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In 1962 Stravinsky accepted a Soviet invitation to visit the country of his birth. It was exactly fifty years since he had left Russia and there was a complicated tangle of emotions behind his decision to return. As an emigre he had always given the impression of violently rejecting his own Russian past. He told his close friend and musical assistant, the conductor Robert Craft, that he thought about his childhood in St Petersburg as a 'period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell'.¹³⁶ Much of this antipathy was an emigre's reaction to the Soviet regime, which had rejected his music and deprived the composer of his native land. The mere mention of the Soviet Union was enough to send him into a rage. In 1957, when a hapless German waiter came up to his table and asked if he was proud of the Russians because of the recent Sputnik breakthrough into space, Stravinsky became 'furious in equal measure with the Russians for having done it and with the Americans for not having done it'.¹³⁷

He was particularly scathing about the Soviet musical academy, where the spirit of the Rimsky-Korsakovs and Glazunovs who had howled abuse at The Rite of Spring was still alive and kicking against the modernists. 'The Soviet virtuoso has no literature beyond the nineteenth century,' Stravinsky told a German interviewer in 1957. Soviet orchestras, if asked to perform the music of Stravinsky or 'the three Viennese' (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern) would be 'unable to cope with the simplest problems of rhythmic execution that we introduced to music fifty years ago'.¹³⁸ His own music had been banned from the Soviet concert repertory since the beginning of the 1930s, when Stravinsky was denounced by the Soviet musical establishment as 'an artistic ideologist of the Imperialist bourgeoisie'.¹³⁹ It was a sort of musical Cold War.

But after Stalin's death the climate changed. The Khrushchev 'thaw' had brought an end to the Zhdanovite campaign against the so-called 'formalists' and had restored Shostakovich to his rightful place at the head of the Soviet musical establishment. Young composers were emerging who took inspiration from Stravinsky's work

(Edison Denisov, Sofya Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke). A brilliant generation of Soviet musicians (Oistrakh, Richter, Rostropovich, the Beethoven Quartet) was becoming well known through recordings and tours in the West. Russia, in short, appeared to be returning to the centre of the European music world - the place it had occupied when Stravinsky had left in 1912.

Despite his own denials, Stravinsky had always regretted the circumstances of his exile from Russia. He bore the severance from his past like an open wound. The fact that he turned eighty in 1962 must have played a part in his decision to return. As he grew older, he thought more of his own childhood. He often slipped into childish Russian phrases and diminutives. He re-read the books he had read in Russia - like Gorky's Mother. 'I read it when it was first published [in 1906] and am trying again now,' he told Craft, 'probably because I want to go back into myself.'¹⁴⁰ Stravinsky told the US press that his decision to go to the Soviet Union was 'due primarily to the evidence I have received of a genuine desire or need for me by the younger generation of Russian musicians'.¹⁴¹ Perhaps there was a desire on Stravinsky's part to secure his legacy in the country of his birth. Yet, despite his claims that nostalgia played no role in his intended visit, that sentiment was surely at its heart. He wanted to see Russia before he died.

On 21 September 1962, the Stravinskys landed in a Soviet plane at Sheremetevo. Straining to catch a glimpse of the forests turning yellow, the meadows, fields and lakes as the plane came in to land, Stravinsky was choking with excitement and emotion, according to Craft, who accompanied the couple throughout their trip. When the plane came to a halt and the hatch was opened, Stravinsky emerged and, standing at the top of the landing stairs, bowed down low in the Russian tradition. It was a gesture from another age, just as Stravinsky's sunglasses, which now protected him from the television lights, symbolized another kind of life in Hollywood. As he descended, Stravinsky was surrounded by a large welcoming committee, out of which emerged Maria Yudina, a stout woman with Tatar eyes (or so it seemed to Craft) who introduced herself to the composer as his niece. Also there was the daughter of Konstantin Balmont, the poet who had introduced Stravinsky to the ancient pagan world of The Firebird and The Rite of Spring. She presented Craft with a 'birch-bark basket containing a