Stravinsky, Igor Books

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

Stephen Walsh

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Widely regarded as the greatest composer of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky was central to the development of modernism in art, yet no dependable biography of him exists. Previous studies have drawn too heavily from 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, laying bare the complicated relationships within his family and showing how he first displayed his extraordinary talents. 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 emigré in France trying to make his living as a conductor and pianist as well as a composer, Walsh reveals the true roots of his notorious obsession with money. He also describes 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. Walsh, long established as an expert on Stravinsky's music, has drawn upon a vast array of material, much of it unpublished or unavailable in English, to bring the man himself, in all his color and genius, to glowing life.

An Autobiography

Igor Stravinsky

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

What a delightful way for any music lover to learn about the first half of Stravinsky's great career. 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

It is always interesting when a great artist communicates with us about their life and art. However, like most of us, they tend to try and put events and ideas in the best possible light. So, it is for later scholars to come along, dig deeper, and get things right. And the history of artists talking about art has proven that what they say about what they do is seldom as useful as the work itself. As Hemingway noted in "Death in the Afternoon", it is always a mistake to meet the author.

And yet it is often most interesting. Stravinsky wrote this in 1934 when he was in his early fifties. The book covers the his life from his childhood to that time and his compositions through the Duo Concertant, Concerto for Violin, and Persephone. Of course, he could not have expected all the music and the direction still in his future. His Symphony in C, the Symphony in Three Movements, The Rake's Progress, and so much more through the Requiem Canticles were all in the future. Who could have expected the horrors of the Second World War at that time? So, it is an interesting document from that point of view because of the way that time was viewed as the context for the past. Nowadays, we would reconstruct everything differently because of what we know of those subsequent years.

Not only is it most useful to know the way his compositions came about (to the extent these anecdotes are accurate), but his views on Beethoven, composition, executants versus interpreters, musical form, and the great artistic personalities he met and knew and worked with along the way. Now, in order to understand Stravinsky's comments about music's inability to communicate anything we have to keep in mind the times. Remember, this was the time when the public lived for Wagner's lietmotive and Richard Strauss's "Ein Heldenleben" (A Hero's Life) and the autobiographical "Symphonia domestica" in which he tried to use music to communicate events from daily life. This was not the art Stravinsky was interested in. And because his music was so different than the nineteenth century musical traditions, it is understandable that his views of how his music should be played free of that tradition make a great deal of sense. His music is much more familiar to us than to his contemporaries, however his rather strident comments about merely executing his music and recreating his recordings is still a cause for great debate in musical circles. Myself, I think we can be informed by his comments and the recordings, and they should carry a great deal of weight, but music requires artistry not merely craftsmanship in the hands of its "executants". Stravinsky's views on the false notion of making Art a substitute for religion are most interesting. He also has a compelling argument why one cannot treat religion and faith critically (as in intellectual analysis) because criticism involves rejection of this or that and that is not faith.

This is a very interesting book and has great historical importance. However, it is also an interesting read for the general music lover. It is a great way to get some context for the first half of Stravinsky's very wonderful and important career.

Editorial Review:

While many hundred thousands of pages have been written about Stravinsky, in this book-the composer's first-we hear from the man himself. An Autobiography chronicles the first half-century of Stravinsky's life, all the while offering his opinions and "abhorrences." A Parsifal performance at Bayreuth? "At the end of a quarter of an hour I could bear no more." Nijinsky? "The poor boy knew nothing of music." Spanish folk music? "Endless preliminary chords of guitar playing."

Igor Stravinsky: The Rake's Progress (Cambridge Opera Handbooks)

Paul Griffiths

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Editorial Review:

The Rake's Progress is Stravinsky's biggest work and one of the few great operas written since the 1920s, rare too for the unusual quality of its libretto, by Auden and Kallman. Its importance is undisputed, but so too are the problems it raises: problems of both performance and understanding, caused by the irony with which it is so thoroughly permeated. In aspects of style and operatic convention it looks back to the eighteenth century, and in particular to the operas of Mozart and da Ponte, while making references also to other periods, to operas from Monteverdi to Verdi. Yet at the same time it is wholly a work of the twentieth century, and indeed it is centrally concerned with the impossibility of return, artistic, psychological or actual, as well as with the nature and limitiation of human free will. The Rake's Progress is not one of unbridled dissipation but rather, more interestingly, one of attachment to naive notions of freedom and choice, and his tragedy is that he can never go back.

Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934-1971

Stephen Walsh

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A valuable second volume of an important biography of Stravinsky 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 15 people found this review helpful.

Regardless of your opinion of his music, there is no doubt that Igor Stravinsky was one of the most significant composers of the twentieth century. I love his music and find his many changes in style fascinating. And while his big well-known masterworks (even the debate over which those are) are more widely appreciated, I also find his smaller works interesting and engaging. No matter what he did, Stravinsky created works that were among the most lively and engaging in whatever style he was using. He was fiercely independent and uncompromisingly himself. Given the course of the life he led and the multiple exiles alluded to in the subtitle, the strength he had to maintain that originality is possibly the most amazing thing about the man.

This very large and very detailed biography of Stravinsky's life from 1934 until his death in 1971 is fascinating on several levels. For me, the most interesting part and the primary reason I wanted to read the book is to read in more detail the circumstances of the birth of the compositions from this half of the composer's life. Who commissioned what, how the final composition was or was not what was originally discussed, what the considerations were for the resources used, and then Stravinsky's use of serial techniques (and how that developed and how the variety of approaches he took to serialism remained Stravinsky).

There is also the story of his life in Europe and then the move to the United States. The strange relationship between Stravinsky's first wife (whom he loved all his life even after she died) and his second wife, Vera, while his first wife was still alive and Vera was his mistress. Of course, this affected his relationship with his children, as did his life in Hollywood while they lived in Europe. Soulima later came to California and lived with Stravinsky for a time, but got a post on the piano faculty of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Stravinsky's family details are not simple and it is interesting how the author, Stephen Walsh, teases them out.

Stravinsky never held an academic post beyond some short term lecturing and teaching of composition. He never even received an academic degree. He was a man who had to depend on himself and his music to make his way in the world. The reputation he had developed as modernist was both a source of pride and riches as well as a reason for others to attack him (from both the old and new guard). That he was strong enough to take the blows and keep composing and creating wonderful new works is a testimony of his own internal strength and of those who cared about him and supported him emotionally and in the practical day-to-day matters that allowed him time and space to compose.

Of course, whenever one considers this portion of Stravinsky's life, especially his close associates, the name of Robert Craft is right at the front if a bit off center. Walsh presents a complex picture of Craft (which means it is likely close to realistic) that acknowledges the important role Craft performed in getting Stravinsky through his compositional crisis after "The Rake's Progress". Stravinsky thought he was finished. He was nearly seventy years old and most composers (with a few notable exceptions) are no longer composing by that age. But many writers and composers have a period of being blocked at one time or another and find a way out. Would Stravinsky have found a way out on his own? Maybe. However, Craft was there and it was his support and guidance in the serial methods that gave Stravinsky new impetus and we have several wonderful masterpieces and many other interesting works from 1952 that would certainly not have come about without Craft and the role he played. However, Walsh also takes a clear and dispassionate look at Craft's statements and finds some of them truthful, others somewhat at odds with the facts, and others to be outright misrepresentations. The author is also as clear as it is possible to be about which letters, reviews, and books Craft wrote in Stravinsky's name. At some point it is not knowable whether Craft was saying what Stravinsky wrote in different words or which pieces are Craft using the Stravinsky name to advance his own agenda.

The last few years of the composer's life, after the "Requiem Canticles", are a period of decline and rising family tensions. How all that explodes in sad recrimination and jealousies after Stravinsky's death is quite sad. Nobody comes off all that well, but Vera and Craft least of all. I am sure they would tell this story differently (and Craft has), but it seems to me that the children (then older adults) were not treated as well as they should have been.

In any case, I am grateful to Craft for the support he gave Stravinsky and music that support allowed him Stravinsky to write and the support he gave Stravinsky in promoting his work and in conducting and recording his works, especially when Stravinsky was too frail to do the work himself. Craft as a person is simply human after all with feet of clay (maybe clay up past the knees for all I know), but he still fulfilled an important purpose in Stravinsky's artistic life. Others may well have their own jealousies and resentments against him that exaggerate his flaws and assign motives that do not exist. Still, this book does a fine job in sorting out certain aspects of various situations that have been muddled and misrepresented until now.

The author does say some strange things about disease, but he is using the language the Stravinsky's used. For example, that a cold worsened into the flu or that tuberculosis was inherited. There is more of this kind of thing. He also focuses a great deal on the high commission and conducting fees Stravinsky charged. This is a fair point, but isn't really given its full context. Stravinsky was in huge demand; he was a unique commodity so he simply asked for enough money to make it worth his while. This may have upset some who would have preferred to get his work more affordably, but so what? Just compare what he received to popular artists such as Elvis and Frank Sinatra and all of a sudden he doesn't look so well paid.
For me, the most odd thing the author said is on page 464 where the author refers to "The Rite of Spring" as a late romantic masterpiece. I was so startled that I had to stop reading. I remember when I first heard this work in 1971 or 1972 in a high school music theory class (music rudiments and grammar, really). It astounded me because I had never heard anything like it. As I played recordings for my friends, some thought I was running the music backwards. Nowadays, it does not shock nearly as much as it did even a few decades ago, but it certainly still has freshness and power. Stravinsky is a modern composer, not a Romantic composer of any stripe. You might get away with calling Firebird romantic, but even there it has little in common with Mahler or Richard Strauss or even Rachmaninoff does it? Such a label seems to me to be too much bowing to the serialists and other academic moderns. Is this really the term being used for this founding work of modern music outside the Boulez - Stockhausen - Babbit believers?

I enjoyed this book a great deal and it will have a valued place in my library.

Editorial Review:

Stephen Walsh's magisterial, engagingly written two-volume Stravinsky is the most detailed and extensive work available on the life of the man widely regarded as the greatest composer of the twentieth century. This second volume takes up the composer's story in 1934, in a Europe growing ever more chaotic in the lead-up to World War II. Walsh follows Stravinsky's emigration to the United States, where he courted Hollywood, associated with writers and artists including Aldous Huxley, W.H. Auden, and George Balanchine, began a career as a conductor and recording artist, and composed a string of masterpieces that changed the course of twentieth-century music. Stravinsky: The Second Exile takes full account of Russian-language sources, including much correspondence, made available since the composer's death and since the fall of the Soviet Union, and is the first work to thoroughly assess the authenticity of many of the writings published under Stravinsky's name.

Harmonic Organization of the "Rite of Spring"

Allen Forte

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Exactly what I expected 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Prompt delivery from Amazon. If you want to be introduced with a new way to analyze more atonal music, such as The Rite, this is a great buy. No regrets on my part whatsoever!

Editorial Review:

Forte here applies his analytical approach as set forth in The Structure of Atonal Music to one of the monuments of modern music. Together the introduction and the analysis, with its more than 100 musical examples, both illuminate the structure of the work and demonstrate the way in which Forte's method may be applied in the analysis of complex music. "[This study] is welcome and long overdue. The influence of Allen Forte on contemporary music theory has been enormous, and The Harmonic Organization of "The Rite of Spring" has importance for a number of serious musicians, particularly, for disciples and others interested in set-theoretic approach, and for those interested in Stravinsky's work..Seeing the theory applied consistently to a specific work can show if it provides any true illumination of the work..This study should not be ignored."-Frank Retzel, Notes

Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works

Eric Walter White

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A fine one volume reference to Stravinsky's life and his compositions 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I really leaned on this book when I took a course on Stravinsky in my studies at the University of Michigan School of Music. There are later books that contain deeper analyses and penetrating discussions of aspects of Stravinsky, his composing process, and his works, but this remains a very fine single volume discussion of Stravinsky's life (a brief overview) and a really useful introduction to each of Stravinsky's works. Not only did I turn to it countless times during that course, I have used it many times over the years to find out this or that about certain works and to fine my way to other sources.

The book is organized as many useful music biographies are: a discussion of his life and then a discussion of the musical works. There are many really nice illustrations, a solid bibliography (but a bit dated by now), and a most useful index.

If you are interested in Stravinsky, and you should be, this is a great resource to have on your shelf and refer to as you investigate his works and life.

The Stravinsky Legacy (Music in the Twentieth Century)

Jonathan Cross

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Editorial Review:

The music of Igor Stravinsky has had a profound impact on the development of twentieth-century music. In this book, Jonathan Cross explores the technical and aesthetic legacy of Stravinsky in relation to a broad range of composers, from Varèse to Andriessen, from Messiaen to Birtwistle. He also proposes a reexamination of Stravinsky's own neoclassical music and Theodor Adorno's notorious critique of Stravinsky. This book is part history, part analysis, part aesthetics, and will be of value to anyone who takes an interest in the music of our time.

Stravinsky and Balanchine: A Journey of Invention

Charles M. Joseph

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Editorial Review:

Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine, among the most influential artists of the twentieth century, together created the music and movement for many ballet masterpieces. This engrossing book is the first full-length study of one of the greatest artistic collaborations in history. Drawing on extensive new research, Charles M. Joseph discusses the Stravinsky-Balanchine ballets against a rich contextual backdrop. He explores the background and psychology of the two men, the dynamics of their interactions, their personal and professional similarities and differences, and the political and historical circumstances that conditioned their work. He describes the dancers, designers, and sponsors with whom they worked. He explains the two men's approach to the creative process and the genesis of each of the collaborative ballets, demolishing much received wisdom on the subject. And he analyzes selected sections of music and dance, providing examples of Stravinsky's working sketches and other helpful illustrative materials. Engagingly written, the book will be of great interest not only to music and dance historians but also to ballet lovers everywhere.

Igor Stravinsky (Getting to Know the World's Greatest Composers)

Mike Venezia

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Roll over Beethoven and tell Tchiakovsky the news... 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

It is nice to see that along with Ludwig Van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Peter Tchaikovsky that author/illustrator Mike Venezia is also looking at 20th century types like Duke Ellington, George Gerswhin, Igor Stravinsky, and the Beatles for his Getting to Know the World's Greatest Composers series. In case the young readers who come across this book do not know, Venezia points out that from 1964 to 1970 the Beatles were the most popular musical group in the world. Unlike most of the other great composers Venezia looks at the Beatles never had any real musical training and were pretty much self taught. Venezia talks about the origins of rock 'n' roll and the influence of particular artists on the Beatles. He then provides early biographies for John, Paul, George and Ringo, with each of the Fab Four getting their own cartoon, before providing a brief history of the band.

The actual compositions of the Beatles are dealt with in only general terms. The only songs that get mentioned are "She Loves You," because of the cheery "yeah, yeah, yeah" part, Hello Goodbye" because there is a photo of them performing it, and the 40-second final piano chord of "A Day in the Life" from the "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album. Venezia does provide some basic music appreciation lessons talking about the Beatles experimentation with different kinds of instruments, bringing in musicians from symphony orchestras, and such. However, this is no substitute for actually listening to the group's music. Of course, once you start talking about great Beatles songs, where do you stop?

The biographical sections on the early years of the four Beatles and their early days trying to make a name for themselves will prove of most interest to young readers. My only real complains about this volume would be that it really does not talk about the impact the Beatles had on popular culture, which was immense, and that except for the difference in Ringo's nose you cannot tell the Fab Four apart in Venezia's cartoons. I was sort of looking forward to better caricatures than this, to be honest.

Editorial Review:

The author/illustrator of the highly successful Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists series lends his creative talents to another fun, informative series, this one featuring world-famous composers.

Stravinsky Inside Out

Charles M. Joseph

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Popularly known during his lifetime as "The World's Greatest Living Composer," Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) not only wrote some of the twentieth century's most influential music, he also assumed the role of cultural icon. This book reveals Stravinsky's two sides--the public persona, preoccupied with his own image and place in history, and the private composer, whose views and beliefs were often purposely suppressed. Charles M. Joseph draws a richer and more human portrait of Stravinsky than anyone has done before, using an array of unpublished materials and unreleased film trims from the composer's huge archive at the Paul Sacher Institute in Switzerland. Focusing on Stravinsky's place in the culture of the twentieth century, Joseph situates the composer among the giants of his age. He discusses Stravinsky's first American commission, his complicated relationship with his son, his professional relationships with celebrities ranging from T. S. Eliot to Orson Welles, his flirtations with Hollywood and television, and his love-hate attitude toward the critics and the media. In a close look at Stravinsky's efforts to mold a public image, Joseph explores the complex dance between the composer and his artistic collaborator, Robert Craft, who orchestrated controversial efforts to protect Stravinsky and edit materials about him, both during the composer's lifetime and after his death.