Music: Composer’s Chronicle

For three months this winter a thin. baggy-eyed Russian, considered by many to be one of the greatest of contemporary composers, will tour the U. S. For a fortnight in January he will conduct the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, for another fortnight the Cleveland Orchestra. Contracts are pending whereby Igor Stravinsky may also appear with the bis symphony orchestras on the Pacific Coast. He will play the piano in joint recitals with Samuel Dushkin. the self-effacing violinist who is devoting his career to Stravinsky’s music. Last week Stravinsky’s autobiography was published in the U. S.* proved to be a terse, candid book, attempting to clarify a record and a credo which have long seemed enigmatic. Also last week it was announced that another Stravinsky opus will have its world premiere in the U. S. next spring. Edward Warburg and Lincoln Kirstein, wealthy young backers of the American Ballet, have commissioned him to compose a new dance suite for their troupe, plan to present it during the popular-priced season at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera House.

Two years ago, on Stravinsky’s last U. S. visit, a customs officer looked suspiciously over a bundle of his scores, asked in what language they were written (TIME. Jan. 14. 1935). Many U. S. concertgoers are just as confused when they hear Stravinsky’s music. Others regard his trick harmonics as a glorious, artistic in novation. A few rank him and his old friend Painter Pablo Picasso, equally well-grounded in classicism and equally able to produce conventional art forms if he chose, as the 20th Century’s greatest artistic jokesters.

Stravinsky’s autobiography testifies to the fact that he at least is smugly sure of himself. He is self-critical only when speaking of his school days. He got consistently poor marks. His father, a basso at the Imperial Opera, wanted to make him a lawyer, consented to a musical career only when Rimsky-Korsakov was sufficiently impressed to take the boy for a pupil.

For Rimsky’s daughter’s wedding Stravinsky wrote Fen d’ Artifice, a fantasy so colorful that Sergei Diaghilev promptly commissioned him to write for the Russian Ballet. Fame came quickly with The Firebird (1910), Petrouchka (1911) and Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) which caused such a furor at the Paris premiere that the dancers, unable to hear the music, followed the beat of the frenzied Vaslav Nijinsky, shouting to them from the wings while Stravinsky kept a tight grip on the dancer’s coat collar. Of Nijinsky, now interned in a Swiss insane asylum, Stravinsky writes: “He spoke little, and, when he did speak, gave the impression of being a very backward youth whose intelligence was very undeveloped for his age. . . . The poor boy knew nothing of music. . . .” To Stravinsky, German Richard Wagner is a bore, his fellow Slav, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, a genius of late greatly underrated. Stravinsky says he detests “star conductors” who pride themselves on their interpretations. According to Stravinsky’s precepts the composer’s notations should be all-sufficient.

Stravinsky’s chronicle does little to picture him as the peckish little man his severe critics find him, a fidgety hypochondriac, a mediocre conductor who rarely makes his music as effective as the interpreters he derides. Most reviewers prefer such massive works as Oedipus Rex, Persephone, Symphonic des Psaumes, to such thin, cerebral, experimental products as Ragtime for Eleven Instruments or Suite de Puldnella, in which he seems to be unmercifully ribbing the fruitless flute-tootling and fiddle-sawing of some of the unimaginative 18th-Century composers.

With his unfaltering faith in himself, Stravinsky has often declared that there is “nothing to discuss, nor to criticize; one does not criticize anybody or anything that is functioning. A nose is not manufactured; a nose just is. Thus, too, my art.” In his autobiography, says he, “I find that while the general public no longer gives me the enthusiastic reception of earlier days, that does not in any way prevent a large number of listeners, mainly of the younger generation, from acclaiming my work with all the old ardor. I wonder whether, after all, it is simply a matter of the generation.”

*Stravinsky-Schuster ($3).