Stravinsky Inside Out
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- $33.99
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- $33.99
Publisher Description
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 Charles M. Joseph draws a richer and more human portrait of Stravinsky than anyone has done before, using an array of unpublished materials and unreleased film trims from the composer’s huge archive at the Paul Sacher Institute in Switzerland.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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Along with other scholars, Joseph (Stravinsky and Balanchine, forthcoming) has undertaken a reevaluation of the life and legacy of Igor Stravinsky (1882 1971). For several decades, the composer of Rite of Spring and Firebird has been seen through the lens of idolizer, writer and conductor Robert Craft, whose many books about Stravinsky, and those supposedly written with him, must be taken with several grains of salt. Joseph, a Skidmore College professor of liberal arts, focuses on specific issues of Stravinsky criticism in chapters like "Boswellizing an Icon: Stravinsky, Craft, and the Historian's Dilemma" and "Film Documentaries: The Composer On and Off Camera." He recounts Stravinsky's stormy relationship with his son Soulima, who was Joseph's college piano teacher, and the composer's relations with many prominent figures: he kept a copy of W.H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety in which Auden inscribed, "Leonard Bernstein is a shit." Joseph is almost supernaturally polite about what he believes to be Craft's shoddy work, especially as the latter denied him permission to quote certain documents. However, Joseph gratuitously and inaccurately calls pianist Glenn Gould "always outlandish" when in fact he was an eccentric genius who happened to loathe Stravinsky, which seems increasingly understandable. The more we know about Stravinsky, an anti-Semitic fan of Mussolini who behaved badly toward colleagues, friends and family, the more he makes Picasso look like a choirboy. A certain macabre wit keeps him entertaining, though, such as when he annotated a Time article that called him an "animated Gothic gargoyle" with the words "How kind." Although sometimes lapsing into dense academic prose, this book adds new material to ongoing Stravinsky studies and should attract modern music aficionados. Photos.
