|
| From his Russian beginnings to years spent in Switzerland, Paris, and the United States, Igor Stravinsky’s life was shaped by displacement, personal loss, and successive artistic reinventions. |
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) was among the most consequential composers of the twentieth century, a figure whose successive changes of style reshaped modern musical thought. Born in Russia, he spent most of his adult life abroad, finding new possibilities in Russian folk traditions, radical rhythmic invention, the reconsideration of earlier forms, and eventually serial techniques. Across these transformations, his music retained a distinctive precision, vitality, and sense of design. His influence reached far beyond the concert hall, profoundly affecting ballet, orchestral writing, and generations of composers.
Stravinsky’s career unfolded through a succession of remarkable collaborations and historical upheavals. His work with Sergei Diaghilev produced The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring, three ballets that changed the relationship between music and movement. Later works, from Pulcinella and the Symphony of Psalms to The Rake’s Progress and the late Requiem Canticles, reveal an artist who continued to rethink his methods well into old age. The journey from St Petersburg to Switzerland, France, and the United States was therefore both a story of exile and a history of artistic renewal.
1882
Born on June 17 — June 5 under the Old Style calendar — at Oranienbaum, now Lomonosov, near St Petersburg in the Russian Empire. His father, Fyodor Stravinsky, is a prominent bass at the Mariinsky Theatre, while his mother, Anna, is an accomplished pianist. Music and the theatre are part of his surroundings from earliest childhood.
1892
Begins piano lessons and attends performances at the Mariinsky Theatre, discovering the richness of the Russian operatic tradition. These experiences stimulate his imagination even as his family expects him to pursue a more conventional profession.
1901
Enters the law faculty at St Petersburg University while studying music theory privately. Composition gradually claims more of his attention, although a professional musical career still lies outside the plans originally made for him.
1902
Meets Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and shows him some of his early compositions. The encounter becomes one of the decisive events of his youth. His father dies in the same year, as Stravinsky grows increasingly determined to devote himself to music.
1905
Begins regular composition lessons with Rimsky-Korsakov, concentrating especially on orchestration, harmony, and the handling of musical material. The technical discipline acquired under his guidance will remain fundamental even after Stravinsky’s own musical language moves far beyond that of his teacher.
1906
Marries his cousin Catherine Nossenko, whom he has known since childhood. They will have four children. He is also working on his Symphony in E-flat major, an ambitious early score still shaped by the Russian orchestral tradition.
1908
The death of Rimsky-Korsakov affects him deeply. Stravinsky composes the orchestral Funeral Song in his memory, a work that will subsequently be considered lost for more than a century. Meanwhile, Scherzo fantastique and Fireworks reveal an orchestral imagination beginning to acquire an independent character.
1909
Sergei Diaghilev hears Stravinsky’s music in St Petersburg and recognizes the young composer’s potential. He first commissions orchestrations of Chopin for the Ballets Russes, followed by a new ballet drawn from Russian folklore. The collaboration opens the way to international recognition.
1910
The Firebird premieres in Paris with the Ballets Russes, choreographed by Michel Fokine, and is greeted with great enthusiasm. Stravinsky enters the centre of European artistic life almost overnight, meets musicians including Claude Debussy, and begins dividing his time between Russia and Western Europe.
1911
Petrushka premieres in Paris, with Vaslav Nijinsky in the title role. Its story of a puppet endowed with human feelings inspires a score of sharply articulated rhythms, folk-derived elements, and startling instrumental combinations. The success consolidates Stravinsky’s position at the forefront of musical innovation.
1913
On May 29, The Rite of Spring premieres at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, with choreography by Nijinsky. The performance provokes uproar and fierce divisions among the audience. Irregular rhythmic patterns, dissonant harmonies, and unconventional choreography challenge expectations of what music and ballet could be. The work will come to be recognized as a defining achievement of musical modernism.
1914
The First World War finds the family in Switzerland. Travel becomes increasingly difficult, and what had been a temporary stay develops into a prolonged separation from Russia. Stravinsky continues drawing on the songs, tales, and rituals of his homeland, while exploring the possibilities of smaller and more flexible musical forces.
1917
The Russian Revolution decisively alters his family’s financial circumstances. The loss of income from Russia intensifies the uncertainties of exile. During these years he works on Les Noces, a score inspired by Russian wedding customs that will pass through several versions before reaching its final form.
1918
Collaborates with the Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz on The Soldier’s Tale, drawn from a Russian folk story. Conceived for narrator, actors, dancer, and an ensemble of just seven musicians, the work reflects the limited financial resources of wartime. Its economical forces lead to a radically inventive form of musical theatre, although the influenza epidemic prevents the planned touring production.
1920
The family settles in France. In Paris, Pulcinella receives its premiere, drawing on eighteenth-century Italian music, much of it then attributed to Pergolesi. Stravinsky transforms the borrowed material through his own rhythmic and harmonic language. The ballet marks a decisive turn toward the neoclassicism that will shape much of his work over the following decades.
1923
Les Noces is presented in its definitive form, scored for voices, four pianos, and percussion. Its concentrated sonority connects Russian ceremonial traditions with a radically modern treatment of rhythm. The Octet for Wind Instruments, also premiered that year, offers another clear statement of Stravinsky’s new compositional direction.
1924
Completes the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments and performs as soloist in its premiere. The need for financial stability encourages him to develop a more systematic career as a pianist and conductor. Touring allows him to present his works directly to an expanding international audience.
1926
Returns to active participation in the Russian Orthodox Church after a period of distance from its religious practice. This renewed commitment becomes an important presence in his life and informs a succession of sacred compositions.
1927
Oedipus Rex, an opera-oratorio with a Latin text developed in collaboration with Jean Cocteau, is premiered. The ancient tragedy is recast through monumental forms and ritual-like restraint, revealing another aspect of Stravinsky’s neoclassical imagination.
1928
Apollon musagète receives its first productions. The Paris staging begins a major collaboration with choreographer George Balanchine, a partnership that will last for decades. The string writing and carefully ordered choreography establish a new ideal of clarity, poise, and balance between musical and physical form.
1929
Sergei Diaghilev dies. His recognition of Stravinsky’s talent and his commitment to new ballet had made possible the composer’s first international breakthrough. Diaghilev’s death closes one of the most formative chapters in Stravinsky’s life and in the history of twentieth-century dance.
1930
Completes the Symphony of Psalms for chorus and orchestra. Its distinctive scoring and rigorously controlled design serve an intensely personal religious expression. The work shows how economy of means and neoclassical discipline could sustain a profound sense of spiritual urgency.
1934
Becomes a French citizen and continues living in Paris. Perséphone, with a text by André Gide, is premiered in the same year. Internationally established, Stravinsky now divides his professional life between composition, conducting, and extensive touring.
1938–1939
A succession of bereavements devastates his family. His daughter Ludmila dies of tuberculosis in November 1938. His wife Catherine dies the following March, and his mother Anna in June 1939. Stravinsky himself is suffering from tuberculosis and spends several months in a sanatorium. Within a short period, he loses three of the people closest to him.
1939
Leaves for the United States in September, shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. At Harvard University, he delivers a series of lectures on musical creation that will later appear as Poetics of Music. This new move combines a major professional opportunity with the need to reconstruct his life after profound personal loss.
1940
Marries Vera de Bosset, with whom he has maintained a long-standing relationship. California gradually becomes their permanent home, within a community that includes many European artists displaced by the war. In the same year he completes the Symphony in C.
1945
Becomes a United States citizen. He has also completed the Symphony in Three Movements, which will receive its premiere early in 1946. The score unites the rhythmic force of his earlier music with the formal lucidity of his American period, while reflecting something of the tension of the wartime years.
1948
Orpheus, another major ballet in collaboration with Balanchine, is completed. Around the same time Stravinsky meets the young conductor Robert Craft, who becomes a close collaborator and intellectual companion. Their association broadens his engagement with recent European music and will be especially consequential for his later work.
1951
The Rake’s Progress, with a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, premieres in Venice under the composer’s direction. The opera represents a culmination of his neoclassical style while also preceding a new phase of compositional exploration.
1953
Completes the Septet, in which his growing interest in new ways of organizing musical material becomes increasingly apparent. He studies Schoenberg and Webern with particular attention and begins developing his own approach to serial writing. Now in his seventies, Stravinsky remains prepared to reconsider methods that had once seemed remote from his aesthetic outlook.
1957
Completes Agon, a ballet for twelve dancers, continuing his association with Balanchine. The music draws together older formal models and newer serial procedures, offering a particularly clear view of the direction his final creative period has taken.
1958
Threni, based on the Lamentations of Jeremiah, is performed for the first time. Serial organization and sacred text meet in a work of concentrated expressive intensity. Stravinsky adapts twelve-tone procedures to his own musical sensibility, maintaining characteristic attention to formal clarity and rhythmic design.
1962
At eighty, returns to the Soviet Union for the first time since 1914. He visits Moscow and Leningrad, conducts concerts, and encounters a musical culture transformed during his long absence. The visit carries considerable personal and symbolic significance for a composer who has spent almost half a century away from his birthplace.
1966
Completes Requiem Canticles, his final major composition. Sparse instrumental writing, serial organization, and sacred reflection converge in a work of remarkable concentration. Stravinsky’s last substantial creative statement retains his lifelong concern for economy and precision.
1967
Makes his final public appearance as a conductor in Toronto. Declining health now prevents the sustained touring of earlier decades. After many years as a pianist, conductor, and recording artist, he gradually withdraws from public musical life.
1969
Moves with Vera from California to New York. Although age and illness increasingly restrict his activity, he remains interested in performances and recordings of his music. The city becomes the final home in a life marked by extraordinary geographical movement.
1971
Dies in New York on April 6, aged eighty-eight. His body is taken to Venice and buried on the cemetery island of San Michele, close to Diaghilev’s grave. The location gives an unexpected symmetry to the end of his life, recalling the collaboration that first brought him international recognition.
_____________________________
- The 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring has become one of the most frequently retold episodes in music history. Contemporary and later accounts describe such loud reactions that the dancers struggled to hear the orchestra, while Nijinsky attempted to communicate the beat from the wings. Over time, these reports acquired an almost legendary quality. The surviving evidence suggests a more complicated event than a simple rejection of unfamiliar music: the choreography, the score, and rival factions within the Paris audience all contributed to the disturbance. The work’s subsequent history is equally important, as its score rapidly developed an independent place in the concert repertory.
- Funeral Song, composed in 1908 in memory of Rimsky-Korsakov, long belonged to the category of lost works. With no accessible score, it survived largely as an entry in Stravinsky’s early biography. In 2015, orchestral parts were discovered in the archives of the St Petersburg Conservatory, making reconstruction and performance possible again. The recovery offered an unusual opportunity to hear the young composer at the moment when he was mourning the teacher who had shaped his musical training.
- Stravinsky’s turn toward neoclassicism involved a highly inventive reimagining of historical music. For Pulcinella, Diaghilev presented him with eighteenth-century Italian pieces then believed to be by Pergolesi. Later scholarship identified other composers among their authors. The distinction matters because it clarifies the nature of Stravinsky’s achievement: through selection, recomposition, and a sharply individual handling of rhythm and orchestration, music inherited from another century acquired a new dramatic and sonic identity.
- Few composers of comparable stature revised their artistic approach as thoroughly, or as late in life, as Stravinsky. After the Russian ballets and decades of neoclassical work, he began exploring serial techniques in his seventies, encouraged in part by his association with Robert Craft and renewed study of Schoenberg and Webern. The transition was gradual and did not dissolve his recognizable musical personality. When Stravinsky died in 1971, his burial near Diaghilev in Venice returned attention to the beginning of his international journey: the young Russian composer whose Firebird had transformed his life sixty-one years earlier.
_____________________________