"Passport to Paris is one of the great neglected memoirs of the 20th-century arts. The cosmopolitan composer Vernon Duke, born Vladimir Dukelsky, succeeded not only in living a mesmerizing life but also in telling his story with incomparable novelistic flair. A sampling of Duke's California poetry augments the allure of an essential republication." --Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise and Wagnerism
"Passport to Paris would qualify as a legendary autobiography except that its long absence rendered it largely forgotten. Its reemergence amounts to a literary and musical correction. Amid accounts of eruptions and fashions on three continents, Vernon Duke explains his irregular ears and provides casual access to the Gershwins, a tingling snapshot of Ethel Waters's opening in Cabin in the Sky, two memorably bandaged fingers--pudgy in Diaghilev's case, worshipped in Stravinsky's--and a sentence that begins: 'Following mother's death and the war, I lost much of my notorious foppishness...' A treasurable bonus is the sheaf of poems uncovered and translated by Boris Dralyuk--poems, not verse or lyrics, though 'Arizona' thirsts for music." --Gary Giddins, author of Visions of Jazz: The First Century
Passport to Paris is a witty, pleasantly chatty, richly detailed memoir of a life in emigration and of a dual career in the "serious" and "popular" music worlds. It provides one of the most vivid and refreshingly buoyant accounts of the perilous exodus from the collapsed Russian Empire undertaken by some two million people during the late 1910s and early 1920s, and also includes rare intimate portraits of major figures in 20th-century music, from Sergei Prokofiev to the Gershwin brothers.
This edition features a new Introduction by Boris Dralyuk as well as poems Duke wrote in California in the 1960s, here translated from the Russian by Dralyuk, that offer a glimpse of the last happy decade of Duke's life.
