Stravinsky on screen
Anybody interested in the mortality of great composers ought to know the smudgy film footage (it’s on YouTube) of Stravinsky’s funeral, which happened 50 years ago this month. The scene is Venice. There’s the drone of chanting priests, a fog of incense, an enormous coffin on a jet-black gondola, rowed down the Grand Canal and out to San Michele, the Venetian island of the dead. It feels like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.
‘But it was actually a rather jolly day,’ says Tony Palmer, who was there, ‘with everyone going to Harry’s Bar to get drunk and be noisy. Stravinsky would have approved, given he liked a drink. He wasn’t the austerely other-worldly character people imagine: he was a man of the world, with a world-outlook coloured by irony. And he was a man in his late 80s who’d been ill for a while, so the death wasn’t especially tragic. We celebrated rather than mourned.’
