I think Stephen Walsh has something to say about that as indicative of Stravinsky's overall outlook, able to enter other's worlds like a tourist, but other than through various rather manneristic devices that are reasonably consistent from piece to piece, little able to reveal anything more inward - and he was like that in life, a man forever wearing masks. Of course, not everyone would see that as a vice, and indeed those of a postmodernist persuasion have often celebrated Stravinsky on precisely those grounds, to do with the essential quality of artifice in his work (Glenn Watkins book Pyramids in the Louvre in particular tries to draw a direct line between Stravinsky and later postmodernst music).

In many ways that is inextricably linked with the above. There's a certain infantile quality (but not presented in a self-reflexive manner) that I perceive throughout the output. But I'm not really convinced that the earlier 'Russian' works are any less 'aloof' - they seem every bit as much calculated and contrived to me. But that to some extent is also true of the tradition from Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky in some works, and others from which Stravinsky drew. The studied impersonality that in the world of ballet is sometimes made into a virtue (Tchaikovsky, whilst not going that far, certainly presented virtue in the fact that he had to deny some of his own subjectivity in order to satisfy the functional demands of the ballet), is a step backwards to a pre-Beethovenian form of subjectivity and servitude, though not surprising when having its roots in a musical culture that had by Stravinsky's time never had a full bourgeois revolution.

That said, the techniques that Stravinsky employed (which, as Taruskin has shown, utterly have their roots in Russian folk music) of angularity, discontinuity, montage, and so on, whilst not entirely unprecedented (aspects of such devices reach back well into the nineteenth century and maybe before as well) were a deeply radical innovation, every bit as much as parallel innovations in literature and film. Stravinsky employed them for conveying either a type of stylised primitivism (as did many early modernists in other artistic fields) or other forms of idealised archaisms, but that is by no means the only application they had.

I do understand that statement, r, though (and I'll be shot down in flames for this) for it to really work for me, it needs to have the 'S' for Stravinsky replaced by an 'M' for Mozart.

 There, I've outed myself, though I'll stress that I don't mean the whole of Mozart's output (e.g. not the later operas): but I do get a sense that though his output be undeniably that of a genius, much of his inspiration seems to pass straight from whence it stems to the manuscript without any intervention whatsoever, and consequently passes from one of my ears to the other without engaging the brain in any way. It must be synaptic wiring, though: we all have composers whose works do not touch us, but I do feel that that personal barriers should not be trotted out as a vindication for belittling any composer's standing. (I'm sure you'll appreciate that that last statement is most avowedly not aimed in your personal direction, btw.)

Ron - know EXACTLY what you mean. Strange, I have no such problem with Haydn... (I sense a human agency at work?). And Bach, who might be prime candidate for an aloofness labelling, avoids it because one feels that the head and heart are equally engaged?

The source for the axe comment is a testimony by Vladimir Ussachevsky, Stravinsky saying to him, 'Slowly and casually', that 'Well yes, I did write it with an axe'. It is contained in 'Stravinsky (1882-1971): A Composer's Memorial', in Perspectives of New Music Vol. 9 No. 2 (Spring-Summer 1971), p. 35.

The interviewer was Robert Craft, wasn't it?   It all seems very genial. Perhaps they'd all had a few and he was inane as a newt too.

Did I spy a breeding pair of French bassoons at the end there? 



Fair enough, autoharp, thanks. In my defence I believe it was Ms Lenz who was wielding the tin-opener. I was merely suggesting that, once one had got over the idea of consuming worms, some of S's were surprisingly nutritious as well as tasty .

Mr. Smittims's feeling is rather like our own feeling, except that our feeling is that in a way music has not moved forward since Strawynsci's three seminal ballets and Schoenberg's Five seminal Orchestral Pieces, the seeds of all of which were sown as long ago as 1909. Almost every work written since then does we think little more than echo some aspect of those. What they have in common is a new rejection of refinement and an acceptance or toleration of brutality - as Mr.Pace has already indicated in his reply 25. That same post-1908 attitude led to the first war did it not?

In a very similar way, everything we have seen in popular drama for the past sixty years echoes the second war in some way. One example among thousands is Dr. Who and the Daleks. The Dalek's moral standpoint is simply that of the SS all over again is it not? Or as another example, all those evil élite geniuses and their mysterious laboratories. . . .

You know, that's a remarkably good point.  I'm not sure I've ever heard that line before.

So I suppose the relevant questions, if we accept that (which I do, with a caveat that the way Wagner dealt with that shadow far exceeded anything that could be said to have been foretold by Beethoven), are:

(1) Could the same be said of Stravinsky (or of any other C20th composer): that his shadow dominated the 20th century, even for composers who tried to escape it? And

(2) If so, does that make him 'the greatest composer of the century'?
[In other words, is pervasive influence (a) a necessary, (b) a sufficient condition of greatness?]