Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky the Russian-born composer, pianist and conductor (1882-1971), one of the most influential musical figures of the twentieth century. His ballets for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, above all The Rite of Spring, transformed the language of music, and his long career passed through a succession of styles that repeatedly reset the course of modern composition.

Russian Origins and Rimsky-Korsakov

Igor Stravinsky was born in 1882 at Oranienbaum near Saint Petersburg, the son of a celebrated bass singer at the Imperial Opera. He studied law at the university, but music drew him away, and after the death of his father he devoted himself to composition. He became a private pupil of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the leading Russian composer of the day, whose teaching in orchestration left a lasting mark.

Under Rimsky-Korsakov he wrote his early works, including a symphony in E flat and the short orchestral pieces that brought him to the attention of Sergei Diaghilev. His command of the orchestra and his feeling for Russian folk material were evident from the beginning, and he was soon launched into the world of the Parisian ballet.

In 1909 Diaghilev engaged him to orchestrate music for the Ballets Russes, and this association would define the first great phase of his career. He wrote the music for The Firebird, produced in Paris in 1910, whose brilliant colours and folk-derived melodies made him famous overnight.

The Ballets Russes and The Rite of Spring

The Firebird was followed by Petrushka in 1911, a ballet set at a Russian fair, in which the composer used the folk puppets to create a score of biting rhythm and vivid character. The work showed him pushing the conventions of harmony and rhythm further, and it confirmed his collaboration with the choreographer Michel Fokine and the designer Alexandre Benois.

The Rite of Spring, first performed in Paris in May 1913, was the most explosive premiere in the history of music. Its depiction of pagan Russia and of a human sacrifice used uneven, hammering rhythms and dissonant, primitive harmonies that provoked a riot in the theatre, though the score was soon recognised as a masterpiece.

The Rite changed what composers believed was possible. Its rhythmic irregularity, its blocks of sound and its abandonment of conventional melodic development opened a path later taken by many modern composers, and its influence on the concert hall and the cinema has been immense. It remains one of the most performed and studied orchestrations in the repertoire.

Neoclassicism and Style Change

During the First World War and its aftermath, in Switzerland and France, Stravinsky turned to smaller forces and to a cooler, more ironic manner. Pulcinella, based on music attributed to Pergolesi, and the Octet opened the phase known as Neoclassicism, in which he drew on the forms and gestures of earlier centuries while writing music unmistakably his own.

He composed opera and oratorio in this style, including Oedipus Rex, a setting of a Latin text by Cocteau, and the Symphony of Psalms, a work of austere beauty commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The Apollo ballet and the Dumbarton Oaks concerto show his fascination with the clarity and balance of the classical idiom.

His changes of style were frequent and deliberate, and each move was criticised by those who expected him to remain the composer of The Rite. He insisted that composers should be free to absorb whatever tradition they chose, and his neoclassical works are now regarded as central to twentieth-century music.

Later Serial Music and Recorded Legacy

In the 1950s Stravinsky startled the musical world again by adopting the serial method developed from Schoenberg, which he had earlier criticised. Works such as the Agon ballet, the Movements for piano and orchestra and the Requiem Canticles show him using twelve-tone techniques with great individuality, in a language that remained recognisably his own.

He had moved to the United States in 1939 and settled in Los Angeles, where he lived until 1969. He became a conductor of his own music and made a series of recordings that are themselves an important part of his legacy, and he wrote a collaboration with the critic Robert Craft, the Conversations and Memories and Commentaries, that illuminate his art.

He died in New York in 1971 and was buried in Venice. His approach to rhythm, harmony and the orchestra shaped the work of countless composers, and his long life was marked by a restless searching that never accepted a final position. He stands with the small group whose work defines the music of the modern age.

Influence and Legacy

Stravinsky's influence is difficult to sum up. He rewrote the possibilities of rhythm, of orchestral sound and of the relation between music and the stage, and his example encouraged composers to treat style itself as a field of choice. His ballets transformed both music and dance, and their scores remain central to the concert repertoire.

His early Russian works, his neoclassical period and his late serial compositions are now understood not as contradictions but as phases of a single, profoundly disciplined career. He was, as much as any composer, the author of the modern musical idiom, and his name is invoked whenever the history of the twentieth century is discussed.

The Rite of Spring, already a century old, still astonishes audiences, and its riotous premiere has become a founding myth of modern art. Stravinsky's music continues to be performed, analysed and admired across the world, and its vitality is undiminished.

See also

• The Rite of Spring
• Ballets Russes
• Neoclassicism in music
• Twelve-tone technique