Stravinsky Inside Out [Hardcover]

Professor Charles M. Joseph (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2001

Popularly known during his lifetime as the world's greatest living composer, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) not only wrote some of the twentieth century's most influential music, he also assumed the role of cultural icon. This book reveals Stravinsky's two sides - the public persona, preoccupied with his own image and place in history, and the private composer, whose views and beliefs were often purposely suppressed. Charles M. Joseph draws a richer and more human portrait of Stravinsky than anyone has done before, using an array of unpublished materials and unreleased film trims from the composer's huge archive at the Paul Sacher Institute in Switzerland. Focusing on Stravinsky's place in the culture of the twentieth century, Joseph situates the composer among the giants of his age. He discusses Stravinsky's first American commission, his complicated relationship with his son, his professional relationships with celebrities ranging from T. S. Eliot to Orson Welles, his flirtations with Hollywood and television, and his love-hate attitude toward the critics and the media. In a close look at Stravinsky's efforts to mould a public image, Joseph explores the complex dance between the composer and his artistic collaborator, Robert Craft, who orchestrated controversial efforts to protect Stravinsky and edit materials about him, both during the composer's lifetime and after his death.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Along with other scholars, Joseph (Stravinsky and Balanchine, forthcoming) has undertaken a reevaluation of the life and legacy of Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). For several decades, the composer of Rite of Spring and Firebird has been seen through the lens of idolizer, writer and conductor Robert Craft, whose many books about Stravinsky, and those supposedly written with him, must be taken with several grains of salt. Joseph, a Skidmore College professor of liberal arts, focuses on specific issues of Stravinsky criticism in chapters like "Boswellizing an Icon: Stravinsky, Craft, and the Historian's Dilemma" and "Film Documentaries: The Composer On and Off Camera." He recounts Stravinsky's stormy relationship with his son Soulima, who was Joseph's college piano teacher, and the composer's relations with many prominent figures: he kept a copy of W.H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety in which Auden inscribed, "Leonard Bernstein is a shit." Joseph is almost supernaturally polite about what he believes to be Craft's shoddy work, especially as the latter denied him permission to quote certain documents. However, Joseph gratuitously and inaccurately calls pianist Glenn Gould "always outlandish" when in fact he was an eccentric genius who happened to loathe Stravinsky, which seems increasingly understandable. The more we know about Stravinsky, an anti-Semitic fan of Mussolini who behaved badly toward colleagues, friends and family, the more he makes Picasso look like a choirboy. A certain macabre wit keeps him entertaining, though, such as when he annotated a Time article that called him an "animated Gothic gargoyle" with the words "How kind." Although sometimes lapsing into dense academic prose, this book adds new material to ongoing Stravinsky studies and should attract modern music aficionados. Photos.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Joseph (liberal arts, Skidmore Coll.; Stravinsky and the Piano) presents a fascinatingly eclectic mix of essays on various aspects of Stravinsky's career, with special emphasis on how he influenced or was influenced by aspects of 20th-century culture such as television, motion pictures, musical developments, and historical events. Whether he's discussing the composer's relationship with his son, Soulima (with whom the author once studied), his attempts at scoring Hollywood movies, or the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge commission for the ballet Apollon Musagete, Joseph takes a no-holds-barred approach, characterizing Stravinsky as a talented yet egotistical and controlling individual. Access to unpublished materials at the Sacher Foundation in Switzerland and the composer's archives provided Joseph with resources unavailable to most previous writers. A basic familiarity with the composer, his surroundings, and musical processes is assumed. Sure to be controversial, this well-written, fully documented title is recommended for academic collections and those specializing in music or 20th-century studies. (Index not seen.) Barry Zaslow, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1ST edition (September 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300075375
• ISBN-13: 978-0300075373
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #473,197 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #51 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Composers & Musicians > Classical

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Worth reading, some great points, but ..., October 27, 2001

By 

Craig Matteson (Saline, MI) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stravinsky Inside Out (Hardcover)

We seem to be at an unfortunate stage of music history writing. The approach of many books, including this one, is the antithesis of the hero worship books written by the shelf-full not too many decades ago. Do we really need this style of book as an antidote? To me, it seems to belabor the obvious that composers, even the very greatest, such as Brahms, Mahler, and Stravinsky, should be mere mortals after all.

Why is it important at all that we point out moments or even decades of pettiness, vainglory, or difficult family relations? How exactly is that supposed to help us understand the art? Why not write a book about a fellow named Bob who lives down your down the street and his ordinary to miserable life?

Of course, we don't write about Bob down the street because he is ordinary and he isn't Stravinsky. Haven't we long ago realized that even Stravinsky the composer is something other than Stravinsky the husband, father, or businessman. Of course extraordinary people have much about them that is quite ordinary.

Some feel that knowing the artist as a human being helps us understand his art. Maybe on the margins it could, but only children believe that a composer was necessarily sad when writing a sad piece or happy when writing a happy piece and so on. Nothing Mr. Joseph tells us about the composition of The Flood helps us understand how it comes out of a Stravinsky. (Even if the author is trying to put forward that in this case it DIDN'T come out of Stravinsky).

Don't get me wrong, this book by Charles Joseph isn't bad. Really, it has much to recommend it and I am glad that I read it and hope you do too. But I was frustrated by the mixing in of well known stories and photographs into a book that claimed to be revealing new things based upon new access to Stravinsky's papers and artifacts in Basel. It isn't that there isn't anything new or semi-new, it is that it isn't set apart from the ho-hum there's that old chestnut again regurgitation of Stravinsky tales.

It is like going to a dinner party and listening across the table to a very knowledgeable guest who tells a few enthralling tales about a very interesting subject, but then spoils the enchantment by going on too long by telling a few too many tales that have no spark or wit about them.

Joseph also doesn't follow up on things that ARE really interesting. For example, when he discusses the actual piano music performance scores that Stravinsky used and the interesting fingerings the composer used as a performer. But we don't get a picture of even one page of those piano scores nor do we get even a hint as to why Stravinsky's written in fingerings are telling. As a pianist of sorts, I can surmise why Stravinsky's fingerings would be interesting, but it would be nice to get even a bit of discussion on such an interesting topic. I would have traded all of those re-printed pictures for one or two of the actual new material and one page of the marked-up piano music.

Yes, there is a 1983 text available through ProQuest that talks about Stravinsky's piano music, but Mr. Joseph indicates in the book that there were new things learned from his seeing the materials in Switzerland. In any case, this book is generally available and his 1983 book is not. Again, why reprint the nude photo of Stravinsky that is NOT original to this book and leave out something that would be valuable and a real contribution such as Stravinsky's piano fingerings?

It would be a real service if Mr. Joseph (or SOMEONE) put together an edition of the piano works with those fingerings in them. Not that pianists will necessarily use those precise fingerings, but they would certainly aid in understanding how the composer himself interpreted the piece.

Especially annoying to me was yet another tired discussion about Robert Craft. Mr. Joseph does demonstrate that Mr. Craft did play a significant role in the genesis of Stravinsky's work "The Flood". The author approaches the point of almost intimating that Craft is at least the co-composer of "The Flood", but never is bold enough to make that accusation. My guess is because for all the support and creative priming that Craft provided for Stravinsky, the evidence is that the composer did indeed compose the music himself. For heaven's sake, every composer since music began based it on some other creative spark or borrowed a theme from another work or even included suggestions from performers for whom the work was written. Composition is not done in a vacuum chamber on the dark side of the moon!

However, anyone who knows anything at all about Stravinsky's output from the fifties onward knows that Craft did us all a tremendous service. Why anyone wants to criticize Craft is beyond me. Unless someone wants to make the case that Stravinsky simply signed his name to Craft's scores and present real evidence they should either whine to people who care or thank Craft for the music he enabled Stravinsky to make in the fifties and sixties.

All in all, it easy for us in our age of sarcasm and witless irony to see the flaws of books that extol our favorite composers as heroes or as flawless paragons of humanity. My suspicion is that it won't take too many more years for people to turn their backs on the recent spate of books that take as their mission the whittling down of the tree of the great artist to a toothpick of a human. It is just too easy to write about human failings. We don't learn much at all about the art from such books and they are tiresome to read.

Finally, I am curious about the surmise that I am not a music scholar? By what definition? In europe a student is a scholar. Over here, what is the definition of a scholar? One who agrees with your points of view? I happen to have spent seven years at the University of Michigan School of Music and have a degree in music theory and several years of graduate school before my life took a different direction. But I have always played my piano and kept up on music. So, my views are not uninformed.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A CONTROVERSIAL BUT REVEALING PORTRAIT OF PERHAPS THE GREATEST 20TH CENTURY COMPOSER, September 29, 2009

By 

Steven H. Propp (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stravinsky Inside Out (Hardcover)

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) was perhaps the greatest composer of the 20th century. This is not a hagiographic portrait such as those by Robert Craft (e.g., Stravinsky in pictures and documents / by Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft). Charles Joseph notes that "Yet in addition to Stravinsky's many humane qualities, his perspicacious manner, his acerbic wit, his bottomless thirst for learning, he was quite capable of vindictiveness, duplicity, and contemptible behavior, even in his treatment of friends."

Joseph's book contains many interesting insights and details; e.g., Stravinsky composed at the piano, until the last years of his life; he sent nude photos of himself to friends while he was working on his masterpiece, "The Rite of Spring"; he was actually arrested in 1940 for illegally arranging the Star Spangled Banner; in 1963 he nearly consented to be interviewed for Playboy magazine; he disliked Leonard Bernstein, etc. Stravinsky was also very interested in American jazz. "Ever since his first trip to America in the mid-1920s, Stravinsky eagerly sought every opportunity to her jazz performed live. He was captivated by its freedom, its expressive qualities."

Stravinsky's relations with his own family are also chronicled---often not to his credit. "One must realize that the composer's children were raised in a rigidly patriarchal family ... in which authority, submissiveness, and deference were inviolable." The composer carried on an extramarital relationship while his first wife "wasted away from tuberculosis."

Although Stravinsky had belittled Schonberg's twelve-tone method, after Schonberg's death, "Stravinsky rescinded his earlier denunciations of Schoenberg, embracing the previously maligned tenets of Viennese serialism.... He now made a commitment to a compositional style that would serve him for the rest of his life."

Finances were often a problem. Stravinsky wrote, "How does a composer of serious music survive economically in our time? The same as any other time---very badly." Joseph notes, "Even with his reputation secure, the composer constantly had to work, often unsuccessfully, at selling himself."

This is perhaps not the most exhaustively detailed biography of Stravinsky out there, but it is very helpful as a supplement to other works.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars He was his own greatest composition, October 1, 2001

By 

Jeff Abell (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stravinsky Inside Out (Hardcover)

Stravinsky, whether you like him or not, was one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. Alternately deified by his collaborators (like Ballanchine, W.H. Auden, and Robert Craft), or villified as a worthless hack by Schoenberg and his accolytes, the truth lies somewhere in between those extremes. While the composer has not lacked for documentation of his life (notably his own Autobiography, and the "conversation books" edited by Robert Craft), there's still a need to balance facts with Stravinsky's own carefully constructed fictions. Few artists in any discipline have been more self-conscious of their public image than Stravinsky, and there is a real need to sort out how much of the composer's lifestory was his own invention. Joseph's well-written, meticulously researched book stops short of being a hatchet-job, but isn't afraid to display the idol's clay feet. (If fact, there's a nude photo of the composer in the book, so you'll see more than just his feet!) Joseph leaves the musicological analysis to others, and provides an engaging, provocative look at the man behind the hype. Turns out, like most human beings, he had his share of flaws as well as moments of genius.