In an interview for the Paris Review, the writer Anthony Burgess once remarked: “I can’t understand the American literary block—as in Ellison or Salinger—unless it means that the blocked man isn’t forced economically to write.” If a lack of economic necessity can prevent an artist from writing, then one might infer the reverse and suggest that an artist’s “inspiration” can be prompted by the very prospect of money. This is contrary to the romantic image of an artist starving for his art in a garret and deriving his or her inspiration from adverse circumstances, an image that has always appealed more to the general public than it ever has to artists themselves (witness the example of Giacomo Puccini, whose romantic depiction of such starving, garret-bound artists in La Bohème was so successful financially that he never had to share their fate).

As we have seen in the case studies of this book, artists have often been keen to mythologize when talking about their work, preferring to leave monetary and social aspects out of the creative equation. It can be instructive here to compare two accounts from the same composer on the gestation of a specific work, one destined for posterity, the other not. When asked by Robert Craft what he meant by “the weight of an interval,” Stravinsky answered: