Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

"These were very controversial at the time. They were conversations between Stravinsky and his, if you like, musical secretary, Robert Craft: an American conductor and musicologist who became his sort of right hand – some would say his evil genius. Stravinsky had been exiled from Russia, exiled from France by the First World War and then again by the Occupation, and he arrived in America in 1945 and settled in Hollywood. Because he was rather stuck up and spoilt and grand, Stravinsky refused to teach at a university in America. The thing about teaching is it keeps you in touch with what’s happening. Stravinsky wasn’t. And so, when this young guy, Craft, turned up as a fan, he took him on as an amanuensis. Craft became an adopted son almost, and eventually a sort of Svengali. In the conversation books you get the feeling that when Stravinsky arrived in Hollywood, he was the centre of the world. Here was this incredibly cultivated man – a survivor, almost a dinosaur, who had lived through the Revolution, spoke old pre-revolutionary Russian, saw Tchaikovsky as a child, knew Rimsky-Korsakov, worked with Diaghilev and all that. Craft’s book – and Craft is the sort of person who will never use three words if he can use 47 – gives you a feeling of this great man decreeing, issuing his opinions. But in actual fact, when Stravinsky arrived in Hollywood he was extremely washed up, in a difficult state musically, and nowhere near the centre of action. The truth was very different, and he was actually searching to reinvent himself."