Music: Stravinsky's Boswell

The late Igor Stravinsky's life was the best documented of any composer's since Beethoven. Why? Largely because of a bespectacled, quizzical-looking musician named Robert Craft, 48. For the last 23 years of Stravinsky's life, Craft served the old master as rehearsal conductor, aide, intellectual catalyst, amanuensis and surrogate son. Moreover, Craft worked with Stravinsky on innumerable magazine articles and six semi-autobiographical books—a series that is supplemented this week by the publication of Craft's Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship 1948/1971 (Knopf; $12.50).

Throughout this distinctive musical and literary collaboration, Craft projected to a wide audience the by now familiar portrait of Stravinsky in his later years—sprightly as a grasshopper, wickedly witty, avid for new words, new ideas and new music right up to his death at 88. By general agreement, Craft did Stravinsky and the world a favor of Boswellian proportions.

Or did he? Another former associate of the composer challenges the validity of the Craft portrait. She is Lillian Libman, 59, Stravinsky's personal manager and sometime member of his menage. In And Music at the Close: Stravinsky's Last Years, a memoir that will be published this fall by W.W. Norton, Libman contends that Stravinsky was actually more abstemious with words and less waspish and argumentative than the Craft collaborations suggest. Indeed, she maintains, many of the words are not Stravinsky's at all but Craft's. Libman calls into question Stravinsky's supposedly keen interest in new music, his thirst for prolonging feuds with colleagues and critics, his hard-edged style as a polemicist, even the authenticity of two recordings supposedly made by the composer.

Libman's charges have set off one of the liveliest feuds the music world has seen in decades. Among her supporters is Composer-Conductor Pierre Boulez, an authority on Stravinsky and his music, who accuses Craft of "a great falsification of the image of Stravinsky." The New York Times, the initial forum for Libman's charges, has also divulged what might be called the crayfish caper. In 1966, a story appeared in the Times under Craft's byline describing a visit by Stravinsky to Strasbourg, France. According to Craft: "After unpacking [Stravinsky] sped to the roof restaurant ostensibly for a view of the old city, which clings to the cathedral like chicks around the mother hen, but he was soon seated and consuming crayfish at an alarming rate."

Actually, Stravinsky fell ill in Paris and never arrived in Strasbourg. Craft deleted the anecdote from some late editions of the Times, then resuscitated it in 1969 as the prologue to the Stravinsky/Craft Retrospectives and Conclusions, with the composer still eating crayfish "at an alarming rate," but this time in Paris. "For some of us," wrote the Times's music critic Donal Henahan, "Robert Craft has dissipated his credibility as historian and biographer, though he may still command our admiration as the Georgette Heyer or Thomas B. Costain of musical history."