Impressions After an Exhibition

Extract

During these summer months the New York Public Library has been holding an exhibition at the Research Library of the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, of manuscripts, drafts, annotations, letters, photographs, posters, objets, objets d'art, and other memorabilia selected from Stravinsky's legacy, and lent by his widow. The exhibition is unprecedented with respect to the collection of objects on display—since, for one thing, it is presumably only after so public a figure's demise that an assortment of this kind becomes open to the possibility of being thus exhibited—although a number of items had been familiar in published form. It is also, I conjecture, the first in a potential succession of exhibitions (depending, primarily, upon the eventual location of, and time at which, the entire legacy of these materials may become, as is to be hoped, in the most positive sense, public property), and it was mounted in conjunction with a Stravinsky Festival celebrating the 90th anniversary of the composer's birth.