News

By Steven J. Smith

    GULF STREAM — Robert Craft will be remembered perhaps more as an upholder of composer Igor Stravinsky’s legacy than as a noted orchestral conductor, writer and lecturer in his own right, according to music scholars Leon Botstein and Thomas McKinley.
    Mr. Craft, 92, died Nov. 10 at his home in Gulf Stream.
    Botstein, a renowned conductor who is also president of Bard College near Kingston, N.Y. — where Craft was born Oct. 20, 1923 — said Mr. Craft’s real achievement in life was “to bring Stravinsky alive” and to prevent the composer from descending into a barren old age.
    “They met in 1948, and Craft introduced Stravinsky to different types of modern composition,” Botstein said. “Without Craft, I think Stravinsky would have fallen silent as a composer.”
    McKinley, professor of music theory and composition at Lynn University in Boca Raton, agreed Mr. Craft was “very influential” in the course of 20th-century classical music because of his relationship with Stravinsky.
    “He basically was Stravinsky’s private secretary for the last 20 to 30 years of his life,” McKinley said. “Late in his life, Stravinsky sort of shocked everybody by changing his style. He had done that before as a younger man in his early, famous ballets ‘The Firebird,’ ‘Petrouchka’ and ‘The Rite of Spring.’ In the ’50s, he changed his style again, into what is known as the atonal or 12-tone style, after Craft introduced him to this type of music.”
    McKinley said that Mr. Craft’s collaboration with Stravinsky on books such as Conversations With Igor Stravinsky, Memories and Commentaries and Expositions and Developments provide invaluable insights into Stravinsky.
    “Many people thought Craft may have written some of it for Stravinsky,” he said. “But I generally trust the books. I certainly don’t think Craft put words into Stravinsky’s mouth.”
    Botstein maintained Mr. Craft took on traits of Stravinsky’s personality that emerged in those books, which were published in the 1950s and 1960s.
    “It’s widely believed that Craft wrote those books,” Botstein said. “He was a terrific writer and a very smart man. Very sophisticated. But he essentially invented Stravinsky’s opinions.”
    Botstein disagreed, however, with assertions that Mr. Craft wrote some of Stravinsky’s later musical works, including Requiem Canticles, completed in 1965-66.
    “I believe those to be entirely Stravinsky,” Botstein said. “Craft didn’t ghost-write. Instead, he was a man whose creativity was best realized in someone else, much like Cyrano de Bergerac. Craft’s own talent came alive through the medium of Stravinsky. After Stravinsky died, though, Craft became a very elegant and interesting writer of music.”
    Mr. Craft also wrote memoirs in diary form of his life with Stravinsky, including Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, first published in 1972, a year after the composer’s death in New York. A later memoir, An Improbable Life (2002), recounted his own story from his youth in Kingston to 2002, including his move to Gulf Stream in 1987. The memoirs provide a broad picture of some of the leading cultural figures of the mid-20th century who moved in Stravinsky’s orbit, including W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Paul Horgan and Aldous Huxley, among many others.
    Mr. Craft’s many recordings as a conductor include an 11-disc set of works by Stravinsky, 10 discs of works by Arnold Schoenberg, and two discs of music by Anton Webern, all for the Naxos label.
    He is survived by his wife, Alva Craft, and his son, Alexander Craft.
    At the end of his life, Mr. Craft was so identified with Stravinsky that the legendary composer became his only creative outlet, Botstein said.
    “But he was a man of exceptional accomplishment,” he said. “Both musically and in the writing, he created an English language that for Stravinsky never existed. And he became a great American writer — a man, at 92, who could look back on his life with a sense of pride and accomplishment.”