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The final chapter covers the last ten years of Nabokov’s life: his fifth and last marriage, to photographer Dominique Cibiel; his friendship with Robert Oppenheimer; his association with the Aspen Institute; his renewed interest in teaching; his close ties with Stravinsky until the composer’s death in 1971; his involvement as adviser to festivals in Iran and Israel, especially; and the resumption of his career as composer, with such works as the Cello variations he wrote for Rostropovitch; his Third Symphony, premiered by Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic; and the opera Love’s Labour’s Lost, on a libretto by Auden and Chester Kallman, premiered in Brussels in 1973; and various abortive projects with Balanchine. While anxious to make sure that the Congress’s legacy would not be misinterpreted, he mostly left out of his autobiography, Bagázh, which came out in 1975, reserving the material for another volume, which he had only begun to draft at the time of his death in April 1978.

Nabokov, who married Natalie Shakhovskoi in 1928, was propelled by Ode to the front rank of the artistic avant-garde with the wide international success of his First Symphony of 1929. This chapter deals, in particular, with his friendships and relationships with contemporary musicians, especially Stravinsky, with whom he quarrelled over his rivalry with Arthur Lourié, as well as Roger Désormière, Wanda Landowska, who tried to convince him to write for the harpsichord, and Sergey Prokofiev, to whom he was particularly close until 1932. In 1933 Balanchine’s Ballets 1933 premiered his oratorio Job, on a text by Maritain.

Nabokov’s first opera, on a libretto he wrote jointly with Spender, was premiered, as Rasputin’s End, in Louisville, in 1958, and, in a revised and expanded version, in Cologne the following year. In addition to the long genesis of the work (also covered in the previous chapter), this section discusses his other two important works of the period, the cantata Symboli chrestiani and the Pasternak Songs. It describes his second trip to India (and Burma), the main outcome of which was his meeting with the French Indianist Alain Daniélou. On the CCF side, he spoke at the Future of Freedom conference in 1955 and, following the crushing of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, he played a key role, with the help of Mehuhin and Dorati, in the establishment of the Philharmonia Hungarica, an orchestra regrouping exiled musicians who had fled their country.

This opening chapter presents the Nabokov family and evokes Nabokov’s childhood, from his birth in 1903 in what is now Belarus to the family’s departure for St. Petersburg in 1911. His parents being separated, those years were spent with the family of his mother, née Falz-Fein, on the estate of Lubcza, on the Niemen river, and in the Ukraine, where his uncle Frederick Falz-Fein had founded what is generally considered the first biosphere, Askania-Nova.

Nabokov left France in 1933 to lecture at the Barnes Foundation. Shortly afterward, his ballet Union Pacific, on a scenario by poet Archibald MacLeish, the first ballet on an American theme, triumphed in a choreography by Massine. Nabokov’s friendships in New York included photographers Cartier-Bresson and Beaton and composer Elliott Carter, to whom he always remained close. In 1936, after visiting his mother in Nazi Germany, he took up a position as music professor at Wells College, in upstate New York.

This chapter is focused on the transnational influences of Japanese music during the Cold War and on music’s role in U.S. cultural diplomacy efforts aimed at Japan. This includes examples of numerous American jazz musicians (David Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Herbie Mann) who were sent to Japan and who created musical “impressions” of their experience. A primary focus in on the 1961 Tokyo East-West Music Encounter organized by Nicolas Nabokov and attended by multiple American composers (Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, Colin McPhee) and scholars (Robert Garfias). The chapter then details the broad influence of gagaku on European (Messiaen, Stockhausen, Xenakis) and American composers, focusing particularly on Alan Hovhaness. Experimental composers, such as Richard Teitelbaum, inspired by John Cage’s engagement with Zen also turned toward Japan. The chapter concludes with an extended discussion of the role of Japanese music and Japanese composers (particularly Toru Takemitsu) in the career of Roger Reynolds.

This chapter outlines the known facts about Carter’s life and tracks the reception history of his music. Carter grew up in a comfortable upper middle class New York household and was groomed to take over the successful importing business founded by his grandfather. His family gave him piano lessons but otherwise discouraged his pursuit of music which only began in earnest when he was in high school and first met Charles Ives. Even after that meeting, Carter studied literature, not music, as a Harvard undergraduate, and only received a full musical education when he went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. This delayed development cast Carter into relative obscurity until the age of forty and critical recognition only came a decade later when he was awarded the first of two Pulitzer Prizes. With the arrival of post-modernism, there was a critical reaction against Carter’s music in the USA, tempered, toward the very end of his life, with some appreciation of the clarity of his very late works.

This chapter focuses on Henry Cowell's life and musical career during the Cold War. In August 1961, as East Berliners fled to West Berlin by the thousands daily, the East German authorities walled in their portion of the city. With West Berlin isolated deep inside East Germany and likely to wither away, only massive subsidies prevented it from being depopulated. In 1962, Nicolas Nabokov was appointed Adviser on International Cultural Affairs to the Berlin Senate. Nabokov was eager to reenergize Berlin's cultural life. The Berlin Senate decided to produce a huge music festival in the spring of 1963, and the United States' Berlin Mission guaranteed American participants all costs other than international travel. Henry, invited by Nabokov, decided to participate in the Berlin festival. Henry also toured Iceland and Sweden. In Berlin he suffered from digitalis poisoning, but recovered in time to record his autobiographical talk for the Radio in the American Sector.

This chapter focuses on Henry Cowell's trip to Asia in the spring of 1961. In November 1960, Nicolas Nabokov, secretary general of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, invited Henry to a week-long conference in Tokyo, the opening event of an “East-West Music Encounter” that would continue with three weeks of concerts by some of the world's most prominent traditional musicians and Western classical artists. Then UNESCO asked him to speak in Tehran at an international symposium on “the preservation of traditional forms of the learned and popular music of the Orient and the Occident.” Henry accepted both invitations, setting aside a few days in Hong Kong to relax midway. One controversial question was whether the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) indirectly sponsored Henry and Sidney Cowell's world tour, but Henry was a perfect example of what the CIA sought: a former communist sympathizer who symbolized American artistic freedom.