Stravinsky, especially after the scandalous 1913 Paris premiere of his revolutionary ballet Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) was labelled the “enfant terrible” of classical music of his time. The famous auction house Christie’s called Souza the “enfant terrible” of Modern Indian art. The enduring formative impression of Roman Catholicism in Souza’s Goan childhood on his art is well-documented. Yashodhara Dalmia, in the chapter A Passion for the Human Figure: Francis Newton Souza of the above-mentioned book The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, quotes him extensively on the subject. Although Stravinsky drifted away in his adult years from the Russian Orthodox Church he had been born into, his homesickness while in Europe drew him back to the faith, “a portable piece of Russia”. An especially moving ceremony at the Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua in 1926 while on a concert tour made him formally rejoin the Church. A slew of sacred compositions followed, most famously his Symphony of Psalms for chorus and orchestra (1930, rev 1948) and Canticum Sacrum for tenor, baritone, chorus and orchestra (1955). Souza and Stravinsky also had inspirational subject matter (in addition to Christianity, of course) that overlapped. Oedipus Rex, based on Sophocles’ tragedy, was a Stravinsky opera-oratorio (1927). The inspiration for Souza’s 1961 depiction of the tragic king was (as he himself explained) his own irrational feeling of guilt that his father died soon after his birth, and the disturbing revelation of surreptitiously watching his mother bathe through a hole he bored in the door. Imagine what Freud (Sigmund, not Lucian) would have made of that! It certainly puts his obsession with the female anatomy in perspective.
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