Igor Stravinsky

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(b Lomonosov, 17 June 1882; d New York, 6 April 1971). Russian composer, later of French (1934) and American (1945) nationality. The son of a leading bass at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, he studied with Rimsky-Korsakov (1902-8), who was an influence on his early music, though so were Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Glazunov and (from 1907-8) Debussy and Dukas. This colourful mixture of sources lies behind The Firebird (1910), commissioned by Dyagilev for his Ballets Russes. Stravinsky went with the company to Paris in 1910 and spent much of his time in France from then onwards, continuing his association with Dyagilev in Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913).

These scores show an extraordinary development. Both use folktunes, but not in any symphonic manner: Stravinsky's forms are additive rather than symphonic, created from placing blocks of material together without disguising the joins. The binding energy is much more rhythmic than harmonic, and the driving pulsations of The Rite marked a crucial change in the nature of Western music. Stravinsky, however, left it to others to use that change in the most obvious manner. He himself, after completing his Chinese opera The Nightingale, turned aside from large resources to concentrate on chamber forces and the piano.

Partly this was a result of World War I, which disrupted the activities of the Ballets Russes and caused Stravinsky to seek refuge in Switzerland. He was not to return to Russia until 1962, though his works of 1914-18 are almost exclusively concerned with Russian folk tales and songs: they include the choral ballet Les noces (‘The Wedding’), the smaller sung and danced fable Renard, a short play doubly formalized with spoken narration and instrumental music (The Soldier's Tale) and several groups of songs. In The Wedding, where block form is geared to highly mechanical rhythm to give an objective ceremonial effect, it took him some while to find an appropriately objective instrumentation; he eventually set it with pianos and percussion. Meanwhile, for the revived Ballets Russes, he produced a startling transformation of 18th-century Italian music (ascribed to Pergolesi) in Pulcinella (1920), which opened the way to a long period of ‘neo-classicism’, or re-exploring past forms, styles and gestures with the irony of non-developmental material being placed in developmental moulds. The Symphonies of Wind Instruments, an apotheosis of the wartime ‘Russian’ style, was thus followed by the short number-opera Mavra, the Octet for wind, and three works he wrote to help him earn his living as a pianist: the Piano Concerto, the Sonata and the Serenade in A.

During this period of the early 1920s he avoided string instruments because of their expressive nuances, preferring the clear articulation of wind, percussion, piano and even pianola. But he returned to the full orchestra to achieve the starkly presented Handel-Verdi imagery of the opera-oratorio Oedipus rex, and then wrote for strings alone in Apollon musagète (1928), the last of his works to be presented by Dyagilev. All this while he was living in France, and Apollon, with its Lullian echoes, suggests an identification with French classicism which also marks the Duo concertant for violin and piano and the stage work on which he collaborated with Gide: Perséphone, a classical rite of spring. However, his Russianness remained deep. He orchestrated pieces by Tchaikovsky, now established as his chosen ancestor, to make the ballet Le baiser de la fée, and in 1926 he rejoined the Orthodox Church. The Symphony of Psalms was the first major work in which his ritual music engaged with the Christian tradition.

The other important works of the 1930s, apart from Perséphone, are all instrumental, and include the Violin Concerto, the Concerto for two pianos, the post-Brandenburg ‘Dumbarton Oaks’ Concerto and the Symphony in C, which disrupts diatonic normality on its home ground. It was during the composition of this work, in 1939, that Stravinsky moved to the USA, followed by Vera Sudeikina, whom he had loved since 1921 and who was to be his second wife (his first wife and his mother had both died earlier the same year). In 1940 they settled in Hollywood, which was henceforth their home. Various film projects ensued, though all foundered, perhaps inevitably: the Hollywood cinema of the period demanded grand continuity; Stravinsky's patterned discontinuities were much better suited to dancing. He had a more suitable collaborator in Balanchine, with whom he had worked since Apollon, and for whom in America he composed Orpheus and Agon. Meanwhile music intended for films went into orchestral pieces, including the Symphony in Three Movements (1945).

The later 1940s were devoted to The Rake's Progress, a parable using the conventions of Mozart's mature comedies and composed to a libretto by Auden and Kallman. Early in its composition, in 1948, Stravinsky met Robert Craft, who soon became a member of his household and whose enthusiasm for Schoenberg and Webern (as well as Stravinsky) probably helped make possible the gradual achievement of a highly personal serial style after The Rake. The process was completed in 1953 during the composition of the brilliant, tightly patterned Agon, though most of the serial works are religious or commemorative, being sacred cantatas (Canticum sacrum, Threni, Requiem Canticles) or elegies (In memoriam Dylan Thomas, Elegy for J. F. K.). All these were written after Stravinsky's 70th birthday, and he continued to compose into his mid-80s, also conducting concerts and making many gramophone records of his music. During this period, too, he and Craft published several volumes of conversations.

works:
Operas

• The Nightingale (1914)
• Mavra (1922)
• Oedipus rex, opera-oratorio (1927)
• The Rake's Progress (1951)

Miscellaneous dramatic music

• The Soldier's Tale (1918)
• Renard (1922)
• The Flood (1962)

Ballets

• The Firebird (1910)
• Petrushka (1911)
• The Rite of Spring (1913)
• Song of the Nightingale (1919)
• Pulcinella (1920)
• The Wedding (1923)
• Apollon musagète (1928)
• Le baiser de la fée (1928)
• Perséphone (1934)
• Jeu de cartes (1937)
• Circus Polka (1942)
• Scènes de ballet (1944)
• Orpheus (1948)
• Agon (1957)

Orchestral music

• Sym., E♭ (1907)
• Fireworks (1908)
• Syms. of Wind Insts (1920)
• Pf Conc., pf, wind, timp, dbn (1924)
• Capriccio, pf, orch (1929)
• Vn Conc., D (1931)
• Conc. ‘Dumbarton Oaks’ (1938)
• Sym., C (1940)
• Danses concertantes (1942)
• Circus Polka (1942)
• 4 Norwegian Moods (1942)
• Ode (1943)
• Sym. in 3 movts (1945)
• Ebony Conc. (1945)
• Conc., D, str (1946)
• Movements, pf, orch (1959)
• Variations (1964)

Choral music

• The King of the Stars (1912)
• Sym. of Psalms (1930)
• Babel (1944)
• Mass (1948)
• Cantata (1952)
• Canticum sacrum (1955)
• Threni (1958)
• A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer (1961)
• The Dove Descending (1962)
• Introitus (1965)
• Requiem Canticles (1966)

Solo vocal music

• Two Bal′mont Poems (1911)
• Three Japanese Lyrics (1913)
• Pribaoutki (1914)
• Berceuses du chat (1916)
• 3 Shakespeare Songs (1953)
• In memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954)
• Abraham and Isaac (1963)
• Elegy for J. F. K. (1964)
• The Owl and the Pussy-Cat (1966)

Chamber music

• 3 Pieces, str qt (1914)
• 3 Pieces, cl (1919)
• Concertino, str qt (1920)
• Octet (1923)
• Duo concertant (1932)
• Septet (1953)
• Epitaphium, fl, cl, harp (1959)

Piano music

• 4 Studies (1908)
• Piano-Rag-Music (1919)
• Sonata (1924)
• Serenade, A (1925)
• Conc., 2 pf (1935)
• Sonata, 2 pf (1944)

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The Russian-born composer Igor Fedorovich Stravinsky (1882-1971) identified himself as an "inventor of music." The novelty, power, and elegance of his works won worldwide admiration before he was 30. Throughout his life he continued to surprise admirers with transformations of his style that stimulated controversy.

Every aspect of music was renewed again and again in the work of Igor Stravinsky. Rhythm was the most striking ingredient, and his novel rhythms were most widely imitated. His instrumentation and his ways of writing for voices were also distinctive and influential. His harmonies and forms were more elusive. He recognized melody as the "most essential" element. Even if his rhythm and his sheer sound sometimes seemed independent of melody, stimulating composers like Edgard Varèse, Olivier Messiaen, Elliott Carter, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen to explore further possibilities of such independence, Stravinsky's own works constituted integral melodies, as much as Claude Debussy's or Ludwig van Beethoven's or Carlo Gesualdo's, if not quite Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's. Stravinsky constantly subordinated all "technical apparatus" to what he recognized in 1939 as "a general revision of both the basic values and the primordial elements of the art of music," a revision continuing throughout his life. "The so-called crisis of means," he insisted in 1966, "is interior."

Beginnings in Russia

Stravinsky was born at Oranienbaum near St. Petersburg on June 17, 1882. Although his father was a star singer of the Imperial Opera, he rather expected the boy to become a bureaucrat. Igor finished a university law course before he made the decision to become a musician. By this time he was a good amateur pianist, an occasional professional accompanist, an avid reader of avant-garde scores from France and Germany, and, of course, a connoisseur of Italian, French, and Russian opera.

The closest friend of Stravinsky's youth was Stephan Mitusov, stepson of a prince. Stravinsky acknowledged that Mitusov was "a kind of literary and theatrical tutor to me at one of the greatest moments in the Russian theater." Mitusov translated the poems of Paul Verlaine that Stravinsky set to music in 1910, and he arranged the libretto of Stravinsky's opera The Nightingale (1908-1914).

One of Stravinsky's classmates at the university was Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov, son of the composer, whose reputation as master orchestrator and teacher at the St. Petersburg Conservatory surpassed the fame of his operas. Stravinsky became Rimsky's apprentice; he did not enter classes at the conservatory but worked privately and intensely at his home. For the sake of the most advanced craftsmanship, Stravinsky gladly submerged his independent taste, confident that he could exercise it later. As demonstration of his learning, with few original features, he composed his Symphony in E-flat (1905-1907), dedicated to his teacher. For Madame Rimsky, there was a charming Pastorale (1907) for wordless voice and piano, later to become a favorite in various instrumental arrangements. For a wedding present to Rimsky's daughter Nadia and his favorite pupil, Maximilian Steinberg, Stravinsky composed a brilliant short fantasy for orchestra, Fireworks (1908). When Rimsky died in the same year, Stravinsky wrote a funeral dirge which he later recalled as the best of his early works; it was not published, and the manuscript was lost.

Scandal, Glory, and Misunderstanding in France

The great impresario Sergei Diaghilev, hearing Fireworks, recognized both the mastery and the budding originality. He at once enlisted Stravinsky to make some orchestral arrangements of Chopin for the season of Russian ballets that he was producing in Paris. Then Diaghilev assigned him bigger tasks, for which Stravinsky postponed his opera Nightingale. 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.

Each of Stravinsky's three ballets for Diaghilev's company scandalized the first audiences. Each quickly became a classic. Each is unique. Firebird (1910) surpasses all Rimsky's variegated splendor and sweetness. Petrushka (1911) brings a new fusion of irony and pathos to the piano, the trumpet, and the dance. The Rite of Spring (1912-1913) is a frenzied breakthrough of 20th-century affinities to prehistoric mankind. Genteel audiences were provoked to riotous protest. The three ballets together made Stravinsky's influence on all the arts enormous and established him alongside older composers like Maurice Ravel and Arnold Schoenberg as a leader of a heroic musical generation.

Among countless testimonials to the power of the Rite, one by John Dos Passos is typical: to him it seemed "just about the height of what could be accomplished on the stage…. Stravinsky's music got into our blood. For months his rhythms underlay everything we heard, his prancing figures moved behind everything we saw…. The ballet would do for our time what tragedy had done for the Greeks."

The young hero was a small man with a big face. Stravinsky's 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. In speech and action he exuded aggressive energy, like that of the Rite of Spring, matched and controlled by correspondingly fastidious craftsmanship. Nijinsky described him as "like an emperor … but cleverer."

World War I interrupted the expansion of Diaghilev's enterprise, and the Russian Revolution uprooted Stravinsky from the home to which he had been returning from Paris. During the war he lived in Switzerland, where he collaborated with the poet C. F. Ramuz on a series of astonishing works based on folklore and, to some extent, on popular music, including ragtime. The most surprising and appealing of these was The Soldier's Tale (1918) for narrator, three dancers, and seven instrumentalists. This work deeply influenced Bertold Brecht, Jean Cocteau, and other dramatists of the 1920s, as well as composers and performers of each later generation. Stravinsky's new turn to concision and counterpoint in The Soldier's Tale was often compared with the contemporary trend of his new friend, the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, who was to work with him on his next Diaghilev assignment, Pulcinella (1920).

But another ballet, begun in 1914, composed in 1917, and finally orchestrated only in 1923, was the grandest fulfillment of these years: Svadebka (Les Noces, or The Little Wedding) for chorus and four solo singers in the pit, with four pianos and percussion. Here the barbaric power of the Rite and the modern concision of The Soldier's Tale met in an austere affirmation of love - too austere to be recognized as affirmation by many people. Alongside these very diverse major works were several smaller ones, for voices and for instruments in various combinations, all of which won frequent performance only much later. Outstanding among these was a memorial to Debussy, Symphonies for Wind Instruments.

A short comic opera, Mavra (1922), revealed a new lyricism in Stravinsky's complicated development. Mavra was a declaration of continuity with the Russian traditions of Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Glinka, and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Though it was not a popular success (to Stravinsky's great disappointment), it influenced young men like Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Kurt Weill, Sergei Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich as much as had the Rite. For them, as for their contemporary Paul Hindemith, Stravinsky seemed now to have left not only Ravel but Schoenberg and his school in a backwater of history; Stravinsky belonged with the young. Stravinsky's instrumental works of the 1920s, including the Piano Concerto, the Octet for winds, the Sonata, and the Serenade in a for piano solo, justified the slogan "Back to Bach," though just what Stravinsky meant by the slogan was seldom fully grasped despite his meticulous qualifications.

An opera-oratorio, Oedipus Rex (1927), and a "white" ballet, Apollo (1928), both defined and transcended the "neoclassicism" that was much talked about between the wars. That Stravinsky's taste was by no means so narrow as this fashionable label suggests is indicated by the next ballet, The Fairy's Kiss (1928), a new tribute to Tchaikovsky, making use of themes from Tchaikovsky's songs and piano pieces. The Divertimento for orchestra and the Capriccio for piano and orchestra likewise testify to Stravinsky's continuing versatility. But these works dissatisfied some admirers of Mavra as much as those of the Rite, without winning the bigger audience of Tchaikovsky's symphonies, not to mention the ever-growing mass of consumers of other music.

The death of Diaghilev in the year the Great Depression began (1929) marked the end of an epoch, the extinction of a social focus for much of Stravinsky's work. Though he was to become a French citizen in 1934, he was not able to win in France the recognition and security he needed. He found some solace with friends like the French poet Paul Valéry, the philosopher Jacques Maritain, and the philosopher-critic Pierre Souvchinsky. These thinkers, more than any musician, helped him seek order and discipline "at a time," as he wrote, "when the status of man is undergoing profound upheavals. Modern man is progressively losing his understanding of values and his sense of proportions." Stravinsky reaffirmed membership in the Orthodox Church, which he had neglected since adolescence.

The Symphony of Psalms (1930) for chorus of men and boys and orchestra without violins became the most widely known of all Stravinsky's works after the Rite. At first its gravity seemed incongruous with the worldliness of the ballets; after it got to be familiar, it was often recommended as a good starting point for acquaintance with Stravinsky's work as a whole.

The theatrical works Persephone (1934) and A Game of Cards (1936) were as obviously unique as the Symphony of Psalms. They were somewhat subordinate to a series of purely instrumental works on a grand scale: the Violin Concerto (1931), Duo concertante for violin and piano (1932), Concerto for two pianos (1935), Concerto for chamber orchestra ("Dumbarton Oaks," 1938), and Symphony in C (1940). If composers like Arthur Honegger, Bohuslav Martinu, Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Benjamin Britten abstracted from Stravinsky's procedures models for their own various recurring problems, this was irrelevant to the lasting values of the Stravinsky works, for he continued to set himself fresh problems and to find fresh solutions.

The true sequel to the Symphony of Psalms was to be liturgical. From 1942 to 1948 Stravinsky worked intermittently on an uncommissioned setting of the Ordinary of the Roman Catholic Mass for chorus and winds. He had been spurred to this work by Mozart's Masses but not in any obvious way; rather, he said, "As I played through these rococo-operatic sweets-of-sin, I knew I had to write a Mass of my own, but a real one." And on another occasion he said, "One composes a march to facilitate marching men, so with my Credo I hope to provide an aid to the text. The Credo is the longest movement. There is so much to believe."

Stravinsky's tone in language matches the aggressive originality of his music. His originality, nevertheless, is at the service of orthodox belief, and his polemics are written "not in my own defense, but in order to defend in words all music and its principles, just as I defend them in a different way with my compositions."

Renewals in America

When he settled in the United States in 1939, 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). From then on, though Agon (1957) was the only later piece composed especially for dance, the ballet made use of many old and new works, illuminating and popularizing them, gratifying and inspiring the composer as did comparatively few other performances of his work. 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). This was a fulfillment not merely of his celebrated anti-Wagnerian stylistic principles but also of capacities and aspirations that had seemed only natural at the outset of his career and of his mature ethical and religious concerns. On the advice of his friend Aldous Huxley, he applied to the poet W. H. Auden for a libretto, to be based on his own vision derived from William Hogarth's prints of The Rake's Progress. Auden's work, in collaboration with Chester Kallman, provided an ideal "fable," embodying elements of farce, melodrama, pastoral, and allegory. The music includes some of Stravinsky's most melodious ideas, contrasting with bold dry recitative, colorful choruses, and concise episodes for the Mozartean orchestra. Performed all over the world, The Rake's Progress was especially successful in versions designed by Ingmar Bergman and Gian Carlo Menotti.

The young conductor Robert Craft became a devoted aide of Stravinsky while he worked on the opera. Soon Craft's pioneering work with the music of Anton Webern aroused Stravinsky's interest. During the 1950s, alongside several younger composers in Europe and America, Stravinsky deeply studied Webern and gradually absorbed new elements into his own still evolving, still very individual, style. Some old friends, like Poulenc, unable to keep up the pace, felt betrayed. But now, as in the 1920s, Stravinsky belonged with the young.

The Cantata on medieval English poems (1952) and the Septet (1953) show a new density of contrapuntal ingenuity in the service of wonderfully lively expression. The moving Song with dirge canons in memory of Dylan Thomas (1954) is still more densely made, with every note accountable as part of a five-note series continually varied. In the oratorio Canticum sacrum in honor of St. Mark (1956), there are passages with Webernish sounds and silences, melodies made mostly of wide skips, and series of twelve notes treated according to Schoenberg's technique. Similar passages in Agon (1953-1957), a plotless ballet for twelve dancers, are combined with references to 16th-century dances and strong C-major cadences in a fantastic synthesis.

Threni, i.e., Lamentations of Jeremiah (1958) for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra appeared as a major historical landmark, for in this work Stravinsky made the twelve-tone technique a "point of departure" throughout, as he continued to do in later compositions. Of these the largest ones are settings of religious texts: A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer (1961), The Flood (1962), Abraham and Isaac (1963), and Requiem Canticles (1966). Some smaller vocal works deserve a place beside the larger ones: the unaccompanied Anthem on stanzas from T. S. Eliot's Quartets, The dove descending breaks the air (1962), the setting for voice and three clarinets of Auden's Elegy for J. F. K. (1964), and even the song for voice and piano on Edward Lear's poem The Owl and the Pussycat (1968). 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. Both were "major" despite a brevity worthy of Webern - the Movements about 10 minutes, the Variations less than 5. Balanchine simply had the Variations played three times, with the threefold dance accumulating power.

Stravinsky died on April 6, 1971, in New York City. He was buried with pomp in Venice.

Assessments of the Composer

The poet Herbert Read declared in 1962 that Stravinsky was "the most representative artist of our own 20th century." The critic François Michel a year earlier gave a reason for calling him "the greatest musician of our epoch" - he was "the only one who could transform its characteristic defects, which he took upon himself, into ways of seeing the truths of all time." The publisher Ernst Roth in 1967 went further, hailing Stravinsky as "the most prophetic of all men of our time. His life is like a symbol of future mankind."

That same year Stravinsky characteristically made fun of "the natural desire to cling to an old man in hopes that he can point the road to the future. What is needed, of course, is simply any road that offers enough mileage and a good enough safety record. And my road … will soon become a detour, I realize … but I hardly mind that. Detours are often pleasant to travel, far more so than those super-turnpikes on which the traffic has yet to discover that the race is not always to the swift."

Further Reading

With his Autobiography (1936), Stravinsky became an important writer on music. His Poetics of Music (1942; translated by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl, 1947) is his most systematic literary work, unique among discussions of music for its authority and scope. But these books, he said later, were "much less like me, in all my faults, than my conversations," which he compiled in collaboration with Robert Craft in a series of volumes: Conversations (1959), Memories and Commentaries (1960), Expositions and Developments (1962), Dialoguesand a Diary (1963), Themes and Episodes (1966), and Retrospectives and Conclusions (1969).

The most comprehensive collection of facts about his life and all his works is Eric W. White, Stravinsky (1966). Other studies include Heinrich Strobel, Stravinsky: Classic Humanist (1955); Roman Vlad, Stravinsky (trans. 1960; repr. 1968); and Robert Siohan, Stravinsky (1969).

Stravinsky, Igor (b Oranienbaum, 17 June 1882, d New York, 6 Apr. 1971). Russian-French-US composer, one of the greatest and most prolific composers for dance in the 20th century. His first ballet score, The Firebird, commissioned by Diaghilev and choreographed by Fokine in 1910, already displayed the rhythmic invention and brilliant variations of timbre and colour that were to make much of his music so atmospheric and danceable. In Petrushka (chor. Fokine, 1911) he developed a distinctive Russian sound using folk themes woven into the music's fabric, and in Rite of Spring (chor. Nijinsky, 1913) he created a radical sound of clashing tonalities and violent irregular rhythms that, together with the primitivist choreography, generated a storm of controversy on the opening night. The score was subsequently used by Massine in 1920 and by many other choreographers (see Rite of Spring) and is now a classic of the concert hall repertory. Other commissions from Diaghilev included Pulcinella (chor. Massine 1920) and Les Noces (chor. Nijinska, 1923), and later scores written specially for dance included Le Baiser de la fée (chor. Nijinska, Ida Rubinstein's Company, Paris, 1928), Perséphone (chor. Joos, Ida Rubinstein's Company, Paris, 1934), and Sceǹes de Ballet (chor. Dolin for Seven Lively Arts revue, Ziegfeld Theater, New York, 1948). It is, though, with Balanchine that Stravinsky's music has become most closely associated. Apollon musagète was first used by Bolm in Washington in 1928, but when Balanchine came to choreograph his own version later that year he claimed it as a personal turning point, Stravinsky's austere neo-classicism inspiring a luminous clarity in his own invention. Stravinsky composed only four ballet scores for Balanchine—Jeu de cartes (American Ballet, New York, 1937), Circus Polka, a ballet for elephants (Barnum and Bailey Circus, New York, 1942), Orpheus (Ballet Society, New York, 1948), and Agon (New York City Ballet, 1957)—but the latter used many of the concert works for his ballets, including Danses concertantes (1944), Jewels (‘Rubies’ section, set to Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, 1967), Duo Concertant (1972), and Symphony in Three Movements (1972).

The rhythmic wit and drive of Stravinsky's music, coupled with its frequent incorporation of dance forms and popular themes, have made it popular with many other choreographers, including Béjart, MacMillan, Robbins, and A. Page, and among the concert pieces most frequently used for dance are the Concerto in D (chor. Hoyer, Hamburg, 1950; chor. Robbins in The Cage, New York City Ballet, 1951; chor. van Manen in Tilt, Netherlands Dance Theatre, 1972); Ebony Concerto (chor. Taras, New York City Ballet, 1960; chor. Cranko, Munich State Opera, 1970; chor. van Manen, Dutch National Ballet, 1976; chor. Woitzel, NYCB, 1994; chor. A. Page, Royal Ballet, 1995) and the Concerto for Piano and Brass Instruments (chor. Taras in Arcade, New York City Ballet, 1963; chor. Robbins in Dumbarton Oaks, NYCB, 1972). On 25 June 1972 NYCB began a week-long Stravinsky Festival featuring 31 ballets to his music, 21 of them new creations. A second festival was held in 1982. Stravinsky's published writings include Chronicle of My Life (London, 1936), Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (with Robert Craft, New York, 1959), Dialogues and a Diary (with Robert Craft, New York, 1963 and London, 1968), and Themes and Episodes (with Robert Craft, New York, 1966).

Stravinsky, Igor Fyodorovich (1882–1971), Russian‐born composer. He left Russia in 1913, living in Switzerland and France until finally moving to the United States in 1939. Stravinsky had already begun working on what was to become the opera Le Rossignol (The Nightingale, 1914), based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, when Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the hugely influential Ballets Russes, requested a score for a ballet based on the Russian legend of ‘The Firebird’. With scenario by Michel Fokine, choreographer for the Ballets Russes, L'Oiseau de feu (The Firebird, 1910) tells of the defeat of the ogre Kashchei by the young Prince Ivan, with help from the Firebird. Written for large orchestra, Stravinsky's colourful score simultaneously looks back to the music of his teacher Rimsky‐Korsakov, and forward to the violent rhythmic innovations of Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913). The Firebird proved to be the first in a series of fairy‐tale‐based ballet scores written by Stravinsky for Diaghilev's company. Before The Rite came Petruschka (1911), with scenario by Stravinsky and Alexandre Benois, set during a vividly realized Shrovetide Fair in St Petersburg in the 1830s, and featuring the traditional figure of the fairground puppet (danced in the original production by Vaslav Nijinsky).

Following two idiosyncratic stage works based on Russian tales from the collections of A. N. Afanasyev—Renard (composed 1915–16; first performed 1922), an animal fable involving Reynard the Fox, and Histoire du soldat (The Soldier's Tale, 1918)—Stravinsky composed music for the one‐act ballet Pulcinella (1920). With costumes and sets designed by Pablo Picasso, Pulcinella tells a simple story involving the hero of the Neapolitan commedia dell'arte. The score is one of the first examples of Stravinsky's neo‐classicism, based as it is on music from the Italian baroque; he later referred to it as ‘my discovery of the past’. Such creative interaction with the music of previous centuries also formed the basis of Le Baiser de la fée (The Fairy's Kiss, 1928), which draws on some of the less familiar music of Tchaikovsky, to accompany a condensed version of Hans Christian Andersen's ‘The Ice Maiden’. Dedicating it to the memory of Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky conceived of the story as an allegory of his predecessor's work.

Bibliography

• Stravinsky, Igor, An Autobiography (1936).
• Stravinsky, Igor, Selected Correspondence, ed. Robert Craft, iii (1984).
• Taruskin, Richard, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through ‘Mavra’ (2 vols., 1996).
• White, Eric Walter, Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works (1966).

— Stephen Benson

(1882-1971), composer. Stravinsky earned fame as a composer for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, a Russian company based from 1909 to 1929 in Paris. Three ballets--The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913)--secured his reputation both as continuator of the traditions of the Russian national school and as fearless modernist. After World War I, his prestige in Paris was enhanced by his advocacy of a smart neoclassical aesthetic that accorded well with the ideals of the reigning intellectual and creative avant-garde. The vogue for American popular music in Europe is reflected in a number of his compositions of the period. By the 1930s he was widely regarded as being (with Arnold Schoenberg) one of the two greatest living composers.

Stravinsky first toured the United States in 1925. He received commissions for two major compositions: the ballet Apollon musagète (1927-1928; revised 1947 as Apollo) and the Symphony of Psalms (1930).

While on his second American tour in 1935, he received a commission from Lincoln Kirstein for the ballet Jeu de cartes, first performed under the composer's baton at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1937. Other American commissions of the thirties included his Concerto in E-flat for chamber orchestra (1938, known as the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto) and the Symphony in C (1939-1940).

In 1939-1940 he was the Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry at Harvard University. The six lectures he delivered in French were translated into English as The Poetics of Music and remain a major enunciation of modernist musical aesthetics.

Stravinsky was in America at the outbreak of World War II (he had resided in neutral Switzerland in World War I) and decided to stay put--a decision partly motivated by a wish to start life anew in the aftermath of personal tragedy (he had lost a daughter, his wife, and his mother the preceding year). He remarried and settled in Hollywood, where he lived until 1969. Despite several attempts, Stravinsky never succeeded in getting his music accepted by the Hollywood studios; some of the music he wrote "on spec" for the movies wound up in his scores from the forties. Another ill-starred early project was his arrangement of "The Star-Spangled Banner," which became a cause célèbre and was banned in Boston in 1941.

Stravinsky had an enormous influence on young American composers despite the fact that he rarely took pupils. Partly thanks to the presence in Boston at that time of Nadia Boulanger, a Stravinsky disciple, a virtual "Stravinsky school" of American neoclassical composition grew up in that city. There was little in the way of reciprocal American influence on Stravinsky; the only composition of his that clearly reflects the impact of his new environment was the Ebony Concerto (1945) for jazz ensemble (plus harp and French horn), written for the Woody Herman band.

In 1947 Stravinsky collaborated with W. H. Auden on an opera in English, based on Hogarth's series of engravings The Rake's Progress. Because of his discomfort with the language, he engaged the young American conductor Robert Craft to read the libretto aloud to him. The relationship with Craft became a quasi-filial one, with profound consequences for Stravinsky's work.

It was Craft's enthusiastic involvement with the music of Schoenberg and his pupils Berg and Webern that piqued Stravinsky's interest in their techniques of serial composition. His gradual approach to the twelve-tone system can be surveyed in works like the Cantata (1952), the ballet Agon (1957), and Threni (for chorus and orchestra, 1957-1958), his first fully twelve-tone work. Stravinsky evolved his own twelve-tone methods over the next decade or so, achieving a remarkable synthesis of the serial approach with his earlier habits of rhythm, articulation, and harmonic structure.

Bibliography:

Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, 1948-1971 (1972); Eric Walter White and Jeremy Noble, "Stravinsky," in The New Grove Modern Masters (1984).

Author:

Richard F. Taruskin

See also Music.

(1882 - 1971), Russian composer.

Among the most influential composers of the twentieth century, Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky epitomized the new prominence of Russian emigré creative artists and their presence on the international scene in the years following the 1917 Revolution. Like the contributions of his emigré colleague writer Vladimir Nabokov and choreographer George Balanchine-Stravinsky's enormous contribution to his art significantly altered the course of twentieth-century music. Stravinsky's compositions encompass every important musical trend of the period (neonationalism, neoclassicism, and serialism, to name a few) and include examples of all the major Western concert genres (opera, ballet, symphony, choral works, solo works, and numerous incidental works, including a polka for circus elephants).

The son of a St. Petersburg opera singer, Stravinsky attained international fame with his early ballet, The Firebird (1910), composed for Sergei Diagilev's Ballets Russes (with choreography by Michel Fokine). Several important ballets followed, including Petrushka (1911, also with Fokine) and the seminal Rite of Spring (1913, choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky), among the most famous works of art of the twentieth century. Stravinsky's compositions for the theater continued to trace a path through the most significant musical and theatrical idioms of his century, and include Les Noces (1923, choreography by Bronislava Nijinska), Apollon musagète (1928), and Agon (1957, both choreographed by Balanchine). Although Stravinsky was a supremely cosmopolitan figure, his music nonetheless retained traces of its Russian origins throughout his long career.

Bibliography

Stravinsky, Vera, and Craft, Robert. (1978). Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Taruskin, R. (1996). Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions. Berkeley: University of California Press.

White, Eric Walter. (1979). Stravinsky: the Composer and His Works. Berkeley: University of California Press.

—TIM SCHOLL

Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky, the composer whose work had a revolutionary impact on the musical world just before and after World War I, was born in Russia on this day in 1882. Best known for his early ballets, The Firebird (1909), Petrushka (1910) and The Rite of Spring (1913), Stravinsky had first trained to be a lawyer. In 1907, he began studying music with Rimsky-Korsakov and was encouraged to compose. He also became a noted pianist and conductor, frequently conducting his own works.

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Stravinsky, Igor Fedorovich (ē'gər fyô'dərô'vyĭch strəvĭn'skē), 1882-1971, Russian-American composer. Considered by many the greatest and most versatile composer of the 20th cent., Stravinsky helped to revolutionize modern music.

Stravinsky's father, an actor and singer in St. Petersburg, had him educated for the law. Music was only an avocation for Stravinsky until his meeting in 1902 with Rimsky-Korsakov, with whom he studied formally from 1907 to 1908. Stravinsky's First Symphony in E Flat Major (1907) is pervaded by the influence of Rimsky-Korsakov's nationalistic style. The work of Stravinsky interested the ballet impressario Sergei Diaghilev, and Stravinsky's first strikingly original compositions-L'Oiseau de Feu (The Firebird, 1910) and Petrouchka (1911)-were written for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris.

In the ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913) he departed radically from musical tradition by using irregular, primitive rhythms and harsh dissonances. The audience at the premiere of the ballet reacted with riotous disfavor. However, in the following year the work was performed by a symphony orchestra, and ever since it has been recognized as a landmark and masterpiece of modern music.

At the beginning of World War I, Stravinsky moved to Switzerland, where he composed several works based on Russian themes, including the ballet Les Noces (The Wedding, 1923). Influenced by 18th-century music, he embarked on an austere, neoclassical style in such works as the poetic dance-drama Histoire du Soldat (The Soldier's Tale, 1918), the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927; text by Jean Cocteau after Sophocles), and the choral composition Symphonie de psaumes (Symphony of Psalms, 1930).

In the 1930s, Stravinsky toured throughout Europe and the United States as a pianist and conductor of his own works. He became a French citizen in 1934, but five years later he moved to the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1945. Compositions of the 1940s include such diverse works as the Ebony Concerto (1946) for clarinet and swing band; the Third Symphony (1946) in three movements; the ballet Orpheus (1948); and a mass (1948) for voices and double wind quintet.

After composing the opera The Rake's Progress (1951; inspired by Hogarth's engravings, with libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman), Stravinsky turned to experiments with serial techniques (see serial music). In Cantata (1952) the new technique was evident, and in the chamber piece Septet (1953) he made the full transition to serialism. He continued to compose in this exacting style in the abstract ballet Agon (1957) and in Threni (1958), a work for voices and orchestra. His creative originality was undiminished in his late works, which display remarkable freshness, meticulous craftsmanship, and an experimental quality.

Stravinsky's influence on 20th-century music is immeasurable. He revitalized the rhythms of European music and achieved entirely new sonorities and blends of orchestral colors. A series of lectures he delivered at Harvard were published as Poétique musicale (1942, tr. Poetics of Music, 1948).

Bibliography

See his autobiography Chronicles of My Life (1935, tr. 1936); his Memories and Commentaries (1960), Expositions and Developments (1962), and Dialogues and a Diary (1963), all three written with R. Craft. See also biographies by R. Siohan (1959, tr. 1966), A. Dobrin (1970), P. Horgan (1972), R. Craft (1972), L. Libman (1972), and S. Walsh (2 vol., 1999-2006); studies by J. Pasler (1986), P. van den Toorn (1987), S. Walsh (1988), and C. M. Joseph (2001 and 2002).

(struh-vin-skee)

A Russian composer, widely considered one of the greatest of the twentieth century. Among his celebrated works are the ballets The Rite of Spring, The Firebird, and Petrushka.

Quotes:

"What force is more potent than love?"

"Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?"

"I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge."

"The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead."

"Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end."

"A good composer does not imitate; he steals."

See more famous quotes by Igor Stravinsky

Biography

Considered one of the great innovators of 20th century music, Stravinsky's early folk-influenced style, his neo-classical middle period, and his later adventures into serialism are heard in some 33 feature productions.

Aspects of Stravinsky's often disputative relationship with the impresario Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russe are explored in Nijinsky (1980). The young Nijinsky is at a loss when confronted with the daunting assignment of choreographing the composer's revolutionary work Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913) which depicts scenes from an ancient, pagan Russia. The difference between the way that musicians and dancers count rhythm becomes an extended, albeit frustrated joke as dancers are shown having breakdowns at rehearsals and Nijinsky shouts beats from the wings at the premiere. Diaghilev walks through the riotous audience urging them to listen to the music even if they don't like the dance, as he reportedly did at the actual event (subsequent performances were successes). Nijinsky also dances in Petrushka as the clown ruled by an evil magician, a metaphor of the tragic power struggle developing between the dancer and his lover Diaghilev.

Excerpts from The Rite of Spring in Disney's original Fantasia (1940) inspired the animators to envision the music as a tone poem about Earth's evolution from its fiery molten days (Dances of the Young Girls), to the rushing torrents of waters (The Ritual of Abduction), to the birth of living forms and simple sea life making its way to shore and evolving legs (The Exalted Sacrifice). The Mystic Circle of the Young Girls underscores scenes of dinosaurs peacefully feeding on vegetation. The Naming and Honoring of the Chosen One and Evocation of the Ancestors introduce more vicious beasts and struggles. Ritual Action of the Ancestors accompanies the search for water, and the Sacrificial Dance punctuates the sudden jutting forth of mountain ranges. The sequence closes with a recapitulation (not in the original score) of the plaintive high bassoon theme.

Excerpts from The Rite of Spring also occur in the study of the great surrealist artist Max Ernst in Max Ernst: Mein Vagabundieren, Meine Unruhe (Max Ernst: My Roving, My Unrest; aka Max Ernst: Journey Into the Subconscious, 1991) and in Jalousie (1991), which also quotes from the composer's cantata Les noces in the TV miniseries Cosmos (1980), and in the German film The Death of Maria Malibran (1971).

In the Disney Pictures Fantasia 2000 (1999), Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, 1919 Version is the final composition illustrated in the film. A lonely caribou wanders through a wintery landscape and meets an elemental feminine sprite who gradually renews the greenery with sweeping motions. She encounters the terrifying firebird spirit of an erupting volcano. Lava spreads across the land to the powerful rhythms of brass and percussion. A plaintive English horn theme underscores scenes of devastation. The caribou raises the sprite up from the ashes on its mighty antlers and once again she sails through the land renewing its beauty.

Stravinsky's music has appeared, although not often, in more lighthearted contexts. At the very onset of the hilarious Raising Arizona (1987), a droll arrangement for whistler and banjo of The Wet Nurses Dance With the Coachmen and the Grooms from Stravinsky's ballet Petrushka accompanies the first meeting of Nicolas Cage's character Hi (Herbert McDonnough) and Ed (Edwina), his future wife (played by Holly Hunter), who is at the moment a police officer taking his arrest photo: "Turn to the right!"

Stravinsky himself appears in the Canadian film Stravinsky (1965) and in the U.S. documentary A Stravinsky Portrait, also made in 1965. ~ "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Rovi

Stravinsky Buy this Movie	Fantasia 2000 Buy this Movie	The Convent Buy this Movie	La Belle Noiseuse Buy this Movie
La Belle Noiseuse - Divertimento Buy this Movie	The Law of Desire Buy this Movie	The Soldier's Tale Buy this Movie	The Firebird (Royal Danish Ballet) Buy this Movie

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For The Record...

Born Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky, June 17, 1882, in Oranienbaum, Russia; died April 6, 1971, in New York, NY; son of Fyodor Stravinsky (opera singer) and Anna (Kholodovsky) Stravinsky; one of four children; married Katerina Nossenko, 1906 (died 1939); children: Fyodor, Ludmila, Svyatoslav, Sulema, Milena, Nicholas, and Katherine; married Vera de Bossett, 1940. Studied piano and composition as a child; began taking private lessons with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov while attending law school, 1903; composed first major work, Symphony in E-flat Major, 1907; wrote Firebird for Ballet Russe, Paris, France, 1908; created major furor with The Rite of Spring, 1913; made first public appearance as a conductor, 1915; composed series of Neo-classical works that featured polytonal features; became known as leader of avant-garde music, 1920s; made first tour of U.S., 1925; began composing more religious works, starting with Symphony of Psalms, 1930; toured South America with son Sulima, a professional pianist, 1936; moved to Hollywood, CA, 1939; gave series of lectures at Harvard University as Elliot Norton Chair, Cambridge, MA, 1940; served as guest conductor with numerous American Symphony Orchestras, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic; had major worldwide success with The Rake’s Progress, an opera, 1951; compared scores for a number of ballets choreographed by George Balanchine; developed partnership with conductor Robert Craft; experimented with serialism, late 1950s; composed Elegy for J.F.K. following President Kennedy’s assassination, 1964; completed last major composition, Requiem Canticles, 1966; moved to New York, NY, 1969; died at the age of 88 in New York, NY, and was buried in Venice, Italy, 1971. Awards: Gold Medal, Royal Philharmonic Society, 1954; U.S. State Department Medal, 1962.

Composer

Few composers have made such dramatic breaks from the status quo in classical music as Igor Stravinsky did in the twentieth century. As Harold C. Schonberg remarked in The Lives of the Great Composers, "What Stravinsky represented, among many other things, was a compete rupture with Romanticism." Long considered the leader of the musical avant garde, Stravinsky developed his reputation by putting his own musical label on the classical styles of the past. His shift to Neo-classicism after World War I resulted in a series of compositions hallmarked by simplicity and restraint that were often critically praised but not favored by the public.

Stravinsky stressed that music was notes and nothing more, and that composition should be an expression of form and logic rather than passion. While his so-called "intellectual" scores often didn’t strike a chord with audiences, his colleagues generally regarded him as one of the best musical technicians of his time. He also had a tremendous influence on other composers who followed him, although he had little interest in discussing his own music.

As the son of a renowned singer at the Imperial Opera in Russia, Stravinsky was surrounded by classical music while growing up. He began taking piano lessons at the age of nine, and also studied composition as a child. Trips to the ballet and opera were commonplace for the young Stravinsky, but his early training did not reveal any significant talent, nor did his compositions foreshadow his musical explorations of the future. As a teenager he became more interested in improvisation and began dabbling in composition.

A key influence of Stravinsky’s early work was the famous Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, whom Stravinsky met around 1900. When Stravinsky’s father died in 1902, Rimsky-Korsakov became the young man’s substitute father and musical mentor as he continued with studies at law school. Stravinsky became the composer’s private student in 1903 and continued in this capacity until Rimsky-Korsakov’s death in 1908. One of his first big compositions, the Symphony in E-flat Majorin 1907, clearly showed the influences of Rimsky-Korsakov’s style. Other early influences on Stravinsky’s work were Scriabin, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and Dukas.

Serge Diaghilev, who had recently established his Ballet Russe in Paris, attended a 1908 performance of Stravinsky’s Fireworks in St. Petersburg. He was so impressed by Stravinsky’s work that he asked the composer to write the music for a ballet based on the Russian fairy tale of the Fire Bird. Stravinsky agreed

and became famous overnight as a result of his Firebird, which backed choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky and received rave notices in France. Despite six decades of composing to follow, the Firebird would remain Stravinsky’s most popular work. He followed this with 1911’s Petrushka, which, according to Schonberg, "solidified Stravinsky’s position as the coming man of European music." Quite daring for its time, this work featured a section that had two unrelated harmonies converging.

Nothing Stravinsky had done before prepared the pubic for his legendary next work, Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), which was also choreographed by Nijinsky. In his discussion of the work, New York Times music critic Paul Griffiths wrote, "By means of syncopation and rapid changes of metre Stravinsky did away with the regular pulse which had governed almost all Western music since the Renaissance." Most shocking about this ballet was its reception at its premiere, where members of the audience jeered and booed during the performance. Schonberg explained the response by writing, "Hardly anybody in the audience was prepared for a score of such dissonance and ferocity, such complexity and such rhythmic oddity." In a single stroke, Stravinsky had thrown out the time-honored standards of harmony and melody and created a new set of musical values.

A Change of Style
Prevented from returning to his native land due to World War I, Stravinsky and his family moved to Switzerland. After the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, he lived in France and soon encountered financial trouble, as funds had been cut off from Russia. Money problems forced Stravinsky to curtail his composing time by working more often as a performing musician and conductor. At this point he began composing a different type of music, focusing on concise works for small groups of instruments rather than majestic scores for large orchestras. One of these was a folk-tale piece composed in 1918 called Histoire du Soldat, which was an early example of musical theater. Based on a Russian tale about a deserting soldier, the piece used the services of a narrator, two actors, a dancer, and seven instrumentalists, while featuring a ragtime number and a chorale. Other notable Neo-classical works that he composed around this time include the Symphonies of Wind Instruments in 1921, a one-act opera entitled Mavra in 1922, and the cantata Les Noces (The Wedding) in 1923. Up to this time many of his pieces still drew heavily on the folk tales of Russia, but eventually his music left that heritage behind.

With his music after 1920 labeled as abstract and cosmopolitan, Stravinsky never again had the impact on audiences that he did with his Russian ballets. This was no surprise to him; he did not expect his anti-sentimental works to cater to the general public. By now his music was much more controlled and featured a strict economy of composition and little bombast. This approach was considerably evident in his oratorio called Oedipus Rex, composed in 1927. His Violin Concerto in the early 1930s was also an example of traditional musical forms put through Stravinsky’s ultramodern filter. His evolution during this period created two schools of thought among critics, one side admiring his newly found simplicity and restraint, the other yearning for the urgency and energy of his previous composition. The composer made his thoughts quite clear in his 1930 autobiography: "I consider that music is, by its very nature, powerless to express anything at all…. The phenomenon of music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things."

In the 1930s Stravinsky was devoting much of his attention to religious works. He wrote a Symphony of Psalms for chorus and orchestra in 1930, and his late 1930s Symphony in C was, according to him, written to honor God’s glory. During this decade he also found himself more in demand in the United States. He had visited America in 1925 and conducted the New YorkPhilharmonic Orchestra, and in 1935 he returned there to conduct a number of major American orchestras.

Tragedy struck the Stravinsky family in the late 1930s. The death of his daughter of tuberculosis in 1938 was followed the next year by the death of his wife. The composer then lost his mother three months later. As World War II began to gain steam in Europe, he moved to the United States, which remained his home for the rest of his life. After settling in Hollywood in 1939, he received a number of requests to compose music for films, but little became of them. His most significant work during his first decade in the U.S. was the very dynamic Symphony in Three Movements completed in 1945. He also composed his Mass for chorus and woodwinds in 1948 for use in church services.

Lost Status in Avant Garde
In the U.S. Stravinsky reconnected with the Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine, with whom Stravinsky had worked previously in Europe. They formed a successful partnership in ballets, including 1948’s Orpheus. Stravinsky’s greatest post-World War II success was an opera collaboration with W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman entitled The Rake’s Progress, which premiered in 1951 and gained international popularity. By this time Stravinsky had lost his position as leader of the avant garde, being upstaged by the rising popularity of Austro-Hungarian Arnold Schoen-berg’s 12-tone techniques and the school of serialism (a musical style whereby a series of different notes is used as the basis of a whole composition). For many years he had condemned serialism, but then had a change of tune in the 1950s due partly to increasing exposure to younger European composers resulting from the European premier of The Rake’s Progress. He was also urged to explore serialism by his friend Robert Craft, an American conductor who had a major influence on Stravinsky in his later years. Stravinsky dabbled with serial elements in a ballet score for Agon, commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein and Balanchine in 1957. Other serial works included Threniin 1958 and Movements for Piano and Orchestra in 1959. Some critics attacked the composer’s embracing of serialism as just a stunt to regain his status in the avant-garde world, but few of Stravinsky’s works in this vein have had any staying power in the musical repertory.

In 1962 Stravinsky returned to Russia for the first time in half a century, giving a series of concerts in Moscow and Leningrad. His visit helped eliminate restrictions against the playing of his work in the Soviet Union. Many of Stravinsky’s compositions in the 1960s were elegies or sacred music, among them the Elegy for J.F.K. in 1964. He wrote his last major composition, the serialism-influenced Requiem Canticles, in 1966, most likely with consideration of his own approaching death.

The Winter of a Legend
By 1967 Stravinsky’s health was deteriorating rapidly, and that year he conducted his last public performance, of the Pulcinella Suite, in Toronto, Canada. In 1968, he and his second wife moved to New York City from Hollywood, then spent three months in 1970 at Evian on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Stravinsky died at his home in New York City the following year. Soon after his death scandal broke out regarding books he had co-written with Craft when LillianLibman, Stravinsky’s personal representative, claimed that many of the details conveyed about the composer’s life were fraudulent. Bernard Holland noted in the New York Times that Stravinsky "rearranged past events, experienced memory lapses (convenient or otherwise) or just plain lied."

Although he experienced many changes during his more than 65 years as a composer, Stravinsky maintained a commitment to precision and directness. As was noted about the composer in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "His life was a varied one, and his music too went through several changes, often startling at the time but revealing an inner consistency when viewed with hindsight."

Selected compositions
Tarantella, 1898.
Symphony in E-flat Major, Opus 1, 1907.
L’Oiseau de Feu (The Firebird) (ballet), 1910.
Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) (ballet), 1913.
Histoire du Soldat (A Soldier’s Tale), 1918.
Mavra (an opera), 1922.
Oedipus Rex, 1927.
Jeu de Cartes (ballet), 1936.
Four Norwegian Moods, 1942.
The Rake’s Progress (opera), 1951.
In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, 1954.
Agon (ballet), 1957.
Elegy for J.F.K., 1964.
Requiem Canticles, 1966.
Selected writings
Stravinsky: An Autobiography, Simon & Schuster, 1936.

Poetics of Muse, Harvard University Press, 1942.

Sources
Books
Arnold, Denis, ed., The New Oxford Companion to Music, Volume 2, Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 1757-1760.
Sadie, Stanley, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Volume 18, Macmillan, 1980, pp. 240-265.
Schonberg, Harold C., The Lives of the Great Composers, Revised Edition, W.W. Norton, pp. 484-506.
Stravinsky, Igor, Stravinsky: An Autobiography, Simon & Schuster, 1936.
Stravinsky, Igor, Poetics of Muse, Harvard University Press, 1942.
Taruskin, Richard, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through "Mavra," University of California Press, 1996.

Periodicals
New York Times, October 7, 1996, p. C15.
New York Times Book Review, August 4, 1996, p. 10.

• Genres: Ballet, Band Music, Chamber Music, Choral Music, Concerto, Keyboard Music, Miscellaneous Music, Opera, Orchestral Music, Symphony, Music Theater, Vocal Music

Biography

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) was a Russian composer who established his reputation with three groundbreaking ballets: L'oiseau de feu, Petrushka, and Le Sacre du printemps. Abruptly changing styles were characteristic of Stravinsky throughout his long career, though his works may be grouped in three broad categories, according to his Russian, neo-classical, and serial periods. Yet whether he exploited Russian folk rhythms, as in Les Noces; obscure Classical pieces, as in Pulcinella; or the twelve-tone row, as in his Requiem Canticles, Stravinsky revealed a strong personality that was easily identified through his quirky metric changes, angular melodies, and spicy harmonic language. ~ Blair Sanderson, Rovi

Discography

Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms; Symphony in C; Symphony in Three Movements Buy this CD	Stravinsky: Le sacre du printemps; Petrushka Buy this CD	Igor Stravinsky: The Rite Of Spring; The Firebird Buy this CD	Stravinsky in Moscow, 1962 Buy this CD	Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky Buy this CD
Stravinsky conducts Stravinsky Buy this CD	Stravinsky: The Firebird; Scherzo a la Russe; Fireworks Buy this CD	Stravinsky conducts Stravinsky Buy this CD	Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky Buy this CD	Stravinsky: Apollo; Jeu de cartes Buy this CD

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