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Ravel & Stravinsky circa 1910

Stravinksy: Discoveries and Memories by Robert Craft

At 89, conductor-composer Robert Craft is currently recording the complete works of Igor Stravinsky for the Naxos label, some based on definitive archival orchestrations from the composer. Craft has written several books on Stravinsky’s life and work and he has even more to disclose, controversially it turns out, in Stravinsky: Discoveries and Memories.

A bombshell comes midway through the book in which he states “the exploration of this subject is long overdue,” and then reveals that Stravinsky went through in the early Diaghilev years around 1910-13, what Craft terms an “ambisexual phase,” and had a series of affairs with men, including French composer Maurice Ravel when they were both young men and “the most successful in concealing their sexuality,” the author assesses. That his gay life coincided and even aesthetically fueled the composition of The Firebird and Le Sacre du Printemps.” Boom, indeed.

Craft’s professional relationship with Stravinsky goes back to 1948 and continued until the composer’s death in 1971. The author even held power of attorney signage over some of Stravinsky’s assets and he continued to work with Igor’s second wife Vera in organizing his musical legacy. They were so close that Vera informed Craft early on that he was so trusted that Stravinsky looked to him for musical advise.

Memories is an intimate, sometimes squirrelly look inside the gilded and heady world that Stravinsky orchestrated. The book is populated with the gallery of luminaries in his orbit from the world of art politics and society. Everyone from Sergei Diaghilev and George Balanchine to Greta Garbo and Charles Chaplin.

International stars aside, Craft’s examination of Stravinsky musical contemporaries are often even more engaging. His contentious musical jockeying with the influential Arnold Schoenberg, for instance, brings condensed insight to the innovations of both composers. Intriguing ongoing dramas are revisited, like the thinly veiled rivalry between Stravinsky and Prokofiev (who was constantly being disparaged by Diaghilev), with Prokofiev eventually challenging the authenticity of Stravinsky’s Russian roots. Snapshots of titans such as Giacomo Puccini who admits to Stravinsky that he musically quoted him in his opera Ill Tabarro.

The heady, chaotic world of classical music, dance, art and drama swirl throughout, then we get to “Amorous Augmentations” the curious title of the chapter on Stravinsky’s sex life. In addition to Ravel, Craft alleges that Igor was involved with Belgium composer, Maurice Delage, and spent weeks “at Delage’s gay agapeone near Paris, not alone but with the notoriously homosexual Prince Argutinsky whose letters are still in private hands.” Letters presumably, Craft reports, a Russian gentleman commenting “are very compromising to Stravinsky biography.”

According to Craft, Stravinsky was also smitten with St. Petersburg University classmate, Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov, son of the famous composer. Later, Igor not only professed his love, but to whom he dedicated his ballet The Firebird to Andrey, then a music critic. The dedicatee, it is revealed, rebuffed Stravinsky’s advances, even attacking his music. Igor was not to be shamed, responding boorishly “I’ve been in love with you a long time, if you were a woman I don’t guarantee what I wouldn’t do to you,” Craft reports.

Later, Stravinsky wrote to him “Neither your poisonous, thunderous, writings about my works nor your protest against my un-artistic behavior should change our warm… relationship.” “Augmentations” concludes with Stravinsky’s numerous affairs with women, including Coco Chanel, and confirms he canoodled heterosexually the rest of his life.

As scholarly as Craft has been through many books on music and this composer, these revelations by now, reads rather like retro page six of The Post, especially when he uses the terms like “nozzle” instead of penis, when describing a nude photo Igor sent to Delage. The evidence of Stravinsky’s gayness, on balance, seems sketchy. The claims have since been challenged in an LA Times by other Stravinsky scholars. Until those alleged Argutinsky letters surface, Stravinsky has only been outed by Craft. Stay tuned for another 40 years.

Meanwhile, Discoveries and Memories coming out on the centenary of the riotous premiere of The Rite of Spring, is otherwise an engaging, chatty, haphazard memoir bringing even more personal dimension to the titanic composer. Craft can still do an earned, if conditional, lifelong victory lap.

Film

Cut!

James Franco has what they used to call the ’it’ factor in movies, along with being a solid actor, the camera loves him. When he is not attending Yale, he seems particularly interested in promoting gay themed movies. He was Harvey Milk’s first boyfriend in Milk and earlier this year, he played a young Allen Ginsberg in a film about the Beats. He also likes to upend movie culture, even when it seems like he is the only one in on it. He perpetrated bad drag last year at the Oscars and was so high that Anne Hathaway kept having to verbally rescue him.

Franco‘s project this year is “Interior. Leather Bar.” a docufiction that recreates scenes that were edited out of William Friedkin’s notorious S&M potboiler “Cruising.“ Franco has gotten a lot of press after its opening at the Sundance Film Festival. He co-wrote the movie with gay indie filmmaker Travis Matthews. Matthews’ 2010 film “I Want Your Love” also very sexually explicit, but clearly not pornographic, was a huge international hit at festivals last year. But even with this muscle behind it, at Philly Qfest this week, “Interior” met with a tepid audience response.

Even though “Cruising” has turned into somewhat of a cult film for various reason, it’s real merit was that it was so offensive to gays that the script was leaked and the idea that Hollywood was again going to portray gay men as psychos who mix brutal violence with sex caused a backlash. It has been cited by gay film historian and AIDS activist Vito Russo as a turning point in how Hollywood would have to depict gay characters and storylines outside of stereotypes. Later Russo would be part of establishing the gay defamation organization GLAAD.

Friedkin was a top director in the 70s with mega-hits “French Connection” and “The Exorcist” behind him, so he could get away with basically nothing more than a slasher flick with pretensions of a psychological thriller. The psycho part in fact played into so many negative gay stereotypes.

In the movie, Al Pacino plays a cop who goes underground in the gay S&M clubs to collar a murderer who stalks gay men into the leather scene has bondage sex with them, then brutally murders them. There is a thread in the film that suggests that the cop not only gets entranced by the leather scene, but becomes violent himself.

Not only was this a bad script, Pacino has never been worse. The talk was that the actor was completely uncomfortable playing the part, especially sex club carnavale going on around him that included fisting scenes. Those in particular were part of 40 minutes that were cut so the movie would avoid an X rating.
Meanwhile, Friedkin’s noir cartoon world of the leather bar scene was otherwise completely prurient. And then there is all that bad dancing when Pacino dives in and spazzes out because he huffing club drugs.

That scene is painstakingly and creepingly recreated in “Interior. Leather Bar” as a docu-fiction, as Franco loiters about the set, trying to defend the premise of ‘imagining’ and talks about the illogical reasoning that goes into what is deemed palatable for film. This is such a sketchy a premise that there are long scenes of Franco and Matthews seeming fairly clueless about what they are doing.

Meanwhile, Franco repeatedly tries to explain the purpose of the film to its star Val Lauren, a straight actor who is having trouble with the explicitness of the sex scenes. (life imitating Pacino, wow, what an angle). Meanwhile, Franco lectures on why it is, for instance, acceptable that someone can be dismembered in the most gruesome detail on film, but many sex acts are strictly forbidden. Good question James, you should have written a paper instead.

At the Qfest screenings, fortunately, preceding “Leather” was Matthews’ compelling “In Their Room: London” was shown first. It chronicles the real intimate private lives of gay men and has poetic intimacy and visual power, reminiscent of Mapplethorpe‘s aesthetic. Six gay Londoners talk about their sex and romantic lives as they get ready to hook up. He busts through voyeuristic frames and creates a safe forum for complete candor, the nudity is so secondary to the full portraiture of these men. “Room” is touching, erotic and unpretentious, it is amazing that Matthews didn’t realize that the Leather Bar would be a such a gratuitous bore.