igor fyodorovich stravinsky

1882-1971
Russian American composer, one of the most influential figures of music in the twentieth century.

Igor Stravinsky is often considered something of a revolutionary, in part based on the riotous reception of his ballet The Rite of Spring (see separate article). Stravinsky's career, however, suggests more evolution than revolution. Perhaps no other composer in this century - or any - has written in such a variety of styles. And it is the unique genius of Stravinsky that his musical personality is detectable in each of these styles.

Stravinsky came from a musical family, although his training was limited, reflecting his family's desire that he pursue studies in law. In the summer of 1902, a few months before his father's death, he obtained an introduction to the Russian composer Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov through one of Rimsky-Korsakov's sons, who was also a student at the university.

Rimsky-Korsakov was sufficiently interested in the young man's early attempts at composition to advise him not to enter the conservatory for academic training but to pursue his studies privately. This advice was followed. A year later Rimsky-Korsakov agreed to tutor him privately, mainly in instrumentation. The arrangement continued for about three years (1903-1906).

Stravinsky (far left) and Rimsky-Korsakov (second left), 1908

It was Stravinsky's habit to discuss his compositions with his mentor as they were planned and written. Rimsky-Korsakov arranged for several of these, including the Symphony in E Flat Major (1905-1907), to be performed at private or public concerts in St. Petersburg.

The last composition to be presented in this way was Fireworks (1908), a brief symphonic poem that Stravinsky intended as a wedding present for Rimsky-Korsakov's daughter. Rimsky-Korsakov died in the summer of 1908, before it could be performed. After his death the mourning pupil wrote a funeral dirge (1908) in memory of his master. It was performed in St. Petersburg the following season; the score is lost.

Stravinsky left the university in 1905. The following year he married his first cousin, Catherine Nossenko. They lived in two rooms of his family's apartment in St. Petersburg and spent their summers in the country at Ustilug in Volhynia, an area of Ukraine. A son (Theodore) was born to them in 1907 and a daughter (Ludmila) a year later.

Collaboration with Diaghilev and Ballets Russes

When Fireworks and an earlier orchestral piece, Scherzo fantastique (1907-08), were performed in St. Petersburg on Feb. 6, 1909, they were heard by the impresario Serge Diaghilev, who was then busy making preliminary arrangements for the summer season of his Ballets Russes to be held in Paris. He was so favourably impressed by Stravinsky's promise as a composer that he invited him to join his small group of artistic collaborators. For the 1909 ballet season Stravinsky was invited to orchestrate various pieces of ballet music, including two piano numbers by Frédéric Chopin for Les Sylphides. For the 1910 season, Diaghilev commissioned from him a new ballet score, The Firebird.

The next few years were a period of intensely close collaboration between the two men, for Diaghilev was anxious that all of Stravinsky's major new works should be mounted by his company. After the decisive success of The Firebird at the Paris Opéra (June 25, 1910), Stravinsky started to write a Konzertstück ("Concertpiece") for piano and orchestra. But, yielding to Diaghilev's arguments, he agreed to adapt the music he had already written to fit a new ballet scenario. This work, Petrushka, received its first performance during the Ballets Russes 1911 season in Paris (pictured left: Nijinsky, in costume for Petrushka, with Stravinsky).

Before this, Stravinsky had had the idea of writing a kind of primitive spring symphony to be called Great Sacrifice; here, too, Diaghilev persuaded him that it should be cast in the form of a ballet. The composition of The Rite of Spring (as it was finally called) was spread over two years (1911-13). The music of this dynamic score created a major scandal when the ballet had its first performance the Théâtre des Champs Élysées, Paris (May 29, 1913).

Stravinsky then reverted to the task of finishing a short opera based on the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen's tale The Nightingale, which he had started in 1908-09 but which had been interrupted by the commission of The Firebird. This opera was now requested by the Moscow Free Theatre, but when that new venture suddenly collapsed, Diaghilev saw his chance and, taking over the work, arranged for it to be produced as part of the Ballets Russes seasons in Paris and London in the summer of 1914.

That summer also marked the conception of a new ballet cantata to be called Les Noces (The Wedding), which Stravinsky decided to base on Russian peasant themes and customs. Had World War I not intervened, this new score might have been ready for production by Ballets Russes in 1915 or 1916. Although the actual composition was completed by 1917, the final form of the instrumentation was not decided until 1923.

Stravinsky's close connection with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes meant that during the five years 1910-14 he spent considerable part of his time outside Russia. He was usually in Paris for the company's summer seasons and occasionally followed them on tour to Rome, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, and London. He still managed to spend part of each summer in his Russian country home at Ustilug, the quiet atmosphere of which he found conducive to composition. His visits to St. Petersburg, however, became increasingly rare. The health of his family was precarious, and a tendency to tuberculosis made the climate of Switzerland attractive. His second son (Soulima) was born at Lausanne, Switz., in 1910, his second daughter (Milena) at Leysin in 1914. Parts of The Rite of Spring and The Nightingale were written at Clarens, Switz., in the intervening years, and the war years were spent entirely in Switzerland, first at Clarens and later at Morges.

These were years of isolation that ultimately led to years of exile, for as the war progressed, Stravinsky became cut off, not only from Russia but also from Ballets Russes - the European engagements of which had to be abandoned and replaced by an American tour - and from his music publishers, who had their headquarters in Berlin.

He tried to overcome these difficulties in various ways. He found a local publisher in Geneva for many of his wartime compositions. In collaboration with the Swiss novelist Charles Ferdinand Ramuz he created The Soldier's Tale (1918), an entertainment "to be read, played, and danced" that was intended to be played on tour by a small traveling theatre. The project collapsed after a successful first performance in Lausanne, owing to a sudden epidemic of Spanish influenza.

As soon as the war was over, Stravinsky decided to move from Switzerland and settle in France; during the next 20 years (1920-39) he lived in various places there - Biarritz, Nice, Voreppe, and Paris. These years were marked by an important change in his music - the abandonment of the Russian features of his earlier style and the adaptation of a Neoclassical idiom. Such a radical change cost him a great effort and only after several years of what he called "samplings, experiments, amalgamations" did he find his way to new works such as Oedipus Rex (1927) and the Symphony of Psalms (1930), capable of holding their own against the best of his earlier works.

In the early postwar years, Stravinsky's ties with Diaghilev and Ballets Russes were renewed. They were now on a much looser basis, however, than in the prewar years, for he saw that in the case of itinerant company, without a firm base, there could be no guarantee of permanence. The only new ballet commissioned by Diaghilev from Stravinsky was Pulcinella (1920), the score of which consisted of music by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi that was arranged by Stravinsky and adapted to a Neapolitan commedia dell'arte scenario. Apollon Musagète (1928) was the last new ballet of his to be mounted by Ballets Russes. The following year (1929) Diaghilev died, and his ballet company folded.

Main picture: Portrait of Stravinsky by Pablo Picasso