Robert Craft

An American conductor named Robert Lawson Craft earned recognition through his close partnership with Igor Stravinsky as well as his advocacy for Anton Webern and the remaining figures of the Second Viennese School. He spent his early years in a middle-class household in upstate New York. After serving as an Army medic in World War II, he trained at Juilliard and the Berkshire Music Center while receiving private lessons from Pierre Monteux. Between 1947 and 1950 he led the Chamber Arts Society of New York, drawing notice through bold programming choices.

Those performances brought him into contact with the sixty-five-year-old Igor Stravinsky, who engaged him as musical assistant and secretary. Craft relocated to the composer’s Los Angeles residence and helped shape the English text for the opera The Rake’s Progress. He also directed two Los Angeles concert series—the Evenings-on-the-Roof and its continuation, the Monday Evening Concerts—where he presented works by Schoenberg, Webern, Varèse, late Stravinsky, and earlier music such as that of Gesualdo.

Following the 1951 premiere of The Rake, Stravinsky encountered a creative impasse yet found unexpected stimulus in Craft’s account of Schoenberg’s Septet. The Russian master, long viewed as Schoenberg’s principal rival, requested scores by Schoenberg and Webern for study; Craft further supplied Ernst Krenek’s instructive volumes on the twelve-tone method. Within a few years Stravinsky astonished the music world by adopting Schoenberg’s system. Craft’s role shifted from assistant to full collaborator, with the composer accepting his input even in the formation of several late pieces. Craft likewise prepared orchestras for Stravinsky’s own concerts and for an extensive Columbia Records series that might otherwise have proved impossible.

To mark the composer’s seventy-fifth birthday, Craft proposed issuing a written interview that would address recurring questions, thereby sparing the elder figure repeated personal encounters. The approach proved effective, leading the two men to produce several joint volumes of memoirs and musical commentary. After Stravinsky’s death, Craft persisted in editing documentary materials and recording his own recollections of their shared years.

Independently he maintained activity as lecturer, conductor, writer, and musicologist. While overseeing the Columbia Stravinsky project, he used spare studio time to produce the first complete recordings of Anton Webern’s numbered works. At the opening of the twenty-first century he recorded music by both Stravinsky and Schoenberg for Koch International Classics, later licensed for reissue on Naxos.

A conductor of notable precision and skill, Craft might have secured greater public prominence had he concentrated on the standard repertory rather than dedicating extensive time to Stravinsky during and after the composer’s lifetime. He has nevertheless stated without reservation that the chance to know and work with Stravinsky fully justified the choice.