IGOR STRAVINSKY IGOR STRAVINSKY from "Great Lives: a Century in Obituaries"
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IGOR STRAVINSKY 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 composer 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 ballet, and he lived to keep pace with the most audacious musical explorers of the 1960s. He seemed ageless in his music, 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 composers 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 The Rite of Spring, a work which, with Tristan and Isolde (though some would say Parsifal) 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 oratorio, Stravinsky typically chose Babel. 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 Russia) and 1952 (the beginning of his overt preoccupation with serial techniques). Stravinsky’s father came of a Polish family, his mother from the Ukraine: 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 Requiem Canticles (1966) it is still strongly discernible. Igor Stravinsky was born at Oranienbaum, near St Petersburg, in June, 1882. His father was principal bass-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 Opera, 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 piano lessons at nine years, harmony and counterpoint 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 sonata (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 symphony 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 Scherzo Fantastique and Fireworks. It was a performance of this last which aroused the interest of Sergei Diaghilev, then preparing to launch his Russian Ballet company. Diaghilev gave Stravinsky some orchestration work (for Les Sylphides) and then asked him to write music for Fokine’s ballet The Firebird, 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 Paris 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 rhythms. 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 concerto which Diaghilev soon persuaded him to transform into Petrushka (1911). These two ballets, 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 dance-drama and not merely more or less trivial divertissement; as such they are of first importance in the history of ballet. 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 the concert hall as in the theatre. Stravinsky’s fortunes were now firmly involved with Diaghilev’s enterprise; when Diaghilev had produced The Nightingale (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 Renard (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 Ragtime 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 piano concerto 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 pianos (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 Pulcinella (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 orchestra 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 George Balanchine with whom Stravinsky was to enjoy a further, very fruitful period of collaboration 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 romanticism without sounding like nineteenth-century music.