Igor Stravinsky
“I consider that music is, by its very nature, powerless to express anything at all.” — An Autobiography (1935)
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The people around him ⏳🌊
- FamilyYekaterina (Katya) Nosenko
His first cousin and first wife, the mother of his four children, she held the family together until her death in 1939, even knowing of her husband's relationship with Vera.
- TeacherNikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
A father figure who taught him orchestration from 1902 until his death in 1908.
- PatronageSergei Diaghilev
As impresario of the Ballets Russes, he set him on the world stage from 'The Firebird' to 'Pulcinella', and the two lie buried on the same island in Venice.
- FriendshipClaude Debussy
An elder who became his friend after the premiere of 'The Firebird' and played through 'The Rite of Spring' with him; Stravinsky wrote 'Symphonies of Wind Instruments' in his memory.
- FamilyVera de Bosset
The lover he met in 1921 and his second wife from 1940, she worked as a painter and stayed by his side to the very end.
- RivalryArnold Schoenberg
A rival who lived in the same Los Angeles yet never sought him out; after his death, Stravinsky embraced the 12-tone technique.
I. The boy from Petersburg · 1882–1901 (age 0–19)
(Birth) He was born in June 1882 in Oranienbaum (today Lomonosov), a summer resort outside Saint Petersburg in the Russian Empire (today Russia). His father, Fyodor, was a celebrated bass at the Mariinsky Theatre and a cultivated man who had gathered a library of several thousand volumes. His mother, Anna, played the piano well enough to accompany singers. He was the third of four brothers: Roman, Yury, Igor and Gury. (Coldness) The air in the house was cold. His father was quick-tempered, and Igor felt that his parents' affection went more to his older brothers. He later recalled his childhood as a time spent waiting for the day he could cast everything aside and leave. The people he grew close to were his German nanny, Bertha, and his younger brother Gury. His eldest brother, Roman, died young in 1897. (Theater) His first memories of music came from the theater. He followed his father in and out of the wings of the Mariinsky, and all his life he treasured the moment, at the 1892 performance marking the 50th anniversary of Glinka's opera, when he glimpsed Pyotr Tchaikovsky in the audience from afar. He began the piano at nine and loved to improvise, but his parents did not regard music as a profession. In 1901, in keeping with his father's wishes, he entered the law faculty of Saint Petersburg University.
II. Rimsky-Korsakov's pupil · 1901–1909 (age 19–27)
(Teacher) Vladimir, a friend he made at university, was the son of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. In the summer of 1902 he went to see Rimsky-Korsakov, who was staying in Heidelberg, and showed him his early exercises; the master advised private lessons instead of the conservatory. At the end of that year his father died of cancer. While pursuing his law studies, he learned orchestration each week at his teacher's home, and Rimsky-Korsakov became the man who filled his father's empty place. (Marriage) In January 1906 he married his first cousin Yekaterina (Katya) Nossenko. Because Orthodox law forbade marriage between cousins, they sought out a priest who would not ask questions and held a quiet ceremony. Katya, who had known him since childhood, was a companion who understood his music deeply. A son, Fyodor (later a painter), was born in 1907; a daughter, Lyudmila, in 1908; a son, Svyatoslav (Soulima, later a pianist·composer), in 1910; and a daughter, Milena, in 1914. In summer they lived in a house he built with his own hands at Ustilug in Volhynia (today Ukraine), where his wife's family had an estate. (Farewell) Having dedicated his Symphony No. 1 to his teacher, in 1908 he wrote the orchestral piece 'Fireworks' to celebrate the wedding of his teacher's daughter, but that June Rimsky-Korsakov died. He composed 'Funeral Song' in his teacher's memory and premiered it early the following year. In February 1909 the impresario Sergei Diaghilev sat in the audience at a concert where 'Scherzo fantastique' and 'Fireworks' were played. Diaghilev first entrusted him with orchestrating two Frédéric Chopin piano pieces for the ballet 'Les Sylphides'.
III. Storm in Paris · 1910–1914 (age 28–32)
(The Firebird) Diaghilev had given 'The Firebird' to another composer, and when it went nowhere he handed it to the twenty-seven-year-old. The premiere at the Paris Opéra in June 1910 was a triumph, and overnight he became a name in Paris. His friendship with Claude Debussy, who came backstage after the performance, began then as well. The colorful orchestration he had learned from his teacher reached its summit in this work. (Petrushka) The next year's 'Petrushka' grew out of an idea for a short piece for piano and orchestra. For the tale of a sad puppet in a fairground show, he wrote polytonal chords that sound two keys at once, and Vaslav Nijinsky danced the puppet. In the summer of 1912 he sat at one piano with Debussy and sight-read the four-hand arrangement of 'The Rite of Spring'. Debussy wrote in a letter that the music haunted him like a beautiful nightmare. That same year in Berlin he heard Arnold Schoenberg's 'Pierrot lunaire' and was deeply struck. (The Rite) In the spring of 1913, in Clarens, Switzerland, he and Maurice Ravel reworked Modest Mussorgsky's opera 'Khovanshchina' on commission from Diaghilev. Ravel predicted that the premiere of 'The Rite of Spring' would be as momentous an event as the premiere of Debussy's 'Pelléas'. At the premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on May 29, the music was all but buried under jeers and shouting, and backstage he clung to the coattails of Nijinsky, who was calling out the beats. Soon afterward he lay ill with typhoid for several weeks. At a concert performance the following year, the audience carried him into the street on their shoulders.
Unfurling the brilliant orchestration he had learned from his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, this is the work that made an unknown young man the star of Paris overnight. To secure copyright, he later revised the suites several times.
- In the introduction, as the cellos·double basses murmur darkly, comes a passage where the strings, touching their strings only lightly, glide into flute-like overtones (harmonics). It was an effect the composer himself was proud of, and it sounds as if the air of the magic garden were stirring.
- In the 'Infernal Dance of King Kashchei', brass and bass drum jab on either side of the beat in syncopated rhythms, painting the frenzy of the demon king's horde. Included in the 1919 suite as well, it is the most often performed passage.
- In the 'Berceuse', the bassoon lulls the monsters to sleep with a low, unhurried solo melody. Scenes in which the bassoon sings so lyrically are rare, which makes this a passage bassoonists cherish.
- The finale begins with a solo horn quietly singing a Russian folk tune; the whole orchestra then takes it up, growing it ever louder and broader. Don't miss the close, where the same tune is stretched out in units of 7 beats to end in majesty.
Born from an idea for a concertante piece for piano, this ballet clothes a fairground puppet in human sorrow. With its chords layering two keys, it opened the door to 'The Rite'.
- The fairground scene of Tableau 1 passes in layered, crisscrossing strands: the murmur of the crowd, a barrel organ, the music of street dancers. Listen as if you were standing in the middle of the fair, hearing many sounds at once.
- In Tableau 2, 'Petrushka's Room', two clarinets play C major and F-sharp major chords at the same time. Known as the 'Petrushka chord', this polytonal (two keys overlaid) sonority sounds like the puppet's torn heart.
- The piano inside the orchestra stands out like a soloist. The passage in the 'Russian Dance' where the piano leads with bouncing chords is a trace of the work's beginnings as a piano piece.
- In the final scene, after Petrushka dies, his ghost shrieks from the rooftop on the trumpet, and the strings end softly with plucked pizzicato. The loneliness left behind at the end of a dazzling festival is the work's final impression.
A ballet depicting a pagan sacrificial rite of ancient Russia, its tumultuous 1913 Paris premiere is often told as the starting point of 20th-century music. Part of it was written at the summer house in Ustilug.
- At the very start, a bassoon sings a melody alone in a register extremely high for the instrument. The sound is so strange and fragile you might not know it is a bassoon, and it is often read as a picture of early spring, the frozen earth awakening.
- In 'The Augurs of Spring', the strings pound out the same chord over and over, while the stresses (accents) fall in unpredictable places. Follow the eight horns jabbing those accents together, and you can see a stamping dance.
- The final 'Sacrificial Dance' is written in changing meters, the time signature shifting almost every bar, and it is notoriously difficult for conductor and players alike. It is the scene in which the chosen maiden dances until she collapses, and the brief, blow-like ending is shocking.
- The composer's own recording as conductor is considered sharp and dry, while Pierre Boulez's is considered transparent and precise. Compare the same passage in both recordings and you will feel the breadth of interpretation.
IV. Exile in Switzerland · 1914–1920 (age 32–38)
(War) In 1914 the First World War found him in Switzerland, where he was staying for Katya's tuberculosis cure. A brief trip to Ustilug and Kyiv that summer was the last he saw of his homeland before the Revolution. The 1917 Revolution cut off his income from the estate and from his Russian publisher, and as the wartime company gave fewer performances, Diaghilev's fees stopped arriving on time. The family of six scraped by in a rented house in Morges on the shore of Lake Geneva. (Loss) In the spring of 1917 Bertha, the nanny who had raised him, died in Morges, and that same year his younger brother Gury died of illness on the Romanian front. With the borders closed, he could not even go to his brother's funeral. In March 1918 Debussy died. He dedicated 'Symphonies of Wind Instruments' (1920), written for winds alone, to Debussy's memory. (Small forces) Hardship gave birth to new forms. In 1918, with the writer C. F. Ramuz, he created 'The Soldier's Tale', which could travel from village to village with only seven players, a narrator and dancers. The patron Werner Reinhart covered the costs, but the Spanish flu spread just after the premiere and the tour came to nothing. Around this time he was wrestling with 'Les Noces', which captured the wedding rites of the Russian countryside, and was also poring over American ragtime scores. (Turning point) In 1919 Diaghilev held out scores attributed to the 18th-century Neapolitan composer Pergolesi and proposed a ballet. 'Pulcinella' (1920), with designs by Picasso, he would later call a revelation through which he discovered his own past. So began the long period that would come to be called neoclassicism.
Exile brought poverty, with income cut off by war and revolution, and that poverty gave birth to the small ensemble of seven players. Into the tale of a soldier who sold his soul, the work drew even ragtime and tango.
- The players number only seven: violin·double bass, clarinet·bassoon, cornet (a small trumpet)·trombone, and percussion. From each family a high and a low instrument come together as a pair, and together they stand in for an entire orchestra in miniature.
- The violin stands for the soul the soldier hands over to the devil. Listen throughout for whose hands the violin is in, and the plot follows in sound.
- The 'Three Dances' that wake the princess run tango·waltz·ragtime. You can hear plainly the spark struck by the American ragtime scores that had only just crossed over to Europe.
- In the closing 'Triumphal March of the Devil' the instruments drop out one by one until only the percussion is left pounding. This passage conveys, through rhythm alone, the ending in which the devil at last drags the soldier away.
V. The neoclassicist in France · 1920–1939 (age 38–57)
(Double life) After moving to France with his family in 1920, he spent his first few months at the designer Coco Chanel's villa in Garches. The following year, through Diaghilev, he met Vera de Bosset, wife of the painter Sergei Sudeikin, and they became lovers. For the next 18 years he shuttled between his family in the south of France and Vera in Paris. Katya knew of the affair and endured it. In Paris he also grew close to Erik Satie. (Livelihood) Money was a constant worry. Because Russia had not signed the Berne copyright convention, 'The Firebird' and 'Petrushka', both written before the revolution, earned almost no royalties wherever they were played. He signed a contract with the Pleyel company to make player-piano recordings, and he wrote the 'Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments' (1924) so that he could take the stage himself as soloist. Conducting was another source of income, and in 1935 he toured with his son Soulima, playing the 'Concerto for Two Pianos'. (Faith) In 1926 he returned to the Russian Orthodox Church he had drifted away from, and he prayed every day. A ritual piety suffuses the Latin opera-oratorio 'Oedipus Rex' (1927) and the 'Symphony of Psalms' (1930), with its chorus and fugue. In 1928, in 'Le Baiser de la fée', he borrowed Tchaikovsky's songs to pay homage. A hater of the revolution, he also went on record in the early 1930s praising Mussolini. (Grief) He gained French citizenship in 1934, but his last year in that country was filled with loss. His daughter Lyudmila died of tuberculosis in November 1938, Katya died of it in March 1939, and in June his mother died too. He himself spent several months in a sanatorium with tuberculosis. He called the 'Symphony in C', which he was writing then, the work of the most tragic year of his life.
He wrote it a few years after returning to the Orthodox faith, on a commission for the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 50th anniversary. He noted that he had inscribed the score 'to the glory of God'.
- The violins·violas·clarinets are left out, and in their place come two pianos and a large body of winds. Listen with an ear for what is missing, and you hear a dry, hard coloring, like a cathedral built of stone.
- The short, detached E minor chord struck at the opening is known as the 'Psalms chord'. The same chord is stamped again throughout the movement like a punctuation mark.
- The 2nd movement is a double fugue (a form in which two subjects enter in turn and interweave). Follow the order: the oboe states the subject first, the other woodwinds follow, and then the chorus enters with a second subject.
- At the end of the 3rd movement, beneath the slow song 'Laudate Dominum (Praise the Lord)', the bass keeps repeating the same four-note figure (an ostinato), and time flows on as if it had stopped. The composer recalled that he pictured Elijah's chariot rising to heaven in the movement's fast section.
VI. Stranger in Hollywood · 1939–1956 (age 57–74)
(New World) In the autumn of 1939 he crossed to America to give lectures at Harvard by invitation, and the following March he married Vera in Massachusetts. In 1941 they settled in a small house in Hollywood, Los Angeles, where he lived for 28 years. Offers to write film scores mostly came to nothing, and when Disney used 'The Rite of Spring' in 'Fantasia' (1940), he held no copyright and was paid little. In 1945 he revised the 'Firebird' suite to secure an American copyright, and at the end of that year he became a U.S. citizen. (Neighbors) In 1942 Sergei Rachmaninoff, who lived in the same city, came to dinner at his house, and a few days later he sent over a jar of honey. With Schoenberg, who also lived nearby, he never had any contact. He did not turn down commissions such as the 'Circus Polka' (1942) for circus elephants or the 'Ebony Concerto' (1945) for jazz band. The 'Symphony in Three Movements' (1945), steeped in impressions from wartime newsreels, was the work in which he came closest to the war. (The rake) In 1948 the young conductor Robert Craft joined him as an assistant and became, in effect, family. Starting from a series of Hogarth engravings he had seen in Chicago, he wrote the opera 'The Rake's Progress' to a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, and it premiered in Venice in 1951. Built on the frame of Mozart's operas, it was the summation of his neoclassicism. Schoenberg died that same year, and Craft recorded that the following year Stravinsky wept, saying he feared he could no longer compose. In the midst of that crisis he began to study the 12-tone technique of Schoenberg and Webern.
Wartime newsreels seen in Hollywood and an aborted film-score project both seeped into this work. The composer said it could be called his 'War Symphony'.
- In the 1st movement the piano stands out within the orchestra almost like a soloist. The composer said the movement was prompted by a documentary on scorched-earth tactics on the Chinese front.
- The 2nd movement is a quiet one centered on the harp, drawn from music he had originally conceived for the film 'The Song of Bernadette'. It sounds like a brief respite between the rugged outer movements.
- In the 3rd movement the piano and harp step forward together. The composer said he had pictured footage of German troops on the march, and he linked the great closing chord to the Allied victory.
- The way the same rhythmic cells are clipped short, repeated and overlapped recalls the rhythmic sense of 'The Rite of Spring'. Hear the two works back to back, and you can tell what 30 years changed and what they left intact.
VII. The final transformation · 1956–1971 (age 74–89)
(Conversion) Past seventy, he recast the 12-tone technique in his own idiom. In 1956 came the 'Canticum sacrum' for St Mark's Basilica in Venice, followed by the ballet 'Agon' (1957), made with George Balanchine, and 'Threni' (1958), set to the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Some longtime supporters saw this as betrayal, but he chose not to stay in one place. In the autumn of 1956, while on tour in Berlin, he suffered a cerebral thrombosis, but he recovered. (Homecoming) In 1962, the year he turned eighty, he was invited to dinner at the White House, and that autumn he set foot on Soviet soil for the first time in 48 years. He conducted in Moscow and Leningrad, met Khrushchev, and saw the Mariinsky Theatre of his childhood again. It was the moment when an exile once condemned as a 'formalist' was cheered in his homeland. (Death) His late works were brief and austere, and they often dealt with death. By way of an elegy for John F. Kennedy and the 'Variations' in memory of Aldous Huxley, he arrived at the 'Requiem Canticles', which he completed in 1966. As his health declined he was hospitalized more often, and in 1969 he moved to New York. He died in his New York apartment on April 6, 1971, at eighty-eight. The 'Requiem Canticles' was performed at his funeral in Venice, and he was buried in the Orthodox section of the cemetery on the island of San Michele, close to Diaghilev's grave. In 1982 Vera was buried beside him.
His last major work, commissioned by Princeton University in memory of a patron, it was performed at his own funeral 5 years later.
- He chose only certain portions of the Requiem Mass text and wove them into nine short pieces that are over in about 15 minutes. Feel the late style that faces death with compressed gestures rather than prolonged grieving.
- In the 'Libera me (Deliver me)', part of the chorus sings while part speaks in a kind of murmur. It sounds like voices of prayer overlapping inside a church.
- In the final postlude, metallic instruments such as bells, celesta and vibraphone sound chords at sparse intervals. The passage ends like tolling bells receding into the distance, and it gathers up the weight of the whole work.
- Though it is written in the 12-tone technique (a method of building a piece by fixing an order for the twelve notes), its rhythms remain sharply defined. It is often cited as proof that the aged Stravinsky kept his own voice even within the new method.
Lesser-known stories
The 'Funeral Song', written in memory of his teacher, was performed once in 1909 and then vanished in the turmoil of the revolution. In 'An Autobiography' Stravinsky lamented that it had probably been the best of his works before 'The Firebird'. In 2015 the orchestral parts were discovered during a reorganization of the St. Petersburg Conservatory library, and the following December, under Valery Gergiev, the piece was performed again for the first time in more than 100 years. In 1920, when Diaghilev revived 'The Rite of Spring' with new choreography, the person who anonymously put up the guarantee for the production costs was Coco Chanel. This remained unknown for a long time until biographers' research later confirmed it. Around that time Chanel also lent her villa to the Stravinsky family, who had nowhere else to go. 'An Autobiography' (1935), which contains the famous line 'music is powerless to express anything', was a book whose prose had been polished by his friend Walter Nouvel, and much of his Harvard lecture series 'Poetics of Music' was likewise written by the composer Roland-Manuel. These facts came to light only after the drafts and letters were made public, and they show that his 'official views' were to some degree the product of collaboration. When his arrangement of the American national anthem was performed in Boston in 1944, the police, citing a state law against tampering with the anthem, warned him to drop it from the next concert. In the retelling, the episode swelled into a story that he had been 'arrested for arranging the anthem', but in reality it ended with a warning.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Orchestration
(Literally) Gwanhyeonak (管絃樂) means music of pipes (管), that is, wind instruments, and of strings (絃), that is, string instruments. Orchestration is the method of deciding how to divide up those instruments. (In music) It is the craft of deciding whether to give the same melody to the flute or the cello, and how many instruments to layer together. The same piece can sound bright or dark, light or heavy, depending on its orchestration. It is a bit like a class play, where the mood of a scene changes completely depending on which classmate is given the same line. Stravinsky learned it from Rimsky-Korsakov. (Elsewhere) In computing, the English word 'orchestration' also refers to coordinating multiple servers and programs so that they work together.
Bitonality
(Literally) Bokjoseong (複調性) means tonality (調性) that is doubled (複). (In music) Most pieces use one key at a time (a system of notes organized around a central pitch, such as C major or G minor), but bitonality sounds two keys at once. The classic example is 'Petrushka', where a C major chord and an F-sharp major chord sound together. If our class sang a song in one key while the class next door sang the same song in another, the result would clash and yet blend strangely; think of it as that effect, deliberately calculated and assembled.
Changing meter
(In music) This refers to the meter changing frequently in the middle of a piece. An ordinary piece keeps repeating 'one two three four', but with changing meter, bars of two, three and five beats alternate. In the 'Sacrificial Dance' of 'The Rite of Spring', the meter changes almost every bar. Just as a jumper has to stay on high alert when the friends turning a long jump rope suddenly change the rhythm, the players must devote all their attention to counting beats.
Ostinato
(Meaning of the word) In Italian it means 'obstinate,' and it shares its root with the English word obstinate. (In music) A short figure repeated stubbornly over and over, usually while other melodies change above it. Stravinsky used the ostinato as a rhythmic engine that drives the music forward. Think of the bass in a video-game soundtrack that keeps thudding away, 'dum-dum, dum-dum,' while only the melody shifts on top of it.
Neoclassicism
(Meaning of the word) It means new (新) classicism. The name itself carries the idea of rewriting the old 'classics' through the eyes of a new age. (In music) A movement of the 1920s–1950s that brought back the forms and textures of the age of Bach and Mozart and wrote them in twentieth-century harmony and rhythm. It put balance and clarity ahead of swelling emotion, and Stravinsky's Pulcinella is often named as its starting point. It is rather like a remake of an old video game with modern technology: the rules of the original are kept, but the graphics and the feel in your hands are new. (Elsewhere) In art and architecture, neoclassicism refers to the late 18th-century revival of ancient Greek and Roman styles, about 150 years ahead of neoclassicism in music.
Fugue
(Meaning of the word) The Italian fuga means 'flight.' The name is thought to come from the way one voice states a subject and the other voices chase after it. (In music) A form in which a single subject is taken up in turn by several voices (lines of melody that each move independently), entering one after another and intertwining. As in a game of tag, where one child runs off and the others dash after along the same path, the later voices follow with the same subject while the earlier ones move on to the next part of the story. The second movement of the Symphony of Psalms is a double fugue, built on two subjects. (Elsewhere) In psychiatry, a 'dissociative fugue' is a state in which a person leaves home and wanders, having forgotten who they are.
12-tone technique
(In music) A method in which the twelve notes within an octave (the seven white keys and five black keys of the piano) are each used exactly once to set an order called a 'tone row,' and the whole piece is built on that order. The aim is to keep any single note from becoming the center, and Schoenberg devised it in the 1920s. It is like a rule that twelve classmates may present only in a fixed order, though they are allowed to run the order backward or turn it upside down. Stravinsky took up the method when he was past seventy.