Igor Stravinsky

Composer

  • Born: June 17, 1882
  • Birthplace: Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov), Russia
  • Died: April 6, 1971
  • Place of death: New York, New York

Russian-born American composer

Summarizing and consummating the history of Western music, Stravinsky reintroduced principles of order and expanded the horizons of music in reaction against the growing chaos of late nineteenth century Romanticism. Stravinsky is considered one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century.

Area of achievement Music

Early Life

Igor Stravinsky (EE-gohr strah-VIHN-skee) was born in a small resort town some thirty miles west of St. Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire. His father, Fyodor, first basso with a St. Petersburg opera company, was also a gifted amateur painter and well-known bibliophile. He had a formidable temper; the home atmosphere was not warm, nor were young Igor’s school years happy ones, either emotionally or academically. His fluency in German and French owed as much to the household domestic staff and prolonged family vacations in Western Europe as to his schooling.

Stravinsky’s earliest musical memories were connected with country holidays when he heard the unison singing of peasant women returning from the fields. Piano lessons began when he was nine, later followed by study of harmony and counterpoint. The teenage Stravinsky absorbed the capital’s rich musical life concerts, opera, ballet. At his family’s insistence, Stravinsky entered St. Petersburg University to study law, but most of his time was devoted to musical studies under composer Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. Rimsky-Korsakov’s sons stood as Stravinsky’s best men when he married his childhood friend and first cousin, Ekaterina (Catherine) Nossenko, in 1906. His first composition to gain public attention, the orchestral fantasy Fireworks (1908), was in honor of the marriage of Rimsky-Korsakov’s daughter.

Turn-of-the-century Russia was experiencing an artistic renaissance, now called its Silver Age. This flowering was perhaps best embodied in the gifted group surrounding Sergei Diaghilev, who had launched a spectacularly successful career as the impresario of Russian culture in Paris. Diaghilev liked Stravinsky’s Fireworks and decided to invite his participation. Then, planning the 1910 Paris season for his Ballets Russes, the impresario wanted a new work based on the Russian folktale, “The Firebird.” Stravinsky completed the commission, and in May, 1910, went to Paris to help prepare the performance of the piece. The premiere was a triumph, and the twenty-eight-year-old composer was to remain a celebrity for sixty-one years.

Pictures of Stravinsky in 1910 are immediately recognizable to those who knew the man at eighty. At five feet two inches tall, he was a slender, wiry man with a forward-craning head suggesting his impatient and sometimes imperious nature. The face, narrow with a very prominent nose and ears and a neatly trimmed mustache, was dominated by the high forehead over his glasses and below a vanishing hairline. In dress, he was stylish, as might be expected of an intimate of the French designer Coco Chanel.

Stravinsky’s personality, like his music, was in stark contrast to the Romantic stereotype of the artist. His work habits, like his personal ones, were disciplined, precise, and methodical. His public manner was severe, elegant, and often acerbic. Typical was his response to someone informing him that the “great success” of a premiere would subsequently be “tremendous” were he to sanction minor changes. His reply was, “Satisfied with great success.”

Life’s Work

The Firebird (1910) marked the beginning of a new international existence for Stravinsky and his family. It was followed by two more landmark ballets staged by Diaghilev’s company: Petrushka (1911), based on traditional Russian puppet theater, and two years later, Stravinsky’s most famous work, Le Sacre du printemps (1913), known in English as The Rite of Spring. The ballet is based on pagan folklore evoking the sudden, violent advent of the northern Russian spring the most loved of Stravinsky’s childhood memories. The music is exotic, barbaric, dissonant, and still disturbing to the listener after many decades. Its Paris premiere remains one of the great scandals of musical history, for audience reaction was so vociferous that the music was barely audible. Some fifty people who disrobed in protest were arrested.

World War I curtailed European musical life, and Stravinsky’s ties with Russia (and the income from his Russian possessions) ended with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. From 1910 to 1920, the family resided mainly in Switzerland, and then, until 1939, in France. The most famous of Stravinsky’s works from the war years is The Soldier’s Tale (1918). Like most of his music until 1920, this piece, designed as a traveling show, was based on Russian folktales.

Stravinsky’s popular fame rests largely on these early works, but his growth as a composer was only beginning. Around 1923, Stravinsky turned to very different musical models as a source of inspiration. While musical modernism’s other avatar, the Austrian Arnold Schönberg, had undertaken radical experiments based on atonality and serialism, Stravinsky now undertook a reexamination of the “classical” eighteenth century and still earlier musical periods. The resulting compositions, such as Sonata for Piano (1924), inaugurated his “neoclassical” period, which extended for thirty years. Audiences that had responded enthusiastically to Stravinsky’s early, exotically flamboyant innovations were often dismayed.

Stravinsky increasingly appeared as a conductor and as a performer of his own work in part for financial reasons. For his tours, he composed a number of piano works, some of which were reserved for his own concert use. Contact with the United States began with a tour in 1925 and a commission for his classically oriented ballet Apollo Musagetes (1928), first performed at the Library of Congress three years later. Others of his neoclassical works are the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927), done in collaboration with Jean Cocteau, and the melodrama Perséphone (1934), done in collaboration with Nobel laureate André Gide. The composer’s reawakened religious feeling found major expression in the Symphony of Psalms (1930) commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This chef d’oeuvre was one of a growing number devoted to religious themes. Stravinsky’s American reputation was further enhanced by a festival dedicated to his work and that of choreographer George Balanchine at the Metropolitan Opera in 1937. The Card Party: A Ballet in Three Deals (1937) was commissioned for the occasion by Lincoln Kirstein, codirector of the newly formed American Ballet.

Stravinsky, well established in French cultural life and a French citizen since 1934, was troubled by the ominous political scene in Europe. Family tragedy augmented his forebodings when tuberculosis claimed his long-ill wife and eldest daughter. Stravinsky himself spent several months of 1939 in a sanatorium together with his remaining daughter, also tubercular. These somber events were, however, accompanied by others that indicated a brighter future. While working on his Symphony in C Major (1940) for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Stravinsky, still in the sanatorium, received news of his one-year appointment to the Charles Eliot Norton Chair at Harvard University.

In September, 1939, Stravinsky, age fifty-seven, arrived in his new homeland. He was soon joined by his close companion of nearly twenty years, Vera Sudeikin, whom he married in 1940 before establishing permanent residence in Los Angeles. They became U.S. citizens in 1945. Stravinsky quickly entered the mainstream of American life. Shortly before his arrival, the composer had reluctantly agreed to Walt Disney’s proposal to use portions of The Rite of Spring to accompany the early, “primeval” section of the Disney classic Fantasia (1940). Even more surprising was a Barnum and Bailey commission for Circus Polka (1942), a short ballet for fifty elephants performed under the big top. Other popular ventures were the ballet sequence done for Broadway producer Billy Rose’s revue The Seven Lively Arts (1944), and the Ebony Concerto (1945) for a Woody Herman Carnegie Hall performance. Stravinsky also continued his more serious work: Symphony in Three Movements (1946), the ballet Orpheus (1947), once again with Balanchine, and his longest single work, the opera The Rake’s Progress (1951), inspired by William Hogarth’s engravings and done in conjunction with poet W. H. Auden.

Stravinsky met the young American conductor Robert Craft in the late 1940’s. Craft, who had a great cultural breadth and was a specialist in contemporary music, especially the serialists Schönberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern, soon became a member of the Stravinsky household and, eventually, the composer’s alter ego. Craft’s presence contributed to the launching of the third phase of Stravinsky’s musical development at seventy-one. The music of the earlier Russian and neoclassical periods had been experimental, sometimes radical, but always rooted in traditional tonality. The composer’s shift to an atonal, serial mode of composition again bewildered much of his audience. New works followed, all in the serial mode: the ballet Agon (1953), the religious choral works Canticum Sacrum (1956) and Threni (1958), and Movements (1960) for piano and orchestra. The Flood (1962), Stravinsky’s last dramatic work, was written for television.

Stravinsky, at eighty, still active as a composer and touring conductor, was a living legend. In 1962, he was a White House guest of John and Jacqueline Kennedy, and later that year, he accepted an invitation from the Soviet Union for an emotional visit to the country he had left a half century before. His last compositions were completed in 1966: the song The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, dedicated to his wife Vera, and the Requiem Canticles, heard at the services following his death on April 6, 1971. He was buried in his beloved Venice.

Significance

Stravinsky’s career summarizes and culminates twentieth century music. His music, which includes more than one hundred compositions, spans sixty years, during much of which he was the world’s best-known serious composer.

Through all three, radically different phases of his musical career, certain Stravinskian constants are evident: shifting, syncopated rhythms; exotic, highly colored instrumental voicings; a relatively high degree of dissonance that was, until the last period, always based on a perceptible basic tonality. The music is marked by precision and emotional coolness. Stravinsky held that composition is a discipline, and the act of composition is the solution of a problem according to certain rules, though the rules may change. Although his compositions were often integrated with other artistic media, Stravinsky was adamant about the absolute independence and integrity of music: It means and expresses nothing beyond itself. Stravinsky spent half his creative life in the United States, and his ties with the country’s music were deep. In his early European music, there are traces of quintessential American forms such as ragtime and jazz. Stravinsky entered more deeply into American popular consciousness than any other composer, even among those with little interest in serious music. In the late 1950’s, Stravinsky and his collaborator Craft began publishing a series of “conversations” that were eventually gathered and published in six books. These witty, elegant, and often caustic recollections and reflections of an original, iconoclastic mind brought the composer the admiration of a wide circle of readers. Often displaced by the turbulent events of his century, Stravinsky found a permanent home in the United States, where he reshaped the musical and cultural life not only of America but also of the world.

Bibliography

Druskin, Mikhail S. Igor Stravinsky: His Life, Works, and Views. Translated by Martin Cooper. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. A fine study of Stravinsky’s musical development by a Soviet musicologist. Especially strong on Russian aspects.

Routh, Francis. Stravinsky. London: J. M. Dent, 1975. This concise, well-informed work is probably the best starting point for the novice. The first half sketches the life, and the second analyzes the music by categories. Appendixes include a useful calendar of Stravinsky’s life, a catalog of his music, a somewhat erratic “Who’s Who?” and a bibliography.

Stravinsky, Igor. The Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947. The best personal statement of Stravinsky’s musical aesthetic.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Stravinsky: An Autobiography. New York: W. W. Norton, 1962. A rather austere and impersonal account of the first half of Stravinsky’s professional life.

Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft. Conversations with Igor Stravinsky. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959. The first of the six Stravinsky-Craft collaborations, discussed in this essay.

Stravinsky, Vera, and Robert Craft. Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978. A vast treasure house of Stravinskiana lovingly compiled by the composer’s wife and longtime associate. An excellent biography. Accurate, judicious, and entertaining.

Walsh, Stephen. Stravinsky, a Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1882-1934. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Some critics have called Walsh’s two-volume biography the definitive work on Stravinsky. In addition to providing an exhaustive account of Stravinsky’s life, Walsh also provides details about Stravinsky’s compositions, recordings, performances, and the reception of his music. The first volume chronicles the composer’s life from his birth through the end of his life in Paris.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Stravinsky, the Second Exile: France and America, 1934-1971. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. The second volume traces Stravinsky’s life in the United States.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. The New Grove Stravinsky. New York: Grove, 2002. A smaller, more concise work than the two-volume biography by Walsh. Contains essays about Stravinsky’s life and music, as well as a list of his works and a bibliography.

White, Eric Walter. Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works. 2d ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. A basic reference work combining a rather mechanical biography and an excellent “Register of Works” giving detailed information on all aspects of the compositions. Essential for serious students.

1901-1940: May 19, 1909: Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes Astounds Paris; June 25, 1910: The Firebird Premieres in Paris; May 29, 1913: The Rite of Spring Stuns Audiences; 1921-1923: Schoenberg Develops His Twelve-Tone System; October 18, 1923: Stravinsky Completes His Wind Octet.

1941-1970: November 20, 1946: First Performance by Balanchine and Kirstein’s Ballet Society; September 10, 1951: Kurosawa’s Rashomon Wins the Grand Prize at Venice; June 18, 1955: Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître Premieres.