Stravinsky (Volume 1): A Creative Spring - Russia and France 1882-1934 (Pimlico): v. 1 [Paperback]

This is a review of the 2002 paperback edition in which the author says, "I have taken the opportunity to correct certain mistakes ... Readers of the hardback text will notice, ... that a body of quotations from the series of conversation books by Stravinsky and Robert Craft has now been removed, as the result of a misunderstanding over permissions." Anyone with at least a passing knowledge of Stravinsky will be aware also of Craft, and Walsh has some highly interesting comments to make about them both in his introduction to this, his first volume of the composer's biography.

The volume opens with Stravinsky's birth, and even here on the very first page, Walsh confronts us with obvious discrepancies - whether consciously-stated or otherwise - in Stravinsky's own memory of his origins and past. Throughout the book, it is clear that the composer never really embraced the past, and often had difficulties coming to terms with it; his very compositions are clear evidence of this. And he had difficulty coming to terms with the truth of the past too, and moulded his memories to suit the requirements of the day. Just one instance can suffice in this review: In his autobiography, `written' in the 1930s, Stravinsky "claimed to have been `at the point of death, ...' [in March 1911]. But there is no mention of it in a letter of 7 March ... !"

The detail of the biography is immense. For instance, with well-written prose Walsh guides us through Stravinsky's family and lineage over twelve long-paragraphed pages in the opening chapter. The review of Stravinsky's youth and family relationships is exhaustive, and there is no respite through the remainder of the two-volume biography. It is not a day-by-day account, for sure, but it sometimes feels like it. The result is often one loses track of the years: many was the time when I read whole chapters without fully realising the years in which the events occurred, and I had to refer to the fully-referenced endnotes for assistance in confirming the exact year of some letter that had been written and quoted, or some programme had been published.

But it is not all dry listings of occurrences of what, where, when, and with whom, for Walsh can also be enlightening. Take this, for example: Stravinsky "spent months, perhaps years, of his life in railway trains. Nobody has yet seriously examined the effects of those incessant anapests of iron wheels over track connectors and points on the consciousness of the greatest rhythmic thinker since Beethoven." The focus of Walsh's work is clearly on the composer, and there is very little attempt to place him within his wider artistic context. The music itself is subject to some critical scrutiny by Walsh, but not in any great depth: this is, after all, a biography, a description of the life rather than of the music.

Having said that, the author does have some insights into how and why some of Stravinsky's scores had such a revolutionary impact. When discussing `Petrushka', for example, Walsh describes Stravinsky's adoption and adaptation of folk tunes as "fractured realism", whereby the composer's was "not a setting of them that Mussorgsky or Borodin would have understood. Stravinsky simply takes figures from the tunes and plays with them in a semi-improvisatory way, varying the rhythms, allowing the accents to fall in different places, teasing the melodic design into subtly different shapes, while accompanying the whole thing, not with textbook harmonies like the ones [his teacher] Rimsky-Korsakov ... used ... , but with mechanical patterns." Walsh goes on to explain how this "freed rhythm once and for all", and how Stravinsky's compositional skill in `Petrushka' was groundbreaking, not least in how "palatable" a form it was presented. "Such things cannot be explained historically. They depend exclusively on the right man being in the right place art the right time."

From this it might appear that Walsh is not only a biographer but a worshipper too, but this an error. He clearly admires the music and the man, but neither is presented as an idol. Rather, Walsh is studiously objective in the main. He has no cogent answer to those criticisms made by Newman and by Koussivitsky (and the audience) of the London premiere of the `Symphonies of Wind Instruments', for instance. And Walsh is open about how the composer would dump his friends and others who had helped him in the past. He also does not attempt to hide the composer's sometimes unsavoury political views and agrees with the often grasping nature of Stravinsky's financial dealings, dealings that even shocked Craft. But on this latter point, Walsh is also aware of how appearances were deceptive. Stravinsky may have appeared to be living it up in Paris, Switzerland, and on the French Riviera, but he also had copyright troubles, a host of dependants to provide for, and no guarantee of a fixed income.

Walsh tracks the changes in the composer's musical directions. He also tracks the development of his relations with those who surrounded him: family, friends, expatriates, writers and performers. Then there are passing references to those contemporaries who have also entered the pantheon, such as Glazunov, Schoenberg, Strauss, Debussy, Poulenc - but no Shostakovich (until the second volume). Some room is given to events outside the immediate closed life of the composer, such as the Russo-Japanese War or the general strikes of 1905, but there is no room to expand upon these or indeed on general trends in cultural thought, beyond passing references to Stravinsky's anti-communism and his anti-liberalism.

In the final chapter of this volume - when the composer gained French citizenship in 1934 - Walsh opens with a consideration of Stravinsky's claim no longer to be a Russian: "I am a cosmopolitan". Unlike Prokofiev, he did not return to live in Russia, but the icons on the wall of his French home showed that he had not completely turned away from his homeland and his past. Walsh writes how, "For fifteen years his music had been ostentatiously detaching itself from its Russian root", but it still preserved "more of the old Stravinsky than he might have cared to admit."

There are sixteen pages of monochrome plates. A full list of Stravinsky's works to 1935 is provided. There are over 100 pages of extensive notes, and ten pages of bibliography. With the riches on offer from the author and publisher, one feels somewhat grudging to ask for more, but a family tree and maps of his origins and travels would be extremely helpful.

Met by critical acclaim, this is one of the two major musical biographies of the last year. We eagerly look forward to the second volume.