Happy Man
Paul Driver
- BuyStravinsky: The Second Exile – France and America 1934-71 by Stephen Walsh
Cape, 709 pp, £30.00, July 2006, ISBN 0 224 06078 3
- BuyDown a Path of Wonder: Memoirs of Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Other Cultural Figures by Robert Craft
Naxos, 560 pp, £19.99, October 2006, ISBN 1 84379 217 6
At the end of his two-volume biography, Stephen Walsh writes that Igor Stravinsky’s music is ‘the one unquestioned staple of the modern repertoire, the body of work that, more than any other, stands as an icon of 20th-century musical thought and imagery’. There couldn’t be a richer subject for a musical biographer and Walsh admits to having an obsession with his subject. The stamina of biographers often amazes me, and Walsh certainly doesn’t lack it: he has tracked Stravinsky’s movements in minute detail. He marshals his facts into a narrative that, while unpretentiously chronicle-like, is never flat, and he is a stylish writer and sharp analyst of music. His method is to counterpoint narrative and analysis, and he does this with unobtrusively musical flair. The book is lucidity itself (‘lucidity’ is the significant last word of Stravinsky’s autobiography), and a model of good sense.
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Letters
Vol. 29 No. 4 · 22 February 2007
From Paul Driver
In my review of Stephen Walsh’s Stravinsky biography the bald statement that Stravinsky and Schoenberg never met is an unfortunate accident (LRB, 8 February). I was well aware they met at a rehearsal of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire in 1912. The intention was to say that they never met during their sojourn in Hollywood.
Paul Driver
London NW6
Vol. 29 No. 6 · 22 March 2007
From Paul Mountain
In his review of Stephen Walsh’s biography of Stravinsky Paul Driver discusses at some length the role of Robert Craft as the composer’s protégé, interpreter and custodian of the archive (LRB, 8 February). Driver rightly challenges the increasingly manufactured nature of Craft’s series of books of ‘conversations’ with Stravinsky issued in the 1970s and 1980s; but it is surprising that he makes no mention of Craft’s earlier Chronicle of a Friendship 1948-71, which is a rich source of biographical material and, published in October 1971, only six months after the composer’s death, displays a spontaneity and authenticity that the books of conversations lack.
The Chronicle reveals Craft’s sensitivity to the allegations of Stravinsky’s sell-out to glib neoclassicism from Pulcinella (1920) onwards. Craft affords these criticisms considerable space and respect, in particular those of Pyotr Suvchinsky (1892-1985), an early patron and, intermittently, lifelong friend of the composer. Suvchinsky’s analysis was delivered in November 1956 over supper with Craft and Pierre Boulez:
[Suvchinsky] advances the theory that money is the root of all compromise in IS’s case. ‘Money was always too important to him. The lure of it led him away from composition and into conducting. And he hated to part with it, even to pay the smallest tradesman’s bill. And can you tell me what happened after Les Noces? The descent into Mavra, the Pergolesi rifacimenti, the Tchaikovsky anthology, the titivated echoes of opera composers in Jeu de cartes and the other gaietés parisiennes: surely such a bizarre métamorphose must have some other explanation besides money? Wasn’t the real trouble that he did not understand – in Taine’s sense – the general ideas of the time? The general ideas were Schoenberg’s ideas, and it was Stravinsky who turned the younger generation against Schoenberg. Poulenc, describing the extent to which he and his group were dominated by Stravinsky, told me not long ago that the mere suggestion by any of them that Schoenberg or Berg might be worth investigating would automatically have made them traitors in Stravinsky’s eyes. At the time Stravinsky was dismissing Wozzeck, which he had not heard, as une musique boche, and Mahler, of whom he knew nothing, as Malheur.’
Suvchinsky continues in this vein for four pages, describing his old friend’s personal neuroses, his avarice, his flirtations with Action Française and his flattery of Mussolini at the height of the Abyssinian aggression, all of which Craft records in faithful detail, along with his own eloquent, partial defences.
The same sort of criticism has been made of plenty of others, if less harshly and without the allegations of a specifically political cowardice. The difference with Stravinsky was that, after a long, central period of varying quality, in his seventies he absorbed the Vienna School’s serialism into his compositional technique, and thus produced a number of late works of remarkable individuality and intensity. The worst one can say about works such as Agon, Threni and Requiem Canticles is that they are new wine in a very old skin which somehow, miraculously, manages not to burst.
Paul Mountain
Worcester
