Robert Craft

Though many of their travels were linked with performances, their visit to the Edinburgh Festival in 1967 was evidently the most discreet of ventures. It was Peter Diamand’s celebrated Stravinsky year which included a new cantata Abraham and Isaac, the British premiere of the “pocket” Requiem Canticles conducted by Pierre Boulez, and Scottish Opera’s festival debut with a new production of The Rake’s Progress.

Reputedly staying at the Caledonian Hotel, they were spotted by nobody, though the tall Craft and tiny Stravinsky, pictured together here,  with Stravinsky on the right, would have been an instantly recognisable pair.

Abraham and Isaac, conducted by Colin Davis, had already been heard in Berlin, with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as soloist in a concert where the conducting was shared, as it often was, by Stravinsky and Craft. Though some critics considered that Craft generally just got in the way, Stravinsky himself thought him masterly, and one of the most impressive recordings of The Rite of Spring was made by him with his name transliterated into Russian.

For 86 years of his long life, he was closely involved with Stravinsky’s music, discovering The Firebird at the age of six in New York, “knowing instantly,” he said, “that this music was somehow something to do with me”.

The son of a New York stockbroker whose career was temporarily wrecked in the 1929 crash, he was sent to the New York Military Academy when he was 12, but loathed it. More to his taste was the Juilliard School of Music, where he later won a place, shoplifting in the process a copy of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony with which to follow a performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and becoming a pupil of Pierre Monteux, first conductor of The Rite of Spring.

His Stravinsky turning point, however, came in 1948, when at the age of 25 he wrote to the 66-year-old composer in Beverly Hills asking if he could borrow a score of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments for a concert he was conducting. Stravinsky replied that he was in the process of revising the work, adding that, if Craft wished, he could come and conduct it in person.
“I almost fainted when I read this,” said Craft, and it was then that one of the most rewarding musical relationships of the 20th century was born.

Craft was invited to move in with the Stravinskys at their home, helping to improve the composer’s grasp of English and guiding him through WH Auden’s newly completed libretto for The Rake’s Progress page by page, explaining the word stresses and at the same time getting to know the great English poet, who dropped again and again into the action of the wonderful Stravinsky chronicles that Craft later wrote.

By the time The Rake’s Progress reached Edinburgh from Venice in the early 1950s it was already an established masterpiece, though Scottish Opera’s subsequent production conducted by Alexander Gibson was the first Scottish version of the piece to be staged.

Craft’s influence on the maverick composer’s neo-classical masterpiece, and on his later conversion to Schoenberg and Webern, was substantial, refreshing Stravinsky’s genius and resulting in a final outpouring of masterpieces of maximum importance.

Though it could be said that Craft was lucky to establish such a rapport with a great composer, it could also be affirmed that he brought luck to Stravinsky himself. Yet his main strength lay not so much in the advice he gave the composer but in his own brilliance as a writer and the quantity of enthralling books he wrote on his subject.

Whatever Craft’s critics said against him (and his responses to them were nothing if not prompt) he certainly knew how to speak for himself. When the British musicologist Stephen Walsh invaded his territory with a splendid two-volume study of Stravinsky, Craft was quick to declare that it contained 400 errors.

Even in boyhood he had been called a walking encyclopedia but his books are more than factual – though in suggesting that Stravinsky and Ravel were once lovers he surely went too far.

But as the possessor of a virtuoso vocabulary and as the most polished of stylists, he remains a pleasure to read. His chronicles, both in their early edition and their enlarged later one, are a triumph that made him much more than Stravinsky’s Boswell.

Robert Craft was married twice, firstly just after Stravinsky’s death in 1971 to Rita Christiansen, the composer’s nurse, by whom he had a son, Alexander, who survives him. In 1986 he met an estate agent, Alva Minoff, whom he married in 1993 and who also survives him.

CONRAD WILSON