Caring for Stravinsky

Musical Times, Summer 2002 by Gritten, Anthony

As far as his public image was concerned, Stravinsky was 'a contrarian by nature' (Joseph, p. 126), and played on the 'elusiveness' Joseph, pp.267-68) often expected of great artists. `He liked keeping all parties baffled' (Joseph, p.151) and `wanted, perhaps even needed, to be seen as the "other"' (Joseph, p. 1). The real Igor Stravinsky never stood up, having learnt how to avoid doing so early in his career, as Adolph Bolm rued: 'I cannot help having a feeling that [the Ballets Russes] made a supreme effort in order to be different' (quoted in Joseph, p.62). Straus tows a similar, if historiographically more conventional, line:

Beyond that, however, [his serial mistakes] show him as a man unwilling to play it safe by writing again what he had written before. Instead, they reveal the restless, questing nature of his musical intellect, his willingness to break with the neoclassical conventions of his earlier music, to seek ever new modes of expression within the serial language, and to accept the inevitability of mistakes attendant upon so bold an enterprise (Straus, p.80).

Stravinsky himself clearly enjoyed, or publicly professed to enjoy, this very bold, public role, and `was quite proud of the ruckus he was creating' in The rite (Joseph, p.69), and `His mischievous delight in baffling others led him to champion the most outrageous positions imaginable' (Joseph, p.95).

He thrived on exposure, turning it to his advantage in a consistent barrage of `self-promotion' (Joseph, pp.2, 4) and commodification (Joseph, pp.32-33). He had, again, learnt how to '[sell] himself' (Joseph, p.198) at the feet of the Ballets Russes: Although `The uproar at the [Rites] premiere took the company by surprise, [...] Diaghilev took the offensive, ensuring support for the new ballet with a generous distribution of free tickets' (Hill, pp.29-30); indeed, `The audience', wrote Jean Cocteau in a now familiar Stravinskyian phrase, `played the role that was written for it' (quoted in Hill, p.30). Nevertheless, despite his almost continuous public presence, Stravinsky was, as Boris de Schloezer put it in 1932, `an enigma' (quoted in Joseph, p.1) and his work contained multiple 'paradoxes' (Hill, pp.vii, viii). Stravinsky himself once remarked that 'I am pleased to be free to create things which are always an exception' (quoted in Joseph, p.19).

The sheer enigmatic force of what Jacques Maritain once described as Stravinsky's `sacred egoism of the creative spirit' (quoted in Joseph, p.246) had its `dark side' (Joseph, pp.xii, 14). Like many creative people, Stravinsky was `selfabsorbed' (Joseph, pp.71, 73) and `embraced his fame vengefully' (Joseph, 6), `freely [mingling] his own blend of insecurity, rage, obsession, anguish, depression, cynicism' (Joseph, p.10). In fact, his own son Soulima `couldn't make sense of the blurry line that sometimes separates villainy from heroism - and on which side of that line his father stood' (Joseph, p.68), and `There is little evidence, in fact, that Stravinsky felt any social responsibility as a "giant of the arts"' (Joseph, p.159), as is fairly clear from consideration of Stravinsky's relation to figures like Mussolini and of the background to his concertising in Germany during the 1930s. The overall picture that Craft confronted as Stravinsky's editor both before and even more so after 1971 must have seemed somewhat 'toxic' (Joseph, p.258).