Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1882-1934

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. (Nov.)