546
PARTISAN REVIEW
having been powerfully influential in the music world, but it wasn't
until suddenly, when Auden started to write libretti for him and
when
The New York Review of Books
got Craft to write for him and
about him-
Thomson:
I preceded him in
The New York Review.
Trilling:
-that Stravinsky was all at once voted into our Iiterary–
intellectual culture. Do you recognize what I'm saying when I say
that?
Thomson:
Yes, but he'd had similar relations with the French literary
world.
Trilling:
Who were the people in the literary world of France that he
associated with?
Thomson:
He had collaborated on several musical-dramatic works
with Jean Cocteau, for instance, and with Andre Gide, when he
started writing to French texts. He had composed in Russian almost
exclusively, I would say, up to about 1925-6-7. Then he tried French,
and then French translated into Latin. The latter was successful in
Oedipus Rex. Persephone,
in French, was less so. He was afraid of
French, afraid of making errors of prosody in a language which is so
rigidly governed by its living grammarians and writers. He spoke
German perfectly well but he never composed in it, and German was
unfavorably viewed in those days anyway, on account of World
War
I.
And he put a few phrases of Hebrew into a Latin cantata after
the war. He came to setting English late in life. Stravinsky's high
point as a member of the intellectual community came, I presume,
with his giving the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, which
he read in French. They were actually composed by a musician,
Roland-Manuel, and a good deal of the philosophic thought in them
about aesthetics was the result, if I am not mistaken, of Stravinsky's
conversations with a Swiss philosopher named Ramuz; but the
actua l writing, I believe, was done by Roland-Manuel. He was a
good writer and a good friend of Stravinsky's and he could see that it
came out in proper French, which the old man could pronounce
quite we ll.
Trilling:
He was already an old man when he gave the Norton lectures?
Thomson:
I 'm just referring to him affectionately as the old man. In
the music world one used to refer to Toscanini also as "the old man. "
Trilling:
When were Stravinsky's Norton lectures?
Thomson:
In 1942, and he was born in 1882.
Trilling:
So he was a young man in his sixties.
Thomson:
He was under sixty when he wrote them.
