Carpentier's Stravinsky: Rites and Wrongs

Despite the wealth, or as many critics have seen it, the welter of musical and musicological references which suffuse and on occasions threaten to swamp Alejo Carpentier’s writings, fictional and otherwise, the whole matter of music has received scant and largely unconvincing attention from his critics.1 A number of commentators rather precipitously jumped at the chance of highlighting the indubitable but equally undisguised links between El acoso and Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, whilst others have remarked upon certain rather loose parallelisms between the different forms which his fictional works have taken and those of Western classical music, especially the sonata and the symphony.2 In this case they have