Author: Igor Stravinsky Publisher: ISBN: Category : Composers Languages : en Pages : 21
Book Description
The Igor Stravinsky correspondence on The Rake's Progress consists of correspondence, dated May 1950 to May 1951, between Stravinsky and his lawyer in New York, L. Arnold Weissberger, concerning the mounting of his opera, The Rake's Progress. Also included are copies of letters to F. H. Ricketson of the Central Civic Opera House Association, Denver, Colorado; Lincoln Kirstein; Howard Taubmann of the New York Times; and Betty Bean and Dr. E. Roth of Stravinsky's publishers, Boosey & Hawkes, London. The letters discuss business matters pertaining to the production of the opera, financial support for the work, where to stage the premier (including discussions about a possible staging at USC), locations for the opera's American debut, problems associated with Italian singers performing in English, and various other financial and administrative matters pertaining to the completion and production of the work. Stravinsky's letters to Weissberger are on his personal letterhead with his Los Angeles address, "1260 N. Wetherly Drive, Hollywood 46, California."
Author: Igor Stravinsky Publisher: ISBN: Category : Composers Languages : en Pages : 518
Book Description
"This initial selection from the extraordinary lifetime of letters to and from Igor Stravinsky, annotated by his friend and associate Robert Craft, includes correspondence with W. H. Auden, Jean Cocteau, Lincoln Kirstein and other friends, as well as Stravinsky's letters to Nadia Boulanger, Ernest Ansermet, and Craft himself. The book presents a wealth of previously unpublished information about Stravinsky's relationships with other musicians, and about his methods of composition. The opening section, based on letters to Stravinsky from his first wife Catherine, is among the most important material yet made available for an understanding of the composer's personal and family life. If the exchanges with Auden (The Rake's Progress) and Cocteau (Oedipus Rex) take first place for general interest, the letters to Ansermet - who conducted more performances of Stravinsky's music than anyone but the composer himself - give a remarkable view of the musical and ballet worlds, especially of the Diaghilev period, and of the great impresario himself. This book, accompanied by two further volumes, is a major contribution to the Stravinsky canon and to the cultural history of the twentieth century."--whsmith.co.uk.
Author: Paul Griffiths Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521281997 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 128
Book Description
The Rake's Progress is Stravinsky's biggest work and one of the few great operas written since the 1920s, rare too for the unusual quality of its libretto, by Auden and Kallman. Its importance is undisputed, but so too are the problems it raises: problems of both performance and understanding, caused by the irony with which it is so thoroughly permeated. In aspects of style and operatic convention it looks back to the eighteenth century, and in particular to the operas of Mozart and da Ponte, while making references also to other periods, to operas from Monteverdi to Verdi. Yet at the same time it is wholly a work of the twentieth-century, and indeed it is centrally concerned with the impossibility of return, artistic, psychological or actual, as well as with the nature and limitation of human free will. The Rake's Progress is not one of unbridled dissipation but rather, more interestingly, one of attachment to naive notions of freedom and choice, and his tragedy is that he can never go back.
Author: Chandler Carter Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253041597 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 360
Book Description
From the fall of 1947 through the summer of 1951 composer Igor Stravinsky and poet W. H. Auden collaborated on the opera The Rake's Progress. At the time, their self-consciously conventional work seemed to appeal only to conservative audiences. Few perceived that Stravinsky and Auden were confronting the central crisis of the Modern age, for their story of a hapless eighteenth-century Everyman dramatizes the very limits of human will, a theme Auden insists underlies all opera. In The Last Opera, Chandler Carter weaves together three interlocking stories. The central and most detailed story explores the libretto and music of The Rake's Progress. The second positions the opera as a focal point in Stravinsky's artistic journey and those who helped him realize it—his librettists, Auden and Chester Kallman; his protégé Robert Craft; and his compatriot, fellow composer, and close friend Nicolas Nabokov. By exploring the ominous cultural landscape in which these fascinating individuals lived and worked, the book captures a pivotal twenty-five-year span (from approximately 1945 to 1970) during which modernists like Stravinsky and Auden confronted a tectonic disruption to their artistic worldview. Ultimately, Carter reveals how these stories fit into a larger third narrative, the 400-year history of opera. This richly and lovingly contextualized study of The Rake's Progress sheds new light on why, despite the hundreds of musical dramas and theater pieces that have been written since its premier in 1951, this work is still considered the "the last opera."
Author: Igor Stravinsky Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 9780520044029 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 212
Book Description
For the first time in one volume--the celebrated Stravinsky and Craft Conversations Few would dispute that Igor Stravinsky was the greatest composer of the twentieth century. Conductor and writer Robert Craft was his closest colleague and friend, and for over twenty-one years he lived with the Stravinskys in their Hollywood home. In the early 1950s he accompanied the composer on his concert tours, and from the mid-1950s to Stravinsky's death in 1971 he co-conducted his concerts. Together Stravinsky and Craft published five acclaimed collections known as the Conversations series, which sprung from informal talks between the two men. In this newly edited and re-structured one-volume version, Craft brings Stravinsky's reflections on his childhood, his family life, professional associates, and personal relationships into sharper focus and places the major compositions in their cultural milieux. The Conversations books are the only published writing attributed to Stravinsky that are actually "by him" in terms of fidelity to his thoughts and opinions, making this volume required reading for all fans and students of Stravinsky's music.
Author: Nadia Boulanger Publisher: Boydell & Brewer ISBN: 158046596X Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 349
Book Description
Published for the first time: a rich epistolary dialogue revealing one master teacher's power to shape the cultural canon and one great composer's desire to embed himself within historical narratives.
Author: Igor Stravinsky
Author: Igor Stravinsky
Author: Igor Stravinsky
Author: Paul Griffiths
Author: Chandler Carter
Author: Igor Stravinsky
Author: 
Author: Igor Stravinsky
Author: Igor Stravinsky
Author: Nadia Boulanger