Kraftwerk

Musical Times, Spring 2005 by Shawn, Allen

Kraftwerk An improbable life: memoirs Robert Craft Vanderbilt University Press (Nashville, 2002); 448pp; $39.95. ISBN 0 8265 1381 6.

WHILE FAR FROM a 'tell-all' autobiography, lobert Craft's An improbable life is a iluable overview of an amazing life that enhances our understanding of its brilliant and enigmatic author. The mostly chronological narrative courses through Craft's experiences year by year, event by event, in the manner of a lively, frank and highly annotated date-book. It is introduced by an evocative account of his childhood and early pre-Stravinsky - manhood, and is interrupted by a few longer chapters dealing with specific matters, such as Isaiah Berlin's relationship to Stravinsky's creation of Abraham and Isaac. Yet despite its ostensibly dry structure, the book flies by on the wings of its author's spectacular literary gifts and the richness of the experiences he recounts.

Craft's life cannot be easily summarised. He has been a conductor of significance for more than 50 years. By virtue of the unfamiliar repertoire he introduced to the public for the first time in concert and then recorded (everything from Monteverdi, Schiitz and Gesualdo to Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Varèse, Stockhausen, Boulez, and Stravinsky) and through the power of intellect, insight and knowledge he has displayed in his voluminous writings, he arguably influenced the awareness of musicians and audiences of the second half of the 20th century to a degree equalled only by Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez. As a part of the Stravinsky household from the late 19405 on he was at the centre of 25 years of musical history. In the last 35 years he has expanded his career as conductor and author, embarking on large scale projects recording the works of Schoenberg and Stravinsky and continuing to write on an extraordinary range of subjects. Yet he remains a private figure. One would be hard pressed to find anyone else so central to the story of modern music who has been so little discussed as a personage in his own right.

An improbable life reveals a more complete and somewhat different man from the brilliant yet selfeffacing young Craft who narrated Chronicle of a friendship. The object of the friendship in the Chronicle now belonging to history, Craft now speaks of him with a new perspective and sense of relaxation. Stravinsky comes to life in these pages with a vividness that no stranger's account of him could ever match. Amazingly, given how documented the composer was, Craft manages to still surprise us with new information. In the process we also gain a better understanding of the complex, symbiotic relationship between the two men. Particularly significant and hitherto undescribed in such detail is the extent of Stravinsky's attendance at Craft's recording sessions of Schoenberg and Webern, and the degree to which Stravinsky even contributed precious, expensive recording time from his own sessions for this purpose. Newly documented is the degree of Craft's influence on Stravinsky's creative projects and orchestrations of early works.

One of the cherishable qualities about the book is the equality of attention Craft's devotes to each of its characters. The passages about Craft's family, teachers, friends and army acquaintances are as interesting as those about Eliot and Auden. Famous personages filled the pages of the Chronicle and fill this one, too, sometimes almost to a comical degree, but there are many refreshing passages about people important to the Stravinskys who were known to noone outside their circle. Valuable, too, is the new indepth focus on some intellectual and musical figures (such as Elliott Carter and Ernst Krenek) who were only peripheral figures in the earlier diaries and chronicle. In the process a truer, more nuanced portrait of the musical times emerges.

Although on occasion Craft pauses to reflect upon his own behaviour or temperament, his selfrevelations are communicated primarily through his activities and through the words and deeds of others. Alongside quotes from his own letters and diary entries, he makes fascinating use of accounts and letters of Christopher Isherwood, Paul Morgan, Dorothy Crawford, Ingolf Dahl, Lawrence Morton, Elliott Carter, Ernst Krenek, Hans Werner Henze, Glenn Gould and many others. He also reprints two long letters he wrote on behalf of Mrs Stravinsky that absorbingly describe the Stravinsky's California household and its routines. The book is first and foremost an intellectual record of the world Craft inhabited. He provides a journalist's wealth of detail to his descriptions of his whereabouts at each point in the story, and thumbnail sketches bristling with specifics about each person in it. One would be tempted to call this relatively non egocentric approach to memoir-writing 'Stravinskian', were it not for the fact that that in certain key passages, such as those dealing with the author's mother and sisters or his son, Alexander, Craft lets down his guard in a way that his mentor only did in his music. Particularly wrenching are the pages devoted to the deaths of his sister and mother, in which the ache and loss created by the distance he travelled from the world of his childhood - the result of his own ambitions and gifts - become palpable.