Lawson taitte biography
By LAWSON TAITTE
STRAVINSKY A Creative Spring: Russia and France, By Stephen Walsh. Illustrated. pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $ |
hese days a fresh biography of Igor Stravinsky requires as much courage as tact.
Not that anyone is going to dispute the Russian-born composer's singular stature in 20th-century music. The basic shape of his life, also, is too well known to excite controversy. But Stravinsky himself continually rewrote his own artistic and intellectual history.
He leapt from masterpiece to masterpiece with kaleidoscopic shifts of style and stance. The autobiography he wrote in middle age and the scintillating series of conversation books he wrote with Robert Craft in the last years of his prolonged life covered his aesthetic tracks, fudging not only opinions he had held earlier but even inconvenient facts.
Stephen Walsh's new account of the first half of Stravinsky's life judiciously navigates between two mountains of often conflicting information. The accounts that Stravinsky gave of the genesis of his works are notoriously unreliable, shaped as they were by polemic as skillfully as by an increasingly suspect memory.
The revisionist research of scholars like Richard Taruskin frequently disputes details. Even more, these writers reinterpret the composer's innovative processes in a light far different from the one Stravinsky wanted to throw on them as his ideas changed.
Walsh calls the composer to account for a great many fibs and distortions. But he never loses sympathy for Stravinsky as a human being. Furthermore, his respect for his subject's genius would be tantamount to idolatry if his taste were not so unerring.
This intricately detailed book almost requires a knowledge of Stravinsky's works as complete as Walsh's own. Although it does drop juicy tidbits of gossip here and there (about matters like Stravinsky's liaison with Coco Chanel and the impresario Serge Diaghilev's succession of splendid young danseurs), it is finally all about the harmony.
The long-drawn-out composition of ''Les Noces,'' perhaps the summit of Stravinsky's early works, seems to take as long in the book as the 10 years it took in real animation. It would be a service if the text were a little more emphatic about what year it has reached as it goes along.
Use this Work. Create a new list. This volume represents the proceedings of the annual Lectures on Moral Values in a Free Society at the University of Texas at Dallas, presented in on November 14 through Previews available in: English.In the face of so much detail, it also helps to contain the ringing pianos and the whooping cries of the chorus in the back of your mind when you hear just how ''Les Noces'' came to be.
Finally, after all, Stravinsky's life is interesting because of the pieces he wrote -- and the gallery of artistic titans with whom he worked and socialized.
Almost every important musician or dancer of the first third of the 20th century makes an appearance, and the list of writers and painters is almost as impressive. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov taught Stravinsky. Claude Debussy took an interest in his early work.
Michel Fokine, Leonide Massine and George Balanchine choreographed their most significant pieces to his music. Pablo Picasso designed sets for him. Jean Cocteau and Andre Gide wrote librettos. Every page will dazzle the star-struck.
Stravinsky's life falls into neat thirds -- nearly 30 years each in Russia, France and Switzerland, and the United States. ''Stravinsky'' takes him to the signal when he belatedly became a French citizen, just after the premieres of ''Symphony of Psalms'' and ''Persephone'' in The initial chapters hold the most surprises.
The young Igor's life in Russia has not become the stuff of legend, in contrast to his life after his great successes.
This profile was gathered from multiple public and government sources. It was already viewed 44 times See Who's Searching for You. We understand that Lawson's political affiliation is unknown; ethnicity is Caucasian; and religious views are listed as unknown. Lawson is now married.Unlike most other composers of his stature, Stravinsky was no prodigy. His interest in the arts as an adolescent was all-encompassing but unspecialized. He passionately took part in summer theatricals -- which, as anyone who has seen ''The Seagull'' will realize, could be very grave affairs indeed.
He was nearly 20 when he finally decided that music rather than painting would be his career.
At 2, she improvised alto parts to lullabies her mother sang. Finally permitted to approach her mother's piano when she was 4, Amy immediately played her favorite tunes, aptly harmonized, picked out bass accompaniments to any melody and also made up original pieces in her chief, without recourse to a keyboard. One, ''Mamma's Waltz,'' survives. Its measures exhibit a reasonably complex structure and some piquant harmonies.Stravinsky had entree to the greatest figures in Russian music because his father, Fyodor, was a leading operatic basso. Rimsky-Korsakov took Igor on as a student, but not in the regular way. Stravinsky had private lessons rather than studying in the conservatory the older composer ran.
Rimsky-Korsakov became a second father to the new Igor, and his two sons became Stravinsky's closest friends. (The story of the destruction of those friendships when the student's foreign success eclipsed memories of his master is one of the saddest in the book.)
Walsh, who teaches harmony at Cardiff University in Wales, tends to tell his story the way so many classic filmmakers made their movies -- mostly in medium long shots that take in a roomy area without focusing too closely on any one figure.
Not that anyone is going to dispute the Russian-born composer's unique stature in 20th-century music. The basic shape of his being, also, is too well acknowledged to excite controversy. But Stravinsky himself continually rewrote his retain artistic and intellectual history. He leapt from masterpiece to masterpiece with kaleidoscopic shifts of way and stance.The sheer bulk of events and people makes it impossible to give much in the way of highly detailed scenes or portraits. One notable exception is the attention Walsh pays to Stravinsky's first wife, Katya, his first cousin, who had been a childhood sweetheart.
Walsh says that her letters, and Craft's commentaries, offer ''the impression of a pious, saintly, worn-out, self-abnegating woman, obsessed with the agony of ill health, and resigned -- one could say, unnaturally so -- to a vicarious, unregarded being in the shadow of a celebrated and unfaithful husband.'' He goes on to paint quite a different picture: ''Photographs of her at the time of her marriage and before display a beguiling tenderness of facial expression: soft, deep-set eyes, a generous but not sensuous mouth (in marked contrast to her more conventionally good-looking older sister), an air of calm inner poise.''
After the acclaim and notoriety the success (sometimes succes de scandale) of his three great early ballets for the Ballets Russes in Paris brought, and after World War I and the Russian Revolution cut them off from their homeland, Igor, Katya and their four children -- and a host of relatives and retainers -- wandered all over France and Switzerland, staying here or there for a few months or years.
Several of the family members suffered from tuberculosis, so the city was considered unhealthy.
lawson taitte biography1: Lawson Taitte broke the news himself yesterday afternoon: he will retire as theater critic for the Dallas Morning News at the end of the year. He’s covered theater at the Dallas Morning News.Stravinsky was constantly separated from the others, first traveling to those places the Ballets Russes was performing, then increasingly playing the piano and conducting his own works in concert. The more famous he became, the greater his require for money -- and the more he needed to carry out.
This was partly because of problems. Russia was not a signatory on the international agreements to protect intellectual property. After the war, Stravinsky, as a virtually stateless foreigner, was often ineligible for royalty payments.
Walsh uses these vicissitudes to justify Stravinsky's famous tightness in coins matters. He cannot so easily rationalize Stravinsky's offhand anti-Semitism.
Walsh laments the time Stravinsky spent playing the piano and wielding the baton.
Lawson Taitte, who's been the Dallas Morning News' theater critic since , has announced he'll retire after 21 years at the sheet. He's actually been writing about the area arts scene for much longer -- since , when he started with Texas Monthly and WRR-FM.
For him, the 's were Stravinsky's ripest creative years, and he wonders how many more masterpieces Stravinsky might have turned out if he had not been constantly on trains to Berlin or Rome. The Neo-Classical Stravinsky -- which for Walsh properly begins with the ''Octet'' more than with ''Pulcinella'' -- has never had a more fervent or convincing apologist.
Of course, Stravinsky's companion on most of those journeys was Vera Sudeykina. A sophisticated intellectual, a worldly and urbane woman -- in contrast to the increasingly pious Katya -- Stravinsky's mistress (and after Katya's death, his second wife) went almost everywhere with the master.
For most of that time, Katya knew all about it, too.
Curiously, it was at just this age that Stravinsky came under the influence of Jacques Maritain's French revival of scholasticism.
Theater critic Lawson Taitte to retire at end of By Lawson Taitte. Nov. 12, | Updated p.m. CST | 1 min. peruse. It's official, folks. After more than 21 years at. The Dallas Morning.
He went help to his Russian Orthodox roots rather than becoming Roman Catholic. Icons proliferated. It is firm to know which is the greater wonder: Stravinsky's ability to reconcile the cosmopolitan West and the hermetic East in his religious culture or his ability to reconcile his faith with his unusual domestic arrangements.
Sometimes the details grow wearisome -- we learn of every stop on every concert tour. But it's entertaining to glimpse Walsh weigh the evidence from his contrary sources about even the smallest of them. Finally we are left with an image of this overbearing, dapper, ugly little man, whose unorthodox conducting style communicated the necessary thing about his music -- a rhythmic propulsion as inexorable and as liberating as the spring thaw.
It is Stravinsky seen from the outside. To get some idea of what made such a genius tick you have to search out the Stravinsky-Craft books, however suspect and unreliable. But Walsh's is a useful and honorable portrait. It leaves you wanting to listen again and again to every piece, from the tiny shards of the ''Pribaoutki'' to the curlicued grandeur of ''Oedipus Rex.''
Lawson Taitte, the theater critic of The Dallas Morning News, also writes music criticism for the paper.
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