Stravinsky. Glimpses of a Life.

The Collaboration between Igor Stravinsky, the Russian-born composer who dominated the modernist musical world of his time, and the young American, Robert Craft, whose talents Stravinsky quickly recognized, is one of the most remarkable stories in the annals of contemporary music. Robert Craft worked alongside Stravinsky during the last twenty-three years of the composer's life, both as his co-author of a series of books and as conductor of his music, most notably the premieres of Agon (1957), The Flood (1962), Abraham and Isaac (1964), the Variations for Orchestra (1965), and Requiem Canticles (1966).No less importantly, as this new book reveals, Robert Craft became the instrument of Stravinsky's American acculturation. Before his association with the younger man, the composer's social world in the United States seldom extended beyond the company of fellow refugees, with whom he spoke Russian, French, and German. The composer of the greatest opera in English, The Rake's Progress, became fluent in the language through the young Robert Craft.Glimpses of a Life is the first collection of Craft's own writings - his homage to a man and a time - devoted entirely to Stravinsky. The book's five sections span Stravinsky's life in France and America. The biographical chapters present the composer in unexpected and heretofore unknown perspectives. Personal chapters present an intimate view of his relationships with his two wives and of his role as parent.The chapters on Stravinsky's music examine the creative processes that produced such masterpieces as Oedipus Rex, Persephone, Svadeska (The Wedding), and Histoire du Soldat. An essay on the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, the work that brought the twenty-three-year-old conducting student and the sixty-five-year-old composer together, revises all previous commentaries on this critical piece. The four chapters on The Rite of Spring explore its musical structure, the composer's concept of its choreographic movement, and the history of the composition and its performance.The volume includes ten essays that have never been available to the public before, as well as fifteen chosen by the author as his most important on the composer. Glimpses of a Life is a book of permanent interest.

This is an odd hybrid of a book, as even its author acknowledges, devoted half to close examinations of aspects of Stravinsky's life (1882-1971) and relationships, half to sometimes technical analysis of his works. Craft is, of course, admirably suited for both tasks, but the book is essentially a grab bag of essays and reviews, many of which have appeared before (mostly in the New York Review of Books ). The longest pieces deal with Stravinsky's relations with his children, in which the chilly, removed father and the selfish, sometimes devious offspring all come off poorly. A sketch, through her correspondence, of his long-suffering first wife Catherine and her relationship with the composer's mistress Vera Sudeikina, whom he married after Catherine's death in 1940, is also revealing, and there is interesting commentary on the creation of the famous Craft-Stravinsky "Conversations" book collaborations. There are glimpses of Stravinsky with Dylan Thomas, and a bizarre story of conductor Leopold Stokowski helping to support the composer by inventing an imaginary female benefactor so he could secure American premieres of some of Stravinsky's works. But far too much of the book is devoted to minutiae of interest only to Stravinsky scholars and musicologists. Photos.
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