Stravinsky And Politics

[Guest]

Stravinsky approved the overthrow of the Tsar in 1917 and seems to have been well-disposed toward Kerensky's provisional government. He clearly didn't like the Bolshevik government that succeeded it (and looted his homes), because he expressed his feelings by emigrating to France, and then to the USA.

So, I'm wondering what political positions Stravinsky took in later life? Did he sign up to the 'better dead than red' Russophobia that gripped the USA in the fifties, or did he just keep his head down?

The fact that he made a return visit to Russia in 1962 suggests he had kept an open mind about his country of origin.

Anyone know anything else on this? I can't seem to find sources on the internet, or elsewhere.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Stravinsky was a great, great composer, but always something of an opportunist in his political leanings. He was hostile to the Bolsheviks less from ideological principles than from resentment that they "confiscated" his Russian property and deprived him of income from sales of and royalties from his scores. He was often performed in Fascist Italy, and made some comments on Mussolini that would later embarrass him. Nor did he say anything against Nazism until his works were "banned" and income from his contract with Schott's. His fondness for JFK similarly came from the President's appreciation of the composer's cultural significance to the United States during the Cold War.

His return to Russia in his 80th birthday year was less to do with "an open mind" than with nostalgia: he missed the landscape and language.

Finding sources is difficult: AFAIK, the Steven Walsh two-volume biography is the most accurate. Otherwise, it's digging around in various volumes of cultural history and memoirs of the composer.

Best Wishes.

[Mandryka]

Stravinsky was a great, great composer, but always something of an opportunist in his political leanings. He was hostile to the Bolsheviks less from ideological principles than from resentment that they "confiscated" his Russian property and deprived him of income from sales of and royalties from his scores. He was often performed in Fascist Italy, and made some comments on Mussolini that would later embarrass him. Nor did he say anything against Nazism until his works were "banned" and income from his contract with Schott's. His fondness for JFK similarly came from the President's appreciation of the composer's cultural significance to the United States during the Cold War.

His return to Russia in his 80th birthday year was less to do with "an open mind" than with nostalgia: he missed the landscape and language.

Finding sources is difficult: AFAIK, the Steven Walsh two-volume biography is the most accurate. Otherwise, it's digging around in various volumes of cultural history and memoirs of the composer.

Best Wishes.

Thanks for that: pretty much as I suspected, then.

I think it was Hitler's expansionist activities that finally gave fascism a bad name around the world: up to that point, Mussolini was fairly well-respected by Italy's artistic community. Puccini was happy to describe himself as a facscist but died before the term gained any meaning; Toscanini only fell out with Il Duce when he was 'told' to play the Fascist anthem at the start of his concerts; and Mascagni - as is well-known - was happy to be Mussolini's house operatist until the bitter end.

I think when you start appropriating peoples' property and redistributing their wealth, you can't fail to antagonise them. Can't think of any well-heeled Russian artists - Gorky excepted, perhaps, and that only initially - who actually welcomed the Bolsheviks.

[Suffolkcoastal]

I think ferneyhoughgeliebte has summed up Stravinsky's politics very well. The Walsh two-volume biography is excellent and thoroughly recommendable. A good summing up of Stravinsky's politics was after he had arrived in the US and enquired whether 'there would be a revolution there' as otherwise 'where would I go?'.

[Serial_Apologist]

Famous composers and their attitudes to dictatorship and political oppression deserves a separate thread - no doubt one has existed. Mixing music with pollitics, especially those of broadly left-wing stamp, has always curried disfavour in the capitalist west - not just from right-wing ideologues, for obvious reasons, but from liberal reformists who hold to ideals of art transcendcent of historical era. I often wonder which way Debussy would have turned, given his (understandable, many might say) French nationalism during WW1. D'Annunzio, with whom he collaborateed on "Le Martyr", later became a fascist sympathiser, as did many of the neo-classical group around Casella in the 1920s/30s - GF Malipiero imo being an especially sad case.

S-A