Doubts Greet Claims About Stravinsky’s Sexuality
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/arts/music/doubts-greet-claims-about-stravinskys-sexuality.html?ref=arts&_r=0
…..Mr. Craft, 89, was Stravinsky’s confidant and literary
collaborator in his final decades and has for many years written his own
accounts of the composer’s life and work. His essay appeared on the heels of
his latest book, “Stravinsky: Discoveries and Memories” (Naxos),
which repeats its most provocative assertions, blending the artistic,
historical and personal.
Mr. Craft contends
first that Stravinsky’s creative influence over the epochal 1913 ballet “The
Rite of Spring,” particularly its choreography, was far greater than has been
assumed. And then there’s the gay thing.
“It will come as a
surprise to most people,” Mr. Craft writes in the book, “that in the early
Diaghilev period” — the years following 1909, when Stravinsky began
collaborating with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes — “Stravinsky was
exclusively in an ambisexual phase while writing ‘Petrushka’ and ‘The Rite of
Spring.’ ”