Stravinsky as context

The eloquent conclusion of Richard Taruskin's monumental study of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions has quickly become the most widely quoted, generally accepted declaration of Stravinsky's significance for twentieth-century compositional practice:

Taruskin's purpose is to assert that once, in Petrushka, ‘Stravinsky at last became Stravinsky’ by transforming his own defining Russian context, he could be seen as ‘one of music's great centripetal forces, the crystallizer and definer of an age’, whose ‘work possessed a strength of style, and his oeuvre a unity, that could accommodate an endless variety of surfaces’. It is a powerful argument, and its appeal might even have been strengthened by Taruskin's subsequent emphasis on the deplorable morality of Stravinsky's sympathy for fascism and anti-semitism – a general lack of democratic fervour that allegedly infiltrates even the exuberant rituals and ultimate sublimity of Les Noces.