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| Bravo Maestro |
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James Fenton
copyright © 2006
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Originally published
in The Guardian
16 December 2006
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Robert Craft, the American conductor and Stravinsky's
former assistant, was in London recently, and his publishers,
Naxos Books, put on a tea at the Ritz. Craft's new book, Down
a Path of Wonder, is a collection of his essays and memoirs,
covering a wide range of music, literature and travel. At its
core is a series of pieces about those composers Craft has known:
Stravinsky pre-eminently, but also Schoenberg (whose work Craft
championed in America in the 1950s) and others. Writers encountered
include Auden, Isherwood and Evelyn Waugh.
Naxos is somewhat new to book-publishing, but
is interested in the kind of tie-up whereby you buy, say, a
book about Beethoven, which includes the facility to download
from their site the music mentioned in the book. While setting
up this kind of mass publishing, the people at Naxos realised
that they were also in a position to market more specialist
music books, and this was their first experiment in that direction.
Obviously, its appeal for them also had something to do with
the fact that Craft has conducted several of their Stravinsky
and Schoenberg recordings.
Anyway, they put on a very good tea in a room
full of extravagant pink floral arrangements, and Craft read
to us from his book, while his wife, Alva, held the microphone.
We all moved to the edge of our seats, because Craft has a soft
voice and is a controversial figure who has been attacked periodically
and is quite prepared to answer back. The Naxos people, while
full of deference and (I thought) genuine respect, were visibly
nervous, perhaps that he would lose the patience of his audience,
or perhaps that he would land them in some thumping great libel
suit.
I wouldn't be able to form an opinion as to
the merits of any argument about Craft, but I think I have a
sense of how things began. We all, in our relationship to the
great artists or writers who interest us, have a tendency to
possessiveness. Suppose we read Stendhal and form a deep admiration
for his work. Along with that admiration there comes a sneaking
sense that we not only know the man very well, we know him better
than anyone else. In those moments when Stendhal perhaps felt
undervalued or misunderstood (if such there were), we would
have understood him. We would have been there (supposing we
had been there) to listen to his woes.
It's a fantasy, of course, and it's a fantasy
that is always getting out of hand. Particularly unwelcome in
such a fantasy is the knowledge that there actually was somebody
in, roughly speaking, the role we imagine for ourselves. In
Stravinsky's case, Craft lived for 23 years as a member of the
composer's family: "We co-rehearsed and co-conducted concerts
and recordings; listened to music together at home, at opera
houses, theatres, concert halls; spent countless hours together
in cars, steamships, trains and planes ... I read to him during
evenings at home regularly throughout the years, and, of course,
conversed daily with him in all of our activities."
Naturally, given these circumstances, anyone
who wanted to get near Stravinsky in the latter part of his
life was going to encounter Craft as well. Here is Pierre Souvtchinsky,
quoted by Craft from a recent book: "Écoutez, he
[Craft] can be insufferable, but he is very interesting. The
Stravinskys are very fortunate to have him. He is a precious
presence for them, young and intelligent, he distracts, informs,
and stimulates them; without Bob they would have become gâteux
[doddering]. Can you imagine Igor cut off from the world, lost
there in the backwoods of Hollywood?"
To the charge that he kept Stravinsky too much
to himself, Craft in his book pleads guilty, although he implies
that the composer wanted this relationship and was unwilling
to let it drop. Clearly, though, it put Craft in a difficult
position in some respects. When the aged Stravinsky conducted
a concert, Craft was the supporting act or sometimes the surrogate.
This was not always welcome: when Craft conducted first halves,
he writes, "I was obliged to walk out on stage and be received
by a dim flurry of applause, a buzz of inter- audience questioning,
and once something like a groan."
So this sense of Craft as a presence whenever
one wanted to see Stravinsky goes back a long way, and the controversy
over Craft's written accounts of the composer's conversations
is also an old one. More recently, Stephen Walsh has published
a two-volume biography of Stravinsky, which Craft claims owes
a large "unacknowledged" debt to Craft while simultaneously
attacking him. On this matter, I haven't any view as to the
rights and wrongs, not having read Walsh.
But among the writers at the Ritz tea there
was one who had not only read Walsh's biography, he had read
it with admiration. And, in the most respectful way, but also
rather firmly, this gentleman was prepared to tell Craft that
he thought the work was brilliant. Craft's response to this
was not to explode, or to flounder around, but to concede a
point here and there, while attempting to restate his case -
a clearly large and complex case that would take a long time,
and much patience, to set out. This was, after all, a matter
of several lives' works - Stravinsky's life, those of his family,
and Craft's too.
And the friendships, enmities, collaborations
and rivalries involved stretched back beyond most of our births.
Craft has an amazing memory and also, quite clearly, a remarkable
archive. Detailed rebuttals of facts are a speciality. It is
impressive to see him in action, but one feels also that fate
has been rather cruel to leave him with so much explaining to
do. Perhaps, though, one shouldn't feel this. After all, the
music to which he chose to devote himself was controversial
when he began, and it would be a bad sign if the controversy
had simply evaporated. One felt half inclined to cheer him on,
to urge him back into the ring for another bout. The other feeling
was to say, as Hamlet says to the ghost, "Rest, perturbed
spirit."
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