From the issue dated October 11, 2002
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Rooting for Truffles With IgorStravinsky scholarship blossoms despite a protective heirBy SCOTT McLEMEE When Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring made its debut in Paris in 1913, the crowd went wild, but not in a good way. The musicians themselves found the ballet's score perplexing; in rehearsal, they burst into laughter while playing what many assumed were misprints in the sheet music. The dissonant chords and primitive rhythms had a still more unnerving effect upon the audience. Concertgoers, dressed in formal evening attire, began to heckle the performers and to whack one another on the head. It was a glorious moment in cultural history. The ballet was the musical
Charles M. Joseph, a professor of music at Skidmore College, was 15 years old when he watched The Flood on CBS that year. He was fascinated by "the horrific, alien-looking masks the players wore, the sur-realistic sets ... the avant-garde flavor of it all." It was the beginning of a decades-long fascination with the composer -- one that would eventually lead to conflict with Stravinsky's assistant and heir, Robert Craft, who wrote the libretto for Stravinsky's 1962 composition. Mr. Joseph devotes a chapter to The Flood in each of his two recent books from Yale University Press, Stravinsky Inside Out (2001) and Stravinsky & Balanchine: A Journey of Invention (2002). It is perhaps an unusual degree of scholarly attention to a musical work that found very few admirers. While an estimated seven million people tuned in to see the television performance, most were rather less transfixed by it than Mr. Joseph. His parents, for example, quietly left the room. Stumbling Into Scholarship Thirty years after the composer's death, "we are on the cusp of a new Stravinsky scholarship," wrote Mr. Joseph in the volume that appeared last year. It might not be a flood, just yet, but the number of studies has swelled over the past decade. The decisive factor was the opening of Stravinsky's papers to researchers in 1986 at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. "We estimate we have about 80 percent of the music manuscripts, with most of his sketches and preliminary studies," says Ulrich Mosch, the curator of the Stravinsky archive. "There are also about 70,000 letters, as well as press clippings and programs." The labor of organizing the material continued for some years after the collection was made available to the public. "There is now continuous interest by scholars who come to work sometimes for long periods." Mr. Joseph was among the first. He recalls going to Basel in the late 1980s to pursue his interest in Stravinsky's piano music. He "almost literally stumbled across a box of uncatalogued material that had just arrived" -- a set of correspondence that led him into a new line of research. "I focused on the unpublished materials to see what aspects would emerge from them," says Mr. Joseph. "What I found was much more human than history has portrayed Stravinsky." Or rather, than Stravinsky portrayed Stravinsky -- for Mr. Joseph reveals a figure who crafted his public persona with as much care as he did his musical compositions. A series of lectures the composer gave upon assuming a chair at Harvard in 1939 projects an image of the artist as a man of ideas. Mr. Joseph acknowledges the composer's great intellectual energy -- his penchant for borrowing concepts from thinkers as disparate as Sigmund Freud and the Renaissance philosopher Nicholas of Cusa, for example. Yet the Harvard lectures were actually prepared by a ghostwriter who worked from a few pages of notes by the composer. From The Rite of Spring on, writes Mr. Joseph, Stravinksy was typecast as "the bellicose little Russian who wielded his own brand of swashbuckling panache, cutting his own swath. ..." However, Mr. Joseph finds that Stravinsky's work was shaped by the need to collaborate with other artists -- while remaining in total control of the process. "There was a constant search for partners who were equally inventive," writes Mr. Joseph, "yet willing, ultimately, to accede to his carefully thought-out vision." The composer's demands could lead to creative stalemate. The archives contain documentation of several efforts to work with writers and directors in Hollywood, but Stravinsky never wrote an original film score. One long-term collaboration proved brilliantly successful, though. "The relationship of Stravinsky with [the choreographer] Balanchine was one of equal partners, an artistic collaboration at the highest level," Mr. Joseph continues. Both had deep roots in Russian culture, particularly its folk music and dance, while also sharing a preoccupation with artistic control. (Balanchine was willing to sew costumes for his dancers, when necessary, and even to try them on.) "Both needed to roll up their sleeves and root up ideas with their bare hands," writes Mr. Joseph, "like a pig snorting truffles, to paraphrase one of the composer's descriptive images ..." It also seems a fitting metaphor for the work remaining to be done by musicologists. "Because of the release of primary source materials," says Mr. Joseph, "lots of young scholars are looking at Stravinsky now. Before, we had no choice but to rely mostly on Robert Craft's writings." Craft Warnings The mention of Robert Craft has an interesting effect on any conversation about Igor Stravinsky. People tend either to raise their voices or to become very quiet. Mr. Craft joined the composer's social circle in 1948, while in his early 20s, and served as his personal assistant for the rest of his life -- handling correspondence, conducting his music, and overseeing the publication of a half dozen volumes of conversations in which the composer discussed his own life while also commenting (sometimes very sharply) on the contemporary musical world. An Improbable Life: Memoirs, published this month by Vanderbilt University Press, is only the most recent of Mr. Craft's books chronicling Stravinsky's career, as seen from backstage. Mr. Craft says that he became, in effect, Stravinsky's adopted son; following the death of the composer's wife, he inherited many of the papers, as well as a portion of the copyright. His commentary on Stravinsky scholarship resembles the approach of a heat-seeking missile to its target. While reviewers lauded Stephen Walsh's Stravinsky: A Creative Spring -- the first of two volumes of a biography drawing on the archival material in Basel -- Mr. Craft pronounced it "bungled" in an essay in The Musical Quarterly. "I can't imagine that he's now writing about the later years," he says, "because he doesn't know anything about them." Indeed, Mr. Craft told The New York Times in 1972 that only he could write Stravinsky's biography: "Nobody else can do it." Although this did not come to pass, he has published some dozen books on the composer, including a three-volume edition of his letters, while also conducting his music. In November, Faber and Faber will publish Memories and Commentaries -- a selection of the dialogues with Stravinsky. In the introduction to the latest volume, Mr. Craft writes that the conversations are "the only published writings attributed to Stravinsky that are actually 'by him,' in the sense of fidelity to the substance of his thoughts." That slightly convoluted formulation alludes to a controversy that has followed Mr. Craft for several decades: Many readers argue that the language and opinions attributed to Stravinsky in the interviews from the final decade of his life sound quite a bit like Mr. Craft himself. Figuring out just where Stravinsky ends and Mr. Craft begins has become an unavoidable problem for researchers. "A growing number of scholars who have compared Craft's edited letters with the originals in Basel have quickly grasped several critical discrepancies," notes Mr. Joseph. "There is, regrettably, no dodging the problem." The documentation concerning the "conversations" is equally problematic. In some cases, the composer made a rough draft which Mr. Craft edited. At other times, the manuscript suggests that Mr. Craft composed both the questions and Stravinsky's answers, which the composer then revised. When asked specifically about the longstanding allegations about the "conversations," Mr. Craft would say only, "It's obvious that if I weren't there, there wouldn't be any books!" What Ulrich Mosch, the curator of Stravinsky's papers, calls "the delicate and difficult question of copyright control" (shared between European and American branches of the family, as well as with Mr. Craft) makes quoting primary documents a potential minefield. Harry Haskell, the editor at Yale University Press who worked on Mr. Joseph's books, says that they came out a year behind schedule because Mr. Craft's lawyer denied his permission to cite some material. Mr. Joseph had to rework the manuscript, paraphrasing quotations to avoid possible legal action. "A good deal of specificity and color was sacrificed," says Mr. Haskell, "but not any of the substance." When asked about this, Mr. Craft said by e-mail, "I have not seen either of Mr. Joseph's books and have not said a word of discouragement about him. ... I have seen only two reviews of Stravinsky Inside Out, one devastating and the other not laudatory." Locating extremely negative reviews of Mr. Joseph's work proves difficult, however. One critic who complained about "slogging" through Mr. Joseph's prose still considered his research valuable enough to recommend the effort. Mr. Haskell says that Stravinsky & Balanchine is now in its third printing. And the dance critic Elizabeth Kendall, reviewing it in The New York Times, described it as "a generous book that partakes of the intelligence, reticence, and wit of the Stravinsky-Balanchine collaboration itself." Internecine conflicts have not driven musicologists away, however. In Multiple Masks: Neoclassicism in Stravinsky's Works on Greek Subjects (to be published in January by the University of Nebraska Press), Maureen A. Carr, a professor of music theory at Penn State University at University Park, avoids biographical skirmishes as much as possible, focusing instead on how the composer used borrowings from classical mythology as a means of reworking the musical language developed in his earlier works (including The Rite of Spring). The experience of going to Basel was crucial, she says. Immersing herself in Stravinsky's notebooks and drafts "made all the difference. Unless you study the sketches and see how he evolves toward his final compositional idea, it's difficult to reach conclusions. It would be so limiting if all I had to look at were the finished score." Her painstaking analysis of how Stravinsky created "the diatonic framework of Apollo" by modifying "the tritonal axis that he is likely to have borrowed from Moussorgsky's Boris Gudanov" is not something the ordinary listener is likely to agree with -- or disagree with, either, for that matter. But it's all part of the process of coming to terms with the maestro's complex legacy. "He's a magnet for other people's ideas," Ms. Carr says, "but everything he does has his thumbprint on it. It's so mysterious. If you listen to three seconds of a piece, you know it's Stravinsky." http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 49, Issue 7, Page A20
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education