Articles
CRAFT/STRAVINSKY
The relationship of Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky is unique in music history. The only other one which comes close is that of Boito and Verdi. Boito, however, being a composer himself, despite his regenerative effects on Verdi, had his own compositional fish to fry--small though they might have been. As Craft himself says, Stravinsky “realized that I had nothing to say in music, but he must also have sensed that I had something useful to say to him about it.”1 Craft's involvement with Stravinsky was just about total, and although it brought him many benefits and advantages, its price was not small.
By the time of Stravinsky's death, after years as a companion, advisor, assistant and surrogate conductor, recording supervisor, literary collaborator, and God knows what else, Craft's reputation was somewhat tarnished. The path breaking conductor responsible for early recordings and therefore dissemination (at least in the United States) of the music of Webern, Schoenberg, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Varese, as well as Stravinsky, was more and more overlooked. Craft tended to be regarded more as an opportunistic self-serving hanger-on than as an astute and accomplished musician who was the person who had virtually singlehandedly made Stravinsky's later creative life possible. In the age of Watergate, the Stravinsky-Craft relationship was sometimes regarded in a more or less automatic way as some kind of conspiracy against somebody (possibly "the public"). Occasionally some anomaly regarding a recording would be reported, or questions would be raised about the Stravinsky-Craft books: it would be asked, for instance, if Stravinsky could have written his part of them. (Anybody who had ever read Nicholas Nabokov's Old Friends and New Music, with its chapter about Nabokov and Balanchine visiting the Stravinskys in Hollywood for Christmas, 1948, shortly before Craft arrived on the scene would have clearly recognized in the Stravinsky presented there the same personality which sings out so clearly from the books in question. That his writing had been polished was clear, anyway. It always had been by somebody.). The height of this feeding frenzy was Lillian Libman's book, And Music At the Close, which presents Craft as a less that scrupulous, self-serving manipulator of the elderly composer. After Stravinsky's death Craft, although he continued to conduct and to write, was much less in the public eye. Since 1991, however, Craft has reemerged on recordings with a Stravinsky series on the Music Masters label, and in 1992 he published a book about the composer.
The book, Stravinsky: Glimpses of a Life is of great interest generally, and is particularly fascinating for anyone with a specific interest in Stravinsky or who might have been a reader of the Stravinsky-Craft books. Although it contains a number of thorough and informative articles on various aspects of specific works of Stravinsky, including Les Noces, Le Sacre du Printemps, and L'histoire du Soldat, and notices of various Stravinsky performances and exhibitions which are not without interest, the most compelling parts are the ones dealing with personal matters. In the first section of the book, Craft examines, in detail and apparently with great candor, various aspects of his relationship with Stravinsky. He offers a history of his association with Stravinsky and his music and reflects on his influence on Stravinsky, both personal and musical, and on Stravinsky's on him. Craft is very specific in describing his role in Stravinsky's assimilation of twelve-tone music in the 1950's, and of the extent of his direction of Stravinsky's compositional activity during the last twenty years of the composer's life. He also gives a thorough account of the history of the Stravinsky-Craft books, and throws in for good measure a chapter on the brief relationship of Stravinsky and Dylan Thomas. Much of what is included in these chapters will have been pretty much clear to anyone who has followed what was previously available on the subject. Some of the details presented are somewhat startling, to this reader, anyway. Although there had never been any question of the importance of Craft's advice to Stravinsky the composer, for instance, the extent to which he directed Stravinsky's compositional activity--choosing the texts for A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer and Requiem Canticles and making substantive recommendations regarding technical matters and musical symbolism in The Flood, as well as deciding which projects the composer would undertake and which he would not--is surprising, and a little unsettling. None of this in anyway diminishes the greatness either of the music in question or of its creator, but it might cause one to feel that sausages and legislation are not the only things it's just as well not to observe too closely in the making.
In a section entitled "Life in France," Craft also offers ample details of Stravinsky's relationships with his two wives, and theirs with each other, as well as accounts of the making of The Poetics of Music, Stravinsky's Norton lectures, which were written by Roland-Manuel and Suvchinsky, and of Stokowski's intercessory role between Stravinsky and an anonymous patron(ness), who was probably Stokowski himself. The section also includes a chapter on the litigation after Stravinsky's death between his children and his widow. This last chapter is powerful, compelling, and quite grisly reading.
The prose style and voice of Glimpses of a Life is familiar to any reader of the Stravinsky-Craft output, but it has a greater urgency and poignancy than the earlier writing, and offers further evidence of Craft's continuing personal devotion to his friend, who also happened to have been one of the greatest composers of this century.
The most compelling proof of Craft's devotion to Stravinsky has always been provided by his performance and recordings of Stravinsky's music, and this has been emphatically renewed with his new series of recordings on Music Masters. The five volumes thus far released (a sixth, a recording of The Rake's Progress, is due soon) contains an immense amount of music, many of the pieces not otherwise easily available. The scope of the project is ambitious and far ranging. It is, in fact, intended to include the complete works eventually. A statement by Craft in the program notes of the first volume stipulates the intention to include in each volume one later work along with one "blue-chip popular piece." This plan has not been followed in subsequent volumes, although the programming of each volume is attractive, and, especially in the case of volume IV (American Stravinsky), enlightening.
Volume One of this new series is the largest, comprising two discs. It features Oedipus Rex, although it also includes Le Sacre du Printemps, Symphony of Psalms, Symphony in Three Movements, Requiem Canticles, and, as some sort of after thought and without much necessity, the Pas De Deux from Apollo, Fanfare for a New Theater, and Fanfare for Three Trumpets. Volume Two consists of the
suite from Pulcinella, Symphony in C, Les Noces, the Russian Peasant Choruses, and the three Russian Sacred Choruses. Volume Three features Persephone, but also includes Symphonies of Wind Instruments, (this is a first recording of the original version--a thorough discussion of this piece and the ins and outs of its different versions is contained in Glimpses of a Life), the Concertino in the later version for twelve players, the Octet for wind instruments, and Zvezdoliki. The largest works on Volume Four, subtitled American Stravinsky, are Agon, Scenes de Ballet, and the orchestration of the Bach Vom Himmel Hoch Variations, but the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, the Eight Instrumental Miniatures, the Circus Polka, the Scherzo A La Russe, and the Greetings Prelude are included, along with an arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner for male chorus (this is said to be the first recording; a previous recording of The Star Spangled Banner on a Columbia LP2 is for mixed chorus and orchestra; that one is presumably the one confiscated before Stravinsky could conduct a performance of it with the Boston Symphony.), and Stravinsky's harmonization of a tune written as a birthday present for him by Balanchine in 1946. Volume Five features Renard, but also includes the Suites for Small Orchestra, Four Norwegian Moods, Ode,and Ragtime for Eleven Instruments, along with the Concerto for Two Pianos, Piano-Rag Music, and the early piano Etudes.
Elliott Carter, in Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds, remembering Stravinsky's piano playing, remarked on "the composer's extraordinary, electric sense of rhythm and incisiveness of touch that made every note he played seem a 'Stravinsky-note,' full of energy, excitement, and serious intentness."3 (The evidence of Stravinsky's playing and conducting can be found on EMI's Composer In Person series, which includes Stravinsky recordings from 1930 to 1938.)4 The best of Craft's new recordings--and none of these performances is anything less than excellent--capture a quality which could be described in that manner. All of them are rhythmically lively and incisive and several are at a speed which is literally breathtaking (sometimes for the good, and sometimes not). Since all of the recordings are with established groups (The Orchestra of St. Luke's and The Gregg Smith Singers) or members thereof, they reflect a shared ensemble experience and a uniform conception of style, which is a luxury that Stravinsky seldom had in the 1960's, when he embarked on a "complete works" recording project with Columbia.
Because of Craft's intimate association with Stravinsky and Stravinsky's recordings in the 1950's and 1960's, the temptation to compare these recordings with those earlier ones is irresistible. There is obviously not space here for anything like an exhaustive discussion of these performances, on their own merits or as they compare to earlier ones, but I do have a few observations on a very few of the works:
The selection of works in Volume IV is very interesting and extraordinarily entertaining. Many of the works which Stravinsky wrote in the United States during the 1940's may not be particularly substantial, but the ones included here, the Circus Polka, Scherzo A La Russe, and Scenes de Ballet, certainly are snappy, and they are clearly the works of a great composer. The proximity of Scenes de Ballet to Agon, which follows it almost immediately--separated only by the Balanchine-Stravinsky Chorale, which lasts 24 seconds--allows a particularly enlightening comparison, suggesting that, at least in some ways, Agon wasn't all that much different from the music that Stravinsky was writing thirteen years earlier. In any case the close succession is striking, and allows one to reflect on how the earlier and later music are alike and how they are different. The performance of Agon is especially brilliant, but for some reason it duplicates the old Stravinsky recording's5 mis-inflection of the very beginning, making it sound as though the opening figure starts on rather than off the beat. This performance captures the spirit that made the Stravinsky recording preferable to more polished performances by others, and combines it with a standard of execution which is far beyond that of any previous recording. The whole of Volume IV is particularly wonderful.
The first recording that Craft made of Stravinsky's music was of Renard6. His program notes for the present recording relate that Stravinsky told him that it was too slow and he has vowed to redress that mistake. The older recording, which can be consulted in the collection of the Harvard Music Library, is slow, but the words are intelligible and are delivered with a certain amount of humor and understanding. The recording that Stravinsky himself made7 is faster and intelligible. The new Craft recording goes whizzing by much faster than is necessary, giving the singers little chance to pronounce the words, let alone give them much of a quality of meaning anything. All of these recordings are in English. Craft's notes for the new recording assert that Stravinsky insisted that the work be performed in the language of the country in which it is performed. The policy of presenting it in this recording in English would seem to be in contradiction to his insistence in Glimpses of a Life that the contemporaneous Les Noces, which at certain times Stravinsky also wished to be performed in the language of the country in which it was performed, must be performed in only Russian in order to preserve its quantitative and accentual formulae. One would assume that the sonic qualities of the Russian text as composed into the work are just as important in Renard, and in any case, as Craft says about somebody else's performance of another Stravinsky work in Glimpses, "One may as well notunderstand Russian as not understand English."8 9
The recording of Les Noces on Volume II is in Russian, as is an older recording by Craft10 , also with the Gregg Smith Singers, unlike the Stravinsky recording on Columbia11 or the recording Stravinsky made for the BBC in 1934, contained in the EMI Composers In Person set, both of which are in English. Craft's older Columbia recording is really wonderful, and seems to me to be the finest recording I've heard of the work, and possibly the best performance of it that I've heard. It somehow conveys the impressions that all the performers feel the rhythms in their bones. It also has verve and great good cheer, as is appropriate for a rowdy wedding party. The newer recording is fast--very fast--and although there is no denying the impressiveness of playing such a very hard piece so well at such high speeds, it all doesn't exactly add up to a good, cheerful, or cheering performance. It just seems really fast--and a little driven. The older Stravinsky recording is very interesting in what it indicates about what a state of the art performance of a very difficult avant garde piece would have been like in 1934, but doesn't seem to give as much information about what Stravinsky might have wanted it to sound like. (This can also be said for the other conducted ensemble performances on the EMI set, although the performance of the Octet, recorded in Paris in 1932 is suave and charming, and they all are very interesting.) One of the points of interest about Stravinsky's 1962 recording for Columbia is that the pianists are Samuel Barber, Roger Sessions, Aaron Copland, and Lucas Foss. The performance itself is a little on the slow side, not overly well together, and not one of Stravinsky's most impressive
Despite a reputation also a little tarnished, some number of the Stravinsky Columbia recordings are rather good performances. I recall the recordings of The Symphony of Psalms and Symphony in C, with the CBC Orchestra and the Festival Singers of Toronto, Orpheus, with the Chicago Symphony, and Threni, with a rather distinguished pickup group, with some affection. Initially the Craft recording of Symphony of Psalms seemed to suffer by comparison. A revisit revealed certain ensemble problems in a performance gilded by time. In fact the Craft is much cleaner, and does not lack the sense of intentness which marks the Stravinsky recording.
Even though some of the performances of some of the works on these new Craft recordings may be marred by excessive speed and one may quibble with some aspects of certain of the performances (I'm not sure, for instance that Paul Newman's narration adds very much to the recording of Oedipus Rex.), one can only be grateful for the mere existence of some of the others (Requiem Canticles, for instance) All of these are very fine on their own account, and each is clearly the result of a life time of thinking about and working with Stravinsky's music. I am waiting eagerly for the Craft recordings of The Flood, A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer, and the Variations for Orchestra, as well as Orpheus and a number of other earlier and later works. In the meantime, these recordings are another reason for gratitude to Robert Craft for his devotion to Stravinsky and his music and for the quality of his work.