Stravinsky in pictures and documents

de Vera Stravinsky, Robert Craft

The portrait of the man and the musician that emerges from Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents is almost entirely new. This is all the more remarkable in that nearly seventy years of the composer's life were spent in the public eye. In spite of the publicity attendant on the birth of each new composition and on every podium appearance, Stravinsky managed to conceal what was most important to him in his private life, thoughts, and beliefs. Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents is the authoritative record of the composer's life, compiled by his second wife and by Robert Craft, his friend and associate of twenty-three years. Mme Vera Stravinsky selected the illustrations and the portions of the quoted excerpts concerned with the biography. Craft chose the other excerpts and wrote the connecting texts and commentaries.^ Through letters to and from Stravinsky--in all periods of his life--the book reveals the complexity, brilliance, and sharp edge of his mind, as well as the idiosyncrasies of his character. Like Stravinsky's life, the volume is divided into three sections: the Russian and Swiss years, the two decades in France between the World Wars, and the final thirty-two years in America. A fourth part, the Appendixes, contains supplementary essays concerning various aspects of Le Sacre Printemps as well as of the composer's life and work that were too detailed to be included in the main text, and finally a critical bibliography of studies of Stravinsky published since his death. Part One includes a large number of Stravinsky's letters (previously unpublished) to his parents; his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov; his composer colleagues in Russia and France; and the Ballets Russes impresario, Serge Diaghilev.^ It also contains valuable chronologies of the creation and performance of Stravinsky's principal compositions of the period: Le Sacre du Printemps, Les Noces, Histoire du Soldat, and Pulcinella. Part Two provides the materials for a new interpretation of Stravinsky's relationships with his most eminent contemporaries: Diaghilev and Cocteau, composers Schoenberg, Prokofiev, and Hindemith, and conductors Ansermet, Monteux, and Klemperer. Chronicles of the chief compositions of the period are included--Oedipus Rex, Apollo, Symphony of Psalms, Persephone--and views of Stravinsky, in pictures and words, on his extensive concert tours. The third part will be the most interesting for the large number of readers all over the world who have seen Stravinsky perform. It is a portrait of the artist growing older, his leadership as a composer, his reluctant and gradual withdrawal from his life as a performer.^ The narrative of his last years is movingly told, in photographs as well as in words [Dust jacket]