Stravinsky
A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1882-1934
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Walsh, a lecturer in music at the University of Wales, has undertaken a staggering task in this, the first of an exhaustive two-volume study of the man who is arguably the 20th century's greatest composer. Both on his own and by the medium of the amanuensis of his later years, Robert Craft (Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship), Stravinsky (1882-1971) drew many layers of deception and distortion over the thoughts and events of his youth, and Walsh has taken it as his task to disperse them. While respectful of Craft's encouragement of Stravinsky's muse in his later years, Walsh shows how many of Craft's judgments, fueled by Stravinsky's revisionist tendencies and retrospective malice, were flawed. Walsh also pays tribute to Richard Taruskin's pioneering work on Stravinsky (Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions). Walsh gives the most complete picture yet of the liberal, bourgeois and musical Petersburg family in which Stravinsky grew up; his early years at the conservatory under Rimsky-Korsakov; the sensation caused by his ballets for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes; the Rite of Spring scandal; and the long string of masterpieces in various styles that followed. Here, too, is the tale of a passionately Russian artist deprived by revolution of his homeland and the copyright of his works, as well as the insecurity he felt as he wandered Europe, mostly in France and Switzerland. He moved always among a host of glittering artists--Ravel, Debussy, Cocteau, Picasso, Gide, to name only a few--in those fecund years, and, always, a crowd of Russian exile hangers-on who hoped that increasingly wealthy Igor, as uncle, cousin or compatriot, would help them out. Thus was born the penny-pinching, materialist, cynical composer of the later years, as Walsh convincingly shows in this overwhelmingly detailed and often witty portrait.