Retrospectives and conclusions
"In this, the sixth of the now-famous collaborations by Stravinsky and Robert Craft, the great composer's verbal brilliance is presented in Craft's artful juxtaposition of Stravinsky's table talk and writings: essays, reviews, polemics. Here we watch the pyrotechnics of a mind in which music is linked to the intellectual and social currents of our time by a vast--and vastly entertaining--connective tissue. The moral implications of Beethoven's greatest quartets; the non-novelty of Karlheinz Stockhausen's seventy-minute chord; a confrontation of Monostatos with Eldridge Cleaver; the relative merits and flaws of three recordings of Le Sacre du printemps; today's young composer settling down to commune with his Moog--all are fuel for Stravinsky's light-shedding intellectual flights. Excerpts from Craft's diaries of his long association with Stravinsky and the Stravinsky circle, as well as his hitherto unpublished notes on Berg's Lulu, are included. This book, like its five predecessors, is at once superb reading and a fascinating and important contribution to modern musical history."--Dust jacket
Print Book, English, 1969
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1969