Opinion – Daniel de Mesquita Benevides: Igor Stravinsky, who would have turned 140, could have been called Stra-whiskey

Dates and ephemeris exist so we can toast and drink — the rest is secondary (and eventually welcome). It is likely that someone has said this, in other words.

Stravinsky himself, whose birth is celebrated on the 17th, could have said so. He was, after all, a witty dandy, fond of fine clothes, fine art, and good whiskey.

He declared that he was so fond of this venerable Scottish invention that its name might have been Stra-whisky.

It would be 140 years old. It is possible to imagine him on some cosmopolitan sidewalk, with his long and elastic body, carried by his majestic nose. When he saw a Cubist woman crossing the street with her face not meeting, he would stop for a drink, straight from the bottle he always carried in his coat pocket.

Few composers of classical music were so popular and exerted such fascination. Among his fans and friends were Debussy, Proust, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Disney and Coco Chanel, with whom he had an affair.

Charlie Parker, seeing him at a table at the legendary Birdland, in New York, played some notes from “Bird of Fire”. Stravinsky, surprised by the tribute, spit out the whiskey, in Alex Ross’ description.

The music critic also tells, in “Noise”, an essential book, about the premiere of “The Rite of Spring”, the Russian composer’s masterpiece. Paris, late May 1913: “From the boxes, where the more affluent spectators sat, came roars of disapproval. The aesthetes from the balconies and from the stands roared back. They were shades of class struggle.”

It must have been an earthquake, the seats shaking with the rhythmic brutality of the show, which still had Nijinsky’s daring choreography. The ostrich feathers on the ladies’ heads may have flown with each step on the stage of Diaghilev’s ballerinas. The central character, who appeared in a dream of the composer, was obliged, in a pagan rite, to dance to death.

Stravinsky has been compared to his drinking partner Picasso, with whom he worked on the ballet “Pulcinella”. Restless, they sought the zeitgeist at the source. Just as the Spanish genius went through the blue, pink, cubist, primitive, etc. phases, the genius born on the Baltic Sea, son of a baritone of aristocratic origin, went from percussive exuberance to neoclassicism, reaching dodecaphonism.

It mixed Slavic folk songs with jazz tinctures, eardrums rumbling to the strange scream of tubas and horns. At the best of his work, he would have intuitively understood the irregular and hypnotic beats of African music, under which he made the river flow from the European avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s, when the world seemed to explode, with violence or pleasure.

Talkative and lively, he didn’t shy away from having his favorite drink in any situation, which included the bed (as some amusing photos attest). You’d expect him to prefer vodka, but no. On the other hand, it’s possible that he didn’t like to mix his whiskey with other drinks. A common attitude among malt lovers, not least because there are relatively few good cocktails based on Lowland nectar.

One of the best, if not the best, is affinity, which had its heyday just when the young Stravinsky left Paris gaping, torn between applause and jeering.

affinity

Ingredients

• 50 ml blended scotch whiskey
• 25 ml dry vermouth
• 25 ml sweet vermouth
• two splashes of orange bitters

How to make

Shake ingredients with ice and strain into a coupe glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.