Cite as 667 F.Supp. 120 (S.D.N.Y. 1987)
The third convincing claim of fair use is no. 230 where Kobler quotes Craft for the purpose of impeaching, rather than adopting, his statement. For nos. 203, 204 and 230, the claim of fair use is sufficiently strong that I did not mark those passages as infringing.
But few of Kobler’s quotations of Stravinsky advance such persuasive claims of a fair use purpose. More common are takings of Stravinsky’s radiant, startlingly expressive phrases to make a richer, better portrait of Stravinsky, and to make better reading than a drab paraphrase reduced to bare facts. A few examples follow:
In describing the mourners at Stravinsky’s funeral, Kobler mentions Leopold Stokowski, adding a description Stravinsky had written of him:
“He looked like a sleek Russian wolfhound then, and only later, in his film-star years, when he must have spent an hour a day trying to find a perfect bisexual hairdo, and disheveling it in exactly the right way, did he ever appear to be ungroomed.” [No. 1.]
Of Stravinsky’s childhood memories of St. Petersburg:
“… the droshkies on cobblestones or wooden-parquetry pavements … the horse-drawn streetcars and, in particular, the rail-scraping noise they made as they turned the corner near our house and whipped up speed to cross the Krukov Canal bridge … the cries of the vendors …especially those of the Tartars, though, in truth, they did not so much cry as cluck…. But the most memorable street cry of all was the knife grinder’s: ‘Tocheet nozhi, nozhui, pravir!’ (‘Sharpen your knives and scissors, strop your razors!’) … the cannonade of bells from the Nikolsky Cathedral near our house….” [No. 8.]
Of an early piano teacher:
“She … was an excellent teacher and a blockhead, by which I mean that her aesthetics and bad taste were impregnable and her pianism of a high order.” [No. 15.]
On his memory of his first wife Catherine, from whom he had lived mostly apart as she was confined by tuberculosis to a sanitarium in Switzerland while Stravinsky, achieving brilliant successes throughout Europe and America, was more often in the company of the beautiful Vera Sudeikina, whom he married after Catherine’s death:
“We were from then on until her death extremely close, and closer than lovers sometimes are, for mere lovers may be strangers though they live and love together all their lives.” [No. 24.]
In narrating a strange dream Stravinsky experienced while composing Firebird, in which, according to Kobler, a virgin was sacrificed to the God of Spring, Kobler adds a quotation from an unrelated Stravinsky passage:
that “violent Russian spring that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking.” [No. 34.]
Quoting Stravinsky on the lack of musical precedent for The Rite of Spring:
“I had only my ear to help me; I heard and wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which The Rite passed.” [No. 39.]
On the opportunistic manipulation of wealthy patrons:
“The trick … is to compose what you want to compose and get it commissioned afterwards.” [No. 52.]
On the composer Manuel de Falla:
“a man even smaller than myself, and as modest and withdrawn as an oyster…. His nature was the most unpityingly religious I have ever known, and the least sensible to manifestations of humor. I have never seen anyone so shy.” [No. 55.]
On Aldous Huxley:
“the most aristocratic man I have ever known, and I do not mean in the sense of birth…. Aldous is an aristocrat of behavior. He is gentle, humble, courageous, intellectually charitable. Of the learned people I know, he is the most delectable conversationalist, and of that breed he is one of the few who are always droll….” [No. 153.]
And on Christopher Isherwood:
