MUSIC: Stravinsky-Craft, Inc
Joan Peyser · 2016
In a centenary article, entitled My Life With published in the June 10, 1982, issue of the New York Review of Books, Robert Craft wrote: I dread to contemplate the prurient hypotheses and tendentious projections of music historians concerning the nature of the glue that held us together. Craft's concern is understandable in light of the hostility he provoked from those who knew the circumstances of his arrival in the Stravinsky household in 1949. The situation was this: Stravinsky's first wife, Catherine, the mother of his four children, had been dead for ten years. Soon after her death the composer married Vera de Bosset, with whom he had been having an open liaison for almost twenty years. In 1940, at the time of the marriage, the Stravinskys settled in Los Angeles and, after the end of World War II, invited the composer's second son, Soulima, to join them in the United States. Soulima Stravinsky, then living in Paris with his wife and young son, was the only one of Stravinsky's children to have pursued a career in music. In the 1930s, along with his father, he played the Stravinsky Concerto for Two Solo Pianos on tours in Europe and South America. They even made a recording of that particular work. Soulima also performed the solo piano part in performances of his father's Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments and the Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra under the direction of Stravinsky and several other conductors as well. In June 1948 Soulima and his family accepted the invitation to make a new life in California and took up residence in a small cottage rented and furnished by the Stravinskys about two