11. Posthumous reputation and legacy.

Stravinsky's death removed an artist widely regarded, by 1971, as a figure from the past. Concert audiences were seldom confronted with any work of his from the previous quarter-century, and even in theatrical quarters praise of works later than The Rite of Spring was a lot easier to come by than performances. Meanwhile, in modern music circles his reputation was in the balance. The late serial works, forbidding to lay audiences, were mostly regarded as irrelevant by orthodox avant-garde musicians, while the opposed radical and experimental tendencies rejected them along with the rest of post-Schoenbergian intellectualism. What Ernst Roth called the ‘special and complex relationship between Stravinsky and the age in which he lived’ (‘In Remembrance of Igor Stravinsky’, Tempo, no.97, 1971, p.6) was certainly not yet generally understood as a consistent, still less as a continuingly active one.

A few decades on, it is perhaps possible to describe this relationship in more useful terms. Stravinsky's unique artistic trajectory was crucially that of an exile: an exile, moreover, who had been uprooted at the precise moment that he was tapping down most deeply into his native musical soil. And like all productive exiles, he cultivated a flexible and reciprocal association with his changing environment. While consistently producing work which transformed the sensibilities of those who heard it, he himself continuously allowed his own sensibilities to be fed, even transformed, by the music and music-making of others. This is the only plausible explanation of his astonishing ability to absorb other idioms without ever sacrificing the integrity of his own. He himself was well aware of the trait, and made a joke of it. ‘I am probably describing a rare form of kleptomania’, he told Craft (Memories and Commentaries, p.110), who himself remarked (E1992, p.44) that Stravinsky ‘wanted to be influenced’. Perhaps no great composer has ever had the creative confidence to steal with such energy, and with so little fear that his own personality would be submerged or distorted in the process.

This combination of stylistic diversity and artistic unity and integrity seems to be the main source of Stravinsky's undimmed vitality as a creative force. For younger composers of almost every persuasion, his work has continued to offer inspiration and a source of method. And just as he stole without penalty, it seems that the best of his successors can go on plundering him with at least the hope of impunity. Essentially a pre-postmodern composer, who exploited the diversity and impersonality of the modern age not in any jaded or dissolute spirit but in order to meet its challenges and survive its menaces, he has emerged as the archetypal product of and source for an epoch which now has the doubtful privilege of contemplating those same choices without any comparable threat and at its leisure.