Igor Stravinsky

• 1. Introduction

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  Igor Stravinsky once received a score back from his mentor in the mail, returned with a note reading: "Not delivered on account of death of addressee." That mentor was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the most powerful figure in Russian music, and Stravinsky had spent years orbiting him. Within two years of that note, Stravinsky would write The Firebird, the ballet that made him an overnight sensation in Paris. Within five years, he would compose The Rite of Spring, a work that caused a near-riot at its premiere and changed the way composers understood rhythmic structure for generations after.

  Stravinsky was born in 1882 and died in 1971, spanning nearly nine decades and almost every major upheaval in Western music. His career is often divided into three major stylistic periods: a Russian period, a neoclassical period, and a serial period. What that division obscures, however, is the stubbornness required to reinvent oneself so radically, so often, in public. Supporters were confused. Critics attacked him. Young composers at one point found his music irrelevant. He kept going anyway.

  By 1998, Time magazine had placed him among the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. Philip Glass wrote that there was "not a composer who lived during his time or is alive today who was not touched, and sometimes transformed, by his work." How did a boy who was told by his own parents that he had no musical talent become the composer who scattered the elements of musical language so completely that, as one musicologist put it, they could never be put together as before?

• 2. The Rimsky Years

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  From the age of nine, Stravinsky studied piano privately, and by the time he was sixteen he was attending rehearsals at Saint Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater five or six days a week. His father, Fyodor, was a bass at the Mariinsky and descended from a line of Polish landowners; the family name derives from the Strava river in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Despite this immersion in music, Fyodor and his wife Anna saw no particular talent in their son, partly because he frequently improvised rather than practicing assigned pieces.

  Stravinsky enrolled in law at the University of Saint Petersburg in 1901, as his parents expected. There he befriended Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov, and during the summer of 1902 the two traveled to Heidelberg, where Stravinsky brought a portfolio of compositions to show Vladimir's father, the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Rimsky-Korsakov was not stunned, but he was impressed enough to take Stravinsky on personally, advising him against the Saint Petersburg Conservatory's rigid environment and agreeing instead to guide him directly.

  After Fyodor died later in 1902, Stravinsky grew more independent and spent increasing time in Rimsky-Korsakov's circle. His first major assignment was a four-movement Piano Sonata in F-sharp minor written in the style of Glazunov and Tchaikovsky. He then began a large-scale Symphony in E-flat, the first draft of which he finished in 1905. That same year, the events of Bloody Sunday forced the university to close, and Stravinsky graduated with only a half-diploma. He spent more time than ever inside Rimsky-Korsakov's circle, though the atmosphere chafed. The group looked down on contemporary music; Rimsky-Korsakov and his colleague Anatoly Lyadov hated the chamber concerts where Stravinsky first encountered French composers like Franck, Dukas, Fauré, and Debussy.

  In June 1908, Rimsky-Korsakov died. Stravinsky later recalled that Funeral Song, which he composed as a memorial to his mentor, was "the best of my works before The Firebird." It was also, by implication, the last work he would write entirely in that master's shadow.

• 3. Three Ballets, One Riot

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  Sergei Diaghilev attended the February 1909 premiere of two new Stravinsky works, Scherzo fantastique and Feu d'artifice, and was struck by the vivid color and harmonic technique. He subsequently asked Stravinsky to orchestrate some Chopin for a production of Les Sylphides. Then, as the Ballets Russes faced financial pressure and sought a distinctly Russian subject, Diaghilev turned to Stravinsky for a full score on the mythical Firebird.

  The Firebird premiered in Paris on the 25th of June 1910 to widespread critical acclaim. Debussy was brought on stage after the performance and invited Stravinsky to dinner, beginning a friendship that lasted years. Stravinsky later wrote that he composed the work in a state of revolt against Rimsky-Korsakov, pushing for effects in ponticello, col legno, flautando, glissando, and flutter-tongue technique. The ballet used what Stravinsky called "leit-harmony," a system that associated the Firebird with whole-tone phrases and the villain Koschei with octatonic harmony.

  Petrushka followed in Paris on the 13th of June 1911, and it contained one of the first prominent uses of bitonality in modern music through the recurring "Petrushka chord." It had begun as a Konzertstück for piano and orchestra depicting a puppet coming to life, but Diaghilev heard the early drafts and pushed Stravinsky to expand it into a full ballet. The premiere was received with equal acclaim as The Firebird.

  The third ballet arrived from a vision Stravinsky had while composing The Firebird: he saw sage elders seated in a circle watching a young girl dance herself to death in a pagan ritual. He shared the idea with his friend, the painter Nicholas Roerich. With radical choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, The Rite of Spring premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on the 29th of May 1913. Its uneven rhythms, superimposed harmonies, atonality, and extensive instrumentation caused the near-riot that has since become legend. Musicologist Donald Jay Grout described the work as having "the effect of an explosion that so scattered the elements of musical language that they could never again be put together as before."

• 4. Exile, War, and Folk Roots

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  Shortly after the premiere of The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky was hospitalized with typhoid fever for five weeks. Debussy, Manuel de Falla, Maurice Ravel, and Florent Schmitt all came to visit. When he recovered, the Stravinskys were already effectively displaced: by the time World War I broke out in 1914, they were living in Switzerland, where they would remain until 1920.

  Stravinsky used those years intensively. He researched Russian folk poetry and prepared librettos for numerous works: Les noces, Renard, Pribaoutki, and other song cycles. His income from performance royalties vanished when his Germany-based publisher suspended operations due to the war. To support his family, he sold manuscripts and accepted commissions from wealthy patrons. Renard, a theater work completed in 1916, came from a commission from Princesse Edmond de Polignac. He also made a new concert suite from The Firebird and sold it to a London publisher to regain copyright control.

  The most unusual work of this period came from a collaboration with Swiss writer Charles F. Ramuz. L'Histoire du soldat, composed in 1918, was designed for easy touring: just eleven musicians and two dancers. It blended Russian folk narrative with the tango, waltz, rag, and chorale. After a premiere run funded by Werner Reinhart, all other performances were canceled due to the Spanish flu epidemic.

  Les noces, the ballet-cantata based on texts from a collection of Russian folk poetry by Pyotr Kireevsky, was not completed until 1923, when Stravinsky settled on a percussion ensemble including four pianos. Many of his Russian period works featured animal characters, likely inspired by nursery rhymes he read with his children. Even as his style evolved in later decades, scholars noted that he never fully severed his musical connection to these folk sources.

• 5. Neoclassicism and Its Discontents

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  When the war ended, Stravinsky briefly moved his family to Carantec, France, and then in September 1920 to the home of fashion designer Coco Chanel, an associate of Diaghilev's. The Symphonies of Wind Instruments, composed there, marked what many consider the start of his neoclassical period, though musicologist Béla Bartók argued the period truly began with the Octet for Wind Instruments and the Piano Concerto that followed it.

  In 1921, Stravinsky signed a contract with the player piano company Pleyel to create piano roll arrangements of his music, receiving a studio at their factory on the Rue Rochechouart. He transcribed many major works for mechanical piano. He later signed a second contract with the Aeolian Company in London, producing rolls with his own engraved commentary. He stopped working with player pianos in 1930 when the Aeolian Company's London branch was dissolved.

  Greek mythology ran through many of these works. Apollon musagète, premiered in 1927 with choreography by George Balanchine, depicted the birth and apotheosis of Apollo. Oedipus rex, also from 1927, required a libretto in Latin and was written after Stravinsky asked writer Jean Cocteau to adapt Sophocles's tragedy. Its May 1927 premiere was staged as a concert performance because there was too little time and money to mount it fully, and neoclassicism was not popular with Parisian critics; Stravinsky had to publicly insist his music was not part of the movement.

  A new commission in 1928 from ballerina Ida Rubinstein pushed Stravinsky back toward Tchaikovsky. He wrote The Fairy's Kiss using Hans Christian Andersen's tale The Ice-Maiden as the subject and borrowing themes from romantic ballets like Swan Lake. Diaghilev was furious that Stravinsky had accepted a commission from a rival company, and the feud lasted until Diaghilev's death in August 1929. The Boston Symphony Orchestra's commission that followed in 1930 led to the Symphony of Psalms, a deeply religious choral work, and Stravinsky's reconnection with the Russian Orthodox Church after meeting a priest named Father Nicolas near his home in Nice.

• 6. America and the Serial Turn

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  Stravinsky arrived in the United States in late 1939, contracted to deliver six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University, beginning in October 1939 and ending in April 1940. The lectures were published in French as Poétique musicale in 1941, with an English translation following in 1947. He married his companion Vera de Bosset on the 9th of March 1940 in Bedford, Massachusetts, and the couple moved to Los Angeles after the lecture series ended.

  Money remained scarce as the war cut off European royalties. Stravinsky accepted conducting engagements and composed commercially, including the Scherzo à la russe for Paul Whiteman and music for a Broadway revue. He allowed The Rite of Spring to be used in Walt Disney's 1940 animated feature Fantasia, in a version rearranged and shortened by Leopold Stokowski. Some discarded film music found its way into larger works; the middle movement of the Symphony in Three Movements drew on an unused score for a 1943 film.

  In 1945, Stravinsky received American citizenship and signed a contract with British publisher Boosey & Hawkes for all future works. Around the 1948 premiere of the Balanchine ballet Orpheus, he met young conductor Robert Craft, who had written to ask about a revision to the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Craft quickly became Stravinsky's live-in assistant and collaborator until the end of the composer's life.

  Craft introduced Stravinsky to the serial music of the Second Viennese School after the premiere of The Rake's Progress in 1951. Stravinsky began studying Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg. In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, completed in 1954 following the poet's death in November 1953, was his first work fully based on the twelve-tone technique. The 1956 Canticum Sacrum, which premiered at the International Festival of Contemporary Music in Venice, contained the first movement Stravinsky wrote entirely based on a tone row. His treatment differed from Schoenberg's strict system: he repeated notes freely and reordered cells within the row. Musicologist Jeremy Noble called this shift "the most profound change in Stravinsky's musical vocabulary."

  In January 1962, Stravinsky attended a dinner at the White House with President John F. Kennedy in honor of the composer's 80th birthday. After Kennedy's assassination, Stravinsky wrote the Elegy for J.F.K. That September, Stravinsky returned to Russia for the first time since 1914, conducting six performances in Moscow and Leningrad at the invitation of the Union of Soviet Composers. Stalin had formally banned his music in 1948, but a new interest had grown during the Khrushchev Thaw. During the three-week visit, Stravinsky met with Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and with composers including Shostakovich and Khachaturian.

• 7. Final Years and Requiem

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  On the 17th of May 1967, an obviously frail Stravinsky made his final public conducting appearance at Massey Hall in Toronto, leading the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in a performance of his Pulcinella Suite. His last recording session had taken place in January of that year. After spending the autumn of 1967 in the hospital with bleeding stomach ulcers and thrombosis, he stopped composing.

  His final major composition was the Requiem Canticles of 1966, a work built on a complex four-part array of tone rows. Noble described it as "a distillation both of the liturgical text and of his own musical means of setting it, evolved and refined through a career of more than 60 years." In the interim years before completing it, Stravinsky had worked on tone rows on whatever paper was at hand, including toilet paper from airplane lavatories.

  Stravinsky moved to New York with Vera and Craft in his final years to be closer to medical care. He was discharged from Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan after contracting pulmonary edema, then moved with Vera to an apartment on Fifth Avenue. He died there on the 6th of April 1971 at the age of 88. A funeral service was held three days later at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on Madison Avenue.

  After a service at Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, with Robert Craft conducting a performance of the Requiem Canticles, Stravinsky was buried on the cemetery island of San Michele, several meters from the tomb of Sergei Diaghilev. The man who had commissioned The Firebird and set Stravinsky's career in motion lay nearby. The Requiem Canticles, the last work Stravinsky wrote, was performed at the funeral of the composer who had written it.