of the German tradition (sonata, variation, fugue), as well as the fact that the composer published an article asserting his formalist ideas about it shortly after the Octet's first performance, it has been generally regarded as the beginning of neoclassicism in Stravinsky's music, even though his opera Mavra (1921–22) already displayed most of the traits associated with this phase of his career (Walsh 2001, §5).
There is an early five-page draft of uncertain date for the beginning of the Allegro section in the first movement, at that time planned for piano and wind orchestra.
The waltz coincidentally contains the same intervals as the opening of the fugato, and on 23 August 1922, he created the theme and titled the movement "Thème avec variations monométriques".
[8] His employment of this form, along with the other style elements consciously borrowed from the past, is not out of a reverent desire to perpetuate them, but rather constitutes a defiant and satirical act of mockery.
[18] The finale's material is based on a rhythm identified by Stravinsky in earlier works (such as The Firebird and The Rite of Spring) with the Russian circle-dance called a khorovod.
[19] Aaron Copland witnessed the world premiere in Paris, and reported the general dismay at the abrupt, inexplicable turn away from Stravinsky's well-established neo-primitivist Russian style, to what appeared to everyone as "a mess of 18th-century mannerisms".
From a perspective of several decades later, of course, it had become clear that Stravinsky was embarking on a new and important stylistic phase that was destined to influence composers everywhere by bringing out a latent objectivist tendency in the music of the period, by openly reverting to the ideals, forms, and textures of the pre-Romantic era.
When the Octet was performed at the Salzburg Festival in 1924, by instrumentalists from Frankfurt conducted by Hermann Scherchen, an anonymous reviewer in the Times declared that, "without claiming for it, after the manner of the composer's more violent admirers, that it is a seventh Brandenburg Concerto", it displayed "a complete mastery of the medium", as well as a sure sense of form and "an ingenuity in counterpoint" with its own laws.
Though finding moments of unaccustomed discords preventing acceptance of the music as "beautiful", this critic concluded that "there is so much to admire in the work that it cannot be dismissed as a piece of buffoonery".
