| Igor Stravinsky |
Article Index for Igor |
Website Links For Igor |
Information AboutIgor Stravinsky |
|
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (, ) (, often at the premieres of his works. Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario (1910), '' Petrushka '' (1911), and ("The Rite Of Spring") (1913). The Rite, whose premiere provoked a riot, transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure; to this day its vision of pagan rituals enacted in an imaginary ancient Russia continues to dazzle and overwhelm audiences. After this first Russian phase he turned to Neoclassicism in the 1920s. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms ( Concerto Grosso , Fugue , Symphony ), 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 , Verdi and Tchaikovsky . In the 1950s he adopted Serial procedures, using the new techniques over the final twenty years of his life to write works that were briefer and of greater rhythmic, harmonic, and textural complexity than his earlier music. Their intricacy notwithstanding, these pieces share traits with all of Stravinsky's earlier output; rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few cells comprising only two or three notes, and clarity of form, instrumentation, and of utterance. He also published a number of books throughout his career, almost always with the aid of a collaborator, sometimes uncredited. In his 1936 autobiography, ''Chronicles of My Life'', written with the help of Alexis Roland-Manuel , Stravinsky included his infamous statement that "music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all."Stravinsky (1936) pp. 91-92. With Roland-Manuel and Pierre Souvtchinsky he wrote his 1939–40 Harvard University Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, which were delivered in French and later collected under the title in 1942 (translated in 1947 as ''Poetics of Music'').The names of uncredited collaborators are given in Walsh (2001). Several interviews in which the composer spoke to Robert Craft were published as ''Conversations with Igor Stravinsky''Stravinsky and Craft 1959. They collaborated on five further volumes over the following decade. LIFE Russia Stravinsky was born in , was a Bass Singer at the Mariinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg,Dubal, 564. and the young Stravinsky began piano lessons and later studied music theory and attempted some composition. In 1890, Stravinsky saw a performance of Tchaikovsky's ''Sleeping Beauty'' at the Maryinsky Theater; the performance, his first exposure to an orchestra, mesmerized him.Dubal, 564. At fourteen, he had mastered Mendelssohn 's ''Piano Concerto in G minor'', and the next year, he finished a piano reduction of one of Alexander Glazunov's string quartets. Glazunov , though, thought little of the young Stravinsky's composition skills, calling him unmusical. Dubal, 564. Despite his enthusiasm for music, his parents expected him to become a lawyer. Stravinsky enrolled to study Law at the University Of St. Petersburg in 1901, but was ill-suited for it, attending fewer than fifty class sessions in four years.Dubal, 565. After the death of his father in 1902, he had already begun spending more time on his musical studies. Stravinsky received his jurisprudence degree in 1907, and was then able to concentrate all his efforts on music. On the advice of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov , probably the leading Russian composer of the time, he decided not to enter the St. Petersburg Conservatoire; instead, in 1905, he began to take twice-weekly private tutelage from Rimsky-Korsakov, who became a second father to him.Dubal, 565. That same year, he became engaged to his cousin - Katerina Nossenko, whom he had known since early childhood. They were married on 23 January 1906 , and their first two children, Feodor and Ludmilla, were born in 1907 and 1908 respectively. In 1909, his (Fireworks), was performed in St Petersburg, where it was heard by Sergei Diaghilev , the director of the Ballets Russes in Paris . Diaghilev was sufficiently impressed to commission Stravinsky for orchestrations, and then for a full-length ballet score, '' (The Firebird) . Switzerland Stravinsky travelled to Paris in 1910 to attend the premiere of ''The Firebird''. His family joined him shortly after, and they decided to remain in the west for a while. He moved to Switzerland , where he remained until 1920, moving between Clarens and Lausanne. During this time he composed three further works for the Ballets Russes—'' Petrushka '' (1911), written in Lausanne, and '' (The Rite Of Spring) '' ( 1913 ) and Pulcinella , both written in Clarens. While the Stravinskys were in Switzerland, their second son, Soulima, and their second daughter, Maria Milena, were born, in 1910 and 1913 respectively. During this last pregnancy, Katerina was found to have tuberculosis, and she was placed in a Swiss sanatorium for her confinement. After a brief return to Russia in July 1914 to collect research materials for Les Noces , Stravinsky left his homeland and returned to Switzerland just before the war closed the borders. He was not to return for nearly fifty years. France He moved to France in 1920. During this period he worked with the French piano manufacturer Pleyel to prepare Player Piano music rolls of his music. He personally created around 50 such roll recordings in which he intended to give listeners a definitive understanding of the music and its various tempos etc. Whilst many of these works are now standard repertoire it must be remembered that at the time most orchestras found his music beyond their capabilities and unfathomable. Ballet music issued on Piano Roll s includes , ''Petrushka'' and ''Firebird'' in their entirety. During the 1920s he also recorded live-recording Pianola rolls for Aeolian in New York all of which survive today and can be heard. After a short stay near Paris , he then moved with his family to the south of France until 1934, when he returned to Paris to take up residence at the rue Faubourg St.-Honoré. Stravinsky later recalled this as his last and unhappiest European address; his wife's tuberculosis infected his eldest daughter Ludmila, and Stravinsky himself. Ludmila died in 1938, Katerina in the following year. While Stravinsky was in hospital, where he was treated for five months, his mother also died. Stravinsky already had contacts in the United States ; he was working on the Symphony In C for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and had agreed to lecture in Harvard during the academic year of 1939-40. When war broke out in September, he set out for the United States, at first living in Hollywood but moving to New York in 1969 . America Stravinsky continued to live in the United States from 1939 until his death in 1971; he became a Naturalized 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 time, he preserved a ring of emigré Russian friends and contacts, but eventually realized that this would not sustain his intellectual and professional life in the US. He was drawn to the growing cultural life of Los Angeles, especial during World War II, when so many writers, musicians, composers, and conductors settled in the area; he settled in Beverly Hills and sometimes conducted concerts at the famous Hollywood Bowl as well as throughout the U.S. When he planned to write an opera with W. H. Auden , the need to acquire more familiarity with the English -speaking world coincided with his meeting the conductor and Musicologist Robert Craft . Craft lived with Stravinsky until the composer's death, acting as interpreter, chronicler, assistant conductor, and Factotum for countless musical and social tasks. In 1962, he accepted an invitation to return to St. Petersburg (then known as Leningrad ) for a series of concerts. While there he spent more than two hours speaking with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev , who urged him to return to the Soviet Union . Despite the invitation, Stravinsky remained an émigré firmly based in the West. In the last few years of his life, Stravinsky lived at Essex House in New York City. ]] He died at the age of 88 in New York City and was buried in Venice on the cemetery island of San Michele . His grave is close to the tomb of his long-time collaborator Diaghilev. Stravinsky's life had encompassed most of the 20th century, including many of its modern classical music styles, and he influenced composers both during and after his lifetime. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame at 6340 Hollywood Boulevard and posthumously received the Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1987. PERSONALITY 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 (, 1927) and George Balanchine (, 1928). collaborated on '' Pulcinella '' in 1920. Picasso took the opportunity to make several sketches of the composer.]] Relatively short of stature and not conventionally handsome, Stravinsky was nevertheless photogenic, as many pictures show. Although his marriage to Katerina endured for 33 years, the true love of his life, and later his partner until his death, was his second wife Vera De Bosset (1888-1982). Although a notorious philanderer (even rumoured to have affairs with high-class partners such as Coco Chanel ), Stravinsky was also a family man who devoted considerable amounts of his time and expenditure to his sons and daughters. One of his sons, Soulima Stravinsky , was also a composer, but is little known compared to his father. When Stravinsky met Vera in the early 1920s, she was married to the painter and stage designer Serge Sudeikin , but they soon began an affair which led to her leaving her husband. From then until Katerina's death from cancer in 1939, Stravinsky led a double life, spending some of his time with his first family and the rest with Vera. Katerina soon learned of the relationship and accepted it as inevitable and permanent. After Katerina's death, Stravinsky and Vera were married in Bedford, MA , USA, on 9 March 1940 . Around this time both left France for the USA, to escape World War II (Stravinsky in 1939, Vera in 1940). Patronage too was never far away. In the early 1920s, Leopold Stokowski was able to give 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 paid for generously. Stravinsky proved adept at playing the part of "man of the world", acquiring a keen instinct for business matters and appearing relaxed and comfortable in many of the world's major cities. was embarrassed by his habit of tapping a glass with a fork and loudly demanding attention in restaurants. Stravinsky's 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 , 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. At the end of his life, he was even setting Hebrew Scripture in ''Abraham and Isaac''. STYLISTIC PERIODS Stravinsky's career may be roughly divided into three stylistic periods. Russian The first of Stravinsky's major stylistic periods (excluding some early minor works) was inaugurated by the three , and finally to the savage Polyphonic dissonance of . The first of the ballets, , is notable for its unusual introduction (12/8 meter in the low basses) and sweeping on off-rhythms (''See'' '' (The Rite Of Spring) '' for a more detailed account of this work). As Stravinsky noted about the premières, his intention was "to send them all to hell".Wenborn 1985, 17, alludes to this comment, without giving a specific source. (He succeeded: The 1913 première of is often considered the most famous Riot in music history, with reports of fistfights amongst audience members and a need for police supervision of the second act. The extent of the tumult, however, is open to debate, and may be more apocryphal than factual. See Eksteins 1989, 10–16, for an overview of contradictory reportage of the event by participants and the press. Other pieces from this period include: (''The Nightingale''), ''Renard'' (1916), () (1918), and (''The Wedding'') (1923). Neoclassical The next phase of Stravinsky's compositional style, slightly overlapping the first, is heralded by two works: '' Pulcinella '' 1920 and the ''Octet'' (1923) for wind instruments. Both of these works feature what was to become a hallmark of this period; that is, Stravinsky's return, or "looking back", to the classical music of Mozart and Bach and their contemporaries. This " Neo-classical " style involved the abandonment of the large orchestras demanded by the ballets. In these new works, written roughly between 1920 and 1950, Stravinsky turns largely to wind instruments, the piano, and choral and chamber works. The '' Symphonies Of Wind Instruments '' and '' Symphony Of Psalms '' are among the finest works ever composed completely or largely for winds. Other works such as (1927), (1928, for the Russian Ballet) and the '' Dumbarton Oaks concerto'' continue this trend toward a re-thinking of eighteenth-century musical styles. Some larger works from this period are the three symphonies: the (''Symphony of Psalms'') (1930), ''Symphony in C'' (1940) and ''Symphony in Three Movements'' (1945). ''Apollon'', ''Persephone'' (1933) and ''Orpheus'' (1947) also mark Stravinsky's concern, during this period, of not only returning to Classic music but also returning to Classic themes: in these instances, the mythology of the Ancient Greeks . The pinnacle of this period is the opera '' The Rake's Progress ''. It was completed in 1951 and, after stagings by the Metropolitan Opera in 1953, was almost ignored. It was presented by the Santa Fe Opera in its first season in 1957 with Stravinsky in attendance, the beginning of his long association with the company. This opera, written to a libretto by Auden and based on the etchings of Hogarth , encapsulates everything that Stravinsky had perfected in the previous 20 years of his neo-classic period. The music is direct but quirky; it borrows from classic tonal harmony but also interjects surprising dissonances; it features Stravinsky's trademark off-rhythms; and it hearkens back to the operas and themes of Monteverdi , Gluck and Mozart . After the opera's completion, Stravinsky never wrote another neo-classic work but instead began writing the music that came to define his final stylistic change. Serial Only after the death of Arnold Schoenberg in 1951 did Stravinsky begin using Dodecaphony , the twelve-tone technique which Schoenberg had devised, in his works. Stravinsky was aided in his understanding of, or even conversion to, the twelve-tone method by his confidant and colleague, Robert Craft , who had long been advocating the change. The next fifteen years were spent writing the works in this style. Stravinsky first began to experiment with non-twelve-tone serial technique in smaller vocal works such as the ''Cantata'' (1952), Septet (1953), and ''Three Songs from Shakespeare'' (1953), while his first fully serial (though not yet twelve-tone) work is ''In Memoriam Dylan Thomas'' (1954). '' Agon '' (1954–57) is his first work to include a twelve-tone series, but (1955) is his first piece to contain a movement entirely based on a Tone Row ("Surge, aquilo"). Straus 2001, 4. He later began expanding his use of dodecaphony in works often based on biblical texts, such as ''Threni'' (1958), ''A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer'' (1961), and '' The Flood '' (1962). An important transitional composition of this period of Stravinsky's work was a return to the ballet: ''Agon'', a work for twelve dancers written from 1954 to 1957. Some numbers of ''Agon'' recollect the "white-note" tonality of the neo-classic period, while others (e.g., the ''Bransle Gay'') display his unique re-interpretation of serial method. The ballet is thus like a miniature encyclopedia of Stravinsky, containing many of the signatures to be found throughout his compositions, whether primitivist, neo-classic, or serial: rhythmic quirkiness and experimentation, harmonic ingenuity, and a deft ear for masterly orchestration. These characteristics are what make Stravinsky's work unique when compared with the work of contemporaneous serial composers. INNOVATION 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. Composition Stravinsky began re-thinking his use of the Motif and Ostinato as early as '' The Firebird '' ballet, but his use of these elements reached its full flowering in '' The Rite Of Spring ''. Motivic development, that is using a distinct musical figure that is subsequently altered, repeated, or sequenced throughout a piece or section of a piece of music, has its roots in the Sonata Form of Mozart's age. The first great innovator in this method was Beethoven ; the famous "fate motif" which opens Fifth Symphony and reappears throughout the work in surprising and refreshing permutations is a classic example. However, Stravinsky's use of motivic development was unique in the way he permutated his motifs. In the "Rite of Spring" he introduces additive permutations, that is, subtracting or adding a note to a motif without regard to changes in meter. The same ballet is also notable for its relentless use of Ostinati . The most famous passage, as noted above, is the eighth note ostinato of the strings accented by eight Horns that occurs in the section ''Auguries of Spring (Dances of the Young Girls)''. This is perhaps the first instance in music of extended ostinato which is neither used for variation nor for accompaniment of melody. At various other times in the work Stravinsky also pits several ostinati against one another without regard to Harmony or Tempo , creating a Pastiche , a sort of musical equivalent of a Cubist painting. These passages are notable not only for this pastiche-quality but also for their length: Stravinsky treats them as whole and complete musical sections. Such techniques foreshadowed by several decades the Minimalist works of composers such as Terry Riley and Steve Reich . Twentieth century rock musician Frank Zappa openly credits Stravinsky as a major influence.Zappa and Occhiogrosso 1989, 34, 49, 88, 89, 112, 116, 167, and 195. While Zappa composed mainly avant-garde Rock, Jazz and Blues, he did compose some Orchestral pieces and Stravinsky's name is mentioned on several of his albums, including a song called ''Igor's Boogie'' written when Stravinsky died and included in the album Burnt Weeny Sandwich . Neoclassicism Stravinsky was not the first practitioner of the Neoclassical style. The German composer Richard Strauss is an earlier example (he composed the Mozartian in 1910, as Stravinsky was just beginning the works of his Russian period (recent Strauss scholars have dismissed the notion that Rosenkavalier is a "neo-classical" work)) while others, such as Max Reger , were composing in the manner of Bach long before Stravinsky turned to this style. The Neoclassical style would be later adopted by composers as diverse as Darius Milhaud and Aaron Copland . Sergei Prokofiev once chided Stravinsky for his Neoclassical mannerisms, though sympathetically, as Prokofiev had broken similar musical ground in his Symphony No. 1, ''"Classical"'' of 1916-17. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|