Igor Stravinsky

This article is about the 20th century composer. For other uses, see Stravinsky (disambiguation).

Igor Stravinsky

Signature of Stravinsky

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (sometimes spelt Strawinsky or Stravinskii; Russian: Игорь Фёдорович Стравинский, transliterated: Igorʹ Fëdorovič Stravinskij; Russian pronunciation: [ˌiɡərʲ ˌfʲjodɐrɐvʲɪtɕ strɐˈvʲinskʲɪj]; 17 June [O.S. 5 June] 1882 – 6 April 1971) was a Russian, and later French and American composer, pianist and conductor. He is acknowledged by many as one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century.

Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). The Rite of Spring, which provoked a riot during its premiere, transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky's enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His so-called Russian phase was followed in the 1920s by a period in which he turned to neoclassical music. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms (concerto grosso, fugue and symphony). They frequently concealed a vein of intense emotion beneath a surface appearance of detachment or austerity and often paid tribute to the music of earlier masters, for example J.S. Bach and Tchaikovsky. In the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serial procedures. His compositions of this period shared traits with examples of his earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells and clarity of form, of instrumentation and of utterance.

Life and career

Early life in Russia

Igor Stravinsky, 1903

Stravinsky was born on 17 June 1882 in the Russian resort town of Oranienbaum and was brought up in Saint Petersburg. His parents were Fyodor Stravinsky, a bass singer at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, and Anna Kholodovsky. He recalled his schooldays as being lonely, later saying that "I never came across anyone who had any real attraction for me". During his boyhood, Stravinsky began piano lessons, studied music theory and attempted some composition. In 1890, he was mesmerised by his first exposure to an orchestra, when he saw a performance of Tchaikovsky's ballet The Sleeping Beauty at the Mariinsky Theatre: by the age of fifteen, he had mastered Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto in G minor and finished a piano reduction of a string quartet by Glazunov, who considered the young Stravinsky to be unmusical and thought little of his composition skills.

Despite his enthusiasm for music, his parents expected him to become a lawyer. Stravinsky enrolled to study law at the University of Saint Petersburg in 1901, but he attended fewer than fifty class sessions during his four years of study. In the summer of 1902 Stravinsky stayed with the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and his family in the German city of Heidelberg, where Rimsky-Korsakov, arguably the leading Russian composer at that time, suggested to Stravinsky that he should not enter the Saint Petersburg Conservatoire, but instead study composing by taking private lessons, in large part because of his age. Stravinsksy's father died of cancer that year, by which time his son had already begun spending more time on his musical studies than on law. The university was closed for two months in the spring of 1905 in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday: Stravinsky was prevented from taking his final law examinations and later received a half-course diploma in April 1906. Thereafter, he concentrated on studying music. In 1905, he began to take twice-weekly private lessons from Rimsky-Korsakov, whom he came to regard as a second father. These lessons continued until Rimsky-Korsakov's death in 1908.

In 1905 he was betrothed to his cousin Katerina (Catherine) Gabrielovna Nossenko, whom he had known since early childhood. In spite of the Orthodox Church's opposition to marriage between first cousins, the couple married on 23 January 1906: their first two children, Fyodor (Theodore) and Ludmilla, were born in 1907 and 1908.

A costume sketch by Léon Bakst for The Firebird

In February 1909, two orchestral works, the [Scherzo fantastique] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) and [Feu d'artifice] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) (Fireworks) were performed at a concert in Saint Petersburg, where they were heard by Sergei Diaghilev, who was at that time involved in planning to present Russian opera and ballet in Paris. Diaghilev was sufficiently impressed by Fireworks to commission Stravinsky to carry out some orchestrations and then to compose a full-length ballet score, The Firebird.

Life in Switzerland

Vaslav Nijinsky as Petrushka in 1910–11

Stravinsky travelled to Paris in 1910 to attend the final rehearsals and the premiere of The Firebird. His family joined him before the end of the ballet season that year and they decided to remain in the West for a time, as his wife was expecting their third child. They moved to Switzerland, living in Clarens and then Lausanne where, in September 1910, their second son Siatoslav Soulima was born. A second daughter, Maria Milena, was born in 1913. While pregnant with Maria Milena, Catherine was found to have tuberculosis and she was placed in a Swiss sanatorium in Leysin for her confinement.

Over the next four years Stravinsky and his family lived in Russia during the summer months and spent each winter in Switzerland, which became a second home to them. During this period Stravinsky composed three further works for the Ballets Russes—Petrushka, a ballet in four scenes (1911), the two-part ballet The Rite of Spring (1913) and his 'ballet with song' in one act, Pulcinella (1920). He briefly travelled to Russia in July 1914 to collect research materials for his dance cantata Les noces before returning to Switzerland, just before the national borders closed following the outbreak of World War I. He was not to return to his homeland for nearly fifty years.

The family struggled financially during this period. Russia (and its successor the USSR) did not adhere to the Berne convention and this created problems for Stravinsky when collecting royalties for the performances of all his Ballet Russes compositions. Stravinsky blamed Diaghilev for his finanical troubles, whom he accused of failing to live up to the terms of a contract they had signed. He approached the Swiss philanthropist Werner Reinhart for financial assistance during the time he was writing Histoire du soldat (The Soldier's Tale). Reinhart sponsored and largely underwrote its first performance, which was conducted by Ernest Ansermet on 28 September 1918 at the Theatre Municipal de Lausanne. In gratitude, Stravinsky dedicated the work to Reinhart and gave him the original manuscript. Reinhart supported Stravinsky further when he funded a series of concerts of his chamber music in 1919: Included was a suite from Histoire du soldat arranged for violin, piano and clarinet, which was first performed on 8 November 1919, in Lausanne. In gratitude to his benefactor, Stravinsky also dedicated his Three Pieces for Clarinet (October–November 1918) to Reinhart, who was an excellent amateur clarinettist.

Life in France

Stravinsky as drawn by Picasso in Paris on 31 December 1920

Igor Stravinsky in 1921

Stravinsky moved with his family to France in 1920, He formed a business and musical relationship with the French piano manufacturing company Pleyel. Pleyel essentially acted as his agent in collecting mechanical royalties for his works and provided him with a monthly income and a studio space at its headquarters in which he could work and entertain friends and business acquaintances. Under the terms of his contract with the company, Stravinsky agreed to arrange (and to some extent re-compose) many of his early works for the Pleyela, Pleyel's brand of player piano. He did so in a way that made full use of all of the piano's eighty-eight notes, without regard for human fingers or hands. The rolls were not recorded, but were instead marked up from a combination of manuscript fragments and handwritten notes by the French musician Jacques Larmanjat, the musical director of Pleyel's roll department. Among the compositions that were issued on the Pleyela piano rolls are The Rite of Spring, Petrushka, The Firebird and Song of the Nightingale. During the 1920s, Stravinsky recorded Duo-Art rolls for the Aeolian Company in both London and New York, not all of which have survived.

Patronage was never far away. In the early 1920s, Leopold Stokowski gave Stravinsky regular support through a pseudonymous 'benefactor'. The composer was also able to attract commissions: most of his work from The Firebird onwards was written for specific occasions and was paid for generously.

Vera Stravinsky

Stravinsky met Vera de Bosset in Paris in February 1921, when she was married to the painter and stage designer Serge Sudeikin, and they began an affair which led to Vera leaving her husband. From then until his wife's death in 1939, Stravinsky led a double life, spending some of his time with his first family and the rest with Vera. Catherine bore her husband's infidelity "with a mixture of magnaminity, bitterness, and compassion", passively accepting it as inevitable and permanent.

After living near Paris for a short while, the Stravinsky family moved to the south of France, becoming French citizens in 1934 and returning to Paris that year, to live at the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Stravinsky later remembered this last European address as his unhappiest, as his wife's tuberculosis infected both himself and his eldest daughter Ludmila. Ludmila died in 1938 and Catherine, to whom he had been married for 33 years, died of tubercolosis a year later. Stravinsky himself spent five months in hospital, during which time his mother died.

During his later years in Paris, Stravinsky had developed professional relationships with key people in the United States: he was already working on his Symphony in C for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and he had agreed to deliver lectures at Harvard during 1939. A few months after World War II broke out in September 1939, Stravinsky moved to the United States. Vera followed him the following year and they were married in Bedford, Massachusetts on 9 March 1940.

Life in America

The Essex House in New York, where Stravinsky lived to the end of his life

Stravinsky settled in Los Angeles, living at 1260 North Wetherly Drive, West Hollywood. He spent more time living in Los Angeles than in any other city. He became a naturalized United States citizen in 1945.

Stravinsky had adapted to life in France, but moving to America at the age of 58 was a very different prospect. For a while, he maintained a circle of contacts and emigré friends from Russia, but he eventually found that this did not sustain his intellectual and professional life. He was drawn to the growing cultural life of Los Angeles, especially during World War II, when so many writers, musicians, composers and conductors settled in the area: these included Otto Klemperer, Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel, George Balanchine and Arthur Rubinstein. He lived near to Arnold Schoenberg, though he did not have a close relationship with him. Bernard Holland notes that he was especially fond of British writers, who often visited him in Beverly Hills, "like W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Dylan Thomas. They shared the composer's taste for hard spirits - especially Aldous Huxley, with whom Stravinsky spoke in French". Stravinsky sometimes conducted concerts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the famous Hollywood Bowl and he conducted other orchestras throughout the United States. His plans to write an opera with W. H. Auden coincided with a meeting with the musicologist Robert Craft, who became Stravinsky's interpreter, chronicler, assistant conductor and factotum for countless musical and social tasks, living with him until his death.

Grave of Stravinsky in San Michele Island, Venice

Stravinsky's unconventional major seventh chord in his arrangement of "The Star-Spangled Banner" led to an incident with the Boston police on 15 January 1944, but he was only warned that the authorities could impose a $100 fine upon any "rearrangement of the national anthem in whole or in part". The incident soon established itself as a myth, in which Stravinsky was supposedly arrested for playing the music.

Stravinsky was on the lot of Paramount Pictures during the recording of the musical score to the 1956 film The Court Jester. The red 'recording in progress' light was illuminated to prevent interruptions and Vic Schoen, the composer of the score, had started to conduct a cue, but at that moment he saw that the entire orchestra had turned to look at Stravinsky, who had just walked into the studio. Schoen said, "The entire room was astonished to see this short little man with a big chest walk in and listen to our session. I later talked with him after we were done recording. We went and got a cup of coffee together. After listening to my music Stravinsky told me, "You have broken all the rules". At the time I didn't understand his comment, because I had been self-taught. It took me years to figure out what he had meant".

Stravinsky's professional life encompassed most of the 20th century, including many of its modern classical music styles, and he influenced composers both during and after his lifetime. In 1959, he was awarded the Sonning Award, Denmark's highest musical honour. In 1962, he accepted an invitation to return to Leningrad for a series of concerts. During his stay in the USSR, he visited Moscow and met several leading Soviet composers, including Dmitri Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian.

In 1969, Stravinsky moved to the Essex House in New York, where he lived until his death in 1971 at the age of 88. He was buried in Venice on the cemetery island of San Michele, close to the tomb of his long-time collaborator Diaghilev.

He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and in 1987 he was posthumously awarded the Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was inducted into the National Museum of Dance C.V. Whitney Hall of Fame in 2004.

Personality

File:Stravinsky picasso.png

Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso collaborated on Pulcinella in 1920. Picasso took the opportunity to make several sketches of the composer.

Stravinsky displayed an inexhaustible desire to explore and learn about art, literature and life, which manifested itself in several of his Paris collaborations. Not only was he the principal composer for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, but he also collaborated with Picasso (Pulcinella, 1920), Jean Cocteau ([Oedipus Rex] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help), 1927) and George Balanchine ([Apollon musagète] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help), 1928). His taste in literature was wide and reflected his constant desire for new discoveries. The texts and literary sources for his work began with a period of interest in Russian folklore, which progressed to classical authors and the Latin liturgy and moved on to contemporary France (André Gide, in Persephone) and eventually English literature, including Auden, T. S. Eliot and medieval English verse.

According to Robert Craft, Stravinsky remained a confirmed monarchist throughout his life and loathed the Bolsheviks from the very beginning. In 1930, he remarked, "I don't believe that anyone venerates Mussolini more than I... I know many exalted personages, and my artist's mind does not shrink from political and social issues. Well, after having seen so many events and so many more or less representative men, I have an overpowering urge to render homage to your Duce. He is the saviour of Italy and – let us hope – Europe". Later, after a private audience with Mussolini, he added, "Unless my ears deceive me, the voice of Rome is the voice of Il Duce. I told him that I felt like a fascist myself... In spite of being extremely busy, Mussolini did me the great honour of conversing with me for three-quarters of an hour. We talked about music, art and politics". When the Nazis placed Stravinsky's works on the list of "Entartete Musik", he lodged a formal appeal to establish his Russian genealogy and declared, "I loathe all communism, Marxism, the execrable Soviet monster, and also all liberalism, democratism, atheism, etc.." Towards the end of his life, at Craft's behest, Stravinsky made a return visit to his native country and composed a cantata in Hebrew, travelling to Israel for its performance.

Stravinsky proved adept at playing the part of a 'man of the world', acquiring a keen instinct for business matters and appearing relaxed and comfortable in public. His successful career as a pianist and conductor took him to many of the world's major cities, including Paris, Venice, Berlin, London, Amsterdam and New York and he was known for his polite, courteous and helpful manner.

Stravinsky was reputed to have been a philanderer and was rumoured to have had affairs with high-profile partners such as Coco Chanel. He never referred to it himself, but Chanel spoke about their affair at length to her biographer Paul Morand in 1946 and their conversation was published thirty years later. The accuracy of Chanel's claims has been disputed by both Stravinsky's widow Vera and by his amanuensis Craft. The Chanel fashion house has stated that there was never proof that an affair between Coco and Igor Stravinsky ever existed. A fictionalization of the supposed affair formed the basis of the 2002 novel Coco and Igor and a 2009 film, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. Despite these supposed liaisons, it is known that Stravinsky was a family man who devoted considerable amounts of his time and money to his children.

Faith

Stravinsky was a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church during most of his life, remarking at one time that, "Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament".

Although Stravinsky was not outspoken about his faith, he was a deeply religious man throughout some periods of his life. As a child, he was brought up by his parents in the Russian Orthodox Church. Baptized at birth, he later rebelled against the Church and abandoned it by the time he was fourteen or fifteen. Throughout the rise of his career he was estranged from Christianity and it was not until he reached his early forties that he experienced a spiritual crisis. After befriending a Russian priest named Father Nicolas after his move to Nice in 1924, he reconnected with his faith. He rejoined the Russian Orthodox Church and afterwards remained a committed Christian. Robert Craft noted that Stravinsky prayed daily, before and after composing, and also prayed when facing difficulty. Towards the end of his life, he was no longer able to attend Russian Orthodox services.

In in his late seventies, Stravinsky said:

I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology (Anselm's proof in the Fides Quaerens Intellectum, for instance) it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music. I do not believe in bridges of reason or, indeed, in any form of extrapolation in religious matters. ... I can say, however, that for some years before my actual "conversion," a mood of acceptance had been cultivated in me by a reading of the Gospels and by other religious literature. ...

Music

Further information: List of compositions by Igor Stravinsky

Stravinsky's career as a composer may be divided roughly into three stylistic periods:

Russian period (from about 1908 to 1919)

Stravinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov (seated together on the left) in 1908

Stravinsky's first period (which excludes some of his early minor works) began with Feu d'artifice (Fireworks) and included the three ballets he composed for Diaghilev. These three works have several characteristics in common: they are scored for an extremely large orchestra; they use Russian folk themes and motifs; and they were influenced by Rimsky-Korsakov's imaginative scoring and instrumentation. They also exhibit considerable stylistic development, from The Firebird, which emphasizes certain tendencies in Rimsky-Korsakov and features pandiatonicism in a conspicuous way in the third movement, to the use of polytonality in Petrushka and the intentionally brutal polyrhythms and dissonances of The Rite of Spring.

The first of his ballets, The Firebird, is noted for its imaginative orchestration. This is evident from the outset, as heard in the introduction, which exploits the double bass's low register. Petrushka, the first of Stravinsky's ballets to draw on folk mythology, is also distinctively scored. In The Rite of Spring, the composer attempts to depict the brutality of pagan Russia in his music, the inspiration of the violent motifs that recur throughout the work.

If Stravinsky's stated intention was "to send them all to hell", then he may have rated the 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring as a success: it is a famous classical music riot and Stravinsky referred to it on several occasions in his autobiography as a "scandale". There were reports of fistfights among the audience and the need for a police presence during the second act. The real extent of the tumult is open to debate and the reports may be apocryphal.

Other pieces from the Russian period include: [Le Rossignol] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) (The Nightingale); Renard (1916); Histoire du soldat (1918); and [Les noces] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) (The Wedding) (1923).

Neoclassical period (from about 1920 to 1954)

The next phase of Stravinsky's compositional style extends from the opera Mavra (1921–22), which is regarded as the start of his neo-classical period, until 1952, when he turned to serialism. Pulcinella (1920) and the Octet for wind instruments (1923) are the first of his compositions to feature his re-examination of the classical music of Mozart, J. S. Bach and their contemporaries. Works such as [Oedipus Rex] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) (1927), [Apollon musagète] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) (1928) and the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto (1937–38) continued his re-thinking of eighteenth-century musical styles.

Other works from this period include the three symphonies: the Symphonie des Psaumes (Symphony of Psalms, 1930), Symphony in C (1940) and the Symphony in Three Movements (1945). Apollon, Persephone (1933) and Orpheus (1947) exemplify not only Stravinsky's return to the music of the Classical period, but also his exploration of themes from the ancient Classical world such as Greek mythology.

In 1951 he completed his last neo-classical work, the opera The Rake's Progress, to a libretto by W. H. Auden that was based on the etchings of William Hogarth. It premiered in Venice that year and was produced around Europe the following year, before being staged in the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1953. It was staged by the Santa Fe Opera in a 1962 Stravinsky Festival, in honour of the composer's 80th birthday. The music is direct but quirky and borrows from classic tonal harmony, but also interjects surprising dissonances. It features Stravinsky's trademark off-rhythms and harks back to the operas and themes of Monteverdi, Gluck and Mozart. It was revived by the Metropolitan Opera in 1997.

Serial period (from 1954 to 1968)

In the 1950s, Stravinsky began using serial compositional techniques such as dodecaphony, the twelve-tone technique originally devised by Arnold Schoenberg.

He first experimented with non-twelve-tone serial techniques in small-scale vocal and chamber works such as the Cantata (1952), the Septet (1953) and Three Songs from Shakespeare (1953). The first of his compositions to be fully based on such techniques was In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954). Agon (1954–57) was the first of his works to include a twelve-tone series and [Canticum Sacrum] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) (1955) was the first piece to contain a movement entirely based on a tone row. Stravinsky later expanded his use of dodecaphony in works such as Threni (1958), A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer (1961) and The Flood (1962), which are based on biblical texts.

Agon is choreographed for twelve ballet dancers. It forms an important transition between Stravinsky's neo-classical period and his serial style. Parts of Agon are reminiscent of the 'white-note' tonality of his neo-classic period, while others (for example Bransle Gay) display his re-interpretation of serial methods.

Innovation and influence

Stravinsky is known as "one of music's truly epochal innovators". The most important aspect of Stravinsky's work, aside from his technical innovations (including in rhythm and harmony), is the 'changing face' of his compositional style while always 'retaining a distinctive, essential identity'. He himself was inspired by different cultures, languages and literatures. As a consequence, his influence on composers both during his lifetime and after his death was, and remains, considerable.

Stravinsky's use of motivic development (the use of musical figures that are repeated in different guises throughout a composition or section of a composition) included additive motivic development. This is where notes are subtracted or added to a motif without regard to the consequent changes in metre. A similar technique can be found as early as the sixteenth century, for example in the music of Cipriano de Rore, Orlandus Lassus, Carlo Gesualdo and Giovanni de Macque, music with which Stravinsky exhibited considerable familiarity.

The Rite of Spring is notable for its relentless use of ostinati, for example in the eighth note ostinato on strings accented by eight horns in the section Augurs of Spring (Dances of the Young Girls). The work also contains passages where several ostinati clash against one another.

Stravinsky was noted for his distinctive use of rhythm, especially in The Rite of Spring. According to the composer Philip Glass, "the idea of pushing the rhythms across the bar lines [...] led the way [...]. The rhythmic structure of music became much more fluid and in a certain way spontaneous". Glass mentions Stravinsky's "primitive, offbeat rhythmic drive". According to Andrew J. Browne, "Stravinsky is perhaps the only composer who has raised rhythm in itself to the dignity of art". Stravinsky's rhythm and vitality greatly influenced the composer Aaron Copland.

Stravinsky's first neo-classical works were the ballet Pulcinella of 1920 and the stripped-down and delicately scored Octet for Wind Instruments (1923). He may have been preceded in his use of neoclassical devices by composers such as Prokofiev and Erik Satie. By the late 1920s and 1930s, the use by composers of neoclassicism had become widespread.

Stravinsky composed pieces that elaborated on individual works by earlier composers, a tradition that goes back at least to the fifteenth century quodlibet and parody mass. An early example is his Pulcinella of 1920, where he used music then attributed to Giovanni Pergolesi. His source material was at times quoted directly and at other times reinvented. He developed this technique further in the ballet The Fairy's Kiss (1928), which was based on music by Tchaikovsky. Later examples of comparable musical transformations include Stravinsky's use of Schubert's Marche Militaire No. 1 in his Circus Polka (1942) and "Happy Birthday to You" in Greeting Prelude (1955).

In The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky stripped folk themes to their most basic melodic outlines, often contorting them beyond recognition using added notes, inversion and diminution.

Use of the orchestra

As with many late romantic composers, Stravinsky often called for huge orchestral forces, especially in his early ballets. The Firebird proved him to be the equal of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and lit the "fuse under the instrumental make-up of the 19th century orchestra". In The Firebird he took the orchestra apart and analysed it. Aaron Copland characterized The Rite of Spring as the foremost orchestral achievement of the 20th century.

Stravinsky wrote for unique combinations of instruments in smaller ensembles, chosen for their precise tone colours. For example, Histoire du soldat is scored for clarinet, bassoon, cornet, trombone, violin, double bass and percussion, a strikingly unusual combination for 1918.

Stravinsky occasionally exploits the extreme ranges of instruments, most famously at the opening of The Rite of Spring, where he uses the extreme upper reaches of the bassoon to simulate the symbolic 'awakening' of a spring morning.

Reception

Stravinsky is acknowledged as one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century. He was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the century. He became a naturalized French citizen in 1934 and a naturalized United States citizen in 1945. In addition to the recognition he received for his compositions, he achieved fame as a pianist and a conductor, often at the premieres of his works.

In 1923, Erik Satie wrote an article about Igor Stravinsky in Vanity Fair. Satie had met Stravinsky for the first time in 1910. His attitude towards the Russian composer is marked by deference, as can also be seen from the letters he wrote to him in 1922, in preparation for the Vanity Fair article. With a touch of irony, he concluded in 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 and that every piece of music should be judged on its own merits and not by comparing it to the standards of other composers. That was exactly what Jean Cocteau did when he commented deprecatingly on Stravinsky in his 1918 book [Le Coq et l'Arlequin] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help).

According to The Musical Times in 1923:

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.

In 1935, the American composer Marc Blitzstein compared Stravinsky to Jacopo Peri and C.P.E. Bach, conceding that, "there is no denying the greatness of Stravinsky. It is just that he is not great enough". Blitzstein's Marxist position was that Stravinsky's wish to "divorce music from other streams of life", which is "symptomatic of an escape from reality", resulted in a "loss of stamina", naming specifically Apollo, the Capriccio, and Le Baiser de la fée.

The composer Constant Lambert described pieces such as [Histoire du soldat] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) as containing "essentially cold-blooded abstraction". Lambert continued, "melodic fragments in [Histoire du Soldat] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) 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 he described the cadenza for solo drums as "musical purity...achieved by a species of musical castration". He compared Stravinsky's choice of "the drabbest and least significant phrases" to Gertrude Stein's: "Everyday 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 1949 book Philosophy of Modern Music, Theodor W. Adorno described Stravinsky as an acrobat and spoke of hebephrenic and psychotic traits in several of Stravinsky's works. Contrary to a common misconception, Adorno didn't think that the hebephrenic and psychotic imitations that the music was supposed to contain were its main fault, as he pointed out in a postscriptum that he added later to his book. Adorno's criticism of Stravinsky is more concerned with the 'transition to positivity' that he found in the his neoclassical works. Part of the composer's error, in Adorno's view, was his neo-classicism, but of greater importantance was his music's "pseudomorphism of painting", playing off [le temps espace] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) (time-space) rather than [le temps durée] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) (time-duration) of Henri Bergson. According to Adorno, "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". Adorno maintained that the "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".

Stravinsky's reputation in Russia and the USSR rose and fell. Performances of his music were banned from around 1933 until 1962, the year Nikita Khrushchev invited him to the USSR for an official state visit. In 1972, an official proclamation by the Soviet Minister of Culture, Ekaterina Furtseva, ordered Soviet musicians to "study and admire" Stravinsky's music and she made hostility toward it a potential offence.

According to the British novellist Gabriel Josipovici, The Rake's Progress is perhaps the only one of Stravinsky's works that "gives a justification in terms of human psychology, and of the realities of our world, for that obsessional need to repeat and return".

While Stravinsky's music has been criticized for its range of styles, scholars had "gradually begun to perceive unifying elements in Stravinsky's music" by the 1980s. Earlier writers, such as Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Boris de Schloezer and Virgil Thomson, writing in Modern Music (a quarterly review published between 1925 and 1946), could find only a common " 'seriousness' of 'tone' or of 'purpose', 'the exact correlation between the goal and the means', or a dry 'ant-like neatness' ".

From the mid-1960s onwards Stravinsky's music influenced the work of musicians such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

He was honoured in 1982 by the United States Postal Service with a 2¢ Great Americans series postage stamp.

Awards

• 1959: Léonie Sonning Music Prize
• Grammy Awards
  • 1962: Best Classical Composition by Contemporary Composer (The Flood)
  • 1962: Best Classical Performance – Orchestra (The Firebird, Igor Stravinsky conducting Columbia Symphony Orchestra)
  • 1962: Best Classical Performance – Instrumental Soloist (with orchestra) (Violin Concerto in D, Isaac Stern; Igor Stravinsky conducting Columbia Symphony Orchestra)
  • 1987: Lifetime Achievement (posthumous)

Recordings and publications

Further information: Igor Stravinsky discography

Igor Stravinsky found recordings a practical and useful tool in preserving his thoughts on the interpretation of his music. As a conductor of his own music, he recorded primarily for Columbia Records, beginning in 1928 with a performance of the original suite from The Firebird and concluding in 1967 with the 1945 suite from the same ballet. In the late 1940s he made several recordings for RCA Victor at the Republic Studios in Los Angeles. Although most of his recordings were made with studio musicians, he also worked with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the CBC Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Bavarian Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra.

During his lifetime, Stravinsky appeared on several telecasts, including the 1962 world premiere of The Flood on CBS television. Although he made an appearance, the actual performance was conducted by Robert Craft. Numerous films and videos of the composer have been preserved.

Stravinsky published a number of books throughout his career, almost always with the aid of a (sometimes uncredited) collaborator. In his 1936 autobiography, Chronicles of My Life, which was written with the help of Walter Nouvel, Stravinsky included his well-known statement that "music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all". With Alexis Roland-Manuel and Pierre Souvtchinsky, he wrote his 1939–40 Harvard University Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, which were delivered in French and first collected under the title [Poétique musicale] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) in 1942 and then translated in 1947 as Poetics of Music. In 1959, several interviews between the composer and Robert Craft were published as Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, which was followed by a further five volumes over the following decade.

Bibliography

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• Adorno, Theodor W. 2006. Philosophy of New Music, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-3666-4.
• Anonymous. 1940. "Musical Count". Time Magazine (Monday, 11 March).
• Anonymous. 1944. "Stravinsky Liable to Fine". The New York Times (16 January) (Accessed 22 June 2010).
• Anonymous. 1962. "Life Guide: Salutes to Stravinsky on His 80th; A Funny Faulkner, Farm Tours", Life Magazine (8 June): 17.
• Berry, David Carson. 2006. "Stravinsky, Igor." Europe 1789 to 1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire, editors-in-chief John Merriman and Jay Winter, 4:2261–63. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons.
• Berry, David Carson. 2008. "The Roles of Invariance and Analogy in the Linear Design of Stravinsky's 'Musick to Heare.'" Gamut 1/1.
• Blitzstein, Marc. 1935. "The Phenomenon of Stravinsky". The Musical Quarterly 21, no. 3 (July): 330–47. Reprinted 1991, The Musical Quarterly 75, no. 4 (Winter): 51–69.
• Browne, Andrew J. 1930. "Aspects of Stravinsky's Work". Music & Letters 11, no. 4 (October): 360–66. Online link accessed 19 November 2007 (subscription access).
• Cocteau, Jean. 1918. Le Coq et l'arlequin: notes de la musique. Paris: Éditions de la Sirène. Reprinted 1979, with a preface by Georges Auric. Paris: Stock. ISBN 2-234-01081-0 English edition, as Cock and Harlequin: Notes Concerning Music, translated by Rollo H. Myers, London: Egoist Press, 1921.
• Cohen, Allen. 2004. Howard Hanson in Theory and Practice. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers. ISBN 0-313-32135-3.
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• Copland, Aaron. 1952. Music and Imagination. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
• Copeland, Robert M. 1982. "The Christian Message of Igor Stravinsky". The Musical Quarterly 68, no. 4 (October): 563–79.
• Craft, Robert. 1982. "Assisting Stravinsky: On a Misunderstood Collaboration". The Atlantic Monthly 250, no. 6 (December): 64–74.
• Craft, Robert. 1992. Stravinsky: Glimpses of a Life. London: Lime Tree; New York: St Martins Press. ISBN 0-413-45461-4 (Lime Tree); ISBN 0-312-08896-5 (St.Martins).
• Craft, Robert. 1994. Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, revised and expanded edition. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. ISBN 0-8265-1258-5.
• Davis, Mary. 2006. "Chanel, Stravinsky, and Musical Chic". Fashion Theory 10, no. 4 (December): 431–60.
• Dubal, David. 2001. The Essential Canon of Classical Music. New York: North Point Press.
• Eksteins, Modris. 1989. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Modern Era. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-395-49856-2. Reprinted 1990, New York: Anchor Books ISBN 0-385-41202-9; reprinted 2000, Boston: Mariner Books ISBN 0-395-93758-2.
• Glass, Philip. 1998. "The Classical Musician Igor Stravinsky" Time (Monday, 8 June).
• Greene, David Mason. 1985. Biographical Encyclopaedia of Composers. New York: Doubleday. Griffiths, Paul, Igor Stravinsky, Robert Craft, and Gabriel Josipovici. 1982. Igor Stravinsky: the Rake's Progress. Cambridge Opera Handbooks. Cambridge. London, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, and Sydney: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23746-7 (cloth); ISBN 0-521-28199-7 (pbk).
• Hazlewood, Charles. 2003. "Stravinsky—The Firebird Suite". On Discovering Music. BBC Radio 3 (20 December). Archived at Discovering Music: Listening Library, Programmes.
• Holland, Bernard. 2001. "Stravinsky, a Rare Bird Amid the Palms: A Composer in California, at Ease if Not at Home", The New York Times (11 March).
• Joseph, Charles M.. 2001. Stravinsky Inside Out. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-07537-3.
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• Lambert, Constant. 1936. Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
• Lawson, Rex. 1986. Stravinsky and the Pianola, in Confronting Stravinsky, edited by Jann Pasler. Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-05403-2.
• Lehrer, Jonah. 2007. Igor Stravinsky and the Source of Music, in his Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. ISBN 0-618-62010-9.
• Morand, Paul. 1976. L'Allure de Chanel. Paris: Hermann. Nouv. éd. du texte original, Paris: Hermann, 1996. ISBN 2-7056-6316-9. Reprinted, [Paris]: Gallimard, 2009; ISBN 978-2-07-039655-9 English as The Allure of Chanel, translated by Euan Cameron. London: Pushkin Press, 2008. ISBN 978-1-901285-98-7 (pbk). Special illustrated ed. London: Pushkin, 2009. ISBN 978-1-906548-10-0 (pbk.).
• Oliver, Michael. 1995. Igor Stravinsky. London: Phaidon Press. ISBN 0-7148-3158-1.
• Page, Tim. 2006. "Classical Music: Great Composers, a Less-Than-Great Poser and an Operatic Impresario". Washington Post (Sunday, 30 July): BW13.
• Palmer, Tony. 1982. Stravinsky: Once at a Border.... (TV documentary film). [UK]: Isolde Films. Issued on DVD, [N.p.]: Kultur Video, 2008.
• Pasler, Jann. 1983. "Stravinsky and His Craft: Trends in Stravinsky Criticism and Research". The Musical Times 124, no. 1688 ("Russian Music", October): 605–609.
• Robinson, Lisa. 2004. "Opera Double Bill Offers Insight into Stravinsky's Evolution". The Juilliard Journal Online 19, no. 7 (April). (No longer accessible as of March 2008.)
• Sachs, Harvey. 1987. Music in Fascist Italy. New York: W. W. Norton.
• Satie, Erik. 1923. "Igor Stravinsky: A Tribute to the Great Russian Composer by an Eminent French Confrère". Vanity Fair (February): 39 & 88.
• Siegmeister, Elie (ed.). 1943. The Music Lover's Handbook. New York: William Morrow and Company.
• Simeone, Lisa, with Robert Craft and Philip Glass. 1999. "Igor Stravinsky" NPR's Performance Today: Milestones of the Millennium (16 April). Washington, DC: National Public Radio. Archive (edited) at NPR Online.
• Simon, Scott. 2007. The Primitive Pulse of Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring'. With an interview with Marin Alsop recorded on Friday 23 March 2007. NPR Weekend Edition. (Saturday 24 March). Washington, DC: National Public Radio.
• Slim, H. Colin. 2006. "Stravinsky's Four Star-Spangled Banners and His 1941 Christmas Card". The Musical Quarterly 89, nos. 2 and 3 ([northern] Summer–Fall): 321–447.
• Slonimsky, Nicolas. 1953. Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven's Time. New York: Coleman-Ross. Second edition, New York: Coleman-Ross, 1965, reprinted Washington Paperbacks WP-52, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969, reprinted again Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974 ISBN 0-295-78579-9, and New York: Norton, 2000 ISBN 0-393-32009-X (pbk).
• Straus, Joseph N. 2001. Stravinsky's Late Music. Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis 16. Cambridge, New York, Port Melbourne, Madrid, and Cape Town: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-80220-2 (cloth) ISBN 0-521-60288-2 (pbk)
• Stravinsky, Igor. 1947. Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. OCLC 155726113.
• Stravinsky, Igor. 1962. An Autobiography. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-00161-X; OCLC 311867794. Originally published in French as Chroniques de ma vie, 2 vols. (Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1935), subsequently translated (anonymously) as Chronicle of My Life. London: Gollancz, 1936. OCLC 1354065. This edition reprinted as Igor Stravinsky An Autobiography, with a preface by Eric Walter White (London: Calder and Boyars, 1975) ISBN 0-7145-1063-7 (cloth); ISBN 0-7145-1082-3 (pbk.). Reprinted again as An Autobiography (1903–1934) (London: Boyars, 1990) ISBN 0-7145-1063-7 (cased); ISBN 0-7145-1082-3 (pbk). Also published as Igor Stravinsky An Autobiography (New York: M. & J. Steuer, 1958).
• Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft. 1959. " Conversations with Igor Stravinsky. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. OCLC 896750 Reprinted Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. ISBN 0-520-04040-6
• Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft. 1960. Memories and Commentaries. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Reprinted 1981, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-04402-9 Reprinted 2002, London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-21242-5.
• Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft. 1962. Expositions and Developments. London: Faber & Faber. Reprinted, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981. ISBN 0-520-04403-7.
• Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft. 1966. Themes and Episodes. New York: A. A. Knopf.
• Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft. 1969. Retrospectives and Conclusions. New York: A. A. Knopf.
• Strawinsky, Théodore, and Denise Strawinsky. 2004. Catherine and Igor Stravinsky: A Family Chronicle 1906–1940. New York: Schirmer Trade Books; London: Schirmer Books. ISBN 0-8256-7290-2.
• Taruskin, Richard, reply by Robert Craft. 1989. "'Jews and Geniuses': An Exchange". New York Review of Books (15 June).
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• Wenborn, Neil. 1985. Stravinsky. London: Omnibus Press. ISBN 0-7119-7651-1.
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• Zappa, Frank, and Peter Occhiogrosso. 1989. The Real Frank Zappa Book. New York: Poseidon Press. ISBN 0-671-63870-X (reprinted twice in 1990, New York: Fireside Books, ISBN 0-671-70572-5 and New York: Picador Books ISBN 0-330-31625-7).

Further reading

• Cross, Jonathan. 1999. The Stravinsky Legacy. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-56365-9.
• Joseph, Charles M. 2001. Stravinsky Inside Out. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-07537-5.
• Joseph, Charles M. 2002. Stravinsky and Balanchine, A Journey of Invention. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-08712-8.
• Kohl, Jerome. 1979–80. "Exposition in Stravinsky's Orchestral Variations". Perspectives of New Music 18, nos. 1 and 2 (Fall-Winter/Spring Summer): 391–405. doi:10.2307/832991 JSTOR 832991 (subscription access).
• Kundera, Milan 1995. Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, translated by Linda Asher. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-017145-6.
• Kuster, Andrew T. 2005. Stravinsky's Topology. D.M.A. dissertation, University of Colorado at Boulder. Morrisville, NC: Lulu.com. ISBN 1-4116-6458-2.
• McFarland, Mark. 2011. "Igor Stravinsky." In Oxford Bibliographies Online: Music, edited by Bruce Gustavson. New York: Oxford University Press.

• van den Toorn, Pieter C. 1987. Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring

External links

• Free scores by Igor Stravinsky at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
• Igor Stravinsky @ Boosey & Hawkes
• The Stravinsky Foundation website
• NY Times obituary by Donal Henahan, 7 April 1971 (subscription required to view article)
• 'Compositions for the Pianola - Igor Stravinsky', at the Pianola Institute website
• A Riotous Premiere, an interactive website about The Rite of Spring from the Keeping Score series by the San Francisco Symphony
• Stravinsky A to Z, a BBC Radio 3 reference page containing links to information about Stravinsky
• An audio recording made by William Malloch of Stravinsky rehearsing his Symphonies of Wind Instruments in Memory of Debussy (a 1947 recording, first broadcast in 1961)
• An archive recording of a radio program by William Malloch that includes a discussion of how attitudes toward Stravinsky’s music changed through the years. Included are excepts from the The Firebird, Petrouchka and The Rite of Spring recorded from the 1930s to the 1950s by a variety of conductors, including the composer himself.
• "Igor Stravinsky (biography, works, resources)" (in French and English). IRCAM.
• Excerpts from sound archives of Stravinsky's works from the Contemporary Music Portal
• Jews and Geniuses On Stravinsky being a Jew or not and about his antisemitism. See also another response and the original media review by Robert Craft.
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