NYTBR: 'Stravinsky. The Second Exile,' by Stephen Walsh
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/books/review/30sandow.html
[First chapter and related article appended.]
A Change of Tone
Review by GREG SANDOW
Published: April 30, 2006
STRAVINSKY
The Second Exile: France and America, 1934-1971.
By Stephen Walsh.
Illustrated. 709 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $40.
One of my great musical pleasures in many ways a guilty one is the
slow movement of Stravinsky's Concerto in D, written in 1946 for
string orchestra. Stravinsky, of course, was a Very Serious
Composer, but in the 1930's and 40's he wrote some fluff, and this
slow movement sounds, I swear, a bit like Mantovani, the man who
once reigned as the king of easy listening.
There's something in the printed score that just enchants me. The
movement opens with a simple melody, which any normal, dull
composer would have given to the violins. Stravinsky adds the
cellos and then switches the two instruments on each successive
note, continuing this dizzy do-si-do until the first part of the
melody is finished.
This is crazy. It's also elegant. It also might be mannered. But in
the end, it's just delirious, the mark of a man who couldn't write
the way dull composers do, who kept rearranging all the details of
his music until each moment was unique. As Stephen Walsh acutely
puts it in the second and concluding volume of his huge biography,
Stravinsky was a man with an "inability to perform mechanical
tasks," an "inability . . . to go to sleep artistically."
Walsh's biography is precise and sensitive, sensible in sorting
through some tricky issues and not least quite beautifully written.
Though he describes Stravinsky's music wonderfully, what he mostly
does is tell Stravinsky's story. As he put it in the introduction
to the first volume (which appeared in 1999), he wants above all
"to establish the facts" about Stravinsky something, he adds, that
"has never actually been done before."
When Walsh rejoins him in 1934, Stravinsky is a musical celebrity,
living in France. He had a wife and four children; he also had a
mistress, Vera, who became the companion of his life. His wife and
one of his daughters died (tuberculosis, Walsh suggests, ran in the
family). Stravinsky and Vera fled the war in 1940, married and
settled in Los Angeles. Stravinsky was always preoccupied with
money. He didn't make enough from composing, so he toured
constantly, conducting his own works with various orchestras. His
"geographical profligacy" (in Walsh's phrase) became exhausting,
above all since Vera and Stravinsky (who, we learn, was "addicted"
to zoos, among much else) insisted on seeing all the sights.
As his fame continued to grow, he became "a walking legend, a slice
of history" or, more pointedly, a man with "iconic significance to
a mass of people who cared nothing about his music." He befriended
artists and intellectuals, and, more distantly, Hollywood stars.
Frank Sinatra once spotted him in a restaurant and asked for his
autograph. He was frequently ill. And, though he could be selfish
and controlling, he was very often a delightful man, small,
impeccable and dashing, drinking Scotch (and then more Scotch), and
beaming with "a wonderful radiance." "I came dronk," he would
announce, in his Russian accent. "I slept one hour. . . . I have
had supper, and then I have composed two bars!"
As the story proceeds, some complications arise for the biographer.
In 1948, Stravinsky met a young conducting student named Robert
Craft, who would become his friend, assistant, co-conductor and
virtually a member of his family. And, quite improbably, he also
became Stravinsky's mentor, introducing him to Schoenberg's 12-tone
system, which up to then he hadn't even cared to learn about. Since
at least the 1920's, Stravinsky's neoclassicism had been one pole
of what was then called "modern music." The other pole was
Schoenberg. When Stravinsky, taught by Craft, began writing 12-tone
music, it was as if the elderly Picasso, guided by a younger man,
had started painting like Kandinsky, with an added touch of Jackson
Pollock. No observer of the music scene could ever have predicted
that. Was Craft the Svengali of Svengalis?
But that's only the beginning of the controversy over the Craft
relationship. Craft put together six collections of Stravinsky's
writings and conversations, along with four volumes of his own
reminiscences. He also edited three volumes of Stravinsky's
correspondence, along with Vera's diary. In Volume 1 of his
biography, Walsh firmly but courteously noted that both the
reminiscences and Craft's editing are unreliable. Craft responded
in 2001 in the scholarly journal Musical Quarterly with a brittle
essay that was partly a personal attack on Walsh and partly an
exercise in nitpicking. Walsh kept his silence, but he gives his
devastating answer here.
Walsh is no longer courteous, and when discussing Craft his tone
shifts from sarcasm to outrage. "Craft's account of these
transactions," Walsh writes about one episode, "is
characteristically self-assured, but like much of his work it is
riddled with bias, error, supposition and falsehood." An attack by
Craft on one of Stravinsky's children (which appeared in an
editorial gloss on one of Stravinsky's letters), Walsh writes, is
"so monstrous, so damaging and selective, at times so fallacious,
and withal so private, that it seems astonishing today that it was
ever dignified with publication."
As for the writings by Stravinsky that Craft edited, they were
genuine in content at the start, but not in tone. And toward the
end they were entirely by Craft. Craft also, Walsh appears to
prove, wrote notable parts of what he published as Vera's diaries
(because similar passages later appeared as his own recollections
in his own memoir). In 1971, when Stravinsky was nearing death and
barely conscious, Walsh charges, Craft arranged for Stravinsky to
share his supposed opinions on a Warhol retrospective at the Tate,
among other matters, in an alleged conversation eventually
published in The New York Review of Books.
And yet Walsh strongly defends the personal relationship, the real
need the two men had for each other, the genuine warmth they felt,
the crucial help Craft gave Stravinsky so crucial, in fact, that
without that help, Walsh writes, Stravinsky's later works might
never have been written.
In the decade before he met Craft, Stravinsky was in a peculiar
position. He was feted on conducting tours, but when he wasn't the
conductor, orchestras almost never played his music. (This is
something Walsh doesn't make explicit, though an informed reader
will surmise it.) Meanwhile, a new avant-garde taking off from
Schoenberg's 12-tone system was scorning him. He was finished, he
said; at one point he actually "broke down and wept." So when
Craft, in the early 1950's, showed Stravinsky how Schoenberg's
music worked, he was open to the possibilities it offered.
Though here I'd add a footnote of my own: For anyone who loved to
play with notes the way Stravinsky did think of the Concerto in D
the 12-tone system was a perfect fit. It requires the composer to
make constant arrangements of his notes, first putting them in some
sequential order, and then contriving ways to keep that order
constant throughout the piece. How could Stravinsky not have liked
that? His 12-tone works are disjunct, bracing and dissonant, but
also wildly playful.
Despite small triumphs in his accounts of individual Stravinsky
works, Walsh could have done more with the music. I wish, for
example, he'd grappled more straightforwardly with the state of
music in Stravinsky's time. Stravinsky, at the end of World War II
the most important mainstream composer of his age, had prestige but
no real popularity. That's what happens when classical music comes
to be about the past.
Walsh ends with the almost melodramatic statement that Stravinsky's
music was "the most exact echo and the best response to those
terrifying years that brought it into being," despite also seeming
"studiously, impenetrably deaf to the world around it." But where
does this judgment come from? Almost nothing seems to lead up to
it. Nevertheless, it suggests an alternate biography to the superb
one Walsh has written, one that would focus on everything
Stravinsky did with notes, on what happens in his music, which was
where he lived his richest life.
Greg Sandow is a composer, critic and consultant. He is writing a
book on the future of classical music.
First chapter of 'Stravinsky'
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/books/chapters/0430-1st-wals.html
By STEPHEN WALSH
The small town of Oranienbaum lies on the southern shore of the
Gulf of Finland, some fifty kilometers to the west of St.
Petersburg. The ground rises gently from the sea to what remains
today the main feature of the place, the great baroque palace of
Peter the Great's corrupt favorite Prince Alexander Menshikov, with
its rambling Dutch park - now, alas, somewhat forlorn - originally
laid out in 1714. At one corner of the park a lake debouches into a
stream by way of a modest waterfall surrounded by rocks and pine
trees, a sufficiently Alpine setting, apparently, for the street
which runs east from the park gate nearby to have been christened
with the otherwise absurdly fanciful name Shveytsarskaya Ulitsa -
Swiss Street.
But another, less imaginary thread links this provincial Russian
street with the land of the cuckoo clock and the numbered bank
account. For it was here, in the wooden dacha of one Khudintsev -
Oranienbaum house number 137 - that Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was
born at noon on 5/17 June 1882. And while Switzerland may have left
its faint mark on Oranienbaum, Oranienbaum was to leave an
indelible imprint on Switzerland, a fact also recorded in a street
name, no less incongruous - that of the rue Sacre du Printemps in
the suburbs of Clarens, on the northern shore of Lake Geneva.
Like most provincial towns of what was once the Soviet Union,
Oranienbaum is today a depressing epitaph to three-quarters of a
century of bad management, bad economics, and bad architecture. The
Soviets destroyed it by their own unique combination of neglect and
vandalism. Menshikov's park, with its palaces and walks, was left
to decay; but much of what otherwise remained from tsarist times,
and survived the German bombardment of the early forties, was
bulldozed and replaced by concrete and gray brick which, as usual,
in turn soon crumbled and peeled. The town's name was changed from
the too-German, too-Petrine "Orange Tree" to the harder-nosed
Lomonosov, in honor of an eighteenth-century philologist from
chilly Archangel. Shveytsarskaya Street became Ulitsa Vosstaniya -
Revolution Street. The dacha Khudintseva was heedlessly pulled down
and replaced in 1934 by an electricity substation, itself now
rusting and decrepit. Of all the great birthplaces of Western art,
this must surely be one of the most philistine and dispiriting.
More than seventy-five years later, Stravinsky told Robert Craft
that "we never returned to Oranienbaum after my birth ... and I
have never seen it since." But on this, as on countless other
points of fact, his memory betrayed him. The Stravinskys went back
to Oranienbaum at least twice, in the summers of 1884 and 1885, and
Igor's younger brother, Gury, was born there too, on 30 July/11
August 1884, though in a different house. The place was a
fashionable summer resort for the Petersburg artistic-literary
intelligentsia, and since Igor's father was a singer and a
bibliophile, he was merely following a trend by summering there.
Tolstoy, Nekrasov, and Fet, among writers, and - among painters -
the realist peredvizhniki ("wanderers") Savrasov, Shishkin, and
Repin, all stayed and worked in Oranienbaum. Stravinsky apart,
musicians remember it as the place where Musorgsky spent his last
summer (1880), working on Khovanshchina and Sorochintsi Fair, and
quietly drinking himself to death. In the second half of the
nineteenth century a theatre was built in the station square, and
Fyodor Stravinsky performed some of his best-known operatic roles
there, including Varlaam in Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, Farlaf in
Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila, and (a month or two after Gury's
birth) Ramfis in Verdi's Aida. Fyodor would transport his entire
household to Oranienbaum in about the middle of May, and he himself
would commute to and from St. Petersburg, Viborg, or even distant
Moscow, according to the pattern of his performance schedule. It so
happens that there was a family connection with Oranienbaum, since
Fyodor's wife, Anna Kirillovna, had a first cousin, Ivan Ivanovich
Kholodovsky, living there, and the account books record at least
one subsequent visit by the Stravinsky children (in February 1892).
Dyadya (Uncle) Vanya, as he was known to them, was an army general
whose uniform braid Igor remembered sucking while he was being held
up for a photograph. We may picture Anna and her cousins walking in
the Menshikov park in the high summer of 1884 with her four sons:
Roman, aged eight, Yury, aged five, the two-year-old Igor, perhaps
hand-in-hand with his stout German nyanya (nurse), Bertha Essert,
and the tiny Gury, strapped to his wet nurse. Although no such
actual photographs have survived from that age of studio
portraiture, and although Igor Stravinsky remembered nothing of
Oranienbaum itself, we can construct the rather stiff,
well-behaved, Victorian family group, matriarchal and unsmiling,
from the evidence of somewhat later family portraits which do
survive. Or was the reality, in Fyodor's occasional absence, more
unruly?
As with every family event of the least importance, Fyodor
Stravinsky recorded Igor's birth in painstaking calligraphic detail
in his account book, together with the name of a young lady,
Tatyana Yakovlev, who was to be his wet nurse for the first twelve
months of his life; and he also kept the page of the calendar for
that day, carefully inscribed with information about the birth, and
with the name of the baby's personal saint - the Holy Martyr Prince
Igor - pasted onto the page in addition to the official saints and
martyrs listed for that day. A mere six days earlier, Fyodor had
been in Moscow singing Galitsky's aria from Prince Igor in a
concert conducted by Anton Rubinstein, and Richard Taruskin argues
that, while conventionally naming his son after a listed (if
obscure) saint, the proud father really had in mind the
less-than-saintly hero of Borodin's opera. The implication that
Fyodor had some special sense of his third son's musical destiny
(since, after all, he apparently made no attempt at operatic names
for the other three) might seem contradicted by Stravinsky's later
recollection of his parents' disdain for his musical talent. But as
we shall see, the composer's memories of his family relations are
no more to be trusted than his supposed reminiscences of his own
baptism in the Nikolsky Cathedral, St. Petersburg, on 29 July/10
August 1882, which he describes in sensational detail, even down to
his "intestinal reaction" at being immersed. Of course, we are not
really asked to believe that these are personal memories, merely a
blend of family tradition with normal Orthodox observance. They do
nevertheless draw attention to a contradiction between what
Stravinsky tells us he felt about his childhood and what he
actually felt about it if we believe surviving contemporary
documents. Fyodor's "naming and honoring of the chosen one" - like
the one in The Rite of Spring - may be a little too emblematic for
real life, but it was nevertheless the prelude to a childhood of
profound intensity and richness which Stravinsky never forgot and
which colored his attitude, both to the world and to art, for the
rest of his days.
Like all events and entities, every child is a zero point from
which both the past and the future radiate outwards. But with
Stravinsky the effect was magnified by war, revolution, and exile,
and the sense of severance from the past is, with him, particularly
acute. He himself expressed this (rather than any factual truth)
when he told Craft that "the real answer to your questions about my
childhood is that it was a period of waiting for the moment when I
could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell." But
who exactly were the objects of this strange and surely
retrospective Messianic venom?
The Stravinskys were, in the terms of late tsarist Russia,
downgraded dvoryane, or minor nobility, though if we were to
interpret that in modern Western terms, we should probably describe
them as well-connected bourgeoisie, or perhaps urbanized gentry.
Anna Kirillovna Stravinskaya, Igor's mother, came decidedly from
the landowning, governing classes of nineteenth-century Russia. Her
maternal grandfather, Roman Fyodorovich Furman (1784-1851), had
been a Privy Councillor (tayniy sovetnik) to Nicholas I and a
finance minister on the governing council of the so-called Kingdom
of Poland (actually by this time a fief of the Russian Empire),
while Roman Furman's father, an agronomist originally from Saxony,
had attained the lesser, but nevertheless distinguished, rank of
Court Councillor (nadvorniy sovetnik). Moreover, Roman's mother,
Yelizaveta Engel, belonged to another blue-blooded family of Privy
Councillors, while his aunt Anna Engel herself married into the
aristocratic Litke family, and her children included two of the
most famous admirals in modern Russian history, one of whom was
incidentally also the great-grandfather of Sergey Diaghilev.
Anna Kirillovna Stravinskaya was hardly less well connected on the
paternal side. Her father, Kirill Grigorevich Kholodovsky
(1806-1855), though he owned no land, was a second- or
third-generation nobleman who, like Furman, achieved high political
rank under Nicholas I: he became a State Councillor, a member of
the Council of Thirty, and Assistant Minister of State Properties.
At the time of the birth of his youngest daughter in 1854,
Kholodovsky was for some reason living in Kiev. Anna was the last
of four daughters, and the only one who did not marry a landowner.
Her widowed mother, Maria Romanovna, seems indeed to have opposed
her marriage on these grounds, though Anna's youth (she was still
only nineteen at the time of her wedding in May 1874 [OS]) and the
fact that her intended was a musician were doubtless factors as
well. Fyodor's letters of the time even had to be delivered
covertly through a sympathetic Kholodovsky aunt. "It's terribly
disagreeable for me, and even somewhat painful and distressing," he
wrote from Odessa, "that Mamasha is so upset as to be actually
growing thin and ill; I thought and think that the reason lies not
simply in the idea of being separated from you, my dear, but in the
fact that she perhaps regrets having agreed to our marriage at all;
if so, then it will now be too painful for me to see her."
For all Maria Romanovna's disapproval, Fyodor could point to
quarterings no less impressive than his future wife's, even if he
had a good deal less to show for it in material terms. The
Stravinsky family, like the name, is Polish, a fact which needs to
be stressed in view of recent and perfectly understandable attempts
by Kiev scholars to claim Stravinsky as a Ukrainian of Cossack
lineage. The so-called Soulima-Stravinskys are more accurately
described as "Strawinscy Herbu Sulima," to adopt for the moment the
old Polish spelling of the two names: that is, the Strawinscy
family with the Sulima coat-of-arms. This simply means, for our
purposes, that this branch of the Strawinscys claimed descent from
the more ancient - probably German - house of Sulima. Stefan
Strawinski traced the family tree back to the late sixteenth
century, when the Strawinscys held high state office, in a kingdom
where there were no hereditary titles and power was symbolized by
honorific titles associated with purely ceremonial duties. For
instance, there was a Strawinsky Kasztelan (castellan) of Minsk and
Vitebsk, and another Strawinscy Kasztelan of Brest, who later
became Voyevoda - that is, Governor - of the province of Minsk.
These posts brought with them seats in the Polish Senate and royal
lieutenancies; in other words, their holders were ceremonial
grandees like modern British lords lieutenant, and inevitably they
were large landowners. Gradually the family fortunes declined. In
the next generation (the mid-seventeenth century), Strawinscys held
honorary stewardships and magistracies; one Krzysztof Strawinscy
was czesnik oszmianski - cupbearer at Oshmyany, a town between
Vilnius and Minsk. But these were altogether more provincial
appointments, conferring purely local authority. Of Fyodor's
great-great-grandfather Stanislaw Strawinscy (who married in 1748)
we otherwise know only that he inherited a village called Szokinie,
in the Strava region, but, instead of leaving it to his eldest son,
sold it to a nephew and, presumably, spent the money. A mere three
generations later Fyodor's father, Ignaty Ignatyevich (1809-93), is
no longer a freeholder at all, but a leaseholder and a working
estate manager and agronomist, in the village of Noviy Dvor near
Gomel in the southeastern corner of what is today Belarus, but was
then in the Minsk province of tsarist Russia.
While the genealogy depicts a gradual decay in the social and
economic standing of the Szokinie Stravinskys (to revert, now, to a
transliterated Russian spelling), the geography reveals a parallel
southeasterly drift, but always within the borders of the ancient
Grand Duchy of Lithuania - the eastern half of the pre-Napoleonic
kingdom of Poland. To put this another way, Stravinsky territory
was, very roughly, modern Belarus: that is, White Russian-speaking
and Orthodox, as opposed to Polish and Roman Catholic.
Nevertheless, according to the composer, Fyodor's father was still
Catholic, while Fyodor was baptized Orthodox only because his
Russian mother, Alexandra Ivanovna Skorokhodova (1817-98), was
Orthodox, and under Imperial Russian law - relevant in the former
Polish eastern territories after the partition of 1793 - the
children of a mixed marriage had to be Orthodox. We can add,
speculatively, that in wedding the daughter of a Russian Orthodox
small-landowner in the remote southeast of those territories,
Ignaty Stravinsky was marrying well beneath himself and his
ancestry, but also that, in turning his children into Russians, he
was opening to them new horizons and a new culture. Fyodor's
somewhat rootless success as an opera singer might not have been
possible without his first being declasse and depolonized.
Ignaty Ignatyevich, Fyodor's father, seems in any case not to have
taken kindly to his Orthodox wife, nor she to him. According to the
composer, Ignaty was a womanizer; and according to the composer's
niece Xenia, he was a bad businessman and a failure at estate
management. At all events the couple separated and soon divorced.
Perhaps this was even as early as the 1840s, since Fyodor
Stravinsky, who was born in 1843, was brought up in the house of
his maternal grandfather at Bragin and later recalled sitting in
the window of this house with his nyanya, watching the Cossacks
ride home from the Hungarian war of 1848-49. Ignaty went off to
Poltava, in the Ukraine, where he again perhaps failed as an estate
manager, since he ended his long life in Tiflis, in the house of
his daughter Olga Dimchevsky.
There is a bizarre footnote to this tale of Fyodor's ancestry. The
maternal grandfather, Ivan Ivanovich Skorokhodov (1767-1879), is
none other than the "old gentleman" of Stravinsky's Dialogues, who
died at the age of 111 "as a result of a fall while trying to scale
the garden fence on his way to a rendezvous." This irresistible
picture is both too good and too obviously apocryphal to be worth
denying. But Skorokhodov seems to have been no philanderer like his
son-in-law, but a sweet old man who put a roof over his daughter
and her children and was still worrying about his grandchildren's
welfare after they were married. A gentle, uncomplicated letter
survives from him to Fyodor Stravinsky, among other things
congratulating Fyodor's son Roman on his second birthday. It is an
awe-inspiring thought that if Roman had been Igor, or if
Skorokhodov had survived three more years, composer and
great-grandfather would between them have spanned two centuries of
continuous life. . . .
___________________________________________________________
By LAWSON TAITTE
Published: January 16, 2000
STRAVINSKY
A Creative Spring:
Russia and France, 1882-1934.
By Stephen Walsh.
Illustrated. 698 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $35.
These days a fresh biography of Igor Stravinsky requires as much
courage as tact. Not that anyone is going to dispute the
Russian-born composer's singular stature in 20th-century music. The
basic shape of his life, also, is too well known to excite
controversy. But Stravinsky himself continually rewrote his own
artistic and intellectual history. He leapt from masterpiece to
masterpiece with kaleidoscopic shifts of style and stance. The
autobiography he wrote in middle age and the scintillating series
of conversation books he wrote with Robert Craft in the last years
of his long life covered his aesthetic tracks, fudging not only
opinions he had held earlier but even inconvenient facts.
Stephen Walsh's new account of the first half of Stravinsky's life
judiciously navigates between two mountains of often conflicting
information. The accounts that Stravinsky gave of the genesis of
his works are notoriously unreliable, shaped as they were by
polemic as well as by an increasingly suspect memory. The
revisionist research of scholars like Richard Taruskin frequently
disputes details. Even more, these writers reinterpret the
composer's creative processes in a light far different from the one
Stravinsky wanted to throw on them as his ideas changed. Walsh
calls the composer to account for a great many fibs and
distortions. But he never loses sympathy for Stravinsky as a human
being. Furthermore, his respect for his subject's genius would be
tantamount to idolatry if his taste were not so unerring.
This intricately detailed book almost requires a knowledge of
Stravinsky's works as complete as Walsh's own. Although it does
drop juicy tidbits of gossip here and there (about matters like
Stravinsky's liaison with Coco Chanel and the impresario Serge
Diaghilev's succession of splendid young danseurs), it is finally
all about the music. The long-drawn-out composition of ''Les
Noces,'' perhaps the summit of Stravinsky's early works, seems to
take as long in the book as the 10 years it took in real life. It
would be a service if the text were a little more emphatic about
what year it has reached as it goes along. In the face of so much
detail, it also helps to have the ringing pianos and the whooping
cries of the chorus in the back of your mind when you hear just how
''Les Noces'' came to be.
Finally, after all, Stravinsky's life is interesting because of the
pieces he wrote -- and the gallery of artistic titans with whom he
worked and socialized. Almost every important musician or dancer of
the first third of the 20th century makes an appearance, and the
list of writers and painters is almost as impressive. Nikolai
Rimsky-Korsakov taught Stravinsky. Claude Debussy took an interest
in his early work. Michel Fokine, Leonide Massine and George
Balanchine choreographed their most important pieces to his music.
Pablo Picasso designed sets for him. Jean Cocteau and Andre Gide
wrote librettos. Every page will dazzle the star-struck.
Stravinsky's life falls into neat thirds -- nearly 30 years each in
Russia, France and Switzerland, and the United States.
''Stravinsky'' takes him to the point when he belatedly became a
French citizen, just after the premieres of ''Symphony of Psalms''
and ''Persephone'' in 1934. The early chapters hold the most
surprises. The young Igor's life in Russia has not become the stuff
of legend, in contrast to his life after his great successes.
Unlike most other composers of his stature, Stravinsky was no
prodigy. His interest in the arts as an adolescent was
all-encompassing but unspecialized. He passionately took part in
summer theatricals -- which, as anyone who has seen ''The Seagull''
will realize, could be very serious affairs indeed. He was nearly
20 when he finally decided that music rather than painting would be
his career.
Stravinsky had entree to the greatest figures in Russian music
because his father, Fyodor, was a leading operatic basso.
Rimsky-Korsakov took Igor on as a student, but not in the regular
way. Stravinsky had private lessons rather than studying in the
conservatory the older composer ran. Rimsky-Korsakov became a
second father to the young Igor, and his two sons became
Stravinsky's closest friends. (The story of the destruction of
those friendships when the student's foreign success eclipsed
memories of his master is one of the saddest in the book.)
Walsh, who teaches music at Cardiff University in Wales, tends to
tell his story the way so many classic filmmakers made their movies
-- mostly in medium long shots that take in a wide area without
focusing too closely on any one figure. The sheer bulk of events
and people makes it impossible to give much in the way of highly
detailed scenes or portraits. One notable exception is the
attention Walsh pays to Stravinsky's first wife, Katya, his first
cousin, who had been a childhood sweetheart. Walsh says that her
letters, and Craft's commentaries, give ''the impression of a
pious, saintly, worn-out, self-abnegating woman, obsessed with the
agony of ill health, and resigned -- one could say, unnaturally so
-- to a vicarious, unregarded existence in the shadow of a
celebrated and unfaithful husband.'' He goes on to paint quite a
different picture: ''Photographs of her at the time of her marriage
and before show a beguiling tenderness of facial expression: soft,
deep-set eyes, a generous but not sensuous mouth (in marked
contrast to her more conventionally good-looking older sister), an
air of calm inner poise.''
After the acclaim and notoriety the success (sometimes succes de
scandale) of his three great early ballets for the Ballets Russes
in Paris brought, and after World War I and the Russian Revolution
cut them off from their homeland, Igor, Katya and their four
children -- and a host of relatives and retainers -- wandered all
over France and Switzerland, staying here or there for a few months
or years. Several of the family members suffered from tuberculosis,
so the city was considered unhealthy. Stravinsky was constantly
separated from the others, first traveling to those places the
Ballets Russes was performing, then increasingly playing the piano
and conducting his own works in concert. The more famous he became,
the greater his need for money -- and the more he needed to
perform. This was partly because of copyright problems. Russia was
not a signatory on the international agreements to protect
intellectual property. After the war, Stravinsky, as a virtually
stateless foreigner, was often ineligible for royalty payments.
Walsh uses these vicissitudes to justify Stravinsky's famous
tightness in money matters. He cannot so easily rationalize
Stravinsky's offhand anti-Semitism.
Walsh laments the time Stravinsky spent playing the piano and
wielding the baton. For him, the 1920's were Stravinsky's ripest
creative years, and he wonders how many more masterpieces
Stravinsky might have turned out if he had not been constantly on
trains to Berlin or Rome. The Neo-Classical Stravinsky -- which for
Walsh properly begins with the ''Octet'' more than with
''Pulcinella'' -- has never had a more fervent or convincing
apologist. Of course, Stravinsky's companion on most of those
journeys was Vera Sudeykina. A sophisticated intellectual, a
worldly and urbane woman -- in contrast to the increasingly pious
Katya -- Stravinsky's mistress (and after Katya's death, his second
wife) went almost everywhere with the master. For most of that
time, Katya knew all about it, too.
Curiously, it was at just this time that Stravinsky came under the
influence of Jacques Maritain's French revival of scholasticism. He
went back to his Russian Orthodox roots rather than becoming Roman
Catholic. Icons proliferated. It is hard to know which is the
greater wonder: Stravinsky's ability to reconcile the cosmopolitan
West and the hermetic East in his religious culture or his ability
to reconcile his faith with his unusual domestic arrangements.
Sometimes the details grow wearisome -- we learn of every stop on
every concert tour. But it's entertaining to see Walsh weigh the
evidence from his contrary sources about even the smallest of them.
Finally we are left with an image of this overbearing, dapper, ugly
little man, whose unorthodox conducting style communicated the
essential thing about his music -- a rhythmic propulsion as
inexorable and as liberating as the spring thaw. It is Stravinsky
seen from the outside. To get some idea of what made such a genius
tick you have to search out the Stravinsky-Craft books, however
suspect and unreliable. But Walsh's is a useful and honorable
portrait. It leaves you wanting to listen again and again to every
piece, from the tiny shards of the ''Pribaoutki'' to the curlicued
grandeur of ''Oedipus Rex.''
Lawson Taitte, the theater critic of The Dallas Morning News, also
writes music criticism for the paper.
tympbum
tympbum
Peter T. Daniels
>
> 'Stravinsky. The Second Exile,' by Stephen Walsh
> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/books/review/30sandow.html
> [First chapter and related article appended.]
WHY?????????
> A Change of Tone
>
> Review by GREG SANDOW
> Published: April 30, 2006
>
> STRAVINSKY
> The Second Exile: France and America, 1934-1971.
> By Stephen Walsh.
> Illustrated. 709 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $40.
The American edition of the first volume bears a very interesting note
that it differs significantly from the British edition, because, due to
a "misunderstanding," the latter includes scads of quotations from
unpublished documents that he did not have permission to publish.
Happily, dozens of remaindered copies of the British edition were
available at Strand Books a few years ago.
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
Peter T. Daniels
Why did you copy 37 K of junk to add -- absolutely nothing?
Twice?
And out of google groups, no less!!
That means you deliberately chose to do so.
Twice.