Stravinsky_The Second Exile: France and America 1934 -1971 [Non-Fiction] Mobi/Epub(K-Slender)

Pages: 720
Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (April 25, 2006)
ISBN-10: 0375407529
ISBN-13: 978-0375407529

The second volume of Walsh's remarkably thorough two-part biography begins with Stravinsky arriving in America—his European roots severed by the Second World War and the deaths of his mother, his wife, and his elder daughter—bringing with him a longtime mistress and a neoclassical style that soon goes out of fashion. The story gathers strength with the entry, in the late nineteen-forties, of Robert Craft, a young conductor of overpowering ambition. Craft made Stravinsky's later works possible, patiently introducing him to twelve-tone music, and eventually became such an intimate that a breach with Stravinsky's children was inevitable. Negotiating the ensuing web of lawsuits, wounded egos, and tax-avoidance schemes, Walsh, an academic musicologist who writes with the verve of a first-rate critic, never loses sight of the incandescent figure at its center, a man whose supposedly inexpressive music became "the best response to those terrifying years that brought it into being."