the scenario and the style of presentation with Ovid and a classical dictionary in hand, as Stravinsky recalled in Themes and Conclusions (p.52). The obvious difference between the two works is that, in Orpheus, there is an inescapable minimum of narrative substance, where Apollo was hardly more than a series of ritual actions, like The Rite of Spring. But Balanchine, who was in general uncomfortable with narrative, leant happily towards a highly statuesque, ritualized handling of the Orpheus legend, and in this way the new ballet seemed to become just the kind of work Stravinsky's admirers (who in the past he had rarely bothered to placate) expected him to compose. In fact Orpheus, written for a slightly enlarged Haydn symphony orchestra, is a less predictable score than it may seem. Though based, like other Stravinsky ballets, on a stereotyped series of classical dances, it complicates the issue in surprising ways. Most suggestive are the slow framing movements, the introduction, three interludes, and apotheosis, whose severely hieratic tone (intensified by imitative counterpoint, including canon) lends the action a mysterious, repressed quality the character of a liturgy enacted beyond the iconostasis. Musically, too, it implies a more austere, less conventionalized attitude that was to have its corollary in later works. Counterpoint is here put to work, sometimes with tense harmonic consequences. Stravinsky himself, who was ambivalent about Orpheus in later years, praised those parts of the score where a developing harmonic movement and an active bass line relieve the long chain of ostinati implying a criticism of the more old-style neo-classical bass mechanisms, of which Orpheus also has a few. More interestingly, he referred to the work as mimed [by which he perhaps meant suppressed] song (ibid., p.53), which made it inevitable, he felt, that his next work would be an opera. Orpheus had its first performance at New York City Center on 28 April 1948, with Stravinsky himself conducting. Just over two weeks before, he had conducted the revised version of his Symphonies d'instruments a vent in a Town Hall concert by the Chamber Arts Society, a group run by a young Juilliard graduate called Robert Craft. Unusually, Stravinsky had appeared without fee, as he informed his new publisher Ralph Hawkes, to help Craft and to hear how the revision sounded (he had never conducted the work in public in any form before except for the final chorale, which he had arranged without clarinets to go with the Symphonie de psaumes in a broadcast concert in 1945). But the explanation concealed an association that was already unique in Stravinsky's life. He and Craft had been corresponding about his music for some time, and they had met in Washington a fortnight or so earlier. In New York, Craft at once became Stravinsky's shadow, spending every day with him and Vera, quietly absorbing his conversation and personality. Later Stravinsky invited him to Los Angeles, and at the end of 1949 Craft moved into the house in West Hollywood as the composer's assistant, musical interpreter, factotum, travelling companion, Boswell, collaborator, friend, quasi-adoptive son, even at times