Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, 1948-1971

Life has a funny way of providing punishments to compensate for great fortune. Robert Craft is a very talented musician and writer and has had a more important career with many more valuable contributions than people remember. Why? Because of his friendship with Igor Stravinsky from 1948 until the composer's death in 1971. The reality is that no matter how bright your flame, you will have a hard time shining next to the sun. Everyone is always interested in Stravinsky and it is that name that will remain so very important to history. On the other hand, Craft was really a friend and a support to Stravinsky and lived that life. We have not. So, does it really matter to Craft if what we think? Probably not. Craft had published selections from his diaries in the later "conversation" books that he and Stravinsky did together. In this volume Craft points out that he was not happy with the selections and that putting everything together for a publishing deadline rushed things. Here he has taken more time in the selections and more careful editing. The entries tend to be shorter and more focused. This book is a very interesting read. It also has a great selection of photographs some of which are in color. This book also goes further than the previous publications of Craft's diaries and provide a very touching account of Stravinsky's death and funeral. Of course, Craft shows his usual good taste and his eye for those details and observations that provide us with the most insight and interest. I really enjoyed this book a great deal and was quite upset when I damaged my copy by dropping it while in a rush to get off the plane from a business trip. If you are interested in Stravinsky's life after "The Rake's Progress", this is a must have.

Craft's amazing gifts as a writer are as interesting as is the story of the extraordinary relationship of which he writes. His famous and intimate long-time relationship with Stravinsky and wife Vera makes for fascinating, if not fast, reading. Some of the most interesting people on the planet make their appearance throughout the pages of this massive book (including Auden, Huxley, Spender, and so many more), and all are treated with a prepossessing intelligence, wit and intellectual candor by this remarkable conductor/musician/friend, Robert Craft. If Craft's own art is not that well known to the man in the street, all the better for the role he assumes in his many books about Stravinsky -that of an 'intimate without portfolio', as it were, able to illumine Stravinsky from the inside out, no small feat indeed. Of course, Craft's own art is indeed prodigious, as his many definitive recordings of Stravinsky's music, made since the composer's death, have proven time and again. Page after page of this 'diary' reveals the unique friendship between a genius and his 'brother-son'; Craft's ability to disappear within his observorship in order to reveal the man to whom he devoted such a great part of his life seems infinite, and so admirable. Craft's is a most perceptive mind, a mirror-mind to Stravinsky's in many ways, and more than a glimpse is thereby afforded of one of the titanic creative forces of the twentieth century. He acted as Stravinsky's alter-genius, if you will, and the results here are spellbinding. The book's journey traverses the world, and includes lengthy episodes in Venice, Paris, Los Angeles, Switzerland- all critical places in Stravinsky's history. The pages of the book devoted to Vera Stravinsky, wife, painter, and someone clearly especially loved by Robert Craft, that appear toward the end of the volume after the detailing of Stravinsky's funeral in Venice (of which there is a marvelous photo, the Orthodox priests in fierce array!), are lovely, loving and devoted, and worthy of mention. Craft's books are meat indeed for the Stravinskyphile, and even the uncommitted admirer can find in this work (as in his 'Theme and Variations', in the Dialogues, etc.) an epic chronicling of our time, and will find sure residue of the world's becoming modern through the uncompromising art of Igor Stravinsky. Impossible to overstate either the importance of this book as a testament, or the value of encountering it.