Stravinsky at 75 THE complete catalogue of Strav- insky's published
compositions issued by Boosey and Hawkes on his seventy-fifth birthday covers half a century's work by the most admired and possibly the greatest composer alive today. He is also one of the shrewdest of living composers. His fifty years' output is sizeable. Between the Symphony in E flat Op. 1 (1905-07) and Agon, ballet for twelve dancers (1954-57), there are eighty-four main entries in the chronological catalogue. To work through them is to realise with surprise how few there are that are not in the repertory. Fertile as he is, Stravinsky has been wise enough, unlike Hindemith or Milhaud, to produce only enough to keep the musical world always eager for his next work. His recent advice to the excessively prolific young composer of a five-hour opera, to be more sparing with music, has already become one of the classic quotations of musical history, along with his earlier state- ment, many years ago, that music, like a nose, simply exists, and is not a proper object of criticism.
He has generally been careful also not to spoil the chances of one work by putting too close.a competitor on the market—except where one is for an unusual combination of performers, and the existence of a similar work might be an added inducement to getting the performers together to play them both. Among his instrumental music there are only two mature symphonies, two piano concertos (of very different orchestral constitu- tions),•two sonata-type works for two pianos, two small works for string quartet, and otherwise no duplications. His only long line of works in the same genre is the ballets, of which there are nine, plus three other dramatic works in which dancing plays an important part. Every one of these, it is worth noting, has found its way successfully into the concert repertory, where they skilfully do duty for all the symphonies that Stravinsky has been clever enough not to write.
The zigzag progress of his work has been the basis of much adverse criticism. It has often been attributed to his having no real style and no artistic convictions, or to a desire to attract attention by disconcerting. The answer to this lies in the consistency with which he has maintained his zigzag course: after the violence of The Rite of Spring, the little sets of chamber-music songs; after the splendour of the Symphony of Psalms, the frivolous Violin Concerto; after the return to romanticism in the Symphony in Three Move- ments, the return to jazz in the Ebony Concerto; after the expansive neo-classical melodiousness of The Rake's Progress, the crabbed canons of the Cantata. These perpetual changes of direction are the manifestation of a single and undeviating artistic aim and intention, of Stravinsky's dis- inclination to do what has already been done, either by himself or by another. To go through this catalogue is to be reminded of how many there are of his works that are absolutely unique, different not merely in style from anything he had done before, but different altogether in concep- tion from anything that anybody else had ever thought of. Only a genius could have kept that up for fifty years. A charlatan would have run out of gimmicks, and a man of lesser originality would have settled into a rut after twenty years or so.
If there is also a small element of calculation in Stravinsky's seemingly erratic progress, a skilful exploitation of the uses of surprise, as possibly there is, it is subsidiary. It is like his keen business instinct. He is renowned as a businessman, and ever since he has been in a position to do so, he has driven a hard bargain. Even his inspiration
conserves itself until the figure offered is high enough and the contract signed. When that hap- pens it will function for almost anybody, at almost any kind of work—an Elephant Polka for a circus, .a ballet for Ida Rubinstein, a cantata for St. Mark's, Venice. But Stravinsky is strictly a profes- sional composer, not a `commercial' one. Holly- wood, for instance, has not been able to seduce him—unless it is that it cannot afford him. And when his inspiration does begin to work, whatever the commission and the price, it obeys only the dictates of art and Stravinsky's will, not of the tnaifey. With very rare exceptions we are the gainers even more than he. May he go on in the same way, growing older and richer until Shaw seems in comparison to have died a young pauper.
COLIN MASON
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