By RICHARD TARUSKIN

No composer of classical music was ever more attuned to the power of publicity, or courted it more ardently, than Igor Stravinsky. A celebrity by the age of 30, he learned the art of fame from his early mentor Sergei Diaghilev, the master press manipulator of his day.
The earliest “typical” Stravinsky interviews - charming, crafty, hyperarticulate, unerringly self-serving - appeared in St. Petersburg newspapers in 1912, and the stream, or torrent, continued unabated for nearly six decades, in dozens of languages and on every continent but Antarctica. The last of them actually appeared almost three months after his death, in The New York Review of Books on July 1, 1971.
By then it was well known that Stravinsky’s public words had long been assisted by his close associate, the conductor Robert Craft, who kept the words coming long after Stravinsky’s physical infirmities precluded his participating in their collaboration.
Surely it is obvious that the deluge of verbiage was meant to hide the man from the world rather than to expose him. Stravinsky, whose music waged unending war on the assumption that art was a medium of self-revelation, hugely enjoyed the game of misleading the curious. One favorite ploy was to invent a “fact” or manufacture a recollection.
And yet an unprejudiced listener can learn a lot about Stravinsky from his music, especially in programs like one presented recently at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, in which five singers performed Stravinsky’s complete output of songs. For in that lifetime of work there lurks a true - if partial and implicit - autobiography.
Solo song was not a major genre for Stravinsky. The paucity is significant in itself. When we think of art song, we think pre-eminently of intimate disclosure, and intimate disclosure was hardly Stravinsky’s specialty.
Besides, his father, Fyodor Stravinsky - a stern, unbending figure toward whom the future composer harbored complicated feelings - was a famous singer. Any wonder then that Stravinsky became the greatest of all composers of ballet: the one music-theatrical genre that excludes singers- Or that when he finally did write a great opera, it would be about King Oedipus?
But brief though it is, the list of Stravinsky’s songs is unusually comprehensive. It covers all phases of his career and includes both his earliest extant work and his last finished composition.
The last piece, a setting of Edward Lear’s “Owl and the Pussycat,” was composed nearly 65 years later, in the fall of 1966, and is lovingly dedicated to the composer’s second wife, Vera, who had learned the poem when studying English.
There are also songs dedicated to Stravinsky’s father and to each of his children. Most poignant is a lullaby composed in 1917 for his daughter Ludmila (or Mikushka, as the endearing text calls her), who died of tuberculosis at 29 in 1938.
Many of these are minor works. But there is one spate of songs that, taken collectively, signify a major point in Stravinsky’s musical development. These are the four sets that he composed in Switzerland during and immediately after World War I. They were the work of a stateless person, but they are the most intensely Russian pieces Stravinsky (or perhaps anyone) ever composed.
Homesick and imbued with a nationalist fervor he had never felt at home, he became obsessed with Russian folk verses of a kind that had been widely published by 19th-century ethnographers but had never been of much interest to composers of art songs. But Stravinsky - inspired by the work of the painters associated with Diaghilev, who found not only subject matter but also stylistic models in folk art -saw in Russian folk verses the foundations of a more authentically Russian art music than his teacher’s generation had achieved.
One of the ways he did this was to notice that the verbal accent in Russian folk singing was movable. It could fall on any syllable of any word, leading to all kinds of “wrong” accentuations that produced delightful rhythmic and metrical effects.
One need only compare these enchanting songs, based on distorted folk texts, with Stravinsky’s conventionally expressive and rather pallid earlier songs. All of a sudden, his music springs from watery pastels into blazing Technicolor.
Stravinsky continued to set words this way for the rest of his life. In languages other than Russian, his willful misaccentuations are often taken as errors. (Rarely does any reviewer of “The Rake’s Progress” refrain from setting the poor old Russian straight about English pronunciation.) But in Stravinsky’s manipulation of words he asserted the sovereign power of music, and he did it first in his songs.