The Master's Voice

Another book about Igor Stravinsky? No, not just another book. Lillian Libman's A nd Music at the Close: Stravinsky's Last Years, published this week (Norton; $9.95), has already, sight unseen, caused the music world's most con brio feud of the decade. Engaging in a bit of pre-publication drumbeating last spring, Libman disclosed that her book would challenge the familiar portrait of Stravinsky in his later years--a portrait produced by his literary collaborations with his co-conductor, aide and surrogate son Robert Craft (TIME, June 26).

In a seemingly unending series of magazine articles, not to mention six semiautobiographical books, Stravinsky had appeared as the most wickedly witty, sprightly, feisty and avid of old men. In fact, suggests Libman, Stravinsky was something both more and less than that in the twelve years during which, as his personal manager and sometime member of the Stravinsky menage, she knew the composer. For one thing, he was more sparing with words, less waspish as a polemicist. For another, the lady maintains, many of the words were not the composer's at all; they were Craft's. As she sees it, Composer-Conductor Pierre Boulez was correct when he accused Craft of "a great falsification of the image of Stravinsky."

Fortunately, the book avoids that kind of guilt-riding rhetoric. But its simple day-to-day accounts are both fascinating and devastating. In the last three or four years before his death in 1971, the author says, Stravinsky's attention was no longer even good enough for the TV and film detective dramas and mysteries that he loved. His hearing and vision started to fail. He began "to withdraw into regions none of us would ever be able to enter." Meanwhile, as this decline went on, there was Stravinsky in print as a critic for Harper's, a seer for the New York Review of Books, and a chatty armchair philosopher in his own autobiographical books, waxing eloquent about the latest techniques in computer music, Beethoven sonatas, new plays, new ballets, the Panthers, and maxi fashions. The obvious conclusion is that the writer was mostly Craft.

Part of the problem was fiscal. After 1967, though he labored at his desk every day, Stravinsky neither conducted nor produced any finished compositions. It became necessary to maintain the pretense of a productive Stravinsky, or as Libman puts it, "to create a 'living' man from a dying genius." That enhanced his public image, encouraged his publishers, consoled the Stravinsky household (which did not seem willing to accept the reality) and, apparently, was convincing on his tax returns. (Stravinsky, for example, kept a daily notebook of the minutest home and business expenses, with a view, says Libman, toward justifying deductions to the Internal Revenue Service.)

If the IRS is something of an ogre in Libman's eye, so is Columbia Records. Not only did Columbia credit two recordings to Stravinsky (Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, 1968; Danses Concertantes, 1971) when in fact Craft had conducted them in the composer's absence, but it began taping more and more of the rehearsal sessions in which Craft would drill the orchestra before his older colleague took over. Libman raises the possibility that some of these Craft efforts found their way into the final "Stravinsky" recordings when the tapes were later edited.

Despite its somewhat circular organization and the author's cloying habit of referring to the composer as "the Master," Music at the Close is clearly an indispensable and humane book for Stravinskyites. All the uproar aside, for instance, where else could a fan learn that Stravinsky was so fond of avocados that his wife Vera invariably carried two or three ripening examples in her purse when they traveled?

As to the correct portrait of the later Stravinsky, in terms of documentary proof it is still by and large Libman's word against Craft's. Yet this is a book that has a convincing ring to it. If that ring is to be challenged, it is now up to Craft--and Columbia Records--to do just that.

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