Stravinsky: The Second Exile

A companion to Walsh’s Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, this stand-alone volume takes up the story in 1934, detailing the then 52-year-old composer, conductor and performer’s final years in France before the war and continuing through his years in America. It chronicles the life of a man whose manner and outlook were uncomplicated, if aristocratic, but whose public and private affairs were exquisitely complex. Worldly, well-connected and a notorious autocrat, Stravinsky was also very much a realist, who worried deeply about his ability to support his large and extended family. Walsh has avoided the pitfalls common to many biographers, especially those who focus on artists, and has crafted neither a paean nor a screed, but a balanced, and thoroughly readable, history.