Stravinsky was a prolific composer for well over half a century, achieving success in a variety of musical styles. An exile from his native Russia for 48 years, he finally returned in 1962 to a great deal of acclaim. Many people consider him one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, with such great compositions as The Rite of Spring, The Firebird, and Petrushka, which remain his most popular pieces.
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) was perhaps the twentieth century’s most celebrated composer, a leading light of modernism and a restlessly creative artist. This new entry in the Critical Lives series traces the story of Stravinsky’s life and work, setting him in the context of the turbulent times in which he lived. Born in Russia, Stravinsky spent most of his life in exile—and while his work was deliberately cosmopolitan, the pain of estrangement nonetheless left its mark on the man and his work, distinguishable in an ever-present sense of loss. Jonathan Cross shows how that work emerged over the course of decades spent in Paris, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, in an artistic circle that included Joyce, Picasso, and Proust and that culminated in Stravinsky being celebrated by both the White House and the Kremlin as one of the great artistic forces of the era. Approachable and absorbing, Cross’s biography enables us to see Stravinsky’s life and artistic achievement in a new light, understanding how his work both reflected and shaped his times.
A new look at one of the most important composers of the twentith century Stravinsky and His World brings together an international roster of scholars to explore fresh perspectives on the life and music of Igor Stravinsky. Situating Stravinsky in new intellectual and musical contexts, the essays in this volume shed valuable light on one of the most important composers of the twentieth century. Contributors examine Stravinsky's interaction with Spanish and Latin American modernism, rethink the stylistic label "neoclassicism" with a section on the ideological conflict over his lesser-known opera buffa Mavra, and reassess his connections to his homeland, paying special attention to Stravinsky's visit to the Soviet Union in 1962. The essays also explore Stravinsky's musical and religious differences with Arthur Lourié, delve into Stravinsky's collaboration with Pyotr Suvchinsky and Roland-Manuel in the genesis of his groundbreaking Poetics of Music, and look at how the movement within stasis evident in the scores of Stravinsky's Orpheus and Oedipus Rex reflected the composer's fierce belief in fate. Rare documents—including Spanish and Mexican interviews, Russian letters, articles by Arthur Lourié, and rarely seen French and Russian texts—supplement the volume, bringing to life Stravinsky's rich intellectual milieu and intense personal relationships. The contributors are Tatiana Baranova, Leon Botstein, Jonathan Cross, Valérie Dufour, Gretchen Horlacher, Tamara Levitz, Klára Móricz, Leonora Saavedra, and Svetlana Savenko.
For the last twenty-three years of Igor Stravinsky's incredibly full life, the noted musician, conductor, and writer Robert Craft was his closest colleague and friend, a trusted member of the Stravinsky household, and an important participant in virtually all of the composer's worldwide activities. Throughout these years, Craft kept a detailed diary, impressive in its powers of observation and characterization. This diary forms the basis for Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, now released in this substantially revised and enlarged edition.
Widely regarded the greatest composer of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky was central to the development of modernism in art. Deeply influential and wonderfully productive, he is remembered for dozens of masterworks, from The Firebird and The Rite of Spring to The Rake's Progress, but no dependable biography of him exists. Previous studies have relied too heavily on his own unreliable memoirs and conversations, and until now no biographer has possessed both the musical knowledge to evaluate his art and the linguistic proficiency needed to explore the documentary background of his life--a life whose span extended from tsarist Russia to Switzerland, France, and ultimately the United States. In this revealing volume, the first of two, Stephen Walsh follows Stravinsky from his birth in 1882 to 1934. He traces the composer's early Russian years in new and fascinating detail, laying bare the complicated relationships within his family and showing how he first displayed his extraordinary talents within the provincial musical circle around his teacher, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. Stravinsky's brilliantly creative involvement with the Ballets Russes is illuminated by a sharp sense of the internal artistic politics that animated the group. Portraying Stravinsky's circumstances as an émigré in France trying to make his living as a conductor and pianist as well as a composer while beset by emotional and financial demands, Walsh reveals the true roots of his notorious obsession with money during the 1920s and describes with sympathy the nature of his long affair with Vera Sudeykina. While always respecting Stravinsky's own insistence that life and art be kept distinct, Stravinsky makes clear precisely how the development of his music was connected to his life and to the intellectual environment in which he found himself. But at the same time it demonstrates the composer's remarkably pragmatic psychology, which led him to consider the welfare of his art to be of paramount importance, before which everything else had to give way. Hence, for example, his questionable attitude toward Hitler and Mussolini, and his reputation as a touchy, unpredictable man as famous for his enmities as for his friendships. Stephen Walsh, long established as an expert on Stravinsky's music, has drawn upon a vast array of material, much of it unpublished or unavailable in English, to bring the man himself, in all his color and genius, to glowing life. Written with elegance and energy, comprehensive, balanced, and original, Stravinsky is essential reading for anyone interested in the adventure of art in our time. Praise from the British press for Stephen Walsh's The Music of Stravinsky "One of the finest general studies of the composer." --Wilfrid Mellers, composer, Times Literary Supplement "The beautiful prose of The Music of Stravinsky is itself a fund of arresting images. For those who already love Stravinsky's music, Walsh's essays on each work will bring a smile of recognition and joy at new kernels of insight. For those unfamiliar with many of the works he discusses, Walsh's commentaries are likely to whet appetites for performances of the works." --John Shepherd, Notes "This book sent me scurrying back to the scores and made me want to recommend it to other people. Above all, it is a good read." --Anthony Pople, Music and Letters
Fascinating critical and biographical portrait of famed 20th-century composer includes commentary on the evolution of such masterworks as The Firebird, Petrouchka, Le Sacre du Printemps, Pulcinella, and Histoire du Soldat.
For the first time in one volume--the celebrated Stravinsky and Craft Conversations Few would dispute that Igor Stravinsky was the greatest composer of the twentieth century. Conductor and writer Robert Craft was his closest colleague and friend, and for over twenty-one years he lived with the Stravinskys in their Hollywood home. In the early 1950s he accompanied the composer on his concert tours, and from the mid-1950s to Stravinsky's death in 1971 he co-conducted his concerts. Together Stravinsky and Craft published five acclaimed collections known as the Conversations series, which sprung from informal talks between the two men. In this newly edited and re-structured one-volume version, Craft brings Stravinsky's reflections on his childhood, his family life, professional associates, and personal relationships into sharper focus and places the major compositions in their cultural milieux. The Conversations books are the only published writing attributed to Stravinsky that are actually "by him" in terms of fidelity to his thoughts and opinions, making this volume required reading for all fans and students of Stravinsky's music.
This book undoes 50 years of mythmaking about Stravinsky's life in music. During his spectacular career, Igor Stravinsky underplayed his Russian past in favor of a European cosmopolitanism. Richard Taruskin has refused to take the composer at his word. In this long-awaited study, he defines Stravinsky's relationship to the musical and artistic traditions of his native land and gives us a dramatically new picture of one of the major figures in the history of music. Taruskin draws directly on newly accessible archives and on a wealth of Russian documents. In Volume One, he sets the historical scene: the St. Petersburg musical press, the arts journals, and the writings of anthropologists, folklorists, philosophers, and poets. Volume Two addresses the masterpieces of Stravinsky's early maturityÑPetrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Les Noces. Taruskin investigates the composer's collaborations with Diaghilev to illuminate the relationship between folklore and modernity. He elucidates the Silver Age ideal of "neonationalism"Ñthe professional appropriation of motifs and style characteristics from folk artÑand how Stravinsky realized this ideal in his music. Taruskin demonstrates how Stravinsky achieved his modernist technique by combining what was most characteristically Russian in his musical training with stylistic elements abstracted from Russian folklore. The stylistic synthesis thus achieved formed Stravinsky as a composer for life, whatever the aesthetic allegiances he later professed. Written with Taruskin's characteristic mixture of in-depth research and stylistic verve, this book will be mandatory reading for all those seriously interested in the life and work of Stravinsky.
This, the second and final volume of Stephen Walsh’s magisterial biography of Igor Stravinsky, begins in 1934, when Stravinsky is fifty-two and living in France. Already regarded by many as the most important composer of his generation, Stravinsky is nevertheless at this point a fairly unhappy expatriate, all too aware of the war clouds beginning to gather. Though he still maintains a family life with his wife and children, much of his time is spent with his mistress, Vera Sudeykina, while traveling around Europe giving concerts in order to earn the money to support his dependents–which include a number of relatives. Composing, of course, remains the center of his existence. But changes are imminent: within only a few years his wife, Katya, will be dead, his family scattered, and Stravinsky himself, together with Vera, starting over again in America. Stravinsky: The Second Exile follows the composer through the remainder of his long life, years during which he produces such masterworks as The Rake’s Progress and Symphony in C, and achieves a new level of fame as a conductor and raconteur in his own right. With a dazzling command of sources in several languages and a keen feeling for accuracy in situations where truth and falsehood have become blurred, Walsh traces and illuminates Stravinsky’s increasingly complex and often agonized family relationships along with his crucially important connection with his associate Robert Craft. Walsh is also, as a musicologist and critic, able to speak with knowledge and wit about Stravinsky’s work, expertly describing and assessing the composer’s musical journey from the neoclassicism of his late French and early American periods, through his early essays in serial technique, and on finally to the astonishing intricacies of his final compositions. The first volume of this biography, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, was received with glowing praise for its insight, narrative skills, and readability. The period covered here, beset as it is with myths and misconceptions, is handled with even greater authority. Carefully weighed, eloquent, packed with rich and fascinating detail, it casts a brilliant new light on one of the greatest artists of our time.
