Igor Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, Russia and France, 1882-1934, by Stephen Walsh. Jonathan Cape 699pp, £30 in UK
Stravinsky, rightly or wrongly, became in the eyes of a wide public the composer who effectively symbolised 20th-century music. The shocking scenes that greeted the premiere of his ballet, The Rite of Spring, in 1913 have gone down in the history books as one of the rowdiest riots to greet any masterwork. There was so much noise in the Theatre du Champs Elysees that the dancers, it is said, could hardly hear the music over the commotion in the audience. The composer was livid. "I have never again been that angry. The music was so familiar to me; I loved it, and I could not understand why people who had not yet heard it wanted to protest in advance." However it was the voices in Stravinsky's favour which won the day. The progressive French composer, Florent Schmitt, was soon depicting his Russian friend as, "the Messiah we've been waiting for since Wagner, and for whom Mussorgsky and Claude Debussy, as well as Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg, seem to have prepared the way".
Strauss, with the great tone poems and Salome, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier behind him and at the height of his fame, had already met his young rival. He advised him that the public wouldn't want to listen to the quiet start of The Firebird ("You should astonish them by a sudden crash at the start. After that they will follow you and you can do whatever you like"), and patronisingly told an interviewer "it's always interesting for one to hear one's imitators".
However it was not Strauss but Schoenberg who came to seem Stravinsky's great rival. Yet the two composers, who met in Berlin in 1912, were initially very complimentary about each other, Stravinsky declaring his older colleague to be "a remarkable artist" and recommending his Pierrot Lunaire for performance in St Petersburg. Both had many transformations in front of them, Schoenberg never relinquishing his links with the past, Stravinsky reinventing himself with a thoroughness which scholars are only now beginning to unravel.
The speed of change of Stravinsky's chameleon-like musical character can be gauged from the developments of the three great early ballets, The Firebird, not yet fully out of the exotically perfumed world of his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, Petrushka, grotesque and touching, driven by unrelenting, strange mechanisms, and The Rite of Spring, an explosion of primitive energy which, as Stephen Walsh rightly points out in his new book, brought the orchestra into an entirely new expressive domain. All three were premiered within a three-year span.
As Stravinsky's music changed, through the travelling theatre style of The Soldier's Tale, the driven ritualism of Les Noces, the embracing of neo-classicism, the composer came to view aspects of his past in new and not always favourable lights. The acknowledgments of certain debts, allegiances, dependencies became burdensome. And the last quarter of a century of his life - when he had, in Robert Craft, acquired his own Boswell - became an opportunity to realign the record of the relationships of the past, just as the past was then being freshly re-written by the Soviet authorities in the Russia he had abandoned.
Stephen Walsh, former music critic of The Observer and currently Reader in Music at the University of Cardiff, is one of those scholars who is engaged in the painstaking trawling that's necessary, particularly through long, inaccessible Russian sources, to establish what has been buried or lost from view in Stravinsky's re-touchings. His new book, Igor Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, Russia and France, 1882-1934, is the first part of a two-volume biography. Its most important uncoverings of challenging new evidence relate to the composer's earliest years. Walsh rehabilitates the composer's first wife, Katya, shows the depth of the young Stravinsky's involvement in the circle surrounding Rimsky-Korsakov in St Petersburg and the acute pain of his alienation from it. This painful separation became inevitable, as Stravinsky's own international success began to dwarf that of his teacher, whose progressiveness in politics (a public declaration against political oppression cost him his directorship of the St Petersburg conservatoire in 1905) was not matched by the conservative academicism of his views on art.
Walsh doesn't always make the going easy for his readers, who, he seems to assume, will have as immediate a grasp of the Stravinsky family tree as he has himself. He distances himself, with respect, from the Craft/Stravinsky conversation books of the composer's later life. And, in truth, it must be said that he distances himself somewhat from the younger composer too. The book is both detailed and dispassionate, flaring into life more often in musical descriptions than in the animation of the character of its subject. For all that, the central character, with all his contradictions, complications and manipulations, was such an important actor on the stage of 20th-century music, that such a wealth of information as Walsh has amassed cannot fail to fascinate.
Michael Dervan is Music Critic of The Irish Times. His 100-programme survey of the music of the 20th century, Countdown: Sampling the century, was broadcast on Lyric FM last year
