Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian-born composer, pianist, and conductor. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century.
Background
Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882 in Lomonosov, Russia and was brought up in Saint Petersburg. His parents were both from Ukraine: Fyodor Stravinsky (1843-1902), a famed bass singer at the Kiev opera house and at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, and Anna (née Kholodovsky) (1854-1939), a native of Kiev, one of four daughters of a high-ranking official in the Kiev Ministry of Estates.
Education
Stravinsky began piano lessons as a young boy, studying music theory and attempting composition. By age fifteen he had mastered Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto in G minor.
Igor finished a university law course in the University of Saint Petersburg, before he made the decision to become a musician. He attended fewer than fifty class sessions during his four years of study. The university was closed for two months in 1905 in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday: Stravinsky was prevented from taking his final law examinations and later received a half-course diploma in April 1906. Thereafter, he concentrated on studying music. In 1905, he began to take twice-weekly private lessons from Rimsky-Korsakov, whom he came to regard as a second father. These lessons continued until Rimsky-Korsakov's death in 1908.
In February 1909, two of Stravinsky's orchestral works, the Scherzo fantastique and Feu d'artifice (Fireworks) were performed at a concert in Saint Petersburg, where they were heard by Sergei Diaghilev, who was at that time involved in planning to present Russian opera and ballet in Paris. Diaghilev was sufficiently impressed by Fireworks to commission Stravinsky to carry out some orchestrations and then to compose a full-length ballet score, The Firebird. Stravinsky became an overnight sensation following the success of the Firebird's premiere in Paris on 25 June 1910. Diaghilev soon brought him into the center of an illustrious group of artists in Paris and during the next few years evoked his utmost daring in collaborations with Michel Fokine and Vaslav Nijinsky, among others.
The composer had travelled from his estate in Ustilug to Paris in early June to attend the final rehearsals and the premiere of the Firebird. His family joined him before the end of the ballet season and they decided to remain in the West for a time, as his wife was expecting their third child. After spending the summer in La Baule, Brittany, they moved to Switzerland in early September. Over the next four years, Stravinsky and his family lived in Russia during the summer months and spent each winter in Switzerland. Shortly following the premiere of the Rite of Spring on 29 May 1913, Stravinsky contracted typhoid from eating bad oysters, and was confined to a Paris nursing home, unable to depart for Ustilug until 11 July. During the remainder of the summer, Stravinsky turned his attention to completing his first opera, the Nightingale (usually known by its French title Le Rossignol), which he had begun in 1908.
In April 1914, Stravinsky with his family were finally able to return to Clarens. By then, the Moscow Free Theatre had gone bankrupt. As a result, Le Rossignol was first performed under Diaghilev's auspices at the Paris Opéra on May 26, 1914, with sets and costumes designed by Alexandre Benois. Le Rossignol enjoyed only lukewarm success with the public and the critics, apparently because its delicacy did not meet their expectations of the composer of the Rite of Spring.
In July, with war looming, Stravinsky made a quick trip to Ustilug to retrieve personal effects including his reference works on Russian folk music. He returned to Switzerland just before national borders closed following the outbreak of World War I. The war and subsequent Russian Revolution made it impossible for Stravinsky to return to his homeland, and he did not set foot upon Russian soil again until October 1962.
In June 1915, Stravinsky and his family moved from Clarens to Morges, a town six miles south-west of Lausanne on the shore of Lake Geneva. The family lived there until 1920. Stravinsky struggled financially during this period. He blamed Diaghilev for his financial troubles, accusing him of failing to live up to the terms of a contract they had signed.
Following the premiere of Pulcinella by the Ballets Russes in Paris on 15 May 1920, Stravinsky returned to Switzerland. On 8 June, the entire family left Morges for the last time, and moved to the fishing village of Carantec in Brittany for the summer while also seeking a new home in Paris. Stravinsky formed a business and musical relationship with the French piano manufacturing company Pleyel, which essentially acted as his agent in collecting mechanical royalties for his works and provided him with a monthly income and a studio space at its headquarters in which he could work and entertain friends and business acquaintances.
In May 1921, Stravinsky and his family moved to Anglet, near Biarritz, southwestern France. In September 1924, Stravinsky bought "an expensive house" in Nice: the Villa des Roses. From 1931 to 1933 the Stravinskys lived in Voreppe, near Grenoble, southeastern France. They became French citizens in 1934 and moved to the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. During his later years in Paris, Stravinsky had developed professional relationships with key people in the United States: he was already working on his Symphony in C for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and he had agreed to deliver the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University during the 1939-1940 academic year.
Despite the outbreak of World War II on 1 September 1939, the widowed Stravinsky sailed for the United States at the end of the month, arriving in New York City and thence to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to fulfill his engagement at Harvard. When he settled in the United States, Stravinsky renewed his interest in popular music long enough to compose several short pieces culminating in the Ebony Concerto (1946) for Woody Herman's band. His arrangement of the Star-spangled Banner (1944) was too severe to become a favorite. Several projects for film music were begun, and though none was completed, the music for them found various proper forms; most expansive, and at moments reminiscent of the Rite, was the Symphony in Three Movements (1945). A collaboration happier even than that with Diaghilev developed with the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine. The first fruit of this collaboration was Orpheus (1948). Apollo and Orpheus rivaled the Firebird in the New York City Ballet repertory, and the symphonies, concertos, and miscellaneous pieces came to life. At last Stravinsky was able to undertake a full-length opera, The Rake's Progress (1948-1951). The music includes some of his most melodious ideas, contrasting with bold dry recitative, colorful choruses, and concise episodes for the Mozartean orchestra. In each of these works the complexities of rhythm and sound, as well as the fascinating harmony and counterpoint, serve to clarify and intensify the meanings of the texts. Stravinsky's major instrumental works after the Septet were the Movements for piano and orchestra (1959) and the Variations for orchestra (1964), both of which were interpreted in ballets by Balanchine that could disarm any candid critic of the music.
Stravinsky died on April 6, 1971, in New York City. He was buried with pomp in Venice.
Stravinsky was a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church during most of his life. Although he was not outspoken about his faith, he was a deeply religious man throughout some periods of his life. As a child, he was brought up by his parents in the Russian Orthodox Church. Baptized at birth, he later rebelled against the Church and abandoned it by the time he was fourteen or fifteen years old. Throughout the rise of his career he was estranged from Christianity and it was not until he reached his early forties that he experienced a spiritual crisis. After befriending a Russian Orthodox priest, Father Nicholas, after his move to Nice in 1924, he reconnected with his faith. He rejoined the Russian Orthodox Church and afterwards remained a committed Christian. Robert Craft noted that Stravinsky prayed daily, before and after composing, and also prayed when facing difficulty. Towards the end of his life, he was no longer able to attend church services.
Politics
Stravinsky remained a confirmed monarchist throughout his life and loathed the Bolsheviks from the very beginning. When the Nazis placed Stravinsky's works on the list of "Entartete Musik," he lodged a formal appeal to establish his Russian genealogy and declared, "I loathe all communism, Marxism, the execrable Soviet monster, and also all liberalism, democratism, atheism, etc."
Views
Quotations:
"Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament."
Membership
Royal Philharmonic Society
,
United Kingdom
Personality
Stravinsky proved adept at playing the part of a 'man of the world', acquiring a keen instinct for business matters and appearing relaxed and comfortable in public. His successful career as a pianist and conductor took him to many of the world's major cities, including Paris, Venice, Berlin, London, Amsterdam and New York and he was known for his polite, courteous and helpful manner. Stravinsky was reputed to have been a philanderer and was rumored to have had affairs with high-profile partners, such as Coco Chanel. Stravinsky was considered a family man and devoted to his children.
Physical Characteristics:
Stravinsky was a small man with a big face. His elegant clothes, his thin hair brushed straight back, and a very thin mustache contrasted with his bulging nose, readily grinning or smacking lips, busy bright eyes, and huge ears.
Interests
Writers
Stravinsky displayed a taste in literature that was wide and reflected his constant desire for new discoveries. The texts and literary sources for his work began with a period of interest in Russian folklore, which progressed to classical authors and the Latin liturgy and moved on to contemporary France (André Gide, in Persephone) and eventually English literature, including Auden, T. S. Eliot and medieval English verse.
Artists
Stravinsky had an inexhaustible desire to explore and learn about art, which manifested itself in several of his Paris collaborations. Not only was he the principal composer for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, but he also collaborated with Picasso (Pulcinella, 1920), Jean Cocteau (Oedipus Rex, 1927), and George Balanchine (Apollon musagète, 1928). His interest in art propelled him to develop a strong relationship with Picasso, whom he met in 1917, announcing that in "a whirlpool of artistic enthusiasm and excitement I at last met Picasso." From 1917 to 1920, the two engaged in an artistic dialogue in which they exchanged small-scale works of art to each other as a sign of intimacy, which included the famous portrait of Stravinsky by Picasso, and Stravinsky's "Sketch of Music for the Clarinet."
Connections
In 1905 Stravinsky was engaged to his cousin Katherine Gavrylivna Nosenko, whom he had known since early childhood. In spite of the Orthodox Church's opposition to marriage between first cousins, the couple married on 23 January 1906: their first two children, Fyodor (Theodore) and Ludmila, were born in 1907 and 1908, respectively. On 23 September, their second son Sviatoslav Soulima was born at a maternity clinic in Lausanne. On 15 January 1914, a fourth child, Marie Milène (or Maria Milena), was born in Lausanne. After her delivery, Katya was discovered to have tuberculosis and was confined to the sanatorium at Leysin, high in the Alps. Stravinsky met Vera de Bosset in Paris in February 1921, while she was married to the painter and stage designer Serge Sudeikin, and they began an affair that led to Vera leaving her husband. From 1921 until his wife's death in 1939, Stravinsky led a double life, dividing his time between his family in Anglet, and Vera in Paris and on tour. His wife's tuberculosis infected both himself and his eldest daughter Ludmila, who died in 1938. Katya, to whom he had been married for 33 years, died of tuberculosis three months later, in March 1939. Stravinsky himself spent five months in hospital, during which time his mother died. Vera followed him to the United States in January 1939, and they were married in Bedford, Massachusetts, on 9 March 1940.