Igor Stravinsky

EARLY LIFE

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882, in Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg, Russia, the son of Fyodor Stravinsky a singer with a fine bass voice at the Russian Imperial Opera.

Photoportrait of Igor Stravinsky, Russian composer.

Igor was the third of four children, all boys. As a child he spent the winter months in St Petersburg and the summers in the country where several of his relatives on his mother’s side had large estates.

Igor often went to the operas that his father sang in. He also went to ballets and even heard Tchaikovsky conduct in 1893, at the end of his life.

Although he was taught piano and composition as a boy, Igor's family determined that he would have a career in law, and he graduated from St. Petersburg University in 1905.

However, Stravinsky was far more interested in music; between 1903-06 he studied composition privately under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsokov and became a member of that composer's circle.

CAREER

Through the influence of Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky's early works including "Symphony in E Flat", "Fireworks", and "Scherzo Fantastique" received performances.

Igor Stravinsky, 1903

In 1908 Rimsky-Korsakov died and Stravinsky met Sergei Diaghilev, the Russian ballet impresario. Diaghilev invited Stravinsky to orchestrate various pieces of ballet music for the 1909 season of his Ballets Russes in Paris. 

The following year, the Ballets Russes danced Stravinsky's first major work, The Firebird, and for the next 20 years he was closely associated with Diaghilev's company.

Stravinsky became an overnight sensation following the success of The Firebird's premiere in Paris on June 25, 1910 and the work made him world famous.

In his early years with the Ballets Russes, Stravinsky and his family lived in Russia during the summer months and spent each winter in Switzerland. During this period, Stravinsky composed two further works for the Ballets Russes: Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913).

The premiere of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps ("The Rite of Spring") at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on May 29, 1913 caused a tremendous commotion. The avant-garde nature of the music and choreography resulted in such booing from the audience that the Diaghilev dancers could not even hear the orchestra. The New York Times reported the sensational Rite premiere, nine days after the premiere (see below). 

With the advent of World War I Stravinsky moved permanently to Switzerland. During this time he produced the original stage work Renard (1916), "a burlesque in song and dance."

When the Russian Revolution broke out in February 1917 Stravinsky originally thought it would be a good thing, but when the Bolshevik Revolution followed it became obvious that he would never be able to go back to Russia. Arising from this, he wrote in 1918 L’histoire du soldat ("The Soldier’s Tale"). a theatrical work "to be read, played, and danced" by three actors and one or several dancers.

When the war ended Stravinsky decided to move to France, where he developed subsidiary careers as a concert pianist and conductor. 

The French years marked a major change in Stravinsky's style--from basically Russian influences to the music of the Classical period, as well as exploring themes from the ancient Classical world, such as Greek mythology. Important works in this "neo-classical" period include "the Octet" (1923), the "Concerto for Piano and Winds" (1924), the "Serenade in A" (1925) and the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927). 

Stravinsky in 1921

Throughout the rise of his career Stravinsky was estranged from Christianity. However, in his early forties he befriended a Russian Orthodox priest, Father Nicholas in France and reconnected with his Russian Orthodox faith. This deep religious experience affected his music and he produced a number of religious pieces, the best of which is the "Symphony of Psalms" (1930), written for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 50th birthday celebrations.

Stravinsky was invited to lecture at Harvard University in 1939, and when World War II started he made his home in Hollywood, California. The war years produced the "Symphony in C Major", the summation of neoclassical principles in symphonic form, and "Symphony in Three Movements", which combines features of the concerto with the symphony.

From 1948 to 1951 Stravinsky worked on his neoclassical opera, The Rake's Progress, conducting its first performance in Venice, Italy.

Stravinsky engaged the young American musician Robert Craft to help him in Hollywood. Craft was surprised to find that Stravinsky never visited his fellow composer Arnold Schoenberg, who only lived a few streets away. After Schoenberg died in 1951 Craft encouraged Stravinsky to listen to Schoenberg’s serial music. 

Soon Stravinsky started to use serialism in his own compositions. His Canticum Sacrum for voices and orchestra (1955) and ballet Agon contain 12-tone elements and were followed by the fully serial works Threni (1958), Movements (1959) and Requiem Canticles (1966).

PERSONAL LIFE

From approximately 1890 until 1914 Stravinsky frequently visited Ustilug, a town in the modern Volyn Oblast, Ukraine. He spent most of his summers there, where he also met his cousin, Katherine Gavrylivna Nosenko (called "Katya"), whom he married on January 23, 1906.

In 1907, Stravinsky designed and built his own house in Ustilug, which he called "my heavenly place". In this house, Stravinsky worked on seventeen of his early compositions, among them The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring. 

Igor Stravinsky's house-museum in Ustilug,By Viacheslav Galievskyi 

Katya and Stravinsky's fourth and last child, Marie Milène was born in Lausanne in January 1914. After her delivery, Katya was discovered to have tuberculosis and was confined to the sanatorium at Leysin, high in the Alps. 

In February 1921 Stravinsky met the sophisticated intellectual and urbane Vera de Bosset in Paris, while she was married to the stage designer Serge Sudeikin. The worldly Vera was a stark contrast to the increasingly pious Katya and they began an affair that led to Vera leaving her husband. Vera and Stravinsky saw one another as much as possible for the next 18 years.

In March 1939 Katerina died from tuberculosis. Vera joined Stravinsky in America in January 1940; they were married in Bedford, Massachusetts on March 9th.  

In 1962 Stravinsky returned to Russia for a visit – his first trip to his homeland for nearly half a century. During his stay in the USSR, he met several leading Soviet composers, including Dmitri Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian.

LAST YEARS AND DEATH

Ill health slowed Stravinsky in his final years, and he died in New York City at the age of 88 on April 6, 1971.The cause on his death certificate is heart failure.

As per his wishes, he was buried in Venice on the island of San Michele near the tomb of Sergei Diaghilev.

Sources Compton's Encyclopedia, Europress Encyclopedia