Robert Craft was Stravinsky’s assistant and trusted adviser and who lived with the Stravinskys in Hollywood and New York. Craft had studied music at Juilliard School and met Stravinsky in 1948. He then worked with him until the composer's death in 1971.
It’s often thought that Craft was the composer’s amanuensis, but Stravinsky had no need of anyone to help him with his scores.
Instead, Craft was more of a sounding-board for musical ideas, a confidant and someone who could effectively rehearse orchestras, ready for Stravinsky to conduct.
He was instrumental in guiding the composer in his late style, introducing him to the sound-worlds of Webern, Boulez, Stockhausen and more. ‘I think that if I hadn’t shown him some of the music that the European avant-garde were producing,’
Craft told this magazine in 2006, ‘his idiom wouldn’t have altered much, if at all. Instead, we would have had more works like the ones he was composing in his first years in America – Orpheus and The Rake’s Progress.’
Craft died in 2015.
Main image: Robert Craft with his wife, Alva, at their home in the early 1990s. © Infrogmation of New Orleans, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons