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Igor Stravinsky
1882-1971
The Russian composer who revolutionised 20th-century music, and provoked riots with The Rite of Spring.
Life and Music
• Stravinsky composed masterpieces in almost every genre, most notably an incomparable series of ballet scores.
• He discovered a way of rethinking the creative ideals of the 17th and 18th centuries in a thoroughly contemporary idiom, and in doing so hit upon one of the most vital and far-reaching movements of the last 100 years: Neo-Classicism.
• Without Stravinsky the history of 20th-century music would have turned out quite differently. There is little doubt that composers as contrasting in sound and technique as Poulenc, Copland, Orff and Milhaud would have followed very different creative paths had it not been for Stravinsky’s example.
• Although his father was a distinguished bass singer and the young Stravinsky was given every opportunity as a child, Stravinsky hardly showed the kind of unblinkered passion for music which one normally associates with a great composer. Indeed, he looked set for a career in jurisprudence until he met Rimsky-Korsakov, who immediately recognised he had a talent for composition and offered to teach him.
• Rimsky-Korsakov encouraged Stravinsky to compose at the piano, something that was a formative influence in shaping Stravinsky’s predominantly percussive thought-patterns, even when composing for string instruments.
• Stravinsky’s big break, the ballet The Firebird, came out of the blue. He was commissioned to compose the music only because Anatoly Lyadov let down the impresario Serge Diaghilev at the last minute.
• Barely had the shockwaves caused by The Firebird subsided when he emerged a year later with Petrushka, a dazzlingly novel piece that sounds like the work of an entirely different composer. Like a master film director, Stravinsky creates collage effects in the crowded fairground scenes with strands of music co-existing at different levels at the same time.
• The premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, in Paris in June 1910, caused a sensation, and Stravinsky was catapulted from obscurity to stardom literally overnight. The notorious performance, interrupted throughout by a hail of farmyard noises from the gallery, ended in chaos with rival factions shouting abuse at each other, and the conductor and musicians fleeing in disarray.
• Stravinsky was a master communicator in more ways than one. His opinions on both his own music and others’ make fascinating reading, as lovingly preserved in several collections by his devoted assistant Robert Craft. Additionally he was the first great composer in history to record virtually all of his masterworks, leaving future generations with a priceless musical resource.
• It is one of the miracles of Stravinsky’s output that while each and every piece could be by no one else, no two works sound remotely the same. His output includes pieces which draw on styles from the Baroque and Classical periods, jazz, swing and even the twelve-tone system known as serialism.
Did you know?
In 1942, the great ballet dancer-choreographer George Ballanchine commissioned Stravinsky to write a short piece of music for a ballet with elephants, during which one would lift Ballanchine’s then wife, Vera Zorina, up on to its back. Stravinsky later transcribed this Circus Polka for orchestra, and after conducting the orchestral premiere, he received ‘a congratulatory telegram from Bessie, the young pachyderm who had carried the bella ballerina and who had heard my broadcast in the winter quarters of the circus at Sarasota, Florida’.
