Robert Craft

Few would dispute that Igor Stravinsky was the greatest composer of the twentieth century. Conductor and writer Robert Craft was his closest colleague and friend. Together they published five acclaimed collections known as the Conversations series, which sprung from informal talks between the two men. In this newly edited and re-structured one-volume version, Craft brings Stravinsky's reflections on his childhood, his family life, professional associates, and personal relationships into sharper focus and places the major compositions in their cultural milieu.

For the last twenty-three years of Igor Stravinsky's incredibly full life, the noted musician, conductor, and writer Robert Craft was his closest colleague and friend, a trusted member of the Stravinsky household, and an important participant in virtually all of the composer's worldwide activities. Throughout these years, Craft kept a detailed diary, impressive in its powers of observation and characterization. This diary forms the basis for Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, now released in this substantially revised and enlarged edition. The original edition of this classic memoir has long been out of print. This new revised edition extends the material by more than a third. The text now includes several previously unpublished and historically important letters from prominent musicians, including Arnold Schoenberg, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Glenn Gould. More than fifty photographs and drawings (fourteen in color), most of them previously unpublished, illustrate the new edition. Each of the first twenty-three chapter-years now ends with a Postscript that provides supplementary information and a reflective connecting thread to the text. Craft has also added a Postlude in which he shares important moments of his friendship with Vera Stravinsky during the last years of her life. The whole Chronicle offers both a personal testament and an expansive embrace of the author's world.

Tells about different kinds of work and work places.

"Robert Craft would begin a unique friendship with Stravinsky that would last until the composer's death in 1971. This book tells the story of his "improbable life" before, during, and after his long collaboration with Stravinsky and residence in the Stravinsky household.". "It begins with the author's childhood in Kingston, New York, his time in the New York Military Academy prep school in Cornwall-on-Hudson, and his entry into Juilliard, cut short by Army service. Soon Craft's musical activities lead him into his relationship with Stravinsky in Hollywood, New York, and elsewhere, all richly documented by Stravinsky's letters in the "Dear Bobsky" section of the book.". "His improbable life becomes a whirlwind of international activity at the cutting edge of modern music (and revival of early music) and in the company of celebrities. By letter or in person, figures like Edwin Hubble, Aldous Huxley, Stephen Spender, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, and George Balanchine make their appearances. A whole chapter recreates, through Isaiah Berlin's letters to the author, the texture of the relationship between Stravinsky and Isaiah Berlin that began in London in December 1956 and led to Sir Isaiah's transliteration of the text of Abraham and Isaac for Stravinsky."--BOOK JACKET.

In this rich volume of cultural commentary, Robert Craft's flashing intellect illuminates, communicates, and assesses the thought and genius of half a decade of ferment in the arts. Whether expressing his own precepts or offering his take on the cultural contributions of others, Craft is at his best in these thirty-two essays and reviews that bring to his reader glimpses, insights, first-hand historical contexts, critiques, and studied appreciations from the worlds of painting, music, dance, and literature. Craft's apparently universal scope provides him with comfortable command, whether the subject is W. H. Auden's and T. S. Eliot's politics, body language in Renaissance painting, the little known (to American audiences) Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen and Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, Martha Graham's boudoir, or authoritative considerations of the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. These critiques constitute the kind of reading that challenges and informs while it moves to laughter and to the deepest emotions. Rounding off this banquet is a small dessert in the form of an interview with Craft, drawing from him his contrast of our own fin de siecle with that of the last century.

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]