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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
Average Strawinsky criticism in this country has for thirty years been drab and reach-me-down.
The formulae are as follow: “Strawinsky started brilliantly, much too brilliantly. Firebird and Petrouchka were a coruscation that burned out his genius before he was thirty. The slag was already beginning to show in The Rite of Spring. Thereafter, perverse man, he wrote not with his blood and nerves and basic impulses, as all true music must be written, but with a desiccated though agile brain. He had nothing to say and no style of his own in which to say it. Every new work since 1913 has been a futile academic experiment, form without ‘content’. There has been no creative continuity: only a restless hopping from trick to trick and mode to mode. The general effect is dust-dry, brittle, comfortless. He gives us not music but broken glass”‥
* This and the remaining examples are quoted from a piano reduction made by Mr. Geoffrey Corbett, whose courtesy I acknowledge. Mr. Corbett conducted the Covent Garden première of the Scènes.