To the world of today, Strawinsky looms a figure shrouded in his own greatness, spiritualized. The incredible virtuosity, the utter precision of his methods of work are in themselves perturbing to the average mind. Scores without a single erasion, where each instrumental part is written in a different-coloured ink; the very array of the ink bottles so as to allow the composer to dip his pen in as unhesitatingly as if to touch the keys of his piano—all this suggests an alchemist in his laboratory rather than a composer in the throes of creative fever. But that it is pure gold produced in this laboratory the world contests not.

If one were asked to set down the names of those contemporary musical composers who had contributed most to the advancement of their art, it is more than probable that the name of Igor Strawinsky would be among the first to spring to mind. Yet I well recall the time when Strawinsky was a new and exciting word which one read and pronounced with curiosity, having no first-hand experience of what that name implied.

In his book on Strawinsky published in 1929, Boris de Schloezer pointed out that, contrary to the general opinion, Petrouchka rather than Le Sacre du Printemps was to be considered the really revolutionary work. His reason was that Strawinsky's attitude towards style and technique in Petrouchka was utterly different from that of the composers who “played the organ.” Scriabin had summed up in the most extreme form what Strawinsky meant by playing the organ when he had remarked that good orchestration should be like a good sauce—one should not be able to distinguish the ingredients. Beautiful sonorities for their own sake, blending of colours, filling up of holes, in a word all the magic by which any listener's musical attention can be put to sleep—The Firebird, maybe, had its share of these things, but Le Sacre? Yet in Le Sacre there is as much autonomy of rhythm as there is autonomy of sonority in Firebird; indeed, in some parts there is autonomy of sonority as well, and it is just this that makes the magic. “Playing the organ” was not a happy phrase, for the baroque way of playing the organ has much in common with Strawinsky's ideals. Nevertheless, Le Sacre, however differently, still played the 19th century organ.

Strawinsky's published writings are subservient to his work as a composer. Their prime purpose is to warn, to correct, to explain; and it has been necessary for him to do this, partly because his own music has been so often misinterpreted and misunderstood, and partly because he is an ardent believer in certain aesthetic standards and his life-time of music has been a continuous challenge to those he considers to be false and untrue.

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”‥