Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky is widely regarded as one of the two most influential composers of the modern era since the First World War; the other is Arnold Schoenberg. While Schoenberg pursued relentlessly the implications, as he saw them, of late German Romanticism, Stravinsky was an opportunist who adapted different traditions and styles to his own needs, including, in the end, Schoenberg’s own serial method (though not his style). It’s this extraordinary range, combined with a certainty of form and a precision of sonority, that has kept his music vital, fresh, and even popular.

Early Years: St. Petersburg and Diaghilev

Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum, on the Baltic coast near St. Petersburg, and spent the first 28 years of his life in what was then the capital of Tsarist Russia, with lengthy summer holidays in remote parts of the Empire or at German spas. His father was a principal bass opera singer at the Mariinsky Theatre, so Igor grew up in a musical environment, studied the piano, and made many musical contacts, but was himself destined for the law (which meant, in effect, the civil service). Only with difficulty did he persuade his parents to let him take private composition lessons with Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, then a professor of composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.

Until Rimsky-Korsakov’s death in 1908, Stravinsky worked and composed in what was musically something of a backwater—only a few pieces from this period, such as the Symphony in E-flat (1905–07), the Scherzo fantastique (1907–08), and Fireworks (1908) are still played—but in 1909, he was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev to write a ballet for the 1910 Paris season of his new company, the Ballets Russes. The result was The Firebird, and its instant success not only made Stravinsky famous overnight, but brought him to Western Europe, where he stayed until 1939, living first in Switzerland, then in France. He never again lived in Russia, and returned there only twice, in 1912 and 1962. He was soon composing more ballets for Diaghilev: Petrushka (1911), The Rite of Spring (1913), and Les Noces (1917, first performed 1923)—works that explored new and revolutionary ways of incorporating folk music and its particular rhythmic and melodic characteristics into modern orchestral scores—then, later, Pulcinella (1919) (an idiosyncratic arrangement of 18th-century pieces by Pergolesi and others), Oedipus Rex (1927) (not a ballet but an opera-oratorio), and Apollo (1928)—works which took their stylistic models from Western and classical sources and were duly labelled by critics and (eventually) historians as “Neoclassical.”

Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring for Piano, Four Hands

Middle Period: Chamber Music and the United States

In his Russian folksong phase, while living in Switzerland just before and during the First World War, Stravinsky had also written many smaller works in which he developed further the musical techniques of the ballets. These pieces include vocal chamber music, such as Pribaoutki (1914) and the Berceuses du chat (1915), but also instrumental music, such as Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914), and especially, The Soldier’s Tale (1918)—a stage work with spoken narration, scored for septet—and the Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920)—one of his most individual and innovative masterpieces. On the cusp of his neoclassical phase, he added a short Concertino for string quartet (1920) and, more importantly, an Octet for wind instruments (1922–3), which announced very clearly the stylistically hybrid character, and studiously cool, “inexpressive” tone of this postwar time. But Stravinsky never allowed himself to be labelled with a particular style. His attitude (as he later advised Christopher Isherwood) was to use models from a wide variety of sources, including 19th-century music (Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Delibes), and even ragtime and jazz. To every style he applied the same techniques and the same “ear,” which is why his music always sounds like Stravinsky, whatever the model.

Stravinsky: Histoire du Soldat (The Soldier's Tale), Trio Version for Violin, Clarinet, and Piano

His approach was essentially that of an exile who was losing touch with his native roots and needed to tap down to fresh ones. Stranded in Switzerland during the war with his tubercular wife, four children, and the usual Russian caravan of nyanyas and governesses, and with little prospect of commissions or performances, he was feeling the insecurity of a small boat at sea in a storm. His genius was to make creative capital out of such a situation. But there was a price to pay. In France, after the war and until the mid-1930s, he and his family lived in the provinces, but he spent many months each year in Paris living openly with his mistress, Vera Sudeikina, and travelling with her on his trips as a conductor. Meanwhile his wife, Katya, and eldest daughter, Lyudmila, were slowly dying of tuberculosis: Lyudmila died in 1938, Katya in 1939.

Perhaps partly as a response to these circumstances, he returned to the Orthodox church in the mid-1920s, and a religious tone is frequent in his music thereafter, not only in the Symphony of Psalms (1930), but also in superficially secular works like the Duo Concertant for violin and piano (1931–2) and the danced melodrama Perséphone (1934). In the autumn of 1939, after Katya’s death, he went to Harvard to give the Charles Eliot Norton lectures and, with Europe now again at war, decided to remain in the States, marrying Vera and settling eventually on the west coast, in West Hollywood, Los Angeles.

For a time in America, though he had toured there in the 20s and 30s, he struggled to establish a strong public profile and felt it necessary to accept purely commercial commissions, out of which he still manufactured music that could only be by Stravinsky. Matters improved after the war. His Symphony in Three Movements (1945) was premiered by the New York Philharmonic, he completed a (Latin) Mass (1948), and he composed a new ballet, Orpheus (1947), for Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Society (precursor of the New York City Ballet). By this time, he had acquired a young American assistant, Robert Craft, a Juilliard graduate, who quickly became part of his household, helping him in various musical ways and organizing his travels and other matters. Craft also introduced him to the music of Schoenberg and his pupil Anton Webern, which he had somehow managed to avoid, and explained its serial method to him. 

Late Period: Embracing Serialism

Stravinsky had just completed his only full-length opera, The Rake’s Progress (1948–51), the climax of his neoclassical phase, and was experiencing a creative block. The serial technique, and specifically the sparse, pointillistic music of Webern, helped him escape. Yet the serial, or partly serial, music he began composing in the 1950s was never in the least like Schoenberg, and only passingly like Webern. In a way, the technique was just another model, and works like the Septet (1952–3), the ballet Agon (1953–57), the piano concerto Movements (1958–9), and the choral-orchestral Requiem Canticles (1966)—his last completed work—are all, in their various ways, Stravinskian, with the same favorite sonorities and the same brilliant physicality, whatever the intellectual complexity that underlies them.

Watching and Listening

Stravinsky wrote little chamber music in the classical sense (that is, originally scored for chamber ensemble), but he made a number of duo transcriptions from his own music for recital tours he made with the violinist Samuel Dushkin in the early 1930s. They include two different suites from Pulcinella, of which the Suite italienne for violin and piano (1932) is the better known, and the Divertimento for violin and piano (1934) from the Tchaikovskian ballet The Fairy’s Kiss (1928). There is also a different Suite italienne for cello and piano (1932), also from Pulcinella, arranged for Gregor Piatigorsky. The Octet is important, but the rarely played Duo Concertant (written for Dushkin) is one of Stravinsky’s most interesting minor works. He was wary of the string quartet, and his three works for the combination—the Three Pieces (1914), Concertino (1920), and the late Double Canon (1959)—are brief and marginal.

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