Conversations with Igor Stravinsky by Robert Craft

Author:Robert Craft [Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571308798
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

1 Since writing this I have conducted three performances of the Scherzo (‘whether or not it is “Fantastique” is up to us to decide’, one French critic wrote after its première in St. Petersburg under the baton of Alexander Ziloti) and was surprised to find that the music did not embarrass me. The orchestra ‘sounds’, the music is light in a way that is rare in compositions of the period, and there are one or two quite good ideas in it such as the flute and violin music at no. 63 and the chromatic movement of the last page. Of course the phrases are all four plus four plus four, which is monotonous, and, hearing it again, I was sorry that I did not more exploit the alto flute. It is a promising opus three, though.

I see now that I did take something from Rimsky’s Bumblebee (numbers 49–50 in the score), but the Scherzo owes much more to Mendelssohn by way of Tchaikovsky than to Rimsky-Korsakov.

The progress of instrumental technique was illustrated to me by these recent performances in an interesting detail. The original score—written more than fifty years ago—employs three harps. I remember very well how difficult all three parts were for the harpists in St. Petersburg in 1908. In 1930 I reduced the three parts to two for a new edition of the orchestral material. Now I see that with a few adjustments the same music can be performed by one player, so much quicker are harpists at their pedals.

2 Debussy’s daughter Emma-Claude, who died one year after her father.

3 Which Louis Laloy, the critic, incorrectly attributes to the spring of 1913. What most impressed me at the time and what is still most memorable from the occasion of the sight reading of Le Sacre was Debussy’s brilliant piano playing. Recently, while listening to his En blanc et noir (one of which pieces is dedicated to me) I was struck by the way in which the extraordinary quality of this pianism had directed the thought of Debussy the composer.

4 Debussy was in close contact with me during the composition of Jeux and he frequently consulted me about problems of orchestration. I still consider Jeux as an orchestral masterpiece, though I think some of the music is ‘trop Lalique’.

5 I had dedicated my short cantata Le Roi des Étoiles (1911) to Debussy. He was obviously puzzled by the music, and nearly right in predicting it to be unperformable—it has had only a few performances in very recent years and remains in one sense my most ‘radical’ and difficult composition.

6 I had sent him the score of Le Sacre du Printemps.

7 I was in Leysin in January 1914 completing the Nightingale. Cocteau came there in the hope of persuading me to collaborate with him on a work to be called David, and Diaghilev followed him a few days later with the express intention of discouraging this same project. Diaghilev-Cocteau relations were not ideal at the time, anyway, as Diaghilev could

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