Igor Stravinsky

As the revolutionary composer of The Rite of Spring, Igor Stravinsky left a profound imprint on 20th-century music and pursued a constant quest for innovation, exploring neoclassicism and then serialism, while renewing his musical language over seven decades of activity. Born on June 17, 1882 in Orianenbaum, now Lemonossov, near St. Petersburg, Russia, Igor Feodorovitch Stravinsky was the son of Feodor Stravinsky, a famous bassist at the Mariinsky Theatre. He came into contact with musical theater at an early age, taking piano lessons at nine with Leokadia Kachperova, a former pupil of Anton Rubinstein, before moving on to music theory with various private teachers. He enrolled in the law faculty of St. Petersburg University in 1901, but left his studies to travel in Germany. After meeting Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov in Heidelberg, Rimsky-Korsakov introduced Stravinsky to his father, the famous composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who gave Stravinsky lessons in composition and orchestration between 1903 and 1906, after hearing his Piano Sonata in F sharp minor. In 1906, Stravinsky married Catherine Nosenko, with whom he had four children. From youthful compositions to his first Symphony in E flat major, performed in part by the St. Petersburg Court Orchestra in April 1907, then in its entirety in February 1908, Stravinsky had yet to develop a style of his own when his master died, to whom he paid tribute in a Funeral Song for wind instruments. However, after premiering a Scherzo fantastique and a Feu d'artifice for orchestra, the impresario Serge de Diaghilev, who had just created the Ballets Russes, put him to the test on a piece from the ballet Les Sylphides, performed in Paris. Convinced, Diaghilev suggested he compose a ballet inspired by the legend of L'Oiseau de Feu, which premiered at the Paris Opéra on June 25, 1910 to great acclaim. The brilliant colors of the timbres, the orchestral effects and the asymmetrical rhythms worked wonders. The collaboration continued with Petrouchka, premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet on June 13, 1911, with Vaslav Nijinsky in the title role. The original orchestration, including a piano, heralds the upheavals to come with its " Petrouchka chord" using two different keys. Stravinsky, who lived between his Swiss residence of Clarens and Paris, brought music into the modern era with The Rite of Spring, a celebration of a pagan rite that caused one of the greatest scandals in artistic history. Its premiere, directed by Pierre Monteux at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on May 29, 1913, provoked a violent rejection from the public, who rejected both Nijinsky's choreography and the score, dominated by relentless rhythm, dissonance and incessant bar changes. His reputation established, Stravinsky completed the opera The Nightingale (1914), based on Hans Christian Andersen. During the First World War, he collaborated with Swiss poet Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz on L'Histoire du soldat (1918), employing a narrator and seven instrumentalists. Away from his homeland due to the 1917 Revolution, he worked at the same time on the ballets Renard and Les Noces, which, after successive revisions, were not premiered until 1922 and 1923. His collaboration with the Ballets Russes continued with Pulcinella (1920), based on themes by Pergolesi. After composing Mavra, based on Pushkin, first performed at the Paris Opéra in May 1922, followed by the tribute to Debussy in the Wind Symphony (1921), Stravinsky abandoned the Russian folk idiom to enter a long neoclassical phase, drawing on ancient forms dating back to the Baroque period to create highly personal works in which irony blended with his abstract know-how. On the other hand, cut off from his Russian possessions and resources, he sought to establish himself as a pianist and conductor. So, after theWind Octet (1923), he played the Piano Concerto himself, commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky and premiered in Paris in May 1924. After spending time in Carantec, Brittany, and Biarritz, Stravinsky moved to Nice, where he composed the opera-oratorio Œdipus rex (1928), the ballet Apollon musagète, commissioned by the United States and premiered in Washington in 1928, the Capriccio for piano (1929) and the Symphony of Psalms (1930). In Voreppe, Isère, he conceived the Concerto in D for violin (1931) and the ballet Perséphone (1934), based on André Gide's play. Igor Stravinsky, who had obtained French nationality, returned to Paris and composed the Concerto pour deux pianos (1935), the ballet Jeu de cartes, which he directed in New York in 1937, and the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto (1938). In 1940, he settled permanently in the United States with his second wife, Véra de Bosset. He took with him the score of the Symphony in C, completed in Beverly Hills and premiered in Chicago. Other compositions include a curious Circus Polka "for a young elephant" (1942), a Russian-style Scherzo (1944) and, after acquiring American citizenship in 1945, a Symphony in three movements (1946), an Ebony Concerto for clarinet and swing ensemble (1946) and a Concerto in D for string orchestra (1947). After the ballet Orpheus (1948), Stravinsky worked for three years on the opera The Rake's Progress, which he conducted in Venice in 1951 as part of a festival of contemporary music. Stravinsky abandoned his neoclassical period in style, turning radically to twelve-tone music with the ballet Agon (1957), a new collaboration with Russian choreographer George Balanchine. This turn, initiated by his assistant Robert Craft, was adopted as early as the Cantata of 1952, and continued with the Septuor (1953), Three Shakespeare Songs (1953) and new works of religious inspiration such as In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954), the Canticum Sacrum (1956), premiered at St. Mark's Basilica in Venice, and the cantata Threni (1958). Stravinsky's later works, such as Mouvements pour piano et orchestre (1959), Introïtus (1965) and Requiem Canticles (1966), are even more autere and stripped-down in his serial style. In 1962, Stravinsky returned to his native land, now the Soviet Union, where he was warmly welcomed. After several hospitalizations, he spent the summer of 1970 in Evian, France, before dying of pulmonary edema in New York on April 6, 1971, at the age of 88. In accordance with his wishes, he is buried in Venice's San Michele cemetery, next to the Diaghilev tomb.