Igor Stravinsky Biography

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (Russian: ?????? ????????? ???????????, Igor' Fëdorovi? Stravinskij) (born June 17, 1882, Lomonosov, Russia; died April 6, 1971, New York City) was a Russian-born composer.

Although he composed primitivist, neo-classical and serial works, he is best known for three compositions from his earlier, Russian period: L'Oiseau de feu ("The Firebird") (1910), Petrushka (1911), and Le sacre du printemps ("The Rite of Spring") (1913). These daring and innovative ballets practically reinvented the genre. Stravinsky also wrote for a wide range of ensembles in a broad spectrum of classical forms, ranging from opera and symphonies to piano miniatures and works for jazz band.

Stravinsky also achieved fame as a pianist and conductor, often at the premieres of his own works. He was also a writer; with the help of Alexis Roland-Manuel, Stravinsky compiled a theoretical work entitled Poetics of Music in which he famously claimed that music was incapable of "expressing anything but itself." Several interviews in which the composer spoke to Robert Craft were published as Conversations with Stravinsky. They collaborated on five further volumes over the following decade.

A quintessentially cosmopolitan Russian, Stravinsky was one of the most influential composers and artists of 20th century music, both in the West and in his native land. He was named by Time magazine as one of the most influential people of the century.

He was brought up in St. Petersburg and dominated by his father and elder brother; Stravinsky's early childhood was a mix of experience that hinted little at the cosmopolitan artist he was to become. Although his father Fyodor Stravinsky was a bass singer at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Stravinsky originally studied to be a lawyer. He switched to composition later. In 1902, at the age of 20, Stravinsky became the pupil of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, probably the leading Russian composer of the time. A student effort of his, Feu d'artifice (Fireworks), was called to the attention of Sergei Diaghilev, who was impressed enough to commission Stravinsky, first for orchestrations, and then for a full-length ballet score, L'Oiseau de feu (The Firebird).

Stravinsky left Russia for the first time in 1910, going to Paris to attend the premiere of The Firebird at Ballets Russes. During his stay in the city, he composed two further works for the Ballets Russes—Petrushka (1911) and Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913). The ballets trace his stylistic development: from the L'oiseau de feu, whose style draws largely on Rimsky-Korsakov, to Petrushka's emphasis on bitonality, and finally to the savage polyphonic dissonance of Le Sacre du printemps. As Stravinsky noted about the premieres, his intention was "[to send] them all to hell". (He succeeded: The 1913 première of Le sacre du printemps was probably the most famous riot in music history, with fistfights amongst audience members and a need for police supervision of the second act).

Stravinsky displayed an inexhaustible desire to learn and explore art, literature, and life. This desire manifested itself in several of his Paris collaborations. Not only was he the principal composer for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, but he also collaborated with Pablo Picasso (Pulcinella, 1920), Jean Cocteau (Oedipus Rex, 1927) and George Balanchine (Apollon Musagete, 1928).

Stravinsky's career largely falls into three distinct stylistic periods. Most of his compositions can be placed in one of the three.

Stravinsky's work embraced multiple compositional styles, revolutionized orchestration, spanned several genres, practically reinvented ballet form and incorporated multiple cultures, languages and literatures. As a consequence, his influence on composers both during his lifetime and after his death was, and remains, considerable.

Erik Satie wrote an article about Igor Stravinsky, that was published in Vanity Fair (1922). Satie had met Stravinsky for the first time in 1910. Satie's attitude towards the Russian composer is marked by deference, as can be seen from the letters he wrote him in 1922, preparing for the Vanity Fair article. With a touch of irony he concluded one of these letters "I admire you: are you not the Great Stravinsky? I am but little Erik Satie." In the published article Satie argued that measuring the "greatness" of an artist by comparing him to other artists, as if speaking about some "truth", is illusory: every piece of music should be judged on its own merits, not by comparing it to the standards of other composers. That was exactly what Jean Cocteau had done, when commenting depreciatingly on Stravinsky in his 1918 Le Coq et l'Arlequin.

"All the signs indicate a strong reaction against the nightmare of noise and eccentricity that was one of the legacies of the war.... What has become of the works that made up the program of the Stravinsky concert which created such a stir a few years ago? Practically the whole lot are already on the shelf, and they will remain there until a few jaded neurotics once more feel a desire to eat ashes and fill their belly with the east wind." (Musical Times, London, October 1923, quoted in: Slonimsky, 1953).

Composer Constant Lambert (1936) described pieces such as L'Histoire du Soldat (A Soldier's Tale) as containing "essentially cold-blooded abstraction". He continues, saying that the "melodic fragments in L'Histoire du Soldat are completely meaningless themselves. They are merely successions of notes that can conveniently be divided into groups of three, five, and seven and set against other mathematical groups", and the cadenza for solo drums is "musical purity...achieved by a species of musical castration". He compares Stravinsky's choice of "the drabbest and least significant phrases" to Gertrude Stein's: "Everday they were gay there, they were regularly gay there everyday" ("Helen Furr and Georgine Skeene", 1922), "whose effect would be equally appreciated by someone with no knowledge of English whatsoever".

In his book Philosophy of Modern Music (1948) Theodor Adorno calls Stravinsky an acrobat, a civil servant, a tailor's dummy, hebephrenic, psychotic, infantile, fascist, and devoted to making money. Part of the composer's error, in Adorno's view, was his neo-classicism, but more important was his music's "pseudomorphism of painting," playing off of le temps espace (space) rather than le temps durée (duration) of Henri Bergson. "One trick characterizes all of Stravinsky's formal endeavors: the effort of his music to portray time as in a circus tableau and to present time complexes as though they were spatial. This trick, however, soon exhausts itself." His "rhythmic procedures closely resemble the schema of catatonic conditions. In certain schizophrenics, the process by which the motor apparatus becomes independent leads to infinite repetition of gestures or words, following the decay of the ego."