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Book Review
May. 6th, 2010 07:54 pmStravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1882-1934
by Stephen Walsh
This book was very good, and very thorough - it is very long and only covers the first 50 years of Stravinsky's life (he was close to 90 when he died). It's mostly a biography, but focuses primarily on Stravinsky's musical activities, tracing his influences, stylistic shifts, and the creation of each of his works during those fifty years. Stravinsky and his music are fascinating, and Walsh definitely satifies that fascination.
Walsh's research and scholarship are excellent - he's complete and thorough to the point of exhaustive, but doesn't become too dry or dull. My only problem with his perspective is that he's a little too quick at times to distrust Stravinsky's own accounts of things. To be fair, though, Stravinsky did have very little compunction when it came to manipulating facts in order to serve his own agendas.
Interesting things I learned about Stravinsky from this book:
He and Diaghilev were distantly related.
Despite being very modern, forward-thinking, and even avant-garde in his music, Stravinsky was relentlessly conventional and even old-fashioned in his approach to his personal and domestic life.
During the 1930s, he was surprisingly sympathetic towards fascism.
by Stephen Walsh
This book was very good, and very thorough - it is very long and only covers the first 50 years of Stravinsky's life (he was close to 90 when he died). It's mostly a biography, but focuses primarily on Stravinsky's musical activities, tracing his influences, stylistic shifts, and the creation of each of his works during those fifty years. Stravinsky and his music are fascinating, and Walsh definitely satifies that fascination.
Walsh's research and scholarship are excellent - he's complete and thorough to the point of exhaustive, but doesn't become too dry or dull. My only problem with his perspective is that he's a little too quick at times to distrust Stravinsky's own accounts of things. To be fair, though, Stravinsky did have very little compunction when it came to manipulating facts in order to serve his own agendas.
Interesting things I learned about Stravinsky from this book:
He and Diaghilev were distantly related.
Despite being very modern, forward-thinking, and even avant-garde in his music, Stravinsky was relentlessly conventional and even old-fashioned in his approach to his personal and domestic life.
During the 1930s, he was surprisingly sympathetic towards fascism.
