Rites of Passage

RETROSPECTIVES AND CONCLUSIONS by Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft. 350 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

According to Robert Craft, Igor Stravinsky's recording angel, Retrospectives and Conclusions is the last in the series of "diary books" that began in 1959. Together, these collections of interviews, essays on music and reviews make up an extraordinary loose-leaf monument to the 20th century's leading composer. Professionally speaking, Stravinsky has always been brilliant but baffling. A fierce and uncompromising pioneer who quite literally revolutionized the music of his century, he was also as modishly conscious of musical fashions as Picasso was addicted to changing taste in art and sculpture. Craft has made Stravinsky's one of the best-documented lives since Beethoven's, and his book, music aside, presents some of the most lively and intelligent casual reading available.

The series was born out of complementary needs: Stravinsky's need to get his opinions and perceptions on paper, and Craft's need to nourish his own identity--as a conductor and writer--at the cornucopia of genius.

Like Stravinsky's own music, Retrospectives resists categorization. To the extent that Craft reconstructs Stravinsky's comments from memory and then has the maestro edit them, much of the diary books resembles a collaborative nonfiction novel or a Platonic dialogue. In his own diary entries, Craft combines the elements of a good travel book and restaurant guide with the sensitivity of personal journalism and the instincts of a gossip columnist.

Backward Wasp. Not the least memorable things are the trivia: W. H. Auden crying because he had been given an unsuitable hotel room in Venice, T. S. Eliot dispensing such convivial criticism as "Ezra [Pound] is becoming the best Chinese poet in English"; a dinner for Stravinsky at which the most impressive thing on the table was the besotted head of the guest of honor.

Above all, the book is the story of Craft's love for Stravinsky and his wife Vera. The three have been constant companions for 21 years. Craft, who is 46 and describes himself as "a backward WASP from Kingston, N.Y.," still finds it difficult to understand that he is plugged into what he believes is "the most interesting life of the century."

But the days of this "trio con brio," as Stravinsky calls it, appear to be numbered. Stravinsky is 87 and in precarious health; Craft writes painfully and graphically about the old man's gastric ulcers and thromboses. Conversely, Stravinsky's comments on the trials of decrepitude can be painfully amusing. After one of his recent medical confinements, he observed: "Desert Fathers and such seeking to update their mortifications could hardly find more ingenious exemplars than in a modern hospital. My day began at ca. 5 A.M. with an urgent and for some reason unpostponable mopping of the cell, and once it began even earlier, when the television started by itself."

The composer, however, reserves his most aristocratic scorn and sardonic style for musical and cultural targets.

On Advice for a Young Composer: "If he can turn an honest million outside music he might seriously consider neglecting his talents for a time and turn it. Otherwise, and untempted by all lesser sums, he should go directly underground and do nothing but compose."

On Cultural Centers: "I foresee huge buildings--the more marginal the contents of the art, the larger and more stolid the containers--tumbled about like blocks in low-scoring Stanford-Binet tests. The two largest of them must inevitably be the 'Research Laboratory for the Readjustment of Acoustics in New Concert Halls' and the 'Hall of Fame for Heroes of Public Relations.' "

On the Generation Gap: "Isn't it a tendency of old people of all periods to see everything absolutely and too moralistically, and haven't they always narrowed the issues to their own ever-shortening sight?"

On Art Collectors and Patrons: "Art, to middle-class millionaire politicians, is something to be collected and dowered. And this is part of the reason why our yachting millionaires and racehorse millionaires include so many French Impressionist millionaires but so few musical millionaires: the resalable musical artifacts are comparatively insignificant."

On Foundations: "Money may kindle but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn. (Conscience money may smolder for a while, though.)"

Irascible, intimidating and disquietingly vigorous, Stravinsky's voice is above all that of an artist concerned more with individual acts of creation than with their collective acceptance by a fickle and superficially informed public. It is the underpinning of the absolute faith in his methods and madnesses that enabled him to walk coolly through the riots that greeted the 1913 Paris premiere of his mold-shattering Rite of Spring. It is the same faith that suffuses Retrospectives and Conclusions, most movingly when Stravinsky notes that "to be deprived of art and left alone with philosophy is to be close to Hell."

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