The earliest %26#8220;typical%26#8221; Stravinsky interviews %26#151; charming, crafty, hyperarticulate, unerringly self-serving %26#151; appeared in St. Petersburg newspapers in 1912, and the stream, or torrent, continued unabated for nearly six decades, in dozens of languages and on every continent but Antarctica. By the end of his life he said he was living in a perpetual state of interview. The last of them actually appeared almost three months after his death, in The New York Review of Books on July 1, 1971.By then it was an open secret that Stravinsky%26#8217;s public words had long been ghosted by his close associate the conductor Robert Craft, who kept the words coming long after Stravinsky%26#8217;s physical infirmities precluded his participating in their collaboration. Mr. Craft admitted the deception, or rather explained the reason it had to be maintained, in the author%26#8217;s foreword to %26#8220;Themes and Conclusions,%26#8221; a miscellany of writings attributed to Stravinsky that appeared posthumously in England in 1972 %26#151; though he did so, as always, over Stravinsky%26#8217;s signature.%26#8220;The balance between my income and my needs,%26#8221; wrote the ghost, %26#8220;has, for a decade or more, rested on the %26#8216;deductibility%26#8217; of the latter; and my deductibility %26#8216;status%26#8217; has depended, in turn, on the production, if not of music, then, faute de mieux, of words. For to write, in America, is to %26#8216;write off.%26#8217; %26#8221; But Mr. Craft was only the caboose in a long train of Stravinskian ghostwriters. Others included Walter Nouvel, an associate of Diaghilev, who wrote Stravinsky%26#8217;s %26#8220;Autobiography%26#8221;; Alexis Roland-Manuel, a French composer, and Pierre Souvtchinsky, a Russian %26#233;migr%26#233; intellectual, who together wrote Stravinsky%26#8217;s Harvard lectures, %26#8220;Poetics of Music%26#8221;; and Mercedes de Acosta, Alexis Kall and Arthur Louri%26#233;, who had at various times played the roles Mr. Craft later permanently took on. Surely it is obvious that the deluge of verbiage was meant to hide the man from the world rather than to expose him. Stravinsky, whose music waged unending war on the assumption that art was a medium of self-revelation, hugely enjoyed the game of misleading the curious. One favorite ploy was to plant a %26#8220;fact%26#8221; or manufacture a recollection that would send program annotators afield. Asked by Mr. Craft in a mock interview published in 1960, %26#8220;What do you love most in Russia?%26#8221; Stravinsky answered, %26#8220;the violent Russian spring that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking.%26#8221; It%26#8217;s a sentence that has been recycled, as planned, in at least a gazillion essays on the composer%26#8217;s violent balletic masterpiece, %26#8220;The Rite of Spring.%26#8221; (Google just turned up 57.)The very first memory recorded in the ghosted autobiography of 1936 was of %26#8220;an enormous peasant seated on the stump of a tree.%26#8221; He sang a song %26#8220;composed of two syllables%26#8221; that were %26#8220;devoid of any meaning, but he made them alternate with incredible dexterity in a very rapid tempo,%26#8221; accompanying them with his right hand, which, placed under his left armpit, produced %26#8220;a succession of sounds which were somewhat dubious but very rhythmic, and which might be euphemistically described as resounding kisses.%26#8221; Anyone care to guess how many learned disquisitions on Stravinsky%26#8217;s devotion to %26#8220;pure music%26#8221; or his %26#8220;liberation of rhythm%26#8221; this morsel has unleashed?And yet an unprejudiced listener can circumvent the plants, the ghosts and the recyclers, and learn a lot about Stravinsky from his music, especially in programs like the one on Thursday at the Morgan Library %26#38; Museum, in which five singers will present Stravinsky%26#8217;s complete output of songs. For in that lifetime of work there lurks, inevitably, a true %26#151; if partial and implicit %26#151; autobiography. Solo song was not a major genre for Stravinsky, but that is precisely what makes it possible to present a full, fascinating retrospective in a single evening. That paucity is a telling fact in itself. When we think of art song, we think of lieder, pre-eminently the genre of intimate disclosure, and intimate disclosure (as we%26#8217;ve been noticing) was anything but Stravinsky%26#8217;s bag. 1 2 3 Next Page %26#x00bb;
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