STRAVINSKY

Igor Stravinsky is one of the greatest and most cosmopolitan figures in 20th-century music. During his long life, his music underwent several profound changes, and his influence on other composers, as well as on artists and choreographers, has been enormous.

Stravinsky was Russian by birth. He was born at Oranienbaum, not far from St. Petersburg, on June 17, 1882. His father, Fyodor, was principal bass singer in the Imperial Opera House in St. Petersburg, and the family lived in an apartment near the canal, which was also convenient for the theatre. Stravinsky was the third of four sons. The children were often taken to the opera and ballet, and they also heard their father rehearsing his roles at home. At the age of 11, at a gala opera performance, Stravinsky glimpsed Tchaikovsky only weeks before the famous composer died.

Stravinsky went to school in St. Petersburg, where he started taking piano lessons. This led to later lessons in harmony and counterpoint, and as a teenager Stravinsky became interested in improvisation and composition. After leaving school he studied law at St. Petersburg University, but his heart was never in it. He discovered that the composer Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov was the father of a fellow-student, and this led to a meeting with the composer, who took an interest in the young musician and agreed to supervise his musical studies. Stravinsky continued his law studies, graduating in 1905. At the same time he was starting to compose, and received invaluable advice and instruction in orchestration from Rimsky-Korsakov. Early in 1906 he married his cousin, Katerina Nossenko.

Stravinsky started composing in earnest, always discussing his work with Rimsky-Korsakov. His Symphony in E flat was performed in private in 1907. Two other early works, the Scherzo fantastique, and a dazzling orchestral piece called Feu d’artifice or Fireworks, were performed at a concert in St. Petersburg and heard by the impresario Sergey Diaghilev. Diaghilev formed his Russian Ballet company, which he was planning to take to France.

“THE FIREBIRD” AND THE BALLETS RUSSES

Diaghilev commissioned Stravinsky to compose a score for his new ballet, The Firebird. Stravinsky wrote the music in 1909 and the ballet was staged in Paris in May 1910. It was an immediate success and made the composer famous. In Paris, Stravinsky was surrounded by a galaxy of brilliant dancers, choreographers, artists, and designers. Other composers active in Paris at the time included Claude DEBUSSY and Maurice RAVEL. It now seemed that Stravinsky’s future lay in Paris with Diaghilev’s ballet company, so he brought over his wife and children to be with him.

Igor Stravinsky at the age of 76, conducting a rehearsal of his work in London in 1958.

Stravinsky wrote three major ballet scores for Diaghilev at this time, and they remain his most famous and popular works. The Firebird itself was inspired by a Russian fairy tale about a fabulous bird which helps the dashing Prince Ivan destroy the kingdom of the evil King Kastchei and rescue a bevy of beautiful maidens. Stravinsky’s exciting score still retains much Romantic feeling, though parts of it, notably “King Kastchei’s Infernal Dance,” strike a highly original note. The music is best known today as an orchestral suite.

Petrushka followed in 1911. Set in a fairground in old St. Petersburg, it centres on the figure of a puppet, Petrushka, who is tormented by his love for a doll and jealous of his puppet rival. Stravinsky’s music for Petrushka was advanced compared to anything he had written so far; his innovative harmonies and striking instrumental effects announcing the arrival of a brilliant new composer.

“THE RITE OF SPRING”

Then, on May 29, 1913, came the premiere, at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris, of The Rite of Spring (known in French as Le sacre du printemps). The setting is the sudden and quite violent arrival of spring in Russia as the composer remembered it, with the ice cracking in the rivers and lakes, and with deep stirrings in the frozen ground. The action centres on Stravinsky’s interpretation of the pagan rites and the sacrifice of a young virgin girl connected with the coming of spring. Nothing like either the dancing or the music had ever been seen or heard before. It was the music, especially, with its relentless, explosive rhythms and its shattering harmonies, that provoked the notorious riot in the audience. Years later, the usually matter-of-fact Stravinsky spoke quite mystically about the music. “I heard, and I wrote down what I heard,” he said. “I was the vessel through which Le Sacre passed.” It certainly made him the most notorious composer living and The Rite of Spring is regarded as the major work that set 20th-century music ablaze.

World War I, for its duration, put an end to the extravagant productions of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and Stravinsky, now living in Switzerland, turned to more modest projects. His witty stage piece, The Soldier’s Tale, dating from these war years, also heralded the neoclassical post-war period.

NEOCLASSICISM

Neoclassicism was a reaction against the pre-war music of such composers as Gustav MAHLER, heavy with emotion and written on a large and complex scale. It was also a reaction to the horrors of the war itself. Stravinsky returned to Paris in 1920, where he shared the generally spare, sometimes satirical, sometimes jazz-inspired spirit of the period with Ravel and the young group of French composers known as “Les Six.” His new ballet score for Diaghilev, Pulcinella, was based on music by Giovanni Pergolesi and other 18th-century composers, and therefore was almost literally neoclassical in content and style. His Octet for wind instruments (1923) is a fine and disciplined piece of chamber music. The opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927), with a libretto by the French writer Jean Cocteau, taken from the classical Greek drama by Sophocles, is stark and severe.

At about this time, Stravinsky underwent a spiritual crisis and rejoined the Russian Orthodox Church. This had an inevitable effect on his music. The Orthodox church retains a traditional and solemn chant directly linked to the Gregorian chant of early Christianity. This can be traced in Stravinsky’s sacred choral works of 1926–34.

THE AMERICAN YEARS

During the 1920s and 1930s Stravinsky began forging links with the United States. He wrote his Symphony of Psalms as part of the 1930 celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This is a setting of three Biblical psalms for chorus and orchestra, and the music manages to sound both marvellously archaic and modern at the same time. He made several tours of the U.S. at this time, conducting his own works.

The late 1930s were a tragic period for Stravinsky, as an outbreak of tuberculosis killed his mother, his wife, and his elder daughter. The shock meant that he felt he no longer had any ties with Europe, and in 1939, on the eve of World War II, he sailed for America.

The first event of his American years was a series of lectures in 1939 at Harvard University on the poetics of music, later published as Poétique Musicale. He later settled in Hollywood and was married again in 1940 to Vera de Bosset, whom he had met in Paris. He and his new wife then applied for American citizenship. One of the first important works of this time was the Symphony in C (1940), written to mark the 50th anniversary of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Stravinsky followed this in 1945 with the Symphony in Three Movements, a powerful work with echoes of The Rite of Spring; and with his Ebony Concerto, written for the jazz clarinetist Woody Herman.

Stravinsky returned to the neoclassical mode with a masterly opera, The Rake’s Progress (1951), inspired by the paintings of the 18th-century English artist William Hogarth, which Stravinsky had seen in the Chicago Art Institute. The story, which describes the career of a debauched aristocrat who gambles and drinks his way to eventual madness, gave the composer scope for imitating other works, echoing 18th-century sources, and dramatic action. The libretto was written by the poet W. H. Auden. This was Stravinsky’s first long operatic score, and he took three years to complete the composition. It had its first performance in Venice in 1951, at the International Festival of Contemporary Music, and has been a popular part of the operatic repertoire ever since. This work can be seen as the culmination of Stravinsky’s neoclassical period. While the opera is constructed in a formal framework, the music is exuberant and emotionally expressive.

FLIRTATION WITH SERIALISM

In 1948, Stravinsky met the younger American conductor and scholar Robert Craft, who was to become his assistant and eventual biographer. This association opened up yet another new chapter in Stravinsky’s creative life. Craft encouraged him to start composing in the 12-tone or serial style of SCHOENBERG, who was his neighbour in Hollywood. The ballet Agon (1957) is one of the major works of this serialist period. Craft also collaborated with Stravinsky in the production of several books, created as interviews with the composer and including parts of his correspondence over the years.

In 1953, Stravinsky met the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who was giving a series of poetry readings in America. Stravinsky was impressed with Thomas’s poetry and planned to ask him for a libretto for an opera. Thomas died in New York before the project could get off the ground, and instead Stravinsky composed an elegy, In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954), which included a setting to music of Thomas’s poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night.”

Stravinsky was now busy conducting and recording for posterity much of his own music. In 1962, at age 80, he was a guest at the White House, and then paid a long overdue and triumphant return visit to the Soviet Union. He gave three concerts in Moscow and two in Leningrad, and he, de Bosset and Craft were received by Khrushchev in the Kremlin.

Stravinsky died in New York City on April 6, 1971. He was buried, according to his wishes, on the island cemetery of San Michele, near Venice, close to the grave of Diaghilev, the man who first recognised his genius so many years before. Stravinsky’s amazing creative journey, from the Late Romantic glitter of The Firebird to the austerity of his final compositions, took in every important aspect of 20th-century music over 60 years.

He has been compared with his close contemporary, the artist Pablo Picasso. Both had the chameleon-like ability to adapt their style to changing times while remaining completely themselves. Stravinsky’s music, for instance, is always instantly recognisable from its nervous, restless rhythms and its astringent harmonies.

Richard Trombley

FURTHER READING

Griffiths, Paul. Stravinsky
(New York: Schirmer Books, 1993);

White, Eric Walter. Stravinsky: A Critical
Survey 1882–1946
(Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997).

SUGGESTED LISTENING