Arts and Letters

If anyone can be said to have lived the artistic history of his time and embodied it in outstanding works, it was Igor Stravinsky. In mourning his death, musicians of succeeding generations suffer this loss as a loss of part of their world. The horizon has suddenly become narrower. For while each generation has tended to live out its particular version of the twentieth century, Stravinsky encompassed them all. The general public, however, for whom he was, as he was for musicians, one of the leaders of his time, mourns the Stravinsky of the early part of this century, when it was still possible for a composer to become world-famous. It was a great privilege to have lived in his time, to have awaited year upon year the appearance of new works, each an unexpected departure, a new challenge and yet always totally engrossing and convincing. He never gave up his status as an advanced composer, as he once said jokingly of himself.

Understandably many have, and the temptation to continue in the same direction must have been very great for one who between 1910 and 1913, from his twenty-eighth to thirty-first years, caused an international furor with the three ballets written in quick succession that have remained in the repertory ever since. They revealed a composer who understood the style of ornamental, romanticizing Russian folklore inherited from Rimsky-Korsakoff and could present it more convincingly than anyone else. Yet the line of development which led him so quickly from the Firebird to Petrouchka and then to Le Sacre du printemps indicates that he was already on the way to a complete change of style. He had the courage to follow this direction, which found support from the new artistic trends in France at the time he finally settled there at the end of the First World War.

Here he soon became the leading figure of the post-war generation, the so-called "neo-classicists," in sharp revolt against the former romanticism, impressionism, and fauvism. From then until the end of the Second World War, he explored many facets of this aesthetic with matchless power to convince, ranging more widely than other composers. So widely, in fact, that by 1945 there were indications that still another stylistic change was in progress. And, during the fifties, he became the leader of this second post-war generation—sometimes called "serialists" because they followed the twelve-tone methods of Stravinsky's contemporary, Arnold Schoenberg. From around 1954 to 1967, from his seventy-second to eighty-fifth years, he embraced the methods of this Viennese composer who had long been considered his opponent, outstripping in originality and power all the younger followers with some of his finest works. Naturally each of these about-faces violated public and critical expectations, dismaying and often angering admirers and discouraging many of his disciples.

Yet in no way could this development be considered an effort to be up to the minute, since the works at every stage carried such conviction and imposed themselves by so many remarkable qualities. All are decisively marked by the composer's highly individual way of thinking and expression, by a passion for his particular kind of order and symmetry and by his quick and intense temperament. The approach to these conflicting styles was that of a poet or novelist toward different subject matters, the invariable being the artistic vision, expression, and handling. In Stravinsky the style was truly the man himself, his own voice, not the "styles" he used.

In fact, the voice became more itself through the adoption of these different aesthetics. In the nine large religious works, spread throughout his life, the sharpening of focus on personal religious experience, the gradual elimination of the extraneous with a consequent increase in seriousness fuses the great variety of methods into one coherent development. The non-religious works as well mark this progression toward the discovery of the essence of their respective genres.

Yet for all Stravinsky's deep artistic commitment, there is much lightness and wit. Impatient with romantic gestures, his was a quick, ironic, yet compassionate nature, expressing itself in the brilliant flashes so evident in his secular works, his television appearances, on the recent Columbia record of rehearsals, in the transcripts of his conversations, and in his actions. He could truthfully answer at eighty-five, with his broad smile, when I asked him what he was composing: "What can you write after a Requiem but a setting of The Owl and the Pussy-Cat?"