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[{"style":"mla","pubnonperiodical":{"title":"Topic Pages","city":"Boston","publisher":"Credo Reference Publisher Contributors","year":2017,"state":"MA"},"pubtype":{"main":"pubnonperiodical","suffix":"pubdatabase"},"pubdatabase":{"year":"2017","month":"January","day":"20","yearaccessed":"2017","monthaccessed":"January","dayaccessed":"20","service":"Credo Reference","db":"Credo Reference","searchtext":""},"source":"chapter","chapter":{"title":"Stravinsky, Igor (1882 - 1971)","type":"essay"}}] Topic Page: Stravinsky, Igor (1882 - 1971) Summary Article: Stravinsky, Igor Fyodorovich from The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide Image from: Igor Stravinsky in Great Lives: A Century in Obituaries Russian composer, later of French (1934) and US (1945) nationality.

He studied under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and wrote the music for the Diaghilev ballets The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913), which were highly controversial at the time for their use of driving rhythms and bi-tonal harmonies. At the first performance of The Rite of Spring the audience's reaction caused a riot. His works also include symphonies, concertos (for violin and piano), chamber music, and operas; for example, The Rake's Progress (1951) and The Flood (1962). Stravinsky was one of the most important composers of the 20th century, who arguably determined the course of music for the rest of the century more than any other composer. His versatile work ranges from his neoclassical ballet Pulcinella (1920) to the choral-orchestral Symphony of Psalms (1930).

In such works as the Canticum Sacrum (1955) and the ballet Agon (1953–57), he made use of serial techniques; this was only after the death of Arnold Schoenberg in 1951, as during Schoenberg's lifetime Stravinsky was seen as the main opposition to this technique. Stravinsky was born near St Petersburg, where his father, Fyodor Stravinsky, was the leading bass at the Imperial Opera. His creative output can be divided into three distinct phases, beginning with Russian nationalism and continuing through neoclassicism to twelve-note technique. In 1903 he met Rimsky-Korsakov at Heidelberg and played him his early compositions, but did not become his pupil until 1907. By this time he had finished a piano sonata, begun a symphony, and married his second cousin, Nadezhda Sulima, in 1906. In 1908 he had the symphony performed and wrote the orchestral piece Fireworks for the marriage of Nadia Rimsky-Korsakov and Maximilian Steinberg, and a Funeral Chant on Rimsky-Korsakov's death.

The performance of the Fantastic Scherzo in 1909 attracted the attention of the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who commissioned Stravinsky to write The Firebird for the Ballets Russes. It was produced in Paris in 1910, and Stravinsky began to be known in Western Europe. Petruskha followed in 1911 and The Rite of Spring in 1913; both were produced in Paris, where the latter provoked much protest and fanatical support. In spite of the wild public protest at its premiere, The Rite of Spring was soon successfully performed all over Europe, Russia, and the USA, establishing Stravinsky, with Schoenberg, as the leading avant-garde composer of his time. In 1914 he settled on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, and in Paris the same year Diaghilev produced the fairy-tale opera-ballet The Nightingale. From 1914 Stravinsky became as well known in London as in Paris, and in 1925 made his first tour of the USA.

In the inter-war years many of his works were written in the spirit of neoclassicism, beginning with the ballet Pulcinella in 1920, based on pieces written by Giovanni Pergolesi (he actually wrote all over Pergolesi's original score), and continuing with the concerto for piano with wind instruments in 1924. Oedipus Rex, an opera-oratorio after Sophocles, was premiered in 1927, followed by the classically-inspired ballet Apollon Musagète in 1928, the ballet The Fairy's Kiss (after Tchaikovsky), Capriccio (1929) for piano and orchestra, and the Symphony of Psalms, premiered in 1930 under Ernest Ansermet. In 1937 Stravinsky's ballet Jeu de Cartes was produced by George Balanchine at the New York Metropolitan Opera. He settled in Hollywood in 1939, and the following year he conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in his symphony in C.

The powerful Symphony in Three Movements was premiered by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1946 and in 1948 Balanchine staged the ballet Orpheus. A meeting with W H Auden led to the peak of Stravinsky's neoclassical music, the opera The Rake's Progress which was premiered at Venice in 1951 and inspired by a William Hogarth painting of the same name. Stravinsky had meanwhile met the conductor Robert Craft and under his influence turned towards the serial music of the Second Viennese School. This marks the beginning of the composer's third great period. Interestingly, Stravinsky began fully to explore this kind of music only after its main composer, Arnold Schoenberg, had died. Although the two men lived only a short distance away from each other in Los Angeles, they never met, living in their own entirely separate musical and social circles. The ballet Agon (1953–57) and the religious vocal works Canticum Sacrum (1955) and Threni combine rigorous methods with Stravinsky's familiar creativity. He composed very little after this.

His Requiem Canticles of 1966 was performed at his funeral in Venice, a city which he regarded as his spiritual home. He published Chronicles of my Life (1936), and (with Robert Craft) Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (1959) and Memories and Commentaries (1960). WorksStage ballets, including The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), The Rite of Spring (1913), The Soldier's Tale (dance scene, 1918); Pulcinella (ballet with song, 1920), Les Noces/The Wedding (Russian choreographic scenes; composed 1914–17 and 1921–23, first performance in 1923), Apollon Musagète (1928), Orpheus (1948), Agon (1953–57); opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927); melodrama Perséphone (1934); opera The Rake's Progress (1951); musical play The Flood (1962).

ChoralSymphony of Psalms (1930), Mass with double wind quintet (1944–48), Canticum Sacrum (1955), Requiem Canticles (1966). OrchestralSymphonies of Wind Instruments (1920), Concerto for piano and wind (1924), Capriccio for piano and orchestra (1929), Violin concerto in D (1931), Concerto, Dumbarton Oaks (1938), Symphony in C (1940), Danses concertantes (1942), Symphony in Three movements (1945), Ebony concerto for clarinet and jazz band (1945), Concerto in D for strings (1946). Chamber and instrumental three Pieces for String Quartet (1914), Octet (1923), Duo Concertant for violin and piano (1932), Septet (1952).

quotations 1000+ images about IGOR STRAVINSKY on Pinterest | Irving penn, Ballet and Conductors Une page du manuscrit original de The Rite of Spring -showing quelques bars de La Sacrifiée danse - de la main de Stravinsky, avec des corrections, des annotations et des gribouillis. #igor stravinsky#rite of spring#le sacre du See More Russian Composers (1882-1971) Igor Feodorovich Stravinsky was Russian composer, later of French (1934) and American (1945) nationality. The son of a leading bass at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, he studied with Rimsky-Korsakov (1902-8), who was an influence on his early music, though so were Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Glazunov and (from 1907-8) Debussy and Dukas. This colourful mixture of sources lies behind The Firebird (1910), commissioned by Dyagilev for his Ballets Russes.

Stravinsky went with the company to Paris in 1910 and spent much of his time in France from then onwards, continuing his association with Dyagilev in Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). These scores show an extraordinary development. Both use folktunes, but not in any symphonic manner: Stravinsky's forms are additive rather than symphonic, created from placing blocks of material together without disguising the joins. The binding energy is much more rhythmic than harmonic, and the driving pulsations of The Rite marked a crucial change in the nature of Western music. Stravinsky, however, left it to others to use that change in the most obvious manner. He himself, after completing his Chinese opera The Nightingale, turned aside from large resources to concentrate on chamber forces and the piano. Partly this was a result of World War I, which disrupted the activities of the Ballets Russes and caused Stravinsky to seek refuge in Switzerland.

He was not to return to Russia until 1962, though his works of 1914-18 are almost exclusively concerned with Russian folk tales and songs: they include the choral ballet Les noces ('The Wedding'), the smaller sung and danced fable Renard, a short play doubly formalized with spoken narration and instrumental music (The Soldier's Tale) and several groups of songs. In The Wedding, where block form is geared to highly mechanical rhythm to give an objective ceremonial effect, it took him some while to find an appropriately objective instrumentation; he eventually set it with pianos and percussion. Meanwhile, for the revived Ballets Russes, he produced a startling transformation of 18th-century Italian music (ascribed to Pergolesi) in Pulcinella (1920), which opened the way to a long period of 'neo-classicism', or re-exploring past forms, styles and gestures with the irony of nondevelopmental material being placed in developmental moulds.

The Symphonies of Wind Instruments, an apotheosis of the wartime 'Russian' style, was thus followed by the short number-opera Mavra, the Octet for wind, and three works he wrote to help him earn his living as a pianist: the Piano Concerto, the Sonata and the Serenade in A. During this period of the early 1920s he avoided string instruments because of their expressive nuances, preferring the clear articulation of wind, percussion, piano and even pianola. But he returned to the full orchestra to achieve the starkly presented Handel-Verdi imagery of the opera-oratorio Oedipus rex, and then wrote for strings alone in Apollon musagete (1928), the last of his works to be presented by Dyagilev. All this while he was living in France, and Apollon, with its Lullian echoes, suggests an identification with French classicism which also marks the Duo concertant for violin and piano and the stage work on which he collaborated with Gide: Persï¿½phone, a classical rite of spring. However, his Russianness remained deep.

He orchestrated pieces by Tchaikovsky, now established as his chosen ancestor, to make the ballet Le baiser de la fï¿½e, and in 1926 he rejoined the Orthodox Church. The Symphony of Psalms was the first major work in which his ritual music engaged with the Christian tradition. The other important works of the 1930s, apart from Persephone, are all instrumental, and include the Violin Concerto, the Concerto for two pianos, the post-Brandenburg 'Dumbarton Oaks' Concerto and the Symphony in C, which disrupts diatonic normality on its home ground. It was during the composition of this work, in 1939, that Stravinsky moved to the USA, followed by Vera Sudeikina, whom he had loved since 1921 and who was to be his second wife (his first wife and his mother had both died earlier the same year). In 1940 they settled in Hollywood, which was henceforth their home.

Various film projects ensued, though all foundered, perhaps inevitably: the Hollywood cinema of the period demanded grand continuity; Stravinsky's patterned discontinuities were much better suited to dancing. He had a more suitable collaborator in Balanchine, with whom he had worked since Apollon, and for whom in America he composed Orpheus and Agon. Meanwhile music intended for films went into orchestral pieces, including the Symphony in Three Movements (1945). The later 1940s were devoted to The Rake's Progress, a parable using the conventions of Mozart's mature comedies and composed to a libretto by Auden and Kallman. Early in its composition, in 1948, Stravinsky met Robert Craft, who soon became a member of his household and whose enthusiasm for Schï¿½nberg and Webern (as well as Stravinsky) probably helped make possible the gradual achievement of a highly personal serial style after The Rake.

The process was completed in 1953 during the composition of the brilliant, tightly pattemed Agon, though most of the serial works are religious or commemorative, being sacred cantatas (Canticum sacrum, Threni, Requiem Canticles) or elegies (In memoriam Dylan Thomas, Elegy for J.F.K.). All these were written after Stravinsky's 70th birthday, and he continued to compose into his mid-80s, also conducting concerts and making many gramophone records of his music. During this period, too, he and Craft published several volumes of conversations. Stravinsky was of great importance for the generation of composers after the 1950s. Many Western European composers were influenced by his personal, expressionistic and Russian style. In Russia his idiom was followed by composers like Yevgeny Svetlanov , Sophia Gubaidulina, Sviatolav Ishkanov and even Rodion Shchedrin .

1000+ images about Stravinsky for Kids on Pinterest | Curriculum, Soldiers and Composers Pinterest • The world’s catalogue of ideas Stravinsky for Kids The music of Igor Stravinsky for kids with information on the composer and his music. 13 Pins1.72k Followers Igor Stravinsky, Composer | Atlanta Symphony Orchestra 1882 - 1971 Biography Igor Feodorovich Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov), a Baltic resort near St Petersburg, on 5 June (17 June, New Style) 1882, the third son of Feodor Stravinsky, one of the principal basses at the Maryinsky (later Kirov) Theatre in St Petersburg. Stravinsky’s musical education began with piano lessons at home when he was ten; he later studied law at St Petersburg University and music theory with Fyodor Akimenko and Vassily Kalafati. His most important teacher, though, was Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, with whom he studied informally from the age of twenty, taking regular lessons from 1905 until 1908.

Although Stravinsky’s first substantial composition was a Symphony in E flat, written in 1906 under the tutelage of Rimsky-Korsakov, it was The Firebird, a ballet commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev and premiered by his Ballets Russes in Paris in 1910, that brought Stravinsky into sudden international prominence. In the next year he consolidated his reputation with Petrushka, like The Firebird a transformation of something essentially Russian into a work of surprising modernity. Stravinsky’s next major score – a third ballet commission from Diaghilev – is one of the major landmarks in the history of music: the blend of melodic primitivism and rhythmic complexity in The Rite of Spring marked the coming of modernism in music and was met with a mixture of astonishment and hostility. Stravinsky, now a Swiss resident, became established, as the most radical composer of the age. A rapid succession of works – The Nightingale, an opera, in 1914, Renard in 1915, The Soldier’s Tale in 1918, the Symphonies of Wind Instruments two years after that – all reinforced his aesthetic dominance.

The explicitly Russian flavour of his music – played out in the Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920), the opera buffa Mavra (1922) and Les Noces (1923), for four solo voices, chorus and an orchestra consisting of four pianos and percussion – now gave way to a more refined neo-classicism, beginning with the ballet Pulcinella (1920), for which Stravinsky went back to the music of Pergolesi, reworking it into something completely personal. 1920 was also the year that Stravinsky settled in France, taking French citizenship in 1934. Stravinsky expected to be elected to a vacant seat in the Académie française following Dukas’ death in 1935, and felt rebuffed when Florent Schmitt was elected in his stead.

His ties to his adopted homeland were further loosened when, in a mere eight months, from November 1938, Stravinsky suffered the deaths of his daughter Lyudmilla, aged only 29, his mother and then his wife (and cousin) Catherine (née Nossenko); faced with an imminent war in Europe, Stravinsky and his second-wife-to-be Vera Sudeikin (née de Bosset) emigrated to the United States. After a year spent on the East Coast, including a stint as a lecturer at Harvard University, he and Vera soon settled in California, which they were to make their home for the rest of their lives. Pulcinella turned out to be only the first of many works in which, over the next two decades, Stravinsky subdued the music of the past to his own purposes, among them the ‘divertimento’ The Fairy’s Kiss, derived from Tchaikovsky, and the ballet Apollon Musagète, both premiered in 1928.

Two choral-orchestral works – the oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927) and the Symphony of Psalms (1930) – showed that he could also work on an epic scale; and it was not long before he tackled a purely orchestral Symphony in C (1938), which was followed within four years by the Symphony in Three Movements. With Perséphone (1934), Jeu de Cartes (1936) and Orpheus (1946), the series of ballets also continued, generally in collaboration with George Balanchine, a partnership as important to dance in the twentieth century as Tchaikovsky’s and Petipa’s had been in the nineteenth. Stravinsky’s neo-classical period culminated in 1951 in his three-act opera The Rake’s Progress, to a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. One of the most unexpected stylistic volte-faces in modern music came in 1957, with the appearance of the ballet Agon; Stravinsky himself conducted its premiere at a 75th-birthday concert.

Hitherto he had ignored Schoenbergian serialism, but in 1952 he began to study Webern’s music intensely and Agon was the first work in which he embraced serialism wholeheartedly, though the music that resulted was entirely his own – indeed, it has a formal elegance that he seemed to have been trying to capture in his neo-classical period. The chief works from Stravinsky’s late serial flowering are Threni, for six solo voices, chorus and orchestra (1958), The Flood, a ‘musical play for soloists, chorus and orchestra’ (1962), the ‘sacred ballad’ Abraham and Isaac (1963), Variations for Orchestra (1964) and Requiem Canticles (1966). Stravinsky was also active as a performer of his own music, initially as a pianist but increasingly as a conductor. The first among contemporary composers to do so, he left a near-complete legacy of recordings of his own music, released then on CBS and now to be found on Sony Classical. His conducting career continued until 1967, when advancing age and illness forced him to retire from the concert platform.

His tenuous grasp on life finally broke on 6 April 1971, in New York, and his body was flown to Venice for burial on the island of San Michele, near to the grave of Diaghilev. Igor Stravinsky is published by Boosey & Hawkes Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) Musical notes for school children Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) How to say the name: ‘Stravinsky’ is said like Stra-vin-ski.’Igor’ is said llike ‘Ee-gor ‘. Born: 17th June 1882 in Oranienbaum (near St Petersburg) in Russia. Stravinsky’s grave in Venice Died: 6th April 1971 in New York, New York, USA. Buried: The island of San Michele in Venice, Italy. Type of Music: Modern classical music. A famous piece: Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Sping)—a ballet .

( See below for some videos of this.) Some great pieces: L’Oiseau de feu (The Firebird)—a ballet . ( See below for a video of Stravinsky himself conducting this.) Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Sping) Petrushka—a ballet. Les Noces (The Wedding)—a ballet. Apollo—a ballet. Oedipus Rex (King Oedipus)—an opera (sort of!). A Rake’s Progress—an opera. Symphony of Psalms. He was one of the greatest composers of the last century. He wrote the greatest ballets of the last century. These ballets are performed regularly today. The three ballets L’Oiseau de feu (The Firebird), Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Sping) and Petrushka were first staged by Sergei Diaghilev. These performances have become legendary (the stuff of legends)! He was one of the main composers to create the modern period of classical music. His Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Sping) was one of the first pieces of modern classical music.

This ballet cause a riot when it was first heard because the music was so wild. The audience even started fighting and the police had to come and sort it out!! Le Sacre du Printemps was so new because it had rhythms that had never been heard before in classical music (watch the videos below to see what I mean!). He changed his style of composing many times. For example, Pulcinella and ‘A Rake’s Progress’ are very different from Le Sacre du Printemps. And his last works are very different again. In fact, they are like the music of Schoenberg . He left Russia in 1910, and hardly ever went back. He lived in three other countries after this—first Switzerland, then France, and then USA. He was a devout Russian Orthodox. He worked with some of the greatest artists and writers of the last century, such as Pablo Picasso (an artist) and W.H. Auden (a poet). Here is a video of the beginning of the music for Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Sping).

The beginning of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Sping) As I have said in the box above, this music caused a riot when it was first heard! Can you imagine that? See what you think by watching the end: The end of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Sping) And finally, here is a video of Stravinsky himself conducting his ballet L’Oiseau de feu (The Firebird). Stravinsky himself conducting his ballet L’Oiseau de feu (The Firebird) Choose another composer of classical music . Picture credits: Igor Stravinsky. This photograph is from the George Grantham Bain Collection. It is in the public domain. Click here for the source of this image, along with the relevant copyright information. Stravinsky’s grave in Venice. This photograph is in the public domain. Click here for the source of this image, along with the relevant copyright information. Video credits: STRAVINSKY : Rite Of Spring – V.Gergiev (1/3).

Rite Of Spring (extract) London Symphony Orchestra Leader Andrew Haveron Conductor Valery Gergiev Barbican Centre London 2007. STRAVINSKY : Rite Of Spring – V.Gergiev (3/3). Rite Of Spring (extract) London Symphony Orchestra Leader Andrew Haveron Conductor Valery Gergiev Barbican Centre London 2007. Stravinsky Conducts Firebird. One of those rare videos where the great Stravinsky conducts his own Firebird ..the Lullaby suite at the age of 82. { 1 comment… read it below or add one } 1 Mozart jr 8th February 2016 Wow! That caused a riot?! Leave a Comment Igor Stravinsky (Music) - TV Tropes Igor Stravinsky You need to login to do this. Get Known if you don't have an account Share YMMV Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (June 17, 1882 - April 6, 1971) was a Russian-born composer.

He is the only classical composer present on Time Magazine 's list of "100 People of the 20th Century". Regardless of what criticism people might have of this list, Igor Stravinsky is widely acknowledged as a massively influential composer and one of the most important and iconic figures of modern classical music. Igor Stravinsky's most famous works include three early ballets: The Firebird ", "Petrushka", and The Rite of Spring ". "The Firebird" is one of the most accessible and popular works that Igor Stravinsky wrote, and was his first major work, premiering in 1910. Many people will recognize certain parts of the piece due to its use in Fantasia 2000 and the opening for live concerts of Yes . It was frequently compared to the works of Claude Debussy by critics. It uses many more Romantic elements than Stravinsky's later work. "Petrushka" is a ballet about a puppet that come to life. It premiered in 1911, and is a more modernistic work, using more polytonality and polyrhythms. Although less accessible it nevertheless found critical success upon its debut, and is very popular today.

"The Rite of Spring" was a ballet portraying a savage tribal ritual in which a virgin is sacrificed to bring about spring; it premiered in 1913. It uses dissonance, primitive melodies, polyrhythm, and polytonality, to express this. It was met with extreme hostility on its opening night (the audience rioted, leaving few people in the theater and Stravinsky in tears.) The piece is now critically acclaimed as a masterpiece, and is one of the most famous works of classical music of the modern era, and of all time. Walt Disney even used it in the original Fantasia , which cemented its reputation and even overshadowed it . (Stravinsky is the only composer of a piece used in the Fantasia films that actually was alive to see it used on the movie in theaters. Unfortunately, he hated it .) This is by no means the entirety of Stravinsky's work, as he went through a multitude of styles after the three ballets for which he is most remembered. His change in style throughout his career has been compared to that of Pablo Picasso . Among other works were the ballet "Agon", the ballet "Pulcinella", and the opera "The Rake's Progress".

Rumoured that he had an affair with French couturier Coco Chanel , although this is likely untrue. This creator provides examples of the following tropes: Art-Style Dissonance : Despite his reputation for dissonance most of his work is actually quite melodic. Badass Boast : When Stravinsky played sections of "The Rite Of Spring" to ballet choreographer Sergei Diaghilev Diaghilev was shocked by the dissonance. So he asked Stravinsky: "How long does this go on?" To which the composer snapped back: "Until the very end!" Classical Music : Between 1920 and 1950 Stravinsky composed a lot of neoclassical works, where he reinvented 18th century style baroque music, sometimes to the point of parody. Deal with the Devil : Central plot in L'Histoire du Soldat ("The Soldiers' Tale") and The Rake's Progress. Decon-Recon Switch : While The Rite Of Spring blew up musical conventions, he later became a cofounder of Neoclassicism, which essentially was a Reconstruction of pre-Romantic Classical Music .

Stravinsky, Igor Stravinsky, Igor Born: Saturday, June 17, 1882 in Oranienbaum (near St. Petersburg), Russia Died: Tuesday, April 6, 1971 in New York, New York (USA) Nation of Origin: Russia Pulcinella Other Information: Igor Fydorovich Stravinsky was born on 17 June 1882 at Oranienbaum on the Gulf of Finland opposite Kronstadt and near St Petersburg, Russia. He was a son of Fyodor Ignatyevich Stravinsky (1843 - 1902) a principal bass at the Imerial Opera in St. Petersburg who made over 1200 appearances in 64 roles during his career. Igor Stravinsky took his first piano lessons when he was 9 years old. Very soon he spent his time at piano improvising and not practicing his piano exercises. He also spent a lot of time reading and memorizing opera scores that he was able to find in his father's huge library. Perhaps his first contact with live music was when his father took him to the opera.

Later in life, Stravinsky mentioned this first contact, but credited his sudden interest in music to a performance of Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony (&quotSymphonie Patéthique") which was performed in memory of Tchaikovsky who had died recently in 1893. Since his parents did not want Igor to study music and wanted him to enter a profession, Stravinsky studied law at the University of St Petersburg. To satisfy his need for music, he still had piano lessons and went to concerts. Meeting Rimsky-Korsakov's son gave him an opportunity to be a frequent guest at the world-famous composer's house. Rimsky-Korsakov saw a great talent of his guest, and in 1903 he offered to give Stravinsky private lessons - an offer Stravinsky did not decline. Rimsky-Korsakov organized concerts in St Petersburg at which his students' works were performed. In 1909, at one of these concerts, Stravinsky's first mature compositions &quotScherzo fantastique" (written 1907-08) and &quotFireworks" (written 1908) had their premieres.

It was a good fortune for Stravinsky that Serge Diaghilev attended this very performance. Diaghilev earlier that year formed his famous dance troupe &quotBallet Russe" gathering great names of that period like russian dancer Vaclav Nijinski and choreographer Mikhail Fokine. Diaghilev asked Stravinsky to write for his troupe a ballet on a legend of &quotThe Firebird" because Anatoly Lyadov, the composer from whom Diaghilev first commissioned the score, failed to meet the deadline. &quotThe Firebird", ballet in 1 act and 3 scenes, was written during 1909 and 1910 and first performed in 1910 in Paris with choreography by Fokine. It was a tremendous success and made Stravinsky world-famous overnight. Diaghilev was delighted and for the next season Stravinsky wrote &quotPetrushka" (1910-11) another ballet for Diaghilev's troupe. &quotPetrushka" was first performed before an audience in Paris on June 13, 1911, with Nijinsky in the title role.

While working on the score for &quotThe Firebird", Stravinsky &quothad a fleeting vision..." as he later recounted. It was a vision of a solemn pagan rite of sacrifice of a young girl to please the god of spring. In 1911, after the successful performance of &quotPetrushka" Stravinsky got an opportunity to make his vision come true. From 1911 till the beginning of 1913 he was working on a score for &quotThe Rite of Spring" (&quotLe Sacre du Printemps") subtitled &quotScenes of Pagan Russia" - the new ballet for &quotBallet Russe" troupe. Date: May 29, 1913, place: Thétre des Champs-Elysées, Paris; event: the most notorious world premiere in the history of music - the world premiere of &quotThe Rite of Spring&quot. Things went wrong at the very beginning - during the playing of the opening bars famous french composer Camille Saint-Saens walked out complaining loudly for misuse of the bassoon in a very high register. Soon other loud complaints were heard which gradually turned into a riot.

The audience was so loud that the dancers were unable to hear the music played by the orchestra beneath them. Debussy and Ravel tried in vain to calm the audience. By this event modernism came into world of music and Stravinsky became the prince of the avant-garde. But the music was not the only problem. Many thought that Nijinsky's choreography reflected Stravinsky's denial of all &quotrules" in music. Also, the tale, music and choreography called for controversial clan scenes and cosmography. When World War I began, Stravinsky moved with his family to Switzerland where he continued to compose. Wartime conditions forced Stravinsky to write pieces for smaller groups. Two of his most popular pieces dating from this &quotSwitzerland period" are &quotLes Noces" (&quotThe Wedding", 1914-17) and &quotL'histoire du soldat" (&quotThe Soldier's Tale", 1918). &quotLes Noces", subtitled &quotChoreographic Scenes with song and music", describes a typical Russian ritualistic wedding. The text, arranged in 4 scenes, was adapted by the composer from Russian folk songs.

After trying with several accompaniments for predominantly vocal parts (4 soloists and mixed choir), Stravinsky decided to employ 4 pianos and 17 percussion instruments. &quotL'histoire du soldat", theater piece in two parts, is mixture of music for 12 instruments, 2 spoken roles and 2 danced parts (no singers). Stravinsky wrote it in collaboration with C.F. Ramuz in 1918 on a Russian folk tale about a Soldier who makes a pact with the Devil. Despite its Russian background, the music for &quotL'histoire" is not nationalistic but shows contemporary and cosmopolitan influences like American jazz and ragtime. Stravinsky himself said this piece was his &quotfinal break with the Russian orchestral school." Being unable to return to Russia due to new Communist regime, Stravinsky settled in Paris after the war and became a French citizen in 1934. There he continued his collaboration with Diaghilev and choreographer Massine writing for them &quotPulcinella" (1920), ballet in one scene with song for soprano, tenor and bass soloists and small ensemble.

The whole music is &quotre-composition" of different pieces attributed to the Italian baroque master Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. This piece inaugurates Stravinsky's neo-classical period by which Stravinsky (in a way) rediscovered the past in a time when avant-garde music was flourishing all over the world. Works written in France in the neo-classical manner include the opera-oratorio in 2 acts &quotOedipus Rex" (1927), based on Sophocle's most famous tragedy (text arranged by Jean Cocteau and translated in Latin) and the ballet &quotApollon Musagete" (&quotApollo the Leader of the Muses, 1927) written for the festival of contemporary music in Washington DC (choreography by Balanchine). In late 1930s Stravinsky was tired of old Europe: another war was imminent, his wife and one daughter had died of tuberculosis, and French critics who violently attacked him for &quotLe Sacre du printemps" (calling it &quotLe Massacre du printemps") were now complaining about his new neo-classical style.

In 1939 he moved to the United States of America with his mistress Vera de Bossett and settled in Hollywood in 1940. This was an obvious move since he had some wealthy admirers in the USA. Serge Koussevitsky, a prominent conductor, was already championing his works and commissioned the &quotSymphony of Psalms" (1930) for the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. After settling in the USA, Stravinsky composed some of his best neo-classical works including &quotSymphony in Three Movements" (1942-45) which Stravinsky described as his &quotWar Symphony" and his only full-length opera &quotThe Rake's Progress" (1947-51), inspired by Hogarth's series of eight paintings presenting Tom Rakewell's descent into madness (libretto by W. H. Auden and C. Kallman). Hollywood was at that time a mecca for exiled European artists like Schoenberg and other avant-garde composers but it seems that Stravinsky avoided them.

It was the young American conductor Robert Craft who discreetly introduced Stravinsky to some key avant-garde music. Stravinsky was most deeply impressed by the music of Anton Webern. Gradually Stravinsky began to use the twelve-tone system resulting in the astonishing work &quotAgon" (1957) (agon in Greek means &quotcontest") in which Stravinsky combined tradition and modernity. Towards the end of his life Igor Stravinsky achieved a great celebrity being feted by Pope John Paul XXIII, the Kennedys and even Nikita Khrushchev during his triumphant visit to his homeland in 1962. Igor Fydorovich Stravinsky died in New York on April 6, 1971. As he had requested, he was buried on Venice's cemetery island San Michel near his old companion and friend Serge Diaghilev. Stravinsky's legacy is vast. He wrote operas, ballets, orchestral music (symphonies and pieces for solo instrument and orchestra) works for piano, voices and instrument, unaccompanied voices, and chamber music.

But it is his diverse style, ranging from Russian-influenced early pieces through music for &quotLe sacre du printemps" to neo-classicism and modernism, that makes him an outstanding figure in 20th-century music. It would not be practical to list outstanding recordings of Stravinsky's works because there are so many of them. It is simpler to point to conductors who have championed Stravinsky's works to critical acclaim. They include Pierre Boulez, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Kent Nagano, Robert Craft, and Michael Tilson-Thomas. It should be noted that Stravinsky started his conducting career in his late years. But since Stravinsky was not an outstanding conductor those recordings are mainly of historical interest. Alen Hadzovic Igor Stravinsky | Russian composer | Britannica.com Russian composer Alternative Title: Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky Igor Stravinsky Listen: “Three Pieces for Clarinet” An excerpt from Igor Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for Clarinet.

Igor Stravinsky, in full Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (born June 5 [June 17, New Style], 1882, Oranienbaum [now Lomonosov], near St. Petersburg , Russia —died April 6, 1971, New York , N.Y., U.S.), Russian-born composer whose work had a revolutionary impact on musical thought and sensibility just before and after World War I , and whose compositions remained a touchstone of modernism for much of his long working life. ( Click here for an audio excerpt from Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for Clarinet.) Life and career Stravinsky’s father was one of the leading Russian operatic basses of his day, and the mixture of the musical, theatrical, and literary spheres in the Stravinsky family household exerted a lasting influence on the composer. Nevertheless his own musical aptitude emerged quite slowly. As a boy he was given lessons in piano and music theory. But then he studied law and philosophy at St. Petersburg University (graduating in 1905), and only gradually did he become aware of his vocation for musical composition .

In 1902 he showed some of his early pieces to the composer Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (whose son Vladimir was a fellow law student), and Rimsky-Korsakov was sufficiently impressed to agree to take Stravinsky as a private pupil, while at the same time advising him not to enter the conservatory for conventional academic training. Rimsky-Korsakov tutored Stravinsky mainly in orchestration and acted as the budding composer’s mentor, discussing each new work and offering suggestions. He also used his influence to get his pupil’s music performed. Several of Stravinsky’s student works were performed in the weekly gatherings of Rimsky-Korsakov’s class, and two of his works for orchestra—the Symphony in E-flat Major and The Faun and the Shepherdess, a song cycle with words by Aleksandr Pushkin —were played by the Court Orchestra in 1908, the year Rimsky-Korsakov died. In February 1909 a short but brilliant orchestral piece, the Scherzo fantastique was performed in St.

Petersburg at a concert attended by the impresario Serge Diaghilev , who was so impressed by Stravinsky’s promise as a composer that he quickly commissioned some orchestral arrangements for the summer season of his Ballets Russes in Paris. For the 1910 ballet season Diaghilev approached Stravinsky again, this time commissioning the musical score for a new full-length ballet on the subject of the Firebird. Britannica Stories Ringling Bros. Folds Its Tent The premiere of The Firebird at the Paris Opéra on June 25, 1910, was a dazzling success that made Stravinsky known overnight as one of the most gifted of the younger generation of composers. This work showed how fully he had assimilated the flamboyant Romanticism and orchestral palette of his master. The Firebird was the first of a series of spectacular collaborations between Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s company. The following year saw the Ballets Russes’s premiere on June 13, 1911, of the ballet Petrushka , with Vaslav Nijinsky dancing the title role to Stravinsky’s musical score.

Meanwhile, Stravinsky had conceived the idea of writing a kind of symphonic pagan ritual to be called Great Sacrifice. The result was The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps), the composition of which was spread over two years (1911–13). The first performance of The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées on May 29, 1913, provoked one of the more famous first-night riots in the history of musical theatre. Stirred by Nijinsky’s unusual and suggestive choreography and Stravinsky’s creative and daring music, the audience cheered, protested, and argued among themselves during the performance, creating such a clamour that the dancers could not hear the orchestra . This highly original composition, with its shifting and audacious rhythms and its unresolved dissonances , was an early modernist landmark. From this point on, Stravinsky was known as “the composer of The Rite of Spring” and the destructive modernist par excellence. But he himself was already moving away from such post-Romantic extravagances, and world events of the next few years only hastened that process. Ballet: Fact or Fiction?

Stravinsky’s successes in Paris with the Ballets Russes effectively uprooted him from St. Petersburg. He had married his cousin Catherine Nossenko in 1906, and, after the premiere of The Firebird in 1910, he brought her and their two children to France. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 seriously disrupted the Ballets Russes’s activities in western Europe, however, and Stravinsky found he could no longer rely on that company as a regular outlet for his new compositions. The war also effectively marooned him in Switzerland, where he and his family had regularly spent their winters, and it was there that they spent most of the war. The Russian Revolution of October 1917 finally extinguished any hope Stravinsky may have had of returning to his native land. Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies By 1914 Stravinsky was exploring a more restrained and austere , though no less vibrantly rhythmic kind of musical composition.

His musical production in the following years is dominated by sets of short instrumental and vocal pieces that are based variously on Russian folk texts and idioms and on ragtime and other style models from Western popular or dance music. He expanded some of these experiments into large-scale theatre pieces. The Wedding, a ballet cantata begun by Stravinsky in 1914 but completed only in 1923 after years of uncertainty over its instrumentation , is based on the texts of Russian village wedding songs. The “farmyard burlesque” Renard (1916) is similarly based on Russian folk idioms, while The Soldier’s Tale (1918), a mixed-media piece using speech, mime, and dance accompanied by a seven-piece band, eclectically incorporates ragtime, tango, and other modern musical idioms in a series of highly infectious instrumental movements. After World War I the Russian style in Stravinsky’s music began to fade, but not before it had produced another masterpiece in the Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920).

The compositions of Stravinsky’s first maturity—from The Rite of Spring in 1913 to the Symphonies of Wind Instruments in 1920—make use of a modal idiom based on Russian sources and are characterized by a highly sophisticated feeling for irregular metres and syncopation and by brilliant orchestral mastery. But his voluntary exile from Russia prompted him to reconsider his aesthetic stance, and the result was an important change in his music—he abandoned the Russian features of his early style and instead adopted a Neoclassical idiom. Stravinsky’s Neoclassical works of the next 30 years usually take some point of reference in past European music—a particular composer’s work or the Baroque or some other historical style—as a starting point for a highly personal and unorthodox treatment that nevertheless seems to depend for its full effect on the listener’s experience of the historical model from which Stravinsky borrowed. Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest The Stravinskys left Switzerland in 1920 and lived in France until 1939, and Stravinsky spent much of this time in Paris.

(He took French citizenship in 1934.) Having lost his property in Russia during the revolution, Stravinsky was compelled to earn his living as a performer, and many of the works he composed during the 1920s and ’30s were written for his own use as a concert pianist and conductor. His instrumental works of the early 1920s include the Octet for Wind Instruments (1923), Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (1924), Piano Sonata (1924), and the Serenade in A for piano (1925). These pieces combine a Neoclassical approach to style with what seems a self-conscious severity of line and texture. Though the dry urbanity of this approach is softened in such later instrumental pieces as the Violin Concerto in D Major (1931), Concerto for Two Solo Pianos (1932–35), and the Concerto in E-flat (or Dumbarton Oaks concerto) for 16 wind instruments (1938), a certain cool detachment persists.

In 1926 Stravinsky experienced a religious conversion that had a notable effect on his stage and vocal music. A religious strain can be detected in such major works as the operatic oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927), which uses a libretto in Latin, and the cantata Symphony of Psalms (1930), an overtly sacred work that is based on biblical texts. Religious feeling is also evident in the ballets Apollon musagète (1928) and in Persephone (1934). The Russian element in Stravinsky’s music occasionally reemerged during this period: the ballet The Fairy’s Kiss (1928) is based on music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky , and the Symphony of Psalms has some of the antique austerity of Russian Orthodox chant , despite its Latin text. In the years following World War I, Stravinsky’s ties with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes had been renewed, but on a much looser basis, and the only new ballet Diaghilev commissioned from Stravinsky was Pulcinella (1920).

Apollon musagète, Stravinsky’s last ballet to be mounted by Diaghilev, premiered in 1928, a year before Diaghilev’s own death and the dissolution of his ballet company. Trending Topics Eyjafjallajökull volcano In 1936 Stravinsky wrote his autobiography. Like his six later collaborations with Robert Craft, a young American conductor and scholar who worked with him after 1948, this work is factually unreliable. In 1938 Stravinsky’s oldest daughter died of tuberculosis , and the deaths of his wife and mother followed in 1939, just months before World War II broke out. Early in 1940 he married Vera de Bosset, whom he had known for many years. In autumn 1939 Stravinsky had visited the United States to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University (later published as the The Poetics of Music, 1942), and in 1940 he and his new wife settled permanently in Hollywood, California. They became U.S. citizens in 1945.

During the years of World War II, Stravinsky composed two important symphonic works, the Symphony in C (1938–40) and the Symphony in Three Movements (1942–45). The Symphony in C represents a summation of Neoclassical principles in symphonic form , while the Symphony in Three Movements successfully combines the essential features of the concerto with the symphony . From 1948 to 1951 Stravinsky worked on his only full-length opera , The Rake’s Progress , a Neoclassical work (with a libretto by W.H. Auden and the American writer Chester Kallman) based on a series of moralistic engravings by the 18th-century English artist William Hogarth . The Rake’s Progress is a mock-serious pastiche of late 18th-century grand opera but is nevertheless typically Stravinskyan in its brilliance, wit, and refinement. The success of these late works masked a creative crisis in Stravinsky’s music, and his resolution of this crisis was to produce a remarkable body of late compositions.

After World War II a new musical avant-garde had emerged in Europe that rejected Neoclassicism and instead claimed allegiance to the serial , or 12-tone , compositional techniques of the Viennese composers Arnold Schoenberg , Alban Berg , and especially Anton von Webern . (Serial music is based on the repetition of a series of tones in an arbitrary but fixed pattern without regard for traditional tonality.) According to Craft, who entered Stravinsky’s household in 1948 and remained his intimate associate until the composer’s death, the realization that he was regarded as a spent force threw Stravinsky into a major creative depression, from which he emerged, with Craft’s help, into a phase of serial composition in his own intensely personal manner. A series of cautiously experimental works (the Cantata, the Septet, In Memoriam Dylan Thomas) was followed by a pair of hybrid masterpieces, the ballet Agon (completed 1957) and the choral work Canticum Sacrum (1955), that are only intermittently serial.

These in turn led to the choral work Threni (1958), a setting of the biblical Lamentations of Jeremiah in which a strict 12-tone method of composition is applied to chantlike material whose underlying character recalls that of such earlier choral works as The Wedding and the Symphony of Psalms. In his Movements for piano and orchestra (1959) and his orchestral Variations (1964), Stravinsky refined his manner still further, pursuing a variety of arcane serial techniques to support a music of increasing density and economy and possessing a brittle, diamantine brilliance. Stravinsky’s serial works are generally much briefer than his tonal works but have a denser musical content. Though always in mediocre health (he suffered a stroke in 1956), Stravinsky continued full-scale creative work until 1966. His last major work, Requiem Canticles (1966), is a profoundly moving adaptation of modern serial techniques to a personal imaginative vision that was deeply rooted in his Russian past. This piece is an amazing tribute to the creative vitality of a composer then in his middle 80s.

Assessment Like that of so many masters, Stravinsky’s fame rests on only a few works and one or two of his more important achievements. In The Rite of Spring he presented a new concept of music involving constantly changing rhythms and metric imbalances, a brilliantly original orchestration, and drastically dissonant harmonies that have resonated throughout the 20th century. Later Stravinsky was regarded as the typical rootless exile, a creative chameleon who could dart from style to style but who never recaptured the creative depth of his first masterpieces. Yet the more spectacular modernisms of The Rite of Spring belong to the evolution of Russian nationalist music from Modest Mussorgsky to Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, while that work’s feeling of “primitive dynamism” is a period feature that is found in much music of the early 20th century. Nor were the discordant harmonies of The Rite of Spring entirely new in 1913, though Stravinsky was the first to pursue Claude Debussy ’s purely sensual approach to chords into a harmony that was not itself obviously beautiful. Igor Stravinsky, 1968. Horst Tappe/EB Inc.

The percussive violence and barbaric tone colours of The Rite of Spring did, however, conceal a new kind of rhythmic sensibility and an empirical attitude to sonority that can be traced through all of Stravinsky’s later music, whatever its apparent stylistic allegiance. Stravinsky’s approach was empirical in that he was not prepared to accept established musical practice about development but instead preferred to subject his musical material to a personal system of tests. Working always at the piano, he experimented endlessly with different chord combinations and spacings, explored asymmetrical metrical patterns, and used devices of prolongation and elision to break down the tradition of symmetrical phrasing. Given such sonorities as basic sound objects, rhythm is then regarded as a cumulative process, an adding together of such objects into varied groups, as opposed to the varied subdivision of regular groups that forms the basic method of classical music. Not surprisingly, this procedure tended to work against the past musical styles that Stravinsky used as models in his Neoclassical works, which probably accounts for their intriguing rhythmic obliquity, just as his experimental attitude to chords produced curious distortions of classical harmony.

Stravinsky worked in the same way, in fact, throughout his life, and the same basic principles of construction and dynamics inform Threni and the Requiem Canticles as Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. He had immense influence on the way later composers have felt pulse, rhythm, and form. Stravinsky rejected the Germanic idea that thematic development is the only basis of serious writing. From early on, he preferred a sculptural approach in which the sound object is all-important and large musical structures are achieved cumulatively, with much repetition allied to subtle variations in interior detailing. In his longer works, especially the sacred and theatrical ones, this tends toward an effect of ritual. The power of Oedipus Rex and the Symphony of Psalms, as of The Rite of Spring, is the power of a solemn reenactment, and it was in his sense of the motion and specific gravity of such solemnities that Stravinsky was at his most forceful and inspired.

STRAVINSKY: Firebird (The) / Petrushka The Firebird • Petrushka The Firebird (1910) For the first performance of Firebird, June 25th, 1910, the Ballets Russes programme of the Théâtre National de l’Opéra, Paris, published the following synopsis: The Firebird, one of the most popular Russian folktales, begins when Ivan Tsarevich, the crown prince, sees a marvellous bird of flaming gold. He pursues but fails to catch it, and only succeeds in snatching one of its glittering feathers. The chase has taken him into the domain of Kastchei the Immortal, demi-god of evil, who attempts to capture him and, as he has already done with many valiant knights and princes, turns him to stone. Kastchei’s daughters and thirteen princesses intercede for Ivan Tsarevich and try to save him. Finally the Firebird appears, breaks Kastchei’s spell, and rescues everyone. Ivan Tsarevich and the knights, delivered from their fate, seize the golden apples from Kastchei’s garden.

This neglects to say that the ballet concludes with the coronation and wedding of Ivan Tsarevich, which was Stravinsky’s idea, and it does not explain that the Firebird’s supernatural powers are stronger than the demonic powers of Kastchei. Michel Fokine, who choreographed the ballet, gave a greatly amplified summary of the plot, from which we learn that Ivan first sees the Firebird at moonlight, is blinded by her lucency, prepares to shoot her (!), and on second impulse to take her alive. She flies to the tree with the golden apples in Kastchei’s garden, where Ivan captures her. She pleads with him, and he releases her, whereupon she gives him one of her fiery feathers, telling him that it will prove useful to him. He places the talisman in his tunic and starts to leave. The door of Kastchei’s castle opens and twelve beautiful princesses, followed by the Princess of Unearthly Beauty, steal out and into the garden where they play with the golden apples. Unearthly Beauty’s apple rolls into a bush, where Ivan is hiding. He retrieves it, bows to her, and returns the apple.

The frightened princesses, though attracted by his beauty, modesty, and gallant manners, shyly withdraw. Unearthly Beauty falls in love with him and he with her. The approaching dawn warns the princesses to return to Kastchei’s palace. Ivan follows but Unearthly Beauty stops him, saying that it would mean his death. Outside the wall, he realises that he cannot live without her and returns to search for her. Hacking at the gate with his sword, he sets off the magic carillon, Kastchei’s alarm, whereupon fiendish bolibotchki and kikimoras stream out of the castle and capture him. Kastchei appears and questions his prisoner, who respectfully doffs his hat, then, on beholding the sorcerer’s hideous visage, spits at him. Ivan is placed against the wall, constructed of petrified knights, and Kastchei begins the incantation that will turn him to stone as well. Suddenly Ivan remembers the Firebird’s feather. He waves it and she appears, casting a spell over Kastchei and his demons and forcing them to dance until they fall exhausted to the ground.

Meanwhile, Ivan tries to rescue Unearthly Beauty, but the Firebird leads him to a chest concealed in a tree stump. This contains an egg that represents Kastchei’s soul and the secret of his immortality. When Ivan squeezes the egg, Kastchei squirms. When Ivan tosses it from hand to hand, Kastchei flies from side to side of the stage. When Ivan smashes it on the ground, Kastchei falls dead. His kingdom of evil disappears and is replaced by a resplendent city. Ivan and Unearthly Beauty are married and crowned Tsar and Tsarina. The ballet world is indebted to Sergey Dyagilev above all for discovering Stravinsky’s genius and, on the strength of the young composer’s three-minute Fireworks (1908), entrusting him with the commission for this first modern ballet. Stravinsky began the composition in December 1909, interrupting work on his opera The Nightingale. The sketch-score was finished in March, the reduction for piano two-hands on 3rd April, the full score on 18th May.

To create advance publicity for the Paris première, Dyagilev invited the French critic R. Brussel to an audition of the score in St Petersburg, played by Stravinsky at the piano. Brussel wrote that: We all sat in the little ground-floor room on Zamiatin Perenlok [Dyagilev’s St Petersburg apartment] … The composer, young [27], slim, and uncommunicative, with vague, meditative eyes, and lips set firm in an energetic-looking face, was at the piano. But the moment he began to play, the modest, dimly lighted room glowed with a dazzling radiance. By the end of the first scene, I was conquered: by the last I was lost in admiration. The manuscript on the music-rest, scored over with fine pencillings, revealed a masterpiece. Tamara Karsavina, who danced the title rôle at the première and for many years subsequently, recalled that: Stravinsky often came early to the theatre before a rehearsal began in order to play for me, over and over again, some specially difficult passage. I felt grateful, not only for the help he gave me, but for the manner in which he gave it.

For there was no impatience in him with my slow understanding; no condescension of a master of his craft towards the slender equipment of my musical education. It was interesting to watch him at the piano. His body seemed to vibrate with his own rhythm; punctuating staccatos with his head, he made the pattern of his music forcibly clear to me, more so than the counting of bars would have done. Stravinsky arrived in Paris for rehearsals on 7th June. During them, he revised and corrected extensively, leaving only a few pages without his red ink, or pencil, changes. During one of the rehearsals, Dyagilev was heard to say: “Mark the young composer well; he is a man on the eve of celebrity.” The prediction proved true. The première, at the Paris Opéra, was an enormous success. Extra performances had to be scheduled and the season extended into the summer. Stravinsky became an international figure overnight. Claude Debussy praised the music and invited him to lunch with Erik Satie, who photographed the two of them together.

But before many years Stravinsky was suffering from the universal popularity of the piece, and its use all his life as a stick with which to beat his newer, ground-breaking later music. One of the many differences between the present recording and its predecessors is the restoration of two long, valveless trumpets on stage, each playing a single note. The clarion sonority of these instruments standing out above the entire orchestra, a thrilling effect in all likelihood heard for the first time since 1910 in this recording. Petrushka (1911; revised 1947) A cliché of Stravinsky criticism is that Firebird, Stravinsky’s most popular work, is also his least characteristic. Already in Petrushka (1911) he turned against the heart-on-sleeve expressiveness and literary effusiveness of the earlier ballet (“con tenerezza,” “lamentoso,” “timidamente,” “dolente,” “con maligna giola”). But musical imagery is similarly tied to the storyline in Petrushka, and no less closely.

The principal difference between the two pieces in theatrical terms is that Firebird remains a naive, sweet, childlike fairy tale, while Petrushka is a drama of great power and originality. The Scenario First Tableau. The Admiralty Square, St Petersburg, in the 1830s, a sunny winter day during Carnival Week. The scene shows a segment of the Shrove-tide Fair. Crowds of people are strolling about the stage— common people, gentlefolk, a group of drunkards armin- arm, children clustering around the peepshow, women around the stalls. A street musician appears with a hurdy-gurdy. He is accompanied by a dancer. Just as she starts to dance, a man with a music-box and another dancer turn up on the opposite side of the stage. After performing simultaneously for a short while, the rivals give up the struggle and retire. Suddenly a Mountebank comes out through the curtains of a marionette theatre. The curtains are drawn back to reveal three puppets on their stands—Petrushka, the Ballerina, and the Blackamoor.

The Mountebank charms them into life with his flute, and they begin to dance—at first jigging on their hooks in the little theatre, but then, to general astonishment, stepping down from the theatre and dancing among the public in the open square. Second Tableau. Petrushka’s Cell. The black walls are covered with stars and a crescent moon. Devils painted on a gold ground decorate the panels of the folding doors that lead into the Ballerina’s Cell. On one of the walls is a portrait of the Mountebank scowling. While the Mountebank’s magic has endowed all three puppets with human feelings and emotions, it is Petrushka who feels and suffers most. Bitterly conscious of his grotesque appearance, he feels himself to be an outsider, and resents his complete dependence on his cruel master. He consoles himself by falling in love with the Ballerina, but when she visits him in his cell, his uncouth antics frighten her and she flees. In his despair, he curses the Mountebank and hurls himself at his portrait, but succeeds only in tearing a hole through the cardboard wall of his cell. Third Tableau. The Blackamoor’s Cell.

The wallpaper is patterned with green palm trees and colourful fruits on a red ground. On the right, a door leads into the Ballerina’s cell. The Blackamoor, in a magnificent costume, is reclining on a divan and playing with a coconut, shaking it, then superstitiously kneeling before it. Though he is brutal and stupid, the Ballerina finds him attractive and quickly captivates him with her wiles. Their love scene is interrupted by the sudden arrival of the furiously jealous Petrushka. The Blackamoor kicks him out. Fourth Tableau. The Fair, as in the First Tableau. The nighttime festivities of the Carnival are now at a peak. A group of wet-nurses dance together. A peasant playing a pipe crosses the stage leading a performing bear. A bibulous merchant, accompanied by two gypsies, scatters handfuls of banknotes among the crowd. A group of coachmen strike up a dance and are joined by the nurses. Finally, a number of masqueraders—devil, goat, and pig—rush onto the scene while Bengal flares are let off in the wings.

At this moment there is a commotion in the Mountebank’s theatre, the rivalry between the puppets having taken a fatal turn. Petrushka rushes out from behind the curtain, pursued by the Blackamoor, whom the Ballerina tries to restrain. The Blackamoor strikes down Petrushka with his scimitar. Snow begins to fall, and Petrushka dies, surrounded by the astonished crowed. The Mountebank appears and reassures the bystanders that Petrushka is only a puppet with a wooden head and body stuffed with sawdust. The crowd disperses as the night grows darker, and the Mountebank is left behind. But as he starts to drag the puppet off the stage, he is startled to see Petrushka’s ghost appear on the roof of the little theatre, jeering and mocking at everyone whom the Mountebank has fooled. The growth of Stravinsky’s musical imagination and technical mastery during the months following The Firebird is one of the wonders of twentieth-century music. Firebird revealed an original musical genius in the process of discovering itself, but the score is overtly influenced by the composer’s teacher, Rimsky- Korsakov.

In contrast, Petrushka is entirely new, harmonically, rhythmically, and instrumentally innovative on every page. Common to both ballets is the reliance on folk-music melody. The long-line tunes in the Wet Nurses and the Dance of the Coachmen come from even more popular sources than the Ronde and the Berceuse in Firebird. But considered as a theatre piece, Firebird is devoid of real characters and psychological dimensions, and its plot is the flimsiest of fairy-tales. Moreover, the timescales of the two ballets are wholly dissimilar. The atmospheric Introduction to Firebird seems protracted in comparison to the in medias res beginning of Petrushka, and the dances in the earlier ballet are detachable set-pieces, or at any rate more so than in Petrushka, with the exception of the Russian Dance — which explains why Stravinsky was able to extract three suites from Firebird, but none from Petrushka. The drama in Petrushka takes place in Tableaux Two and Three. The outer world, that of the stage spectators and, at the end, of the theatre audience, is conjured in the First and Fourth Tableaux.

The interaction of the two at the dénouement reveals that the eternal triangle is the essential geometry of the puppet world as it often is of our own. While the Ballerina and the Moor are mechanical figments, however, Petrushka is more than that, though exactly what remains unresolved in the ironic ending. Compared to the lush orchestra of Firebird, the sonorities of Petrushka are brittle (the Russian Dance) and evanescent (the Mountebank’s music and the ending). Moreover, Petrushka annexes new harmonic territory. The famous “Petrushka chord,” which combines the triads of C major and, remote from it, F sharp major, introduces bitonality, and though Stravinsky was not deeply interested in exploring its possibilities in his later music, he did make use of it on a small scale in, for example, Circus Polka and Danses concertantes. At the end of the Third Tableau, when the Moor evicts Petrushka, the music is in two keys, as it is again at the end of the ballet when the Moor pursues, and this time kills him.

The idea of an inner and an outer, binary world, of two existential prisons, is complemented in other aspects of the work. In the First and Third Tableaux, two melodies are juggled in two different meters simultaneously, first with the competing hurdy-gurdy and music-box, and second, in the Third Tableau, when the Ballerina’s Valse and its bass accompaniment are in two different keys. Robert Craft

Question: Which Russian composer 1882-1971, wrote the ballets 'Firebird' and 'Petrushka'?
Answer: (Igor) Stravinsky