Igor Stravinsky, an Autobiography

It is always interesting when a great artist communicates with us about their life and art. However, like most of us, they tend to try and put events and ideas in the best possible light. So, it is for later scholars to come along, dig deeper, and get things right. And the history of artists talking about art has proven that what they say about what they do is seldom as useful as the work itself. As Hemingway noted in "Death in the Afternoon", it is always a mistake to meet the author. And yet it is often most interesting. Stravinsky wrote this in 1934 when he was in his early fifties. The book covers the his life from his childhood to that time and his compositions through the Duo Concertant, Concerto for Violin, and Persephone. Of course, he could not have expected all the music and the direction still in his future. His Symphony in C, the Symphony in Three Movements, The Rake's Progress, and so much more through the Requiem Canticles were all in the future. Who could have expected the horrors of the Second World War at that time? So, it is an interesting document from that point of view because of the way that time was viewed as the context for the past. Nowadays, we would reconstruct everything differently because of what we know of those subsequent years. Not only is it most useful to know the way his compositions came about (to the extent these anecdotes are accurate), but his views on Beethoven, composition, executants versus interpreters, musical form, and the great artistic personalities he met and knew and worked with along the way. Now, in order to understand Stravinsky's comments about music's inability to communicate anything we have to keep in mind the times. Remember, this was the time when the public lived for Wagner's lietmotive and Richard Strauss's "Ein Heldenleben" (A Hero's Life) and the autobiographical "Symphonia domestica" in which he tried to use music to communicate events from daily life. This was not the art Stravinsky was interested in. And because his music was so different than the nineteenth century musical traditions, it is understandable that his views of how his music should be played free of that tradition make a great deal of sense. His music is much more familiar to us than to his contemporaries, however his rather strident comments about merely executing his music and recreating his recordings is still a cause for great debate in musical circles. Myself, I think we can be informed by his comments and the recordings, and they should carry a great deal of weight, but music requires artistry not merely craftsmanship in the hands of its "executants". Stravinsky's views on the false notion of making Art a substitute for religion are most interesting. He also has a compelling argument why one cannot treat religion and faith critically (as in intellectual analysis) because criticism involves rejection of this or that and that is not faith. This is a very interesting book and has great historica