The Most Versatile Composer of All?
“Hats off, gentlemen—a genius.” The deathless words spoken by Schumann on hearing the music of teenager Chopin could have been echoed in a later century on audition of Igor Stravinsky, surely the most versatile composer of modern times. Stravinsky, the ultimate chameleon of musical inventiveness, launched and triumphed in so many distinct styles, to find a comparison you’d have to turn to Picasso in visual art—and, in earlier eras, polymath geniuses like Hildegard von Bingen and Leonardo da Vinci. The…
