For some reason, the history of creative eras often forms around a central duo of artists who are not only giants in themselves but sometimes contrasting embodiments of the time: Bach and Handel in the musical baroque, Mozart and Haydn in the classical period, Picasso and Matisse in modern painting. In modern music, it was Stravinsky and Schoenberg. For most of his career Stravinsky was the more popular of the two, his work moving quickly into the mainstream repertoire (though he got his share of slings and arrows). Schoenberg was the scary and controversial one, who can still rouse bitter debates.
In all his manifestations, whether the surface of the style was voluptuous or austere, Stravinsky was an artist of great focus and clarity. Here’s an experiment: line up the following pieces of his and listen to the first minute or two of each one: Pastorale, The Firebird, Petrushka, Le sacre du printemps, Les noces, L’histoire du soldat, Symphonies of Wind Instruments, Pulcinella, Symphony of Psalms, Agon. As you’ll notice, the stylistic range is so vast it’s almost shocking. What they have in common, however, is that they all immediately define their sound worlds, from the Russian pastels of the early Pastorale, the bustling carnival scene of Petrushka, the keening high bassoon of Sacre, the exotic wailing and chanting of Les noces, all the way to the trumpet fanfares and chattering basses of Agon. Stravinsky’s career formed a record of kaleidoscopic transformations informed by a single creative temperament.
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum near Saint Petersburg, son of a famous operatic bass. He studied piano in his youth but at first showed no particular inclination to music. He got a degree in law and philosophy in Saint Petersburg while playing piano on the side. By then he was studying with the Russian orchestral master Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, who developed in Stravinsky one of the most original imaginations for instrumental color in history. Brilliant orchestration is a Russian specialty; to that tradition Stravinsky would add what he learned from Debussy and Ravel, two superb colorists. The kind of budding personality Stravinsky had as a student is seen in the sweetly undulant little Pastorale from 1907 (originally for piano, later a small group).
Talent aside, it was really a stroke of luck that made Stravinsky’s career. In 1909 the ballet impresario Sergey Diaghilev happened to hear his orchestral Scherzo fantastique at a Saint Petersburg concert. Impressed, Diaghilev hired Stravinsky for some arrangements, then in 1910 commissioned him for a full-length ballet. Stravinsky was twenty-eight; the ballet was The Firebird. Just before the Paris premiere Diaghilev was talking to somebody and pointed across the room to Stravinsky, saying something to the effect of: “Take a look at that young man. A week from now he’s going to be famous.” He was right. The ballet proved a sensation, likewise the music. This joining of Diaghilev’s revolutionary Ballets Russes with its dazzling costume and scenic designers and a dynamic young Russian composer would have historic results.
The story of a Firebird and a sorcerer was taken from Russian folktales. Firebird begins with basses whispering an enigmatic theme, muttering trombones, a slithery texture of string harmonics. It already sounds like nothing else. Stravinsky’s music paints the story in polychrome colors, in twitterings and surgings. In the dance of the wizard Koschey there is a hair-raising rhythmic intensity that would only intensify in Stravinsky’s later music. To this day Firebird remains his most popular work. In his old age somebody offered him what today would be the better part of a million dollars to write another piece like it. Stravinsky declined. “It would cost me more,” he said.
In those years he was absolutely on fire. In 1911 came another work for the Ballets Russes, Petrushka. The story was largely Stravinsky’s: Petrushka, a traditional puppet seen at Russian carnivals, is brought to life by an evil magician and suffers at his hands. At the premiere it proved if anything a still bigger sensation than Firebird. In the title role was the legendary dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. The music is a fantastically varied canvas, beginning with the bustling carnival and including a ballerina, a dancing bear, a hurdy-gurdy with a broken note, delicious extended solos for flute and trumpet, stretches of irresistible sonic delight from the orchestra. In what otherwise might feel disjointed, part of the consistency of the piece is that all of it is based on a single combination of chords, C major and F-sharp major, what would be dubbed the “Petrushka chord.” Stravinsky had a remarkably inquiring ear; he would spend much of his life tinkering with traditional harmony in constantly fresh ways. (A certain number of people, including me in my twenties, go through a Petrushka phase, during which we listen to it all the time.)
Stravinsky began on a high plane with Firebird, topped it with Petrushka, and in 1913 topped it again with one of the most astonishing feats of musical imagination in history: Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). Again the basic story of the ballet was Stravinsky’s. In a primeval Russian village we watch the various rites and dances of spring. At the end a virgin is chosen for a sacrifice: she must dance herself to death. The story was perfect for ballet, perfect for the dancers and designers of the Ballets Russes, perfect for its time, perfect for Diaghilev who wanted his company always to be in the forefront of innovation. Sacre is one of those epochal works that gave a shot in the arm to the entire art of music, the kind of thing Beethoven had once achieved with the “Eroica” Symphony.
At this point Paris was at the center of a revolutionary fervor in the arts, some of which involved a sophisticated primitivism. Picasso developed cubism partly from his encounter with African masks. Stravinsky applied the same train of thought to Sacre. From the eerie bassoon wail that begins it, the piece is a revolution in sound and in its very conception, but a revolution founded on a return to the primeval. Winds twine like vines, strings pound like percussion, French horns howl like elk in heat. Animating it all is the Stravinskian rhythm, relentless and ecstatic, an inexorable pulse often articulated by changing meters. For rehearsals Stravinsky made a piano four-hand version which is sometimes performed; hearing it, one realizes how raw and elemental the music actually was before he clothed it in fantastical orchestral garb. It is one of the few revolutionary works in any medium that never loses its capacity to astonish. The choreography was by Nijinsky, who was equally determined to revolutionize his art. There is a reconstruction of most of the dance, with original sets and costumes, and I highly recommend seeking it out on video. Nijinsky’s choreography is virtually antiballet, the dancers’ movements hunched, ungainly, spasmodic, but with a strange beauty. When you listen on recordings, give the piece your full attention and turn it up loud.
Stravinsky had written Sacre in some kind of ecstasy, writing a friend, “It seems to me that I have penetrated the secret rhythm of spring.” When he and Debussy read over the piano four-hand version, an observer recalled, “We were dumbfounded, overcome by this hurricane which had come from the depths of the ages, and which had taken life by the roots.”
The first performance of Sacre was instantly legendary: it sparked the most demented audience riot ever seen in a theater. Everybody who was anybody in Paris was there and expecting something prodigious, and they got it. From the strange opening notes there was murmuring, which escalated to shouts as the ballet began. Soon the audience had descended to a donnybrook complete with fisticuffs between pros and antis—Maurice Ravel in the middle of the fray crying “Genius! Genius!” It is hard to say whether the outrage was provoked more by the music or the dance, though before long the uproar had overwhelmed the music. Backstage, with Stravinsky holding his coattails, Nijinsky was standing on a chair screaming numbers to his dancers to keep them on the beat because they could not hear the orchestra. At dinner afterward, Diaghilev crowed, “It’s exactly what I wanted!” Stravinsky, I suspect, was horrified. It was as if the world had crushed his ecstasy.
With Sacre Stravinsky completed another revolution that Debussy and Ravel had begun: putting aside traditional forms and thematic development in favor of tone color as a central element, defining its character and form. To put it another way, Stravinsky reversed the traditional relationship of content to form. In the past form was central, the content subordinate. The main point of a work was the whole. In Stravinsky and much music following him, the power of the ideas is the central issue; the form is looser, there to serve the content.
By age thirty-one Stravinsky had produced three works that together changed the face of music and placed him at the forefront of musical innovation, the equivalent of Picasso in painting, Rodin in sculpture, and later James Joyce in literature. (In Germany his corevolutionary Arnold Schoenberg was in his maturity, eliciting his own riots.) Stravinsky’s face became famous, its odd angles forming a kind of modernist icon in itself. There were attempts by other composers to echo Sacre, but really nobody else had the chops to do it. Meanwhile Stravinsky had no intention of repeating it either. To some degree he probably considered the work an end rather than a beginning; the only place to go now was to retreat to something smaller. Perhaps the boiling imagination of his early years had settled down. I have always wondered whether the rabid audience response to Sacre inflicted a wound on Stravinsky’s spirit that never entirely healed. In any case, he would not lay himself out like that again.
But if that was indeed the case, there was nothing rational about his response. One of the most radical works in history, Sacre got plenty of abuse but still conquered the world very fast. After a concert performance a year following the premiere, Stravinsky was carried through the streets of Paris on the shoulders of a cheering crowd. And of course, some twenty-five years later the piece graced Walt Disney’s Fantasia, accompanying a rumpus of dinosaurs. (Stravinsky claimed he never approved using the piece for the cartoon, but he did; the letter exists.)
Still, Stravinsky had one more seismic work to go. After Sacre he began another primitivistic but more stripped-down piece for chorus and instruments. Written in Russian but usually known by its French name Les noces (The Wedding), it is a portrait of a Russian village wedding in some undefined past. A draft of it was done by 1917, then began a long period of uncertainty concerning the instrumental forces. Stravinsky tried full orchestra, bagged that, then experimented with player pianos. Finally in 1924 Les Noces reached its final, desiccated form for chorus, soloists, four pianos, and percussion. Premiered as a ballet, it is equally a concert piece. For each of his first three ballets Stravinsky had created a singular style, and now he did it again: brusquely chanting choruses, incantatory vocal solos. Its total effect is preminimalist and mesmerizing, including the text: “Combing her tresses, her bright golden tresses, combing her tresses…” and so on. I was fascinated by this piece from high school on, but didn’t really understand it until I heard it live. In flesh and blood it is breathtaking, like being caught up in some primordial ritual. (When the wedding party gets drunk, it’s also pretty funny.) The ending, the bridegroom lovingly praising his bride, is truly moving.
Stravinsky would continue to reinvent himself, if never again on the astounding level of those four works. When World War I appeared, he began to cut back his forces and his ambitions. The first fruit of this later period was the little L’histoire du soldat (The Soldier’s Tale) from 1918, a parable about a soldier, a violin, and the devil. The forces are a septet of instruments including percussion, and three characters—Soldier, Devil, Narrator. The music is quirky, ironic, bone-dry, at the same time full of unflagging rhythm and captivating melody. Most celebrated for his rhythm and harmony, Stravinsky was a fine melodist when he let himself indulge in it.
After the war Stravinsky molted again, but this time he stuck with the new aesthetic for decades. He turned away from the Russian background of his earlier music and stories and reached further back to the past. The first signature work of what came to be called his neoclassic period was Pulcinella, an exhilarating reimagining of pieces by the baroque composer Pergolesi. It was commissioned by Diaghilev; at the 1920 premiere the sets were by Picasso. On this eighteenth-century framework Stravinsky lavished his most incandescent orchestration, also his signature harmony and rhythm. Listen to the Pulcinella Suite first; then, if you like, move on to the complete ballet.
Stravinsky pursued his new style in works chaste and sometimes almost chastened. “My music is not free from dryness,” he said, “but that’s the price of precision.” In the larger musical world Stravinskian neoclassicism became the era’s leading influence, especially on French composers, but on Americans as well, among them George Gershwin and Aaron Copland. Neoclassicism was embraced as a more popularistic alternative to the “difficult” modernists who lined up behind Arnold Schoenberg. Yet in the first years of his neoclassic music, Stravinsky got some of the worst, most insulting reviews of his life, from critics who accused him of betraying the revolution he had achieved with Sacre. One critic called L’histoire and Pulcinella “poor, half-starved things.” Young French avant-gardists booed them in concerts. In any case, an enduring conflict had appeared in twentieth-century music, which amounted to two visions of the future: the neoclassicists behind Stravinsky, the atonal composers behind Schoenberg.
Stravinsky and his first wife and children sat out World War I in Switzerland. After the war he lived in France for nearly twenty years, composing and performing as pianist and conductor. Diaghilev died in 1928 and his ballet company evaporated. Stravinsky embraced Christianity, and on a Boston Symphony Orchestra commission produced in 1930 what I call the finest religious work of the twentieth century, Symphony of Psalms. From the crunching E minor chord of its beginning to the answering cascades of woodwinds and its second-movement fugue, the piece is firmly in his austere, somewhat remote neoclassic style. But with a lovely alleluia in the “Laudate dominum,” the piece warms with exquisite harmonies until the sustained trance of the end, intensely spiritual and unforgettable.
By this point Stravinsky was preaching a doctrine that music was incapable of expressing definable emotions, but his work and his responses to other music (he was generous to other composers) were hardly consistent with that philosophy. At one point he became fascinated with Charles Ives’s Decoration Day; he declared it a masterpiece, its ending the saddest he knew. So much for music’s inability to express things.
In 1940, with his first wife dead and war raging across Europe again, Stravinsky married his mistress, the painter Vera de Bosset, and they moved to Hollywood. World War II Hollywood saw a strange scene mixing movie stars and leading European expat artists, among them Arnold Schoenberg. He and Stravinsky had once been friendly, but by this point they were the heads of two mutually hostile camps and had retreated to sniping distance. Schoenberg and Stravinsky both flirted with the idea of doing film music, but it never happened.
In the middle 1950s, after finishing his grandest neoclassical effort, an opera in the spirit of Mozart called The Rake’s Progress, Stravinsky had a creative crisis. Between 1953 and 1957 he had been working on the ballet Agon, and in the middle of composing it he came to feel that his neoclassic vein was played out and he did not know where to go. He resolved the crisis in a completely unexpected way. Agon begins briskly with neoclassic trumpet fanfares, but soon another voice intrudes: Stravinsky began using a Schoenbergian twelve-tone row.
His great rival had died in 1951. Now with Stravinsky taking up Schoenberg’s method the musical world reeled. In terms of popularity, commissions, and academic positions, the compositional scene had been dominated for decades by neoclassicists such as Aaron Copland, who was also of the “Americana” school. Stravinsky’s defection upended the status quo and led to the triumph of serialism in the academy. As for Agon, it is a vibrant piece, full of fresh orchestral colors, showing how personal was his adaptation of his rival’s technique. Stravinsky wrote serial music for the rest of his life.
In the 1950s and 1960s the world came to know Stravinsky in interviews and documentaries, an old man witty and fascinating, a raconteur, a passionate devotee of music, love, and strong spirits. On film during a sea voyage, he holds up his cocktail and declares, “I am nevair seasick! I am sea-droonk!” He died in New York in April 1971. For his resting place he wanted to return to the triumphs and excitements of his youth: at his request he was buried in Venice beside Diaghilev. I still have a newspaper headlining his death. Like many musicians I felt the loss personally. All of us wondered when somebody would step up to fill his shoes. To date, I think, no one quite has.