Stephen Walsh

Review-Survey: Some Recent Stravinsky Literature

If I start this review by voicing the wish that we might have not more but less ink spilt on this (as I think) greatest of all composers born since 1850, it is not out of any feeling that mere words have nothing more to tell us about a music which has probably inspired more documentary and explanatory prose than any since Wagners (I hope I have too much sense of self-preservation for that). What does strike me and it emerges with blinding clarity from many of the latest additions to the vast bibliography is the peripheral and often repetitive character of a lot of the work currently being published. No doubt the centenary year can take some of the blame. But another obvious reason for so much skirting of central issues is the complicated state of primary Stravinsky sources, due to the dragging out of legal disputes which, since the composers death, have ensured that an enquiry to Basle or Winterthur about a Stravinsky manuscript is likely to be answered by a New York lawyer. Readers of Robert Crafts fascinating article My Life with Stravinsky in the New York Review ofBooks will have noted with approval his agenda for future Stravinsky studies, with, at its head, a plea for proper editions of the music. Apart from the gradual publication of the surviving juvenilia, there has been no significant improvement in the deplorable state of the available musical texts since the last works were written and published. Yet in the multitude of words written on Stravinsky in the past two or three years, only one major article, Louis Cyrs discussion of the variant editions of The Rite of Spring,2 has contributed appreciably to any improvement in this daunting but crucial field. Meanwhile analytical studies, memoirs and intellectual biographies proliferate, and there is the threat of countless more, with Stravinsky now a major growth industry in Soviet musicology (for good reasons) and still as much one as ever on US campuses. So far, from the USSR, we have Asafyevs famous 1929 study, translated for the first time, and the much more recent book by Druskin, Asafyevs one-time comrade-in-arms.3 Vershininas book on the early ballets is also due in the coming year.4 From the States there is van den Toorns expansion of his Perspectives articles,5 Josephs on the piano music,6 countless articles, including Taruskins and Karlinskys pioneering work on the Russian background to the early theatre scores, and Alan Lessems penetrating comparison of the neoclassical strains in Stravinsky and Schoenberg.7 From Paris comes the Lesure symposium; from Britain some good translations and reprints (including paperbacks of the conversation books) and the first volume of correspondence.8 Among all this, Kellers expanded preface to his wifes fascinating drawings of the master9 stands out for its pugnacious and waspish tone, though its arguments, not to mention its verbal plays and paradoxes, are no longer unexpected.

Kurtág's Russian settings: The word made flesh

Much of Kurtágs mature work reveals a preoccupation with the Word, either as bearer of meaning or as a self-contained unit of sonority. The interest in language is connected with lapidary forms, whose source appears to lie in a spiritual and creative crisis Kurtág underwent in Paris in 1956, hence their frequent connection in his mind with squalor, degradation and self-mortification. The Russian language works appear to feed on this connection in a specifically passionate, theatrical why which yields a greater expressive range than in much of Kurtágs work, while essentially basing themselves on similar ideas and gestures to those of other works of the time.