“Coco & Igor”… A Passionate Affair…
For… a brief…
Interlude…
Coco Chanel… and…
Igor Stravinsky…
Had an… affair…
It was… 1920…
A dangerous… liaison…
Stravinsky… was a married man…
His wife… Katerina… (Katia)… a gifted musician… bore her husband’s infidelity with a mixture of… “magnanimity, bitterness, and compassion”…
Watching the film “Coco & Igor“… late at night… I empathized greatly with Katia… but was mesmerized… by the passion of Stravinsky and Chanel…
Igor Fiodorovitch Stravinsky… came from a Polish noble family…
A Russian… he later became a French and American composer, pianist, and conductor… and was reputed to be one of the most influential composers of the 20th century…
Known to be a lonely and reclusive figure… he once said…
“I never came across anyone who had any real attraction for me.“
Not until he met… the legendary designer and artistic kindred spirit… Coco Chanel…
The lovers first met in 1913… at the Paris première of the Ballet Russes‘… “Le Sacre du Printemps“… for which Stravinsky wrote the music… and which was choreographed by Vaslav Nijinski. Seven years later… Stravinsky and his family were invited by Chanel to stay at her plush villa outside Paris… having fled post-revolutionary Russia…
He… composed…
She… designed…
It was a relationship that was combustible… passionate… sometimes cruel… inexplicably moody… divine… brief… yet… life enhancing…
The two lovers… never lost their seductive passion for each other… they complimented one another… and were according to Plato…
“Ideal lovers as two halves of an original being… who have reunited…“
Chanel and Stravinsky… embodied cool restrained harmony… but conflicted with their equally haunting discord…
I was… entranced…
Fascinated…
After flashbacks in the film from the Second World War… troops… women working in munition factories… Lenin lecturing an enthralled crowd…
Chanel… un-scarred… her fortunes unaffected by the horror of a shocked post-war Europe… made a breathtaking entrance at a party for Russian exiles…
To which Diaghilev… commented…
“She makes even grief… seem chic“…
Stunning… draped in one of her black evening creations…
Coco Chanel… commented…
“Great loves too… must be endured“…
I… couldn’t…
Agree…
More…
a.