Robert Craft

Robert Craft wrote to Igor Stravinsky in 1948 asking to borrow a score, became his assistant, conductor and constant companion for the composer's last twenty-three years, and produced the conversation books that are the main source for what Stravinsky thought. He was a young conductor with an unusual enthusiasm for Schoenberg and Webern at a moment when Stravinsky had spent decades dismissing them; the standard account is that Craft is the reason the serial works of the 1950s and 1960s exist at all, which Craft himself both encouraged and denied. He lived with the Stravinskys in Hollywood, ran rehearsals, prepared scores, conducted recordings, and travelled everywhere with them. The six volumes of Conversations, published from 1959, are formally interviews and are quoted as Stravinsky's own words throughout the literature; how much of the wording is Craft's has been argued about since, and Craft acknowledged shaping them while insisting the substance was Stravinsky's. He also kept diaries published as Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship. After Stravinsky died in 1971 he was drawn into the litigation between the widow and the children over the estate. He conducted and recorded the complete works twice and wrote criticism for fifty years. He conducted the first recordings of several Webern and Schoenberg works in America. The Stravinsky estate case ran for years and produced considerable ill feeling. He published more than twenty books. He was still writing about Stravinsky sixty years after first meeting him, and died at ninety-two. He first wrote to Stravinsky asking to borrow the parts for the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, a work almost nobody was performing.

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