Preface and Acknowledgments

Stravinsky liked to boast to journalists about his worldwide success as a composer. During a chatty interview with Rafael Moragas in Barcelona in 1925, included in this volume, he described in a bemused fashion how two thousand old ladies had honored him at an event in Philadelphia by attempting to kiss his hand. He had put a halt to the proceedings by announcing through a megaphone that he needed his precious limb to conduct future concerts, and that they would have to stop. In spite of the playful annoyance he expressed in telling the story, he clearly relished the adulation. Fame shaped Stravinsky’s career. His ascent to international stardom began for all intents and purposes in May 1913, when Serge Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes, orchestrated a riot at the premiere of The Rite of Spring—a marketing ploy that made Stravinsky an overnight sensation and that proved so successful that it continues to be used to draw audiences to performances of the work today. From the moment that Diaghilev conflated aesthetic appreciation and capitalist desire by transforming the premiere of The Rite of Spring into scandal, Stravinsky’s music stood in the shadow of his celebrity—his compositional innovations paling in comparison to the symbolic, commercial power of his brand. Stravinsky’s celebrity was no exception in the history of modernism. On the contrary, as Jonathan Goldman argues, celebrity and modernism were mutually constitutive, both serving the goal of reaffirming the centrality of the individual in mass society in the early twentieth century. In Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity, Goldman explains how Oscar Wilde inaugurated modernist celebrity culture in the 1880s, by turning his extraordinary self-production as a psychological subject into an object or stereotype to be admired by the masses—and this shortly after the world’s first legal trademarked image, the red triangle on Bass Ale, was registered in England. Modernist writers followed suit, mobilizing the technologies of consumer culture to promote their writings and themselves in the decades that followed. James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and others fetishized authorship, transforming their signatures into brands, and making style a basis for objectifying themselves as inimitable individuals. The knowledge of their complicity with celebrity culture allows Goldman and others to explode myths about the great divide between modernism and popular culture, and about the modernist artist as isolated, disinterested Romantic genius. Stravinsky adopted Wilde’s culture of the dandy, stylizing himself as an object of desire for the concert-going public while, behind the scenes, flaunting his conspicuous consumption and aristocratic buying habits. After 1913, he was almost always on display: posing for photographs (a medium crucial to the development of modern celebrity), marketing his work in an astonishing number