Stravinsky's Boswell

The late Igor Stravinsky's life was the best documented of any composer's since Beethoven. Why? Largely because of a bespectacled, quizzical-looking musician named Robert Craft, 48. For the last 23 years of Stravinsky's life, Craft served the old master as rehearsal conductor, aide, intellectual catalyst, amanuensis and surrogate son. Moreover, Craft worked with Stravinsky on innumerable magazine articles and six semi-autobiographical books--a series that is supplemented this week by the publication of Craft's Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship 1948/1971 (Knopf; $12.50).

Throughout this distinctive musical and literary collaboration, Craft projected to a wide audience the by now familiar portrait of Stravinsky in his later years--sprightly as a grasshopper, wickedly witty, avid for new words, new ideas and new music right up to his death at 88. By general agreement, Craft did Stravinsky and the world a favor of Boswellian proportions.

Or did he? Another former associate of the composer challenges the validity of the Craft portrait. She is Lillian Libman, 59, Stravinsky's personal manager and sometime member of his menage. In And Music at the Close: Stravinsky's Last Years, a memoir that will be published this fall by W.W. Norton, Libman contends that Stravinsky was actually more abstemious with words and less waspish and argumentative than the Craft collaborations suggest. Indeed, she maintains, many of the words are not Stravinsky's at all but Craft's. Libman calls into question Stravinsky's supposedly keen interest in new music, his thirst for prolonging feuds with colleagues and critics, his hard-edged style as a polemicist, even the authenticity of two recordings supposedly made by the composer.

Libman's charges have set off one of the liveliest feuds the music world has seen in decades. Among her supporters is Composer-Conductor Pierre Boulez, an authority on Stravinsky and his music, who accuses Craft of "a great falsification of the image of Stravinsky." The New York Times, the initial forum for Libman's charges, has also divulged what might be called the crayfish caper. In 1966, a story appeared in the Times under Craft's byline describing a visit by Stravinsky to Strasbourg, France. According to Craft: "After unpacking [Stravinsky] sped to the roof restaurant ostensibly for a view of the old city, which clings to the cathedral like chicks around the mother hen, but he was soon seated and consuming crayfish at an alarming rate."

Actually, Stravinsky fell ill in Paris and never arrived in Strasbourg. Craft deleted the anecdote from some late editions of the Times, then resuscitated it in 1969 as the prologue to the Stravinsky/Craft Retrospectives and Conclusions, with the composer still eating crayfish "at an alarming rate," but this time in Paris. "For some of us," wrote the Times's music critic Donal Henahan, "Robert Craft has dissipated his credibility as historian and biographer, though he may still command our admiration as the Georgette Heyer or Thomas B. Costain of musical history."

The composer's widow Vera, 80, with whom Craft now shares the Stravinsky apartment on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, does not agree. She says stoutly that Craft's Stravinsky is her Stravinsky too--in spite of an occasional stray date or place. Craft dismisses most of what Libman says as the "mole's eye view" of a part-time employee, not a close friend. No one seriously disputes that Craft knew Stravinsky's mind and musical habits better than anyone else, including the composer's family. "In many ways, I was closer to him than his wife, because music was our language." Craft told TIME Music Critic William Bender: "When I first met him, he was living in a refugee world. He valued me because I was young and his first real touch with America. Stravinsky made a cultural switch. He began eating hamburgers on tours and staying in motels. One night we even slept in the same bed. Put that in your story. That'll give 'em something to talk about.

"Later on, I kept his nose to the grindstone. Stravinsky was never self-sustaining. All his life, people had to help him, feed him ideas, furnish him with books, which he read omnivorously once he got them. Where our relationship is important is in all the music he might never have composed but for me. What I'm waiting for is somebody to say 'thank you' for what I did."

Craft is not saying that he composed or rewrote any of the music of Stra vinsky's last two decades, nor has anyone else suggested that. But Craft was indispensable to Stravinsky's conducting career, which brought the old man fees of up to $8,000 a performance. For 20 years, Craft led most of Stravinsky's rehearsals, then yielded to the composer while the audience filed in, or, in the case of recording sessions, when the control-room light went on. A one time research assistant to Composer Arnold Schoenberg, Craft in his own right is an able conductor of early music (Gesualdo) and the ultramoderns (Webern to Varese). His knack for conducting Stravinsky will be displayed this week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, when he leads the Symphony of Psalms and other works for the New York City Ballet's Stravinsky Festival.

Libman's charge that it was Craft who actually presided over two Stravinsky recordings and not the composer, as advertised by Columbia Records, turns out to be true. The recordings, Craft conceded to TIME, are the Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra (1968) and Danses Concertantes (1971), each with a Columbia recording orchestra. The first was described as "supervised by" the composer, the second as "conducted by" him, when in fact Stravinsky was present at neither session. Capriccio has since been withdrawn; Danses Concertantes is still available.

Craft now admits that Stravinsky's contribution to the Stravinsky/Craft books grew less active as the series went along. "Save for the normal editing by the publisher, the words in the first three books are Stravinsky talking," says Craft. The last three? "Well, you might say they are paraphrases of his words." To his credit, Craft says that if he had to do it over again, he would make clearer how the collaboration worked. But what is called for now is a postfactum explanation or sorting out that will enable scholars, musicologists, historians and music lovers to tell where Stravinsky's art left off and his Craft began.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.