KN23 Zwiegespräch zwischen der Fröhlichkeit und der Vernunft

KN23 Dialogue de la Joye et de la Raison [1933]

Dialogue between Joy and Reason — Zwiegespräch zwischen der Fröhlichkeit und der Vernunft

Remarks: On 8th December 1932, Samuel Dushkin and Igor Strawinsky played the Duo Concertant in the Salle Pleyel in Paris. Among the audience was the Petrarch specialist Charles-Albert Cingria (1884–1954) whom Strawinsky met for the first time in May 1914 in Paris. Between the two strongly religious men there developed a close friendship by Strawinsky’s standards with mutual intellectual influence. Cingria saw the spirit of Petrarch reborn in Strawinsky’s work for violin and piano. Strawinsky read Cingria’s book on Petrarch in 1933 and began a larger composition for two singers and a keyboard instrument in January 1933, which was based on Cingria’s version of a text after Petrarch’s Latin didactic dialogue De Remedii utriusque fortunae from the year 1358, which had been translated early in France. Cingria’s book contained additional musical examples by Bardi, Caccini and Gluck. The composition must have been interrupted by his more important work on the melodrama Perséphone and was not taken up again. Strawinsky sent the fragment to Robert Craft as a gift on 25th December 1949, and Craft called it the most marvellous gift I have ever received. It was first published on page 372–378 of the 1st volume of his edition Selected Correspondence of 1982 as a facsimile autotype.

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