Stravinsky was a composer frequently given to announcing music’s independence from the other arts – in particular, its independence from literature. ‘In general’, he wrote in a well-known screed of 1924, ‘I consider that music is only able to solve musical problems; and nothing else, neither the literary nor the picturesque, can be in music of any real interest.’1 Almost forty years later he still defined music in anti-literary terms, asserting (in an article for the official newspaper of the Communist Youth League, of all things): ‘The language of music is a special language; it is not the same as the language of literature.’2