Igor Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, Russia and France 1882-1934
Stephen Walsh
Jonathan Cape, £30, 716pp
The death of a great composer is often followed by a period of reassessment, sometimes of neglect as well. It is a time when admiration turns to scepticism, and the claims made for his achievement during his life are called into question. It's a measure of Igor Stravinsky's domination for almost half the 20th century that since his death in 1971 his significance has never been doubted.
Yet for all that has been written about Stravinsky and his music, both during his long lifetime and afterwards, his character continues to be an enigma. Geographically and musically we know where he came from - Russia - and where he took himself and his work, in a chameleon-like creative development that spanned more than 60 years, but that is about all.
For the rest we've had to fall back on flimsily supported anecdote or the composer's own embroidered versions of his life story, beginning with the autobiography in French in the 30s and developing in the series of conversations (in English) with his assistant and subsequent chronicler Robert Craft, which began to appear in 1959. In those books Stravinsky reinvented himself and his history as resourcefully as he reoriented his musical language throughout his career.
That carefully constructed mythology has blurred the image of one of the supreme artists of our time, and Stephen Walsh's meticulously researched and scrupulously detailed biography sets out to bring it all into focus. This hefty first volume takes Stravinsky from birth in St Petersburg in 1882 to celebrity in Paris, via the grounding he received in the Russian tradition embodied in his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, and the dazzling success of the early ballets composed for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, which spectacularly kick-started his international reputation and defined his position in the vanguard of modernism.
It moves on to the peripatetic life in western Europe forced upon him by the first world war, and finally to the years in which he settled more or less in France. Here he combined composition with the role of an itinerant musician, conducting and playing his own works with leading orchestras in Europe and the US, while his private life - wife and children in the south of France, mistress in Paris - became increasingly complicated.
Walsh has done a wonderful job documenting those physical transformations, and in an entirely non-analytical but remarkably perceptive way he has also drawn out the significance of the musical development. His detailing of Stravinsky's upbringing, much of it taken from letters which have never appeared in English before, is the most compelling part of his book: it provides a corrective to Stravinsky's own revisionism, which was at its most ruthless when it came to his parents' role in his musical training. It is as if the composer wanted to project the image of his genius as materialising from nowhere, succeeding in spite of, rather than because of, his parents.
But, as Walsh shows, Stravinsky's parents encouraged his musicality to the extent of organising piano lessons, even if his authoritarian father Fyodor, a singer at the Maryinsky Theatre in St Petersburg and the leading Russian bass of his time, insisted his son study law at university rather than composition. But Igor's genius had a slow-burning fuse anyway: there were no teenage masterpieces, indeed no work of real substance until he was in his early 20s. From that point, though, he developed frighteningly fast: just 10 years separate the conservative Piano Sonata from the cataclysm of The Rite of Spring.
Walsh's declared unwillingness to speculate, or to write anything that might be construed as psychobiography, means that he does not attempt to explain that very rapid evolution in extra-musical terms. But the decaying imperial world of St Petersburg is brought vividly to life, and the broader context in which Stravinsky matured is carefully detailed.
When the story reaches Paris, and everything opens up for the composer in a spectacularly chic way, this tight focus becomes more frustrating. The world in which Stravinsky moved was as culturally rich as at any time in the 20th century, and largely thanks to Diaghilev he became part of it, meeting Picasso and Braque, Gide, Proust and the young Cocteau, as well as Ravel and Debussy.
It is not just idle curiosity that makes one long to know more about Stravinsky's relationship with some of those figures, but their involvement is confined to walk-on parts; even the legendary occasion on which Debussy and Stravinsky played through The Rite of Spring on two pianos before its premiere is mentioned only in passing. Most curious of all, the description of the genesis of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, one of Stravinsky's most original works, makes no mention of Debussy, although a chorale written in his memory was the starting point for the score.
It would have good, too, to have been given a bit more about Nadia Boulanger, who seems just to materialise in Stravinsky's circle around 1930. You would hardly guess from this book how influential Boulanger's role in spreading the gospel of Stravinskian neo-classicism was on both sides of the Atlantic, any more than you would realise that Vera Sudeykina would become the second Mrs Stravinsky in the 1940s, in what will be the second volume of Walsh's book.
The facts presented here are copious, but instead of minute details of Stravinsky's endless wrangling over fees and royalties, and the programmes of every conducting engagement, a broader impression of the man himself and the impression he made on those around him would have been welcome. Stravinsky's admiration for Mussolini in the early 30s, and his apparently unthinking anti-semitism, are reported with relatively little fuss. Reading between the lines (though Walsh is occasionally censorious), Stravinsky was probably a pretty dislikeable man, but we're never given enough evidence to make up our own minds.
