Stravinsky

"That’s what the biography sheds a rather interesting light on: that Stravinsky wasn’t this great powerful omniscient figure, but, wonderful composer that he was, he was subject to all the usual difficulties. Even more so because he’d lived through these two world wars and a revolution, and was actually in quite a shaky state when he arrived in America. He had to rebuild his career, really. It’s difficult because Robert Craft is still alive and he’s quite litigious, but it’s pretty blunt about him: he made himself very unpopular with the music profession, because he was seen to be exploiting Stravinsky and was also very rude to him in public, in rehearsals, when Stravinsky was very old and frail. It was also felt that he’d misled the public about the extent of how much of these ‘conversations’ were actually written by Craft, which they largely were, towards the end. For me Walsh’s biography was an eye-opener because it’s a counterweight to the slight myth-making of the conversation books, which for Stravinsky were really a way of making some money."