However often during the last few years of his suffering we may have feared the worst, Stravinsky's death came as a profound shock not only to those who had the good fortune of enjoying his personal acquaintance, but also to the whole world of music and the arts. Seldom has the loss of a great man been felt more acutely. The reassuring knowledge of his presence was like a sheet-anchor in the storm that rages through the arts. Stravinsky was the last in what Ernest Newman called ‘the royal line of composers’. Yet he had never wished to be one of their number, and when at last he had to join them, it was against his will. So the enfant terrible of bygone years became a doyen no less terrible.

When Stravinsky left Russia and came to Western Europe, he was often interviewed, not only by specialist critics writing for musical periodicals, but also by newspaper journalists. The results were sometimes disastrous. In the mid-thirties he decided to put the record straight by writing a Chronicle of his Life. In his introduction to the first volume he recalled:

In the numerous interviews I have given, my thoughts, my words, and evenjacts, have often been disfigured to the extent of becoming absolutely un-recognisable.

The title means, ‘The Star Faced One’, although the work is generally known by its French title, Le Roi des Etoiles. It has always been the most elusive of Stravinsky's major scores. Composed in 1911–12 and published in 1913, it soon went out of print and remained so until recently. The work was not performed until 1939, and subsequent performances have been rare. Although there have been signs of increasing interest in Zvezdoliki during the last decade, performances are unlikely to become frequent, owing to the difficulty of the chorus part and to the fact that a large orchestra—quadruple wind and eight horns—is required for a piece lasting only six minutes. The recording Stravinsky made in 1962 is indispensable but not, perhaps, irreproachable. He considered it to have been one of his best, but the tempi are much faster than his score indicates and it could be argued that they run away with something of the music's character.

The five-movement suite from The Soldier's Tale is a trio for clarinet, violin and piano which was written shortly after the original stage work of 1918 (scored for clarinet, bassoon, cornet, trombone, percussion, violin, double bass, male speaker and female dancer). On musical evidence alone, it would be almost impossible to discover which version came first; and the same is true of the other works by Stravinsky which exist in two instrumental forms—including Agon, with its remarkable ‘double’ for two pianos, The Rite of Spring, with its piano duet version, and the Eight Easy Pieces for piano duet, which are also available as two suites for small orchestra.

We all know that the Symphony of Psalms was ‘composed for the glory of God and dedicated to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’, but we don't always notice that this wry equivocation is appropriate to a work whose theme is the relationship between Man and God. A comprehensive and suitably illustrated analysis of the work in those (or any other) terms would fill at least a booklet. Here we must confine ourselves to the exposition and a few representative developments of the Man/God ‘theme’.

Stravinsky's ‘Sacred Ballad for Baritone and Chamber Orchestra’ is his only setting of Hebrew, his only work for solo voice on a religious text, and, indeed, his only ‘ballad’. Completed in 1963 and dedicated to the people of the State of Israel, it is the fifth in the late series of major religious works which began with the Canticum Sacrum of 1956. Its other predecessors are Threni (1958), A Sermon, A Narrative and A Prayer (1961), and The Flood (1962); its solitary successor is the Requiem Canticles of 1966.