Igor Stravinsky

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was born on June 18, 1882, in Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov), a town on the Gulf of Finland near Saint Petersburg where his family spent the summer ^[1]. His father, Fyodor Stravinsky, was a celebrated bass at the Mariinsky Theatre, so the boy grew up surrounded by opera scores, professional singers, and the theatrical life of the imperial capital ^[2].

Despite this environment, his parents steered him toward a safe profession. He enrolled at Saint Petersburg University to study law, attending lectures with little enthusiasm while spending his real energy on piano lessons and private study of harmony and counterpoint ^[1]. A friendship with a fellow student, the son of composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, changed his direction. From about 1902 until Rimsky-Korsakov's death in 1908, Stravinsky studied orchestration and composition privately with the older master, who treated him almost as a member of the family ^[2].

His earliest surviving works, including the Symphony in E flat and the short orchestral fantasy Fireworks, show a gifted student absorbing the colorful Russian orchestral tradition ^[3]. Fireworks, written in 1908, would soon catch the ear of the one man capable of launching him onto the world stage.

Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario behind the Ballets Russes in Paris, heard Stravinsky's early orchestral pieces and gambled on the unknown composer, commissioning a full ballet score based on a Russian fairy tale ^[3]. The result, The Firebird, premiered in Paris on June 25, 1910, and made the twenty-eight year old famous almost overnight ^[1].

Stravinsky followed it in 1911 with Petrushka, a ballet set at a Shrovetide fair in Saint Petersburg, whose brittle textures, superimposed harmonies, and puppet protagonist marked a sharp advance on the lush idiom of The Firebird ^[2]. Parisian audiences and critics now watched his every move.

What came next is one of the most retold events in music history. The Rite of Spring, a ballet depicting a pagan ritual in which a young girl dances herself to death, opened at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on May 29, 1913. The pounding, irregular rhythms, dissonant chords, and Vaslav Nijinsky's deliberately awkward choreography provoked shouting, whistling, and scuffles in the audience ^[4]. Whatever the exact balance of protest and support that night, the score itself soon achieved recognition as a turning point: concert performances within a year drew ovations, and the work established rhythm, rather than melody or harmony, as a primary engine of musical structure ^[1].

The First World War and then the Russian Revolution of 1917 cut Stravinsky off from his homeland and from the income of his family estate. He spent the war years in Switzerland with his wife and children, composing smaller works suited to reduced circumstances ^[2]. The most striking of these was The Soldier's Tale (1918), a theater piece for three actors, a dancer, and seven instruments, mixing tango, waltz, and ragtime into a spare, ironic idiom ^[3].

In 1920 he moved to France, where he would live for almost two decades, taking French citizenship in 1934 ^[1]. There his music took the turn that historians call neoclassicism. Beginning with the ballet Pulcinella (1920), which reworked eighteenth century Italian material then attributed to Pergolesi, Stravinsky adopted older forms, clear textures, and a cool, objective tone ^[2]. The Octet for winds (1923), the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927) with its Latin text, and the Symphony of Psalms (1930), commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, all belong to this long neoclassical period ^[3].

During these years he also built a second career as a conductor and pianist, touring widely to perform his own works, partly out of financial necessity and partly to fix authoritative interpretations of his scores ^[2].

The late 1930s brought a series of blows: his elder daughter Ludmila died in 1938, and within months he lost both his wife Catherine and his mother, all while war again threatened Europe ^[1]. In 1939 Stravinsky sailed for the United States, where he had been invited to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University, published later as Poetics of Music ^[3]. He settled in Hollywood, California, and became an American citizen in 1945 ^[1].

American commissions produced some of the most frequently performed works among Igor Stravinsky achievements. The Symphony in Three Movements (1945) drew on his wartime impressions, while the Ebony Concerto (1945) was written for the jazz clarinetist and bandleader Woody Herman ^[2]. The crown of the neoclassical decades came in 1951 with The Rake's Progress, a full length opera in English composed to a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, inspired by William Hogarth's eighteenth century engravings; it premiered in Venice with the composer conducting ^[4].

Then, past the age of seventy, he changed course once more. Encouraged by his close associate, the conductor Robert Craft, Stravinsky began studying the twelve tone methods of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, composers whose school had long been considered his opposite ^[2]. Works such as the ballet Agon (1957), the choral Canticum Sacrum (1955), and Threni (1958) adapted serial technique to his own rhythmic and textural instincts, astonishing observers who had assumed his style was fixed ^[3].

In 1906 Stravinsky married his first cousin Catherine Nossenko, with whom he had four children: Fyodor, Ludmila, Sviatoslav Soulima, and Milena ^[1]. Catherine suffered from tuberculosis for much of her life, and the illness eventually claimed both her and their daughter Ludmila in the late 1930s ^[2].

From the early 1920s Stravinsky carried on a long relationship with Vera de Bosset, a dancer and painter then married to the designer Serge Sudeikin. Catherine knew of the arrangement, which continued for nearly two decades. After Catherine's death, Igor and Vera married in Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1940 and remained together for the rest of his life ^[1].

Stravinsky was famously exacting about money, contracts, and the performance of his music, and famously sharp in conversation. The series of published dialogues he produced with Robert Craft from the late 1950s onward preserved his opinions, memories, and barbed judgments of colleagues, though scholars continue to debate how much of the prose is Craft's ^[5]. He was also a man of deep religious feeling: after returning to the Russian Orthodox faith in 1926, he composed a steady stream of sacred works, from the Symphony of Psalms to the Requiem Canticles of his final years ^[3].

In 1962, at the invitation of the Soviet government and after an absence of nearly half a century, the eighty year old composer visited Russia. He conducted concerts in Moscow and Leningrad and was received by Premier Nikita Khrushchev, an emotional homecoming for an artist whose music had long been officially disparaged there ^[2].

His last major composition, the Requiem Canticles of 1966, is a compact serial setting of texts from the Latin requiem mass; portions of it were performed at his own funeral ^[3]. Failing health gradually ended his conducting career, and in 1969 he moved from California to New York City.

Igor Stravinsky died in New York on April 6, 1971, at the age of eighty-eight. At his own wish he was buried in the Russian corner of the cemetery island of San Michele in Venice, a short distance from the grave of Sergei Diaghilev, the man who had launched his career sixty years earlier ^[4].

Few musicians of any era matched Stravinsky's influence. Any serious Igor Stravinsky biography must reckon with the fact that he transformed the field at least three times: first with the rhythmic revolution of the Russian ballets, then with the neoclassical rethinking of the past, and finally with his late serial works, which helped legitimize twelve tone writing for a broad public ^[2]. Composers as different as Aaron Copland, Olivier Messiaen, and Elliott Carter absorbed lessons from his scores, and The Rite of Spring remains a rite of passage for orchestras and conservatory students worldwide ^[1].

His recorded legacy is unusually rich. Beginning in the 1920s and continuing into the 1960s, Stravinsky conducted or supervised recordings of nearly all his major works, a project culminating in the Columbia Records edition assembled with Robert Craft, giving later generations direct evidence of his tempos and phrasing ^[5].

Among the more striking Igor Stravinsky facts is the sheer span of his witness: born in the Russia of Tchaikovsky and Alexander III, he died in the New York of the moon landings, having written music in almost every genre along the way. His scores are performed constantly, his ballets remain repertory staples, and his insistence that music should be made with craft, clarity, and discipline continues to shape how composition is taught ^[3].