s nightingale, too, comes to the palace
and sings, and all the ladies of the entourage fill their mouths with
water in the hopes of better imitating the warbling of the songster. But
then there enter envoys bearing the gift of the Emperor of Japan, a
mechanical nightingale that amuses the court with its clockwork antics.
Once more the emperor commands the woodland bird to sing. But it is
flown. In his rage the emperor banishes it from his realm. Then Death
comes and sits at the emperor's bedside, and steals from him crown and
scepter, till, of a sudden, the Nightingale returns, and sings, and
makes Death relinquish his spoils. And the courtiers who come into the
imperial bedchamber expecting to find the monarch dead, find him well
and glad in the morning sunshine.

And in his two major works, "Petruchka" and "Le Sacre du printemps,"
Strawinsky makes the machine represent his own person. For the actions
of machinery woke first in the human organism, and Strawinsky
intensifies consciousness of the body by referring these motions to
their origin. "Petruchka" is the man-machine seen from without, seen
unsympathetically, in its comic aspect. Countless poets before
Strawinsky have attempted to portray the puppet-like activities of the
human being, and "Petruchka" is but one of the recent of innumerable
stage-shows that expose the automaton in the human soul. But the
puppet-show of Strawinsky is singular because of its musical
accompaniment. For more than even the mimes on the stage, the orchestra
is full of the spirit of the automaton. The angular, wooden gestures of
the dolls, their smudged faces, their entrails of sawdust, are in the
music ten times as intensely as they are upon the stage. In the score of
"Petruchka" music itself has become a little mannikin in parti-colored
clothes, at which Strawinsky gazes and laughs as a child laughs at a
funny doll, and makes dance and tosses in the air, and sends sprawling.
The score is full of the revolutions of wheels, of delicate clockwork
movements, of screws and turbines. Beneath the music one hears always
the regular, insistent, maniacal breathing of a concertina. And what in
it is not purely mechanistic nevertheless completes the picture of the
world as it appears to one who has seen the man-machine in all its
comedy. The stage pictures, the trumpery little fair, the tinsel and
pathetic finery of the crowds, the dancing of the human ephemeridae a
moment before the snow begins t