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IGOR STRAVINSKY From "Great Lives: A Century in Obituaries"

Mr Igor Stravinsky, who died yesterday in New York at the age of 88, was for three generations and more than half a century the most influential and the most discussed of the day. His life was long – in his youth he met not only Tchaikovsky and Balakirev, but Ibsen, Monet, Petipa, Réjane, Sarah Bernhardt, Proust; he reached maturity as a composer just before Diaghilev launched his revolution in the Russian , and he lived to keep pace with the most audacious musical explorers of the 1960s.

He seemed ageless in his , because he never closed his mind to the evolution of the art, or to the creative musician’s place as a reflector of current attitudes; in his younger days he led musical fashion, and in his old age he observed, translated, and revealed afresh whatever he found new and exciting and fruitful in the work of with a quarter of his years. He was too serious ever to count as an enfant terrible, and too lively (too determined) of mind ever to become an old master. He became the acknowledged GOM of music, but unwillingly for, as he wrote in 1960: ‘All my life I have thought of myself as the “youngest one”.’

Stravinsky’s chief contribution to twentieth-century music was without doubt the new rhythmic possibilities, especially of asymmetrical pattern, that were suggested, and are still being suggested, in his ballet score , a work which, with Tristan and Isolde (though some would say ) is fundamental to modern music. Language, the manner of self-expression, was an inexhaustible preoccupation for Stravinsky in music, perhaps because also in words he declared himself a ‘convinced etymologist’, concerned with ‘problems of language all my life’. He seems never to have been at a loss for something worthwhile to say – in age as in youth his intellect was as clear, as radiant, and as sharp as a diamond; it was the choice between alternative methods of formulating the truth that perennially absorbed and stimulated him. When invited to contribute to an Old Testament symposial , Stravinsky typically chose . Whatever the language, there was never any doubt about the identity of the speaker. Igor Stravinsky

His linguistic inheritance and history are closely connected with the chameleonic versatility which he displayed in his music – particularly in the years between 1910 (when he left ) and 1952 (the beginning of his overt preoccupation with serial techniques). Stravinsky’s father came of a Polish family, his mother from the : he was brought up by a German nanny, speaking German as fluently as Russian. After leaving St Petersburg he sided linguistically with France, and eventually became a French citizen in 1934, but in 1939 destiny took him to America and in 1945 he adopted American nationality. His writings show an eloquence and feeling for niceties of language as remarkable in English and French as in the tongues with which he grew up, though he acknowledged Russian as his prime vehicle of thought to the end of his days, and musically, too, he never lost a trace of Russian accent; in the Canticles (1966) it is still strongly discernible.

Igor Stravinsky was born at Oranienbaum, near St Petersburg, in June, 1882. His father was principal -baritone at the St Igor Stravinsky was born at Oranienbaum, near St Petersburg, in June, 1882. His father was principal bass-baritone at the St Petersburg , his mother an amateur of music, but there was no strong family heritage of musicianship. Thanks to his father’s post Igor (the third of four sons) was able to attend rehearsals and performances of opera and ballet whenever he wished; in his teens he took full advantage of this. Almost as important to his development was his father’s extensive library; Igor Stravinsky was an omnivorous reader all his life, and enjoyed the retentive memory of a polymath. His father was sceptical of the son’s musical gift, though Igor had, at two years old, correctly reproduced the songs of peasants in the neighbourhood. He began lessons at nine years, harmony and a little later. He was already composing music when, in 1900, he stayed at the country home of his school-fellow Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov, and from then onward he showed his compositions to Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov until in 1902 he became that composer’s pupil for orchestration and form. Stravinsky was destined for a legal career and during these years read jurisprudence at St Petersburg University, from which he graduated in 1905. But by this time music absorbed his whole interest, and there was no question of another career. His father had died in 1902; Stravinsky’s first catalogued work, a piano (now lost) dates from 1904. He was still Rimsky-Korsakov’s pupil when, in 1906, he married his first cousin Catherine Nossenko, and began his in E flat major, a rather Wagnerian piece still occasionally performed (it was with this symphony that he made his conducting debut in Montreux, at Ansermet’s invitation, in 1914).

When Rimsky-Korsakov died in 1908 he had passed on to Stravinsky the serviceable, even virtuoso orchestral technique which can be found in two orchestral works of that year, the Fantastique and Fireworks. It was a performance of this last which aroused the interest of , then preparing to launch his company. Diaghilev gave Stravinsky some orchestration work (for ) and then asked him to write music for Fokine’s ballet , since Ladov, the original choice, was working too slowly. Stravinsky, now in revolt against the methods and ideals of Rimsky, did not care for the subject but accepted the commission. The Firebird (1910) made his name in and subsequently all over Europe; the score does show Rimsky’s influence, particularly in the full orchestral version which Stravinsky later reduced, and is strongly Russian in character, though Diaghilev’s company found it perplexing and unmelodious. For Stravinsky it was an artistic necessity to abandon the voluptuous style to create hard, bright colours and lines, crisp and invigorating . He and his family had now left Russia (apart from a brief visit in 1914 he did not return to his native soil until 1962) and were living in Switzerland; Stravinsky began work on a piano which Diaghilev soon persuaded him to transform into (1911). These two , and a third, The Rite of Spring – at its first performance in 1913 there was a riot – triumphantly proclaimed the viability of the one-act ballet as a medium of - and not merely more or less trivial divertissement; as such they are of first importance in the . But in Petrushka, and still more in The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky was increasingly preoccupied with musical structure in terms of phrases and rhythmic shapes for their own non-associative shape; significantly he took exception to the work of his choreographers in these ballets, and significantly too they have been as successful in hall as in the theatre.

Stravinsky’s fortunes were now firmly involved with Diaghilev’s enterprise; when Diaghilev had produced The (1908–13), Stravinsky turned his back on Russian romantic nationalism, and when war broke out he was obliged to proceed without Diaghilev’s support. During the war years in Switzerland he composed a succession of short works for small groups – the best known are the opera-ballet (1917) and The Soldier’s Tale (1918) – and these forced Stravinsky to sharpen and subtilize his invention, as well as allowing him to develop his rhythmic experiments. The for 11 instruments (1918) signalled a new interest in jazz rhythms and tone-colours, and similarly, the study for pianola (1917), subsequently orchestrated as ‘Madrid’, inaugurated an extensive interest in the possibilities of the mechanical piano and eventually in the piano itself which the composer cultivated once more as the vehicle of his own performances.

His was the first of these; later his second son, Soulima (an old Polish family name), became an exponent of his piano music, and the majestic, very difficult concerto for two solo (1935) was composed for father and son together. From the mechanical piano to the gramophone was a single, logical step. Stravinsky welcomed every opportunity to record his own performances partly to fix tempi and phrasing for the aid of other performers, partly because he abominated the ‘recreative’ type of interpreter who labours to make another man’s work his own (he compared the ideal conductor to a bellringer at the end of a rope).

After the armistice in 1919, Stravinsky worked occasionally for Diaghilev, notably in (1919), in which he rearranged Pergolesi to suit his own features; The Wedding (1923), a tough, heavily stylized, and earthy evocation of Russian peasant life with an consisting of four pianos; and Apollon Musagete (1928) which most strongly typifies the statuesque neo-classicism that was Stravinsky’s chief ideal at this time. The choreography of this ballet was by with whom Stravinsky was to enjoy a further, very fruitful period of in New York. In the same year Stravinsky and Diaghilev parted company after the composer had accepted a commission from a ‘rival’, Mme Ida Rubinstein.

The ballet in question, The Fairy’s Kiss, took its thematic material from Tchaikovsky, and showed that Stravinsky’s command of his own style was sufficiently assured to absorb features of without sounding like nineteenth-century music. Traces of a Tchaikovskian texture could, however, have been remarked already in the aria ‘Non erubescite’ from the sombre and monumental opera oratorio , to a text by Cocteau (of which Diaghilev mounted a concert performance in 1927) though the predominating traits of the work derive more obviously from Bach and Handel. The grandest and most granite-like of these neo-classic works is the Symphony of composed in 1930 for the jubilee of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; its noble, monolithic texture looks back to the exalted of Wind Instruments (1920, in memory of Debussy) and forward to the gravelly hieratical (1958), Stravinsky’s first completely serial composition – all three are strongly ‘Russian’ in character, though the Russia of Mussorgsky rather than Rimsky-Korsakov. Stravinsky had indeed re-embraced the Russian orthodox faith in 1926, but his cast of mind and way of life had become west European and, particularly, French. His major works of the 1930s reflected the nationality which he adopted in this decade; the melodrama Perséphone, text by Gide (1934), in which the composer took deliberate liberties with the stress of the French language – believing that words should no more limit the metre and phrasing than the musical themes should, and the concerto for two pianos, ************************* Jeu de Cartes (1937), another ballet for Balanchine.

In 1939 Stravinsky was offered the chair of Poetics at . Happiness in his Paris home had been broken by the deaths of his mother, his wife, and his daughter Ludmilla, within the space of a year. When French friends advised him to accept the chair he left his new homeland on the eve of war. He settled in California, gave his lectures on The Poetics of Music, married the painter in 1940, and in 1945 became an American citizen. Stravinsky plunged enthusiastically into the musical life of America; he made an arrangement of the Star-Spangled Banner in 1941 (forbidden as being too peculiar), wrote a Circus (1942) for Barnum and Bailey’s elephants, a (1941) for a ‘pop’ music publisher, and the Scènes de Ballet (1944) for a Billy Rose revue; he flirted with film music, but without becoming seriously involved – the Norwegian Moods, the slow movement of the 1945 symphony, and the middle movement of , all originated as film music; and he returned to American jazz in the Ebony Concerto (1945) for ’s band. He also collaborated again with Balanchine, most notably in (1947) and the outstanding (1957). And he returned to the orchestral symphony with the works in C (1940) and in three movements (1945), the latter a masterpiece of argument and invention which sums up all Stravinsky’s diverse explorations since The Rite of Spring. This immensely fruitful period closed in 1951 with The Rake’s Progress, the three-act opera to an English text by W. H. Auden in which Stravinsky adopted the techniques of Viennese classical opera buffa. The remarkable beauties of this ‘number-opera’ cannot disguise the distinction between self-assertive pastiche and original composition: unlike the Tchaikovsky and Pergolesi transcriptions, or the neo-Baroque (1940), which are evocatively timeless and therefore modern, this opera represented a bid to take over the assets of another century, to compose not neo-classical but actually .

For 30 years Stravinsky had been acclaimed the antipode of 12-note music, the high priest of diatonicism. From 1952 onwards his works moved steadily towards the 12-note principle, at first in the (1953) only through diatonic serial construction, later with less overt dependence upon tonality, in the (1955) to honour St Mark’s cathedral in , until in Threni (1958) he adopted the 12-note row entirely. A half-way house was the ballet Agon which begins and ends in but also includes strictly atonal and serial dance numbers. Stravinsky was undoubtedly attracted to serial methods by their application to his predilection for asymmetrical metres and rhythmic phraseology, but also by its non-associative ‘pure’ significance – Webern, rather than Schoenberg, was his starting-point in this new adventure, and it is of Webern that one is reminded, both in the exiguous but oddly moving Epitaphium for the Prince of Fustenberg (1959), and in the epigrammatic concentration of the Movements for piano and orchestra (1959) which cultivate and harvest a broad field of textures and moods within the confines of eight minutes.

In 1962 Stravinsky celebrated his eightieth birthday by revisiting Russia, and by composing three new works: a short, exquisite anthem ‘The Dove Descending’ to lines by T. S. Eliot; a miniature oratorio A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer, which returned to a more direct style than that of Movements and included a splendid setting of St Stephen’s last sermon; and a morality, , to be sung, spoken, acted, and danced on television.

He followed these with Abraham and Isaac, in 1963, a stern, rather hermetic setting of the Hebrew Bible text for baritone and orchestra; in 1964 the orchestral in memory of and the tiny but marvellously concentrated Elegy for J.F.K. (to a haiku text by W. H. Auden); then in 1966 the whose hieratic, deeply moving music seems to sum up the essence of all Stravinsky’s religious composition.

Stravinsky’s eighty-fifth birthday in 1967 was marked by worldwide celebrations. The composer had planned to take part in many of these, but age had begun to make inroads on his physical, if not mental, vitality, and his doctors would not let him travel.

In his late seventies Stravinsky was persuaded, by his young American disciple, , to talk at length about his early life, his recollections of his works, and his views on other music. The four conversation-books derived from these talks made stimulating reading, and provide invaluable source material for biographers and students of musical psychology alike. He regards them as more self-revealing and faithful than the Chronicle of My Life (1935) written with Walter Nouvel, or the Poetics of Music in which his collaborator was Roland-Manuel. The conversations revealed the broad range of his interests, and also his intolerance of many other musicians; there was an attractive streak of malice, including self-deflation, behind the eager bonhomie that his slight birdlike figure presented. One could identify the deep mysticism of the Slav, the debonair gaiety of the Frenchman, the affability and thirst for knowledge of the American; but these traits were personal rather than environmental, just as his music remained completely idiosyncratic whether Grieg, Bach, Machaut, or Boulez was his model. He may have hidden his face behind masks of other men, but his personality imprinted itself upon the whole face of music for over half a century, perhaps for the rest of time.

Less than a month ago, in a letter to The Times, he crossed swords with a critic on the subject of The Firebird. His letters are now being prepared for publication and he remarked that the one he was then writing might well be his last.

© 2005 The Times Newspapers Ltd, All images © The Times except where otherwise stated Persistent URL to this entry: http://www.credoreference.com/entry/collinsgl/igor_stravinsky

APA IGOR STRAVINSKY. (2005). In Great Lives: A Century in Obituaries. Retrieved from http://0-www.credoreference.com.libweb.dmacc.edu/entry/collinsgl/igor_stravinsky

Chicago Great Lives: A Century in Obituaries, s.v. "IGOR STRAVINSKY," accessed September 03, 2012, http://0-www.credoreference.com.libweb.dmacc.edu/entry/collinsgl/igor_stravinsky

Harvard ‘IGOR STRAVINSKY’ 2005, in Great Lives: A Century in Obituaries, Collins, , United Kingdom, viewed 03 September 2012,

MLA "IGOR STRAVINSKY." Great Lives: A Century in Obituaries. London: Collins, 2005. Credo Reference. Web. 03 September 2012.