Igor Stravinsky

FLASHBACK

The composer composed: debonair Igor Stravinsky photographed by George Hoyningen-Huene in 1927, calm after the stormy American premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps. Though that particular fracas was nothing compared with the first performance in Paris—"the battle of May 29,1913," as Stravinsky calls it in one of his letters to Claude Debussy published this month in the third and final volume of Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence (Knopf). And even that brouhaha was a tempest in a teapot compared with what happened after his widow, Vera, died in 1983. Such clashing titans as the Morgan Library, the New York Public Library, the Stravinsky children, and his biographer Robert Craft fought for possession of the archives. Swiss conductor and Valium millionaire Paul Sacher finally won them for $5.25 million.