Memories and Commentaries - Softcover

Craft, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571256058 ISBN 13: 9780571256051

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2011

Synopsis

The conversations between Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft are unique in musical history.' Sunday Times The contents of the celebrated series of Conversations, dating from the last fifteen years of Stravinsky's life, were taken down by Robert Craft in informal talks with the composer. Craft lived for twenty-one years with the Stravinskys in their Hollywood home, or nearby, and for two more years in a next-door hotel room in New York. In the early 1950s he accompanied the composer on his concert tours, and from the mid-1950s to the end of Stravinsky's life co-conducted his concerts. Memories and Commentaries, the second of the series, is a brilliant portrait gallery in which Stravinsky, prompted by Craft, sets down with characteristic wit and insight his memories of such famous writers and musicians as Romain Rolland, Reynaldo Hahn, Lord Berners and Manuel de Falla. There are long sections devoted to Diaghilev, to Russian composers, to Stravinsky's childhood and youth in Russia, and detailed accounts of his collaboration with Benois (The Nightingale), Gide (Persephone) and Auden (The Rake's Progress). The Conversations books are the only published writings attributed to Stravinsky that are actually by him, in the sense of fidelity to the substance of his thoughts, making them required reading for all students and lovers of Stravinsky.

About this title

About the Author:

The distinguished conductor, Robert Craft, met Igor Stravinsky in 1948, and developed what proved to be an extraordinarily fruitful artistic partnership from then until the composer's death in 1971. Craft lived with the family in California and later in New York and remained close to the composer's widow Vera, until her death in 1982.

Review:

"These dialogues between the composer and Robert Craft are nearly as irresistible as Johnson's with Boswell." --Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

"This book is a must for every fan of Igor Stravinsky. Robert Craft's collection, which is finally published together in a single volume, is highly informative and witty. It reads like a novel and at the same time is an important guide to the multi-faceted mind of one of the twentieth century's greatest geniuses. Every professional musician, student and music lover should read it." --James Conlon

"In an increasingly dumbed-down world, where the cultured past is fading forever, it is a relief to rediscover Stravinsky's unique conversations with Robert Craft. Nothing a great man says is inconsequential; all that Stravinsky says is, in fact, consequential. He tells us, in words, what music is, and he does this by reviving (in words) every piece he ever composed. Of course, nothing a composer explains about his own music is as explicit as the music itself-except how it came to be made. In this Stravinsky is a marvelous historian, reanimating Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Thomas Mann and Ansermet, Varese and Auden . . . . This . . . collection is a masterpiece of nostalgia, instruction, originality, and intellectuality of the highest order."
--Ned Rorem

"These conversations, deftly edited by Robert Craft, confirm that Igor Stravinsky had the most fascinating mind and the sharpest tongue of any classical composer-and perhaps any artist-of the twentieth century."
--Howard Gardner, author of Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

"Stravinsky was a fascinating thinker, and in Memories and Commentaries he lives brightly and pungently, while providing a cultural history of Music's last grand epoch. Thank goodness the master had Robert Craft in his life." --David Dubal

"Memories and Commentaries is the fascinating story of the journey of a genius. Stravinsky is here revealed not only as one of the most original gifts of the twentieth century, but as a witty, erudite, and profound observer of his remarkable confreres, of himself, and of his life and times." --Leon Kirchner
d"Stravinsky's reminiscences and reflections, engagingly introduced and ingeniously reassembled by Mr. Craft in biographical order, reemerge as an irresistibly readable record of the composer's life and views-and the closest thing we have to a full "Autobiography" by him. Like his music, formal yet bracingly (sometimes bitingly) direct, shot through with joy, poignancy and poetry, brimming with immediacy, Stravinsky's words rivet the reader's attention on every page and contain an entire education's worth of literary, artistic, musical and intellectual references. From its opening memories of a Saint Petersburg childhood and the Diaghilev years to the closing comments on Beethoven's symphonies and late quartets, the book is a gold-mine of personal recollections, indelible human portraits created with telling detail, and fascinating musical observations drawn from an astonishing life." --Allen Shawn

Praise for the original Conversations series:

"Craft is the ideal chronicler of Stravinsky's life, times, and ideas."
--Simon Karlinsky, The New York Times Book Review

"These books are a treasured contribution to the documentation of music in our time."
--David Drew, The New Statesman

"A series of books of extraordinary interest." --David Dubal

"Stravinsky . . . has a remarkable eye for human singularity and a gift for making it vivid in a few quick strokes."
--Alfred Frankenstein, The New York Times Book Review

"An absolutely scintillating series."
--Nicolas Slonimsky, The Christian Science Monitor

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0571256058
• ISBN 13: 9780571256051
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 202