That seem unpropitious.
Igor Stravinsky despises commentary on himself, which is a final vindication of remarkable sanity. His greatness rests in his classic, harmonious balance of intellect and heart, never false to his craft, his faith. His life and art are a testament to the fecund sanity of stern, uncompromising intellectual hostility toward the world in the creation of beauty. His definition of the intellectual stresses the constructive moral power of analytical discipline and exploration:
Every man who outside of his own job shares a conception of the world, has aconscious line of moral conduct, and so contributes toward maintaining, or changing that conception and encouraging new modes of thought.
Petrospectvies and Conclusions is not a book of self-advertisements, but a precious and noble statement of principle by as great a musician as has ever lived. Those principles come to light most movingly in two brief remarks. "One hopes to worship God with a little art, if one has any. "Then, in a moment of high sobriety and historical cognizance.
"Now will new rules arise through revolution," chants the chorus in a stasimon from the Eumenides.
In all of his very greatest works- Petrouchka. Le Sacre du Printemps, Les Noces, Pulcinella. Apollo, Symphony of Psalins, the Mass, and the incomparable, Igon-Igor Stravinsky never yielded to the "luxurious gloom of choice" which has afflicted so many artists of this century. He pulls the mind of man above itself by the renovation of new rules. In this last book he laughs life into lucidity, he laughs the world into health. It is now an old man's laughter, pungent, compassionate, never self-serving.
Stravinsky is a man of sinewy sagacity, a man who dedicates his monumental energies to the service of humanity through the articulation of art made in scorn of the emotionalism which is the inspiration of lesser artists, in scorn of everything except a sense of truth willed to later men in perfect works. His music is written in humble recompense to God. To create music is to recreate oneself and perhaps, to bring some beauty of order into the world. The harmony of the individual sou? will be the harmony of the earth, and art is the only way. "Myself I must remake, says Yeats's poem, and so must we all."