Igor Stravinsky (1882 - 1971) was a Russian-born composer, conductor and pianist, later a French and then an American citizen, and one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century. [1] He first came to international attention with the ballets written for Sergei Diaghilev, including The Rite of Spring, and went on to work in sharply contrasting neoclassical and serial idioms over a career spanning six decades. [2]
Early life and training
Stravinsky was born in June 1882 in Oranienbaum, now Lomonosov, near St Petersburg. His father was a leading bass at the Mariinsky Theatre, and the household was immersed in the operatic repertoire. [1]
He studied law at St Petersburg University while pursuing music privately. From 1902 until the older composer's death in 1908 he was a pupil of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, from whom he acquired the command of orchestration that marks his earliest scores. [2]
The Ballets Russes
Sergei Diaghilev heard Stravinsky's orchestral music in 1909 and commissioned a ballet for his company in Paris. The Firebird (1910) was an immediate success, and Petrushka (1911) confirmed his reputation with its bitonal harmony and vivid fairground scoring. [1]
The third of the ballets, The Rite of Spring, depicted a pagan sacrificial rite in ancient Russia. Its premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, provoked an uproar in the auditorium that has become one of the best-known episodes in modern cultural history. [3]
Within a year the work was being performed in concert to acclaim, and it entered the repertoire as a defining document of musical modernism. [3]
Exile and neoclassicism
The First World War stranded Stravinsky in Switzerland, and the Russian Revolution cut off his estates and income. He turned to smaller forces, producing the touring theatre piece The Soldier's Tale and the choral ballet Les Noces. [2]
With Pulcinella (1920), based on music attributed to Pergolesi, he began the neoclassical phase that occupied him for three decades. Works such as the Octet, the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, Apollon musagète, the Symphony of Psalms and the Symphony in Three Movements applied clarified textures and eighteenth-century forms to a distinctly modern harmonic language. The period closed with the opera The Rake's Progress (1951), to a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. [1]
America and the serial works
Stravinsky took French citizenship in 1934 and moved to the United States in 1939, delivering the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, published as Poetics of Music. He settled in Hollywood and became an American citizen in 1945. [2]
In the 1950s, encouraged by the conductor Robert Craft, he adopted serial technique, an idiom he had long resisted. Canticum Sacrum, the ballet Agon, Threni and the late Requiem Canticles applied twelve-tone methods without abandoning his characteristic rhythm and instrumental colour. [1]
Later life and legacy
Stravinsky conducted and recorded his own music extensively and published conversations with Craft. He died in New York City on 6 April 1971 and was buried on the cemetery island of San Michele in Venice, close to Diaghilev's grave. [2]
His influence extends across composers of every subsequent school, and his rhythmic innovations reached beyond concert music into jazz and film scoring. Honours included the Léonie Sonning Music Prize, the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal and multiple Grammy Awards. [1]
