Like most very great artists, Stravinsky was by trade a synthesiser of experience. Works that seem to display the sublime detachment of pure art (whatever that may be) turn out to have complex origins in the social and intellectual life around him, origins which could hardly be guessed from the music but which, once known or suspected, can help us come to terms with complexities or even obscurities in the work itself.

There is nothing new about this; the nineteenth century offers several well documented parallels (Schumann, Wagner, Mahler). All the same, the case of Stravinsky is in some respects unique. The Romantics thought of themselves as outcasts, but Stravinsky really was an outcast. Stranded in Switzerland when war broke out in 1914, he was finally cut off from his Russian homeland by the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and thereafter he made only one trip to Russia, in 1962. He moved from Switzerland to France, then later (in 1939) to the USA, and materially speaking he settled wherever he lived: he was no spiritual outcast, like Mahler, nor consciously part of a diaspora, like Schoenberg. But quite simply he was detached from his cultural roots, something which has always made life hard for exiled Russian artists, whether they are like Chagall and resort to recurrent images of old Russia, or like Solzhenitsyn and more or less cease to work creatively.