Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1882-1934 - Hardcover

Walsh, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679414843 ISBN 13: 9780679414841

Publisher: Knopf, 1999

Synopsis

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

About this title

About the Author

Stephen Walsh is a critic and musicologist who has written extensively on Stravinsky and other modern composers. He is now Reader in Music at Cardiff University

Reviews

Walsh, a British musicologist who has written extensively on Stravinsky and his works, has produced the first of a massive two-part biography of the century's greatest composer. The first part takes the reader in a comprehensive chronology from Stravinsky's birth to the end of his Paris years. In the process, Walsh carefully and exhaustively lays bare Stravinsky's genealogy and convincingly details his complex relationships with family, friends, and fellow composers. Drawing extensively on hitherto unexamined primary sources as well as on such indispensable secondary sources as Robert Craft's writings and Richard Taruskin's recent groundbreaking tome, Stravinsky and the Russian Tradition, Walsh performs this feat with admirable clarity and discretion. While there are no musical examples, nor any semblance of analysis, there is nonetheless a great deal of illuminating commentary on each work written during this time period. This is an important source for Stravinsky scholars and an enjoyable read for the casual reader. Highly recommended for all collections.ALarry A. Lipkis, Moravian Coll., Bethlehem, PA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Igor Stravinsky is perhaps best remembered for the folk melodies and driving rhythms of his early ballets, such as The Firebird and The Rite of Spring. Initially incorporating Russian elements but then quickly embracing the French idiom, his style evolved from late romantic to modernist without ever adopting the serialism of Webern and Schoenberg. Stravinsky fled the Bolsheviks to settle in Switzerland and, later, France. With a growing family and a tubercular wife, he turned to conducting and playing his own piano concertos to support them and, in Paris, a mistress. Inspired by literature and myth, he often collaborated with the Russian emigreballet impresarios Diaghilev, Massine, and Balanchine, producing much of his most familiar music. His songs, symphonies, and chamber works are less played today. In this reference-oriented biography, Walsh uses diaries, press clippings, and other materials to probe in detail the life of a man kept very busy with effectively dividing his time between performance, composition, family, and mistress. Alan Hirsch

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 pprobably 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 ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679414843
• ISBN 13: 9780679414841
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 720