Product Description

Popularly known during his lifetime as "The World's Greatest Living Composer," Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) not only wrote some of the twentieth century's most influential music, he also assumed the role of cultural icon. This book reveals Stravinsky's two sides--the public persona, preoccupied with his own image and place in history, and the private composer, whose views and beliefs were often purposely suppressed. Charles M. Joseph draws a richer and more human portrait of Stravinsky than anyone has done before, using an array of unpublished materials and unreleased film trims from the composer's huge archive at the Paul Sacher Institute in Switzerland. Focusing on Stravinsky's place in the culture of the twentieth century, Joseph situates the composer among the giants of his age. He discusses Stravinsky's first American commission, his complicated relationship with his son, his professional relationships with celebrities ranging from T. S. Eliot to Orson Welles, his flirtations with Hollywood and television, and his love-hate attitude toward the critics and the media. In a close look at Stravinsky's efforts to mold a public image, Joseph explores the complex dance between the composer and his artistic collaborator, Robert Craft, who orchestrated controversial efforts to protect Stravinsky and edit materials about him, both during the composer's lifetime and after his death.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #528882 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Along with other scholars, Joseph (Stravinsky and Balanchine, forthcoming) has undertaken a reevaluation of the life and legacy of Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). For several decades, the composer of Rite of Spring and Firebird has been seen through the lens of idolizer, writer and conductor Robert Craft, whose many books about Stravinsky, and those supposedly written with him, must be taken with several grains of salt. Joseph, a Skidmore College professor of liberal arts, focuses on specific issues of Stravinsky criticism in chapters like "Boswellizing an Icon: Stravinsky, Craft, and the Historian's Dilemma" and "Film Documentaries: The Composer On and Off Camera." He recounts Stravinsky's stormy relationship with his son Soulima, who was Joseph's college piano teacher, and the composer's relations with many prominent figures: he kept a copy of W.H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety in which Auden inscribed, "Leonard Bernstein is a shit." Joseph is almost supernaturally polite about what he believes to be Craft's shoddy work, especially as the latter denied him permission to quote certain documents. However, Joseph gratuitously and inaccurately calls pianist Glenn Gould "always outlandish" when in fact he was an eccentric genius who happened to loathe Stravinsky, which seems increasingly understandable. The more we know about Stravinsky, an anti-Semitic fan of Mussolini who behaved badly toward colleagues, friends and family, the more he makes Picasso look like a choirboy. A certain macabre wit keeps him entertaining, though, such as when he annotated a Time article that called him an "animated Gothic gargoyle" with the words "How kind." Although sometimes lapsing into dense academic prose, this book adds new material to ongoing Stravinsky studies and should attract modern music aficionados. Photos.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Joseph (liberal arts, Skidmore Coll.; Stravinsky and the Piano) presents a fascinatingly eclectic mix of essays on various aspects of Stravinsky's career, with special emphasis on how he influenced or was influenced by aspects of 20th-century culture such as television, motion pictures, musical developments, and historical events. Whether he's discussing the composer's relationship with his son, Soulima (with whom the author once studied), his attempts at scoring Hollywood movies, or the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge commission for the ballet Apollon Musagete, Joseph takes a no-holds-barred approach, characterizing Stravinsky as a talented yet egotistical and controlling individual. Access to unpublished materials at the Sacher Foundation in Switzerland and the composer's archives provided Joseph with resources unavailable to most previous writers. A basic familiarity with the composer, his surroundings, and musical processes is assumed. Sure to be controversial, this well-written, fully documented title is recommended for academic collections and those specializing in music or 20th-century studies. (Index not seen.) Barry Zaslow, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker
Throughout his professional life, Igor Stravinsky—the preëminent composer of the last century—projected a confident image to the public: that of a musical visionary and intellectual sophist who was oblivious of the feelings of his audience and his critics. Joseph's book, not a conventional biography but an engaging series of studies, reveals a far more flawed and fragile human being, who craved approval, dealt ungenerously with colleagues, loved James Bond movies, and tried hard to further his son's musical career. Although the aged Stravinsky's eagerness to play the role of celebrity composer for the golden age of television (as long as the price was right) was an embarrassment, most of these episodes testify to the protean survival skills of an artist whose sense of identity was always in flux and whose cunning was commensurate with his talent.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Fluff
This book is remarkably light. It is a breezy discussion of Stravinsky from the viewpoint of a fan interested in the man more in terms of gossip than insight, with a big mis-step in its irrelevant focus on Stravinksy's son and the hardships of being Stravinsky's son. Does this have anything to do with Stravinsky's music. It is gossip, trite.

Thoughtful, fresh, and controversial
I found this book to be an extremely new and interesting look into the mind and personal life of Igor Stravinsky. Understanding the artist as a person helps us to understand and appreciate the art he creates.

In response to Craig Matteson... everyone is entitled to their opinon (and of course, no better place to put one's opinon but in a review). However, Mr. Matteson was off on one point (well, in my opinon, he was off on MANY points, but I'll only discuss one). Joseph has written a very thorough book entitled Stravinsky and the Piano in which he studies Stavinsky's "actual piano music performance scores" in detail - fingerings and markings included. Maybe Mr. Matteson is unaware of this book because it is only available to music scholars, which quite obviously, he is not. So it makes perfect sense to me why Joseph did not include such information in this book. A) he already wrote a book about this, and B) this book is about Stravinsky's split lives (the person vs. the public composer) - therefore the scores and fingerings are obtuse.

Worth reading, some great points, but ...
We seem to be at an unfortunate stage of music history writing. The approach of many books, including this one, is the antithesis of the hero worship books written by the shelf-full not too many decades ago. Do we really need this style of book as an antidote? To me, it seems to belabor the obvious that composers, even the very greatest, such as Brahms, Mahler, and Stravinsky, should be mere mortals after all.

Why is it important at all that we point out moments or even decades of pettiness, vainglory, or difficult family relations? How exactly is that supposed to help us understand the art? Why not write a book about a fellow named Bob who lives down your down the street and his ordinary to miserable life?

Of course, we don't write about Bob down the street because he is ordinary and he isn't Stravinsky. Haven't we long ago realized that even Stravinsky the composer is something other than Stravinsky the husband, father, or businessman. Of course extraordinary people have much about them that is quite ordinary.

Some feel that knowing the artist as a human being helps us understand his art. Maybe on the margins it could, but only children believe that a composer was necessarily sad when writing a sad piece or happy when writing a happy piece and so on. Nothing Mr. Joseph tells us about the composition of The Flood helps us understand how it comes out of a Stravinsky. (Even if the author is trying to put forward that in this case it DIDN'T come out of Stravinsky).

Don't get me wrong, this book by Charles Joseph isn't bad. Really, it has much to recommend it and I am glad that I read it and hope you do too. But I was frustrated by the mixing in of well known stories and photographs into a book that claimed to be revealing new things based upon new access to Stravinsky's papers and artifacts in Basel. It isn't that there isn't anything new or semi-new, it is that it isn't set apart from the ho-hum there's that old chestnut again regurgitation of Stravinsky tales.

It is like going to a dinner party and listening across the table to a very knowledgeable guest who tells a few enthralling tales about a very interesting subject, but then spoils the enchantment by going on too long by telling a few too many tales that have no spark or wit about them.

Joseph also doesn't follow up on things that ARE really interesting. For example, when he discusses the actual piano music performance scores that Stravinsky used and the interesting fingerings the composer used as a performer. But we don't get a picture of even one page of those piano scores nor do we get even a hint as to why Stravinsky's written in fingerings are telling. As a pianist of sorts, I can surmise why Stravinsky's fingerings would be interesting, but it would be nice to get even a bit of discussion on such an interesting topic. I would have traded all of those re-printed pictures for one or two of the actual new material and one page of the marked-up piano music.

Yes, there is a 1983 text available through ProQuest that talks about Stravinsky's piano music, but Mr. Joseph indicates in the book that there were new things learned from his seeing the materials in Switzerland. In any case, this book is generally available and his 1983 book is not. Again, why reprint the nude photo of Stravinsky that is NOT original to this book and leave out something that would be valuable and a real contribution such as Stravinsky's piano fingerings?

It would be a real service if Mr. Joseph (or SOMEONE) put together an edition of the piano works with those fingerings in them. Not that pianists will necessarily use those precise fingerings, but they would certainly aid in understanding how the composer himself interpreted the piece.

Especially annoying to me was yet another tired discussion about Robert Craft. Mr. Joseph does demonstrate that Mr. Craft did play a significant role in the genesis of Stravinsky's work "The Flood". The author approaches the point of almost intimating that Craft is at least the co-composer of "The Flood", but never is bold enough to make that accusation. My guess is because for all the support and creative priming that Craft provided for Stravinsky, the evidence is that the composer did indeed compose the music himself. For heaven's sake, every composer since music began based it on some other creative spark or borrowed a theme from another work or even included suggestions from performers for whom the work was written. Composition is not done in a vacuum chamber on the dark side of the moon!

However, anyone who knows anything at all about Stravinsky's output from the fifties onward knows that Craft did us all a tremendous service. Why anyone wants to criticize Craft is beyond me. Unless someone wants to make the case that Stravinsky simply signed his name to Craft's scores and present real evidence they should either whine to people who care or thank Craft for the music he enabled Stravinsky to make in the fifties and sixties.

All in all, it easy for us in our age of sarcasm and witless irony to see the flaws of books that extol our favorite composers as heroes or as flawless paragons of humanity. My suspicion is that it won't take too many more years for people to turn their backs on the recent spate of books that take as their mission the whittling down of the tree of the great artist to a toothpick of a human. It is just too easy to write about human failings. We don't learn much at all about the art from such books and they are tiresome to read.

Finally, I am curious about the surmise that I am not a music scholar? By what definition? In europe a student is a scholar. Over here, what is the definition of a scholar? One who agrees with your points of view? I happen to have spent seven years at the University of Michigan School of Music and have a degree in music theory and several years of graduate school before my life took a different direction. But I have always played my piano and kept up on music. So, my views are not uninformed.