Stravinsky (Volume 2)
The Second Exile: France and America, 1934 - 1971
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
In 1934, Igor Stravinsky was fifty-two, a Russian expatriate living in Paris and already regarded by many as the most important composer of his generation. Stravinsky: The Second Exile follows him through the remainder of his long life, which he would spend largely in the United States. These are the years during which he would compose such masterworks as The Rake's Progress and Symphony in C, and achieve a new level of fame as a conductor and concert pianist in his own right.
In this second and final volume of Stephen Walsh's acclaimed biography, the author traces and illuminates Stravinsky's increasingly complex and often agonised family life and his crucially important relationship with his associate Robert Craft.
As a musicologist and critic, Walsh is able to speak with authority and wit not only about Stravinsky's life, but also about his work, expertly following the composer's musical journey from the neoclassicism of his late French and early American periods, through his early essays in serial technique, and on finally to the astonishing complexities of this protean genius's final works.
Based on exhaustive research, Stephen Walsh uncovers new and controversial material, making this the second volume of the most definitive biography of the most significant and influential composer of the twentieth century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Walsh, a lecturer in music at the University of Wales, has undertaken a staggering task in this, the first of an exhaustive two-volume study of the man who is arguably the 20th century's greatest composer. Both on his own and by the medium of the amanuensis of his later years, Robert Craft (Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship), Stravinsky (1882-1971) drew many layers of deception and distortion over the thoughts and events of his youth, and Walsh has taken it as his task to disperse them. While respectful of Craft's encouragement of Stravinsky's muse in his later years, Walsh shows how many of Craft's judgments, fueled by Stravinsky's revisionist tendencies and retrospective malice, were flawed. Walsh also pays tribute to Richard Taruskin's pioneering work on Stravinsky (Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions). Walsh gives the most complete picture yet of the liberal, bourgeois and musical Petersburg family in which Stravinsky grew up; his early years at the conservatory under Rimsky-Korsakov; the sensation caused by his ballets for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes; the Rite of Spring scandal; and the long string of masterpieces in various styles that followed. Here, too, is the tale of a passionately Russian artist deprived by revolution of his homeland and the copyright of his works, as well as the insecurity he felt as he wandered Europe, mostly in France and Switzerland. He moved always among a host of glittering artists--Ravel, Debussy, Cocteau, Picasso, Gide, to name only a few--in those fecund years, and, always, a crowd of Russian exile hangers-on who hoped that increasingly wealthy Igor, as uncle, cousin or compatriot, would help them out. Thus was born the penny-pinching, materialist, cynical composer of the later years, as Walsh convincingly shows in this overwhelmingly detailed and often witty portrait.
