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. Igor Stravinsky - the Russian/American composer in a nutshell Igor STRAVINSKY 17 June 1882 - 6 April 1971 (Age 88) Stravinsky was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor. He became an American citizen in 1946. He was one of the most influential composers of the 20th century.

Family Born: 17 June 1882, Oranienbaum, nr St Petersburg, Russia Father: Fedor Stravinsky, a leading Russian opera singer Mother: Anna (Kholodovsky) Stravinsky Siblings: one of four children 1st Wife: cousin Katerina Nossenko in 1906. died 1939 TB 2nd wife: Vera de Bossett, 1940. Children: Theodore, Ludmila, Svyatoslav, Sulema, Milena, Nicholas, and Katherine Died: 6 April 1971, New York Grave: cemetary island of San Michele, Venice. His grave is next to that of Diaghilev.

see findagrave Works * Le baiser de la fée * Jeu de Cartes * The Soldier's Tale, for chamber ensemble, dancers, speaker Orchestral * Symphony in E-flat Major, Opus 1, * Symphony of Psalms * Les Noces (The Wedding), for voices, percussion and 4 pianos * Threni, for soloists, chorus and orchestra * Requiem Canticles, for voices and orchestra * Melodrama, Perséphone * Stravinsky, Igor, Stravinsky: An Autobiography, Simon & Schuster * Stravinsky, Igor, Poetics of Muse, Harvard University Press Stravinsky conducts Firebird Symphonies Of Wind Instruments A brief biography - Age 9: began piano lessons. He also showed a keen interest in opera - he often attended performances at the Kiev Opera where his father was a singer. - Age 18: Began studying law and philosophy at St Petersburg University. A fellow student of his was the son of Rimsky-Korsakov, Vladimir. - Age 20 - 26: received private tuition from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, his friend's father.

- Age 24 : married his first cousin Catherine Nossenko, and had their first two children in the next two years. - Age 27: The impresario Diaghilev attended a performance of his Fireworks and Scherzo Fantastique and as a result commissioned a ballet. The result was The Firebird, based on Russian folk tales and music. - Age 28 - 32: Following the successful premiere of The Firebird in Paris, he moved his family there for the next three years to work with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. During this period he wrote Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. - Age 32: With the onset of the First World War in 1914 and health problems including nicotine poisoning and cholera, they moved to Switzerland. - Age 38 - 57: 1920 Moved back to France. Became a French citizen in 1936. - Age 57: 1939 His mother, his wife and his eldest daughter all died of tuberculosis, causing him understandable deep distress. He moved to the USA. Lectured at Harvard University.

- Age 58: Married his old friend Vera de Bosset and moved to Hollywood, California. - Age 63: 1945 Became an American citizen. - Age 86: Moved to Essex House, New York where he stayed until he died in 1971 aged 88. Favorite Composers in Art - Stravinsky A fascinating collection of images - art, portraits, caricatures, cartoons, album covers and postage stamps. Rite of Spring - Sacrificial Dance Petrushka Scene I - The Shrovetide Fair Bolshoi Ballet Quotes - "A good composer does not imitate; he steals." - "Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it." - "A plague on eminence!

I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares." - "Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune." - "I liked the opera very much. Everything but the music." Benjamin Britten on Stravinsky's The Rakes's Progress "His music used to be original. Now it's aboriginal." Sir Ernest Newman on Igor Stravinsky "The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead." "Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end." Links - and where to get more information Russian Composers: more profiles here at Igor Stravinsky Igor Stravinsky Watch an excerpt of Stravinsky's The Firebird A Russian-American composer, born in 1882, Igor Stravinsky was worldly known as the greatest composer of the 20th century. His contributions to music were wide and varied.

He studied music with Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov from 1903 to 1906. He got famous on his performances, while commissioned with the impresario, Sergey Diaghilev. In 1939 he moved to United States of America and became a US citizen in 1945. Stravinsky’s ballet score, The Firebird (1910) was a huge success in Paris Opera, followed by Petrushka, performed during the Ballets Russes (1911) in Paris. Another outstanding work is The Rite of Spring which was a dynamic masterpiece. He worked on various pieces of ballet music, including piano piece by Frédéric Chopin for Les Sylphides. The Nightingale and The Soldier's Tale (1918) were some of his compositions while on exile in Switzerland during the War. In France, he diverted to neoclassical style and composed Oedipus Rex (1927) and the Symphony of Psalms (1930). His renewed tie with Diaghilev, resulted to his arrangement of Pulcinella (1920) and Apollo Musagetes (1928).

From 1923-1935, he composed piano and wind instruments pieces. The Rake's Progress (1948-51), Canticum Sacrum (1955) and the ballet Agon (1953-57) were larger scale works, where music moves from a modal and tonal beginning into a full serial score. After his work on Requiem Canticles (1966), a work as famous as his masterpieces and neo-classicals, his health failed. He died in 1971 and was buried in Venice. Stravinsky, Igor | Article about Stravinsky, Igor by The Free Dictionary Stravinsky, Igor | Article about Stravinsky, Igor by The Free Dictionary Stravinsky, Igor Stravinsky, Igor (Fyodorovich) (1882–1971) composer, conductor; born in Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg, Russia. Son of an admired bass in the Imperial Opera, he studied piano and composition as a boy. Although he studied law at St.

Petersburg University, he was far more interested in music; between 1903–06 he studied composition under Rimsky-Korsokov and became a member of that composer's circle. In 1909 the Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev invited him to compose for his company, the Ballets Russes; in 1910 the company danced Stravinsky's first major work, The Firebird, and for the next 20 years he was closely associated with Diaghilev's company; their premiere of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps ("the rite of spring") in 1913 caused a tremendous commotion. After 1910 Stravinsky essentially settled in Western Europe—first Switzerland, then Paris—where he toured as a conductor and pianist in performances of his own music; after the Russian Revolution in 1917, he regarded himself as an exile. In 1926 he rejoined the Russian Orthodox Church and his devout Christianity inspired many of his subsequent works. After three tours in the U.S.A.

and several American commissions, he moved there in 1939, settled in Los Angeles, and became a naturalized citizen in 1945. Although he continued to be an international neoclassicist in his musical style, he did show some recognition of his American environment, writing his famous Circus Polka (1942) for the elephants of the Barnum and Bailey Circus and his Ebony Concerto (1945) for Woody Herman ; his various efforts at movie music ended up being used in other compositions. The climax of his neoclassical style was his opera, The Rake's Progress (1951). The young American conductor, Robert Craft, became Stravinsky's inseparable assistant from 1948 on; Craft not only aided Stravinsky in his various musical projects but helped him assemble several books; Craft also introduced Stravinsky to the serialist school of music and, from the early 1950s, Stravinsky composed in his own adaptation of this style.

By this time, he was generally recognized as the leading composer of his era and he toured throughout the world conducting his own and others' works; in 1962 his 80th birthday was widely celebrated and he made a triumphant return to Russia. He settled in New York City in 1969 and died there, but was buried in Venice near Diaghilev's grave. Stravinsky, Igor Fedorovich Born June 5 (17), 1882, in Oranienbaum (now the city of Lomonosov); died Apr. 6, 1971, in New York; buried in Venice. Russian composer and conductor. Son of the singer F. I. Stravinsky. At an early age Stravinsky became acquainted with Russian literature, painting, theater, and music. He began playing the piano at the age of nine, and at 18 he began his own study of the theory of composition while studying law at St. Petersburg University (1900–05). In 1902 he began musical studies with N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, whom he called his spiritual father.

The Scherzo Fantastique and the fantasy Fireworks for orchestra (both 1908) were Stravinsky’s first works to attract attention. Stravinsky was greatly helped by S. P. Diaghilev, organizer of the Russian Seasons Abroad in Paris. It was for Diaghilev’s ballet that he composed The Firebird (1910), Petrouchka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre duprintemps; 1913), which gained the composer world fame. Beginning in 1910, Stravinsky lived alternately in Paris and Switzerland and at his wife’s estate in Russia. He settled in Switzerland in 1914 and in France in 1920. In 1939 he moved to the USA and became a US citizen in 1945. He conducted concert tours abroad, performing his own works and, occasionally, compositions by M. I. Glinka and P. I. Tchaikovsky. These tours became more frequent after World War II. In 1962, Stravinsky performed in composer’s concerts in the USSR.

At the beginning of his career, Stravinsky was influenced by Rimsky-Korsakov, M. P. Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky; he accorded Tchaikovsky’s music high regard even in his later years. C. Debussy exercised a short-lived but strong influence on Stravinsky. Stravinsky was especially interested in Russian folklore, which left its mark on the composer’s Russian period of composition. Next to The Rite of Spring, the central work of these early years was the choreographic cantata The Wedding (Les Noces; 1914–23), which the composer described as “choreographic Russian scenes with singing and music to folk texts from the collection of P. Kireevskii.” Stravinsky turned to folk texts, folk subjects, and the melodiousness of the folk tradition and from these developed an original creative idiom that was bright, explosive, and dynamic. This idiom contributed to a renewal of the Russian national intonational style. At the same time, the everyday music of the modern city also found expression in Stravinsky’s works.

Elements of archaic and everyday music were interwoven in The Soldier’s Tale (Histoire du soldat, “a tale of a deserting soldier and the devil”; 1918), a ballet pantomime with narrator. Here, as in another ballet pantomime with singing, The Fox (Reynard; 1916), Stravinsky drew his subject from a Russian folktale. Stravinsky established a new kind of musical stage work, characteristic of present-day conventional theater, by combining various theatrical devices. For example, he incorporated singing into ballet and used oral recitation to elucidate musical performances. Stravinsky’s shift toward neoclassicism was first evident in Pulcinella, a ballet with singing (based on music by G. B. Pergo-lesi; 1920). The transition was consolidated in his Octet for Wind Instruments and his Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (both 1923). Stravinsky continued in this style until the early 1950’s. Russian themes gave way to those of classical mythology and biblical texts, and the composer concentrated less on vocal music and more on instrumental works.

(For his vocal compositions Stravinsky had mainly used Latin and, sometimes, French texts.) This trend diminished the influence of the composer’s Russian origins, although Stravinsky contended: “I have spoken Russian all my life. I think in Russian and have a Russian style. Perhaps it is not immediately evident in my music, but it is ingrained in it, in its hidden nature” (Komsomol’skaia pravda, Sept. 27, 1962, p. 4). The works Stravinsky composed in this period demonstrated his assimilation of devices and techniques of the European baroque, ancient contrapuntal techniques, and the melodies of Italian bel canto. The composer’s brilliant artistic individuality was able to combine a heterogeneity of styles. Nonetheless, in the late 1930’s, signs of crisis can be seen in Stravinsky’s works, and there was an uncertainty and vacillation in his intellectual striving.

Stravinsky’s finest works composed between the 1920’s and the early 1950’s include the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927), the allegorical ballet The Fairy’s Kiss (Le Baiser de lafée, based on music by Tchaikovsky; 1928), Symphony of Psalms (1930), the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1931), the Concerto for Two Pianos (1935), two symphonies (1940, 1945), the ballet Orpheus (1947), and the opera The Rake’s Progress (1951). In the late 1940’s and the 1950’s, Stravinsky’s creative technique underwent another change—a turn to the twelve-tone technique of A. Schönberg. However, Stravinsky used this compositional technique modulated by his own tonal thinking. His choice of themes became much narrower, and religious images and subject matter predominated. His Mass for Horns and Orchestra (1948) marked a turning point.

His music became more severe and acerbic, often self-consciously complex. Vocal-instrumental works to Latin and English texts were predominant. Stravinsky’s most significant compositions included the cantata Canticum sacrum ad honorem Sancti Marci nominis (1956), the ballet Agon (1957), and Requiem Canticles (1966). Stravinsky’s last composition was an adaptation of two songs by H. Wolf for chamber orchestra (1967). Stravinsky is also the author of literary works, mainly autobiographical. In them he treats certain questions of musical aesthetics in a highly controversial manner, offering subjective evaluations and interpretations. Chronicle of My Life was translated into Russian in 1963 and Dialogues and a Diary in 1971. REFERENCES Igor Stravinsky biography - 8notes.com Igor Stravinsky biography Igor Stravinsky Igor Stravinsky Biography Igor Fyodorovitch Stravinsky (И́горь Фёдорович Страви́нский) (June 17, 1882 – April 6, 1971) was a composer of modern classical music .

He wrote works in the neo-classical and serialist styles, but he is best known for two works from his earlier, Russian period: Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) and L'Oiseau de Feu (The Firebird) . For some, these ballets practically reinvented the genre. Stravinsky also wrote in a broad spectrum of ensemble combinations and classical forms. His oeuvre included everything from symphonies to piano miniatures. Stravinsky is shown here conducting the Columbia Symphony Orchestra through Petrushka . Stravinsky also achieved fame as a pianist and conductor , often at the premieres of his own works. He was also a writer. With the help of his prot�g� Robert Craft , who helped with the composer's English grammar, Stravinsky composed a theoretic work entitled Poetics of Music. In it, he famously claimed that music was incapable of 'expressing anything but itself'. Craft also transcribed several interviews with the composer, which were published as Conversations with Stravinsky. A quintessentially cosmopolitan Russian , Stravinsky was one of the most authoritative composers in 20th century music, both in the West and in his native land.

He was named by Time magazine as one of the most influential people of the century. Contents 8 External links Biography Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov ), near St. Petersburg, Russia . Brought up in an apartment in St. Petersburg and dominated by his father and elder brother, Stravinsky's early childhood was a mix of experience that hinted little at the cosmopolitan artist he was to become. Though his father was a bass singer at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Stravinsky originally studied to be a lawyer . Composition came later. In 1902, at the age of 20, Stravinsky became the pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov , probably the leading Russian composer of the time. Stravinsky left Russia for the first time in 1910, going to Paris to attend the premiere of his ballet L'Oiseau de Feu (The Firebird) .

During his stay in the city, he composed three major works for the Ballets Russes —L'Oiseau de Feu, Petroushka (1911), and Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913). The ballets trace his stylistic development: from the L'Oiseau de Feu, whose style draws largely on Tchaikovsky , Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov, to Petroushka's emphasis on bitonality , and finally to the savage polyphonic dissonance of Le Sacre du printemps. As he himself said, with these premieres his intention was 'to send them all to hell'. (He succeeded: the 1913 premi�re of Le Sacre du printemps turned into a riot.) Stravinsky displayed an inexhaustible desire to learn and explore art, literature, and life. This desire manifested itself in several of his Paris collaborations.

Not only was he the principal composer for Sergei Diaghilev 's Ballet Russes, but Stravinsky also collaborated with Pablo Picasso (Pulcinella, 1920), Jean Cocteau (Oedipus Rex, 1927) and George Balanchine (Apollon Musagete, 1928). Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso collaborated on Pulcinella in 1920. Picasso took the opportunity to make several sketches of the composer. Relatively short of stature and not conventionally handsome, Stravinsky was nevertheless photogenic, as many pictures show. Although a notorious philanderer (even rumoured to have affairs with high-class partners such as Coco Chanel ) Stravinsky was also a family man who devoted considerable amounts of his time and expenditure to his sons and daughters. He was still young when he married his cousin Katerina Nossenko , who he had known since early childhood, on 23 January 1906. Their marriage endured for 33 years, but the true love of his life, and partner until his death, was his second wife Vera de Bosset .

When Stravinsky met Vera in the early 1920s she was married to the painter and stage designer Serge Sudeikin , but they soon began an affair which led to her leaving her husband. From then until the death of Katerina in 1939 Stravinsky led a deft double-life, spending some of his time with his first family and the rest with Vera. Katerina soon learned of the relationship and accepted it as inevitable and permanent. After her death Stravinsky and Vera were married in New York where they had gone from France to escape the war in 1940 . Patronage too was never far away. In the early 1920s Leopold Stokowski was able to give Stravinsky regular support through a pseudonymous 'benefactor'. The composer was also able to attract commissions: most of his work from The Firebird onwards was written for specific occasions and paid for generously. Stravinsky proved adept at playing the part of 'man of the world', acquiring a keen instinct for business matters and appearing relaxed and comfortable in many of the world's major cities. Paris , Venice , Berlin , London and New York all hosted successful appearances as pianist and conductor.

Most people who knew him through dealings connected with performances spoke of him as polite, courteous and helpful. For example, Otto Klemperer , who knew Schoenberg well, said that he always found Stravinsky much more co-operative and easy to deal with. At the same time he had a disregard of his social inferiors: Robert Craft was embarrassed by his habit of tapping a glass with a fork and loudly demanding attention in restaurants. Eventually Stravinsky's music was noticed by Serge Diaghilev, the director of the Ballets Russes in Paris. He comissioned Stravinsky to write a ballet for his theater; so in 1911, Stravinsky traveled to Paris. That ballet ended up being the famous L'Oiseau de Feu. However, because of World War I and the October Revolution in Russia he moved to Switzerland in 1914. He returned to Paris in 1920 to write more ballets as well as many other works. He moved to the United States in 1939 and became a naturalized citizen in 1945. He continued to live in the United States until his death in 1971, unsuccessfully writing music for films.

Stravinsky had adapted to life in France , but moving to America aged 58 was a very different prospect. For a time he preserved a ring of emigr� Russian friends and contacts, but eventually realised that this would not sustain his intellectual and professional life in the USA. When he planned to write an opera with W. H. Auden , the need to acquire more familiarity with the English-speaking world coincided with his meeting the conductor and musicologist Robert Craft. Craft lived with Stravinsky until his death, acting as interpreter, chronicler, assistant conductor and factotum for countless musical and social tasks. Stravinsky's taste in literature was wide and reflected his constant desire for new discoveries. The texts and literary sources for his work began with a period of interest in Russian folklore , progressed to classical authors and the Latin liturgy , and moved on to contemporary France ( Andr� Gide , in Persephone) and eventually English literature: Auden, Eliot , and medieval English verse. At the end of his life he was even setting Hebrew scripture in Abraham and Isaac. In 1962 he accepted an invitation to return to Russia for a series of concerts, but remained an emigre firmly based in the West.

He died in New York City on April 6, 1971 at the age of 89 and was buried in Venice on the cemetery island of San Michele . His grave is close to the tomb of his early collaborator Diaghilev. Stravinsky's life had encompassed most of the 20th Century , including many of its modern classical music styles, and he influenced composers both during and after his lifetime. He has a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6340 Hollywood Boulevard. Stylistic periods Stravinsky's career largely falls into three distinct stylistic periods. Most of his compositions can be placed in one of the three. The Primitive, or Russian, Period The first of Stravinsky's major stylistic periods (excluding some early minor works) was inaugurated by the three ballets he composed for Diaghilev. The ballets have several shared characteristics: they are scored for extremely large orchestras; they use Russian folk themes and motifs; and they bear the mark of Rimsky-Korsakov's imaginative scoring and instrumentation.

The first of the ballets, L'Oiseau de Feu, is notable for its unusual introduction (triplets in the low basses) and sweeping orchestration . Petroushka, too, is distinctively scored and the first of Stravinsky's ballets to draw on folk mythology . But it is the third ballet, The Rite of Spring, that is generally considered the apotheosis of Stravinsky's 'Russian Period'. Here, the composer draws on the brutalism of pagan Russia, reflecting these sentiments in roughly-drawn, stinging motifs that appear throughout the work. There are several famous passages in the work, but two are of particular note: the opening theme played on a bassoon with notes at the very top of its register, almost out of range; and the thumping, off kilter eighth-note motif played by strings and accented by French horns on off-rhythms (See Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) for a more detailed account of this work).

Other pieces from this period include: Renard (1916), L'Histoire du Soldat (A Soldier's Tale) (1918), and Les Noces (The Wedding) (1923). The Neo-Classical Period The next phase of Stravinsky's compositional style, slightly overlapping the first, is marked by two works: Pulcinella 1920 and the Octet (1923) for wind instruments. Both of these works feature what was to become a hallmark of this period; that is, Stravinsky's return, or 'looking back', to the classical music of mozart and Bach and their contemporaries. This ' neo-classical ' style involved the abandonment of the large orchestras demanded by the ballets. In these new works, written roughly between 1920 and 1950, Stravinsky turns largely to wind instruments, the piano, and choral and chamber works. Other works such as Oedipus Rex (1927), Apollon Musagete (1928) and the Dumbarton Oaks concerto continue this trend.

Some larger works from this period are the three symphonies: the Symphonie des Psaumes (Symphony of Psalms) ( 1930 ), Symphony in C (1940) and Symphony in Three Movements (1945). Apollon, Persephone (1933) and Orpheus (1947) also mark Stravinsky's concern, during this period, of not only returning to 'Classic' music but also returning to 'Classic' themes: in these instances, the mythology of the ancient Greeks . The pinnacle of this period is the opera The Rake's Progress completed in 1951. This opera, written to a libretto by Auden and based on the etchings of Hogarth , encapsulates everything that Stravinsky had perfected in the previous 20 years of his neo-classic period. The music is direct but quirky; it borrows from classic tonal harmony but also interjects surprising dissonances; it features Stravinsky's trademark off-rhythms; and it harkens back to the operas and themes of Monteverdi , Gluck and mozart.

After the opera's completion Stravinsky never wrote another 'neo-classic' work and instead began writing the music that came to define his final stylistic change. The Serialist, or Twelve Tone Period Only after the death of Arnold Schoenberg , the inventor of the twelve tone system , in 1951 did Stravinsky begin making use of the technique in his own works. No doubt, Stravinsky was aided in his understanding of, or even conversion to, the twelve tone method by his confidant and helper Robert Craft, who had long been advocating the change. Regardless, the next fifteen years were spent writing the works in this style. Stravinsky first began to dabble in the twelve tone technique in smaller vocal works such as the Cantata ( 1952 ), Three Songs from Shakespeare (1953) and In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954), as if he were testing the system. He later began expanding his use of the technique in works often based on biblical texts, such as Threni (1958), A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer (1961), and The Flood (1962).

For the culminating work of this period Stravinsky again returned to the ballet: Agon, a work for twelve dancers written in 1957. In it, Stravinsky enforced his unique re-interpretation of the twelve tone method, retaining all the Stravinskian signatures that are found throughout his compositions, whether they be 'primitive', 'neo-classic', or 'serial': rhythmic quirkiness and experimentation, harmonic ingenuity, and a deft ear for masterful orchestration. Indeed, these characteristics are what make Stravinsky's output so unique when compared with the work of contemporaneous serial composers. It is also, perhaps, why Stravinsky never fully adopted the twelve tone method wholeheartedly and often deviated from its stricter tenets. Influence and innovation Stravinsky's work embraced multiple compositional styles, revolutionised orchestration, spanned several genres, practically reinvented ballet form and incorporated multiple cultures, languages and literatures. As a consequence, his influence on composers both during his lifetime and after his death was, and remains, considerable.

Compositional innovations Stravinsky began re-thinking his use of the motif and ostinato as early as The Firebird ballet, but his use of these elements reached its full flowering in The Rite of Spring. Motivic development, that is using a distinct musical phrase that is subsequently altered and developed throughout a piece of music, has its roots in the sonata form of Mozart's age. The first great innovator in this method was Beethoven ; the famous 'fate motif' which opens Fifth Symphony and reappears throughout the work in surprising and refreshing permutations is a classic example. However, Stravinsky's use of motivic development was unique in the way he permutated his motifs. In the 'Rite of Spring' he introduces additive permutations, that is, subtracting or adding a note to a motif without regard to changes in meter. The same ballet is also notable for its relentless use of ostinati. The most famous passage, as noted above, is the eighth note ostinato of the strings accented by eight french horns that occurs in the section Auguries of Spring (Dances of the Young Girls). This is perhaps the first instance in music of extended ostinato without either variation or being used to accompany melody.

At various other times in the work Stravinsky also pits several ostinati against one another without regard to harmony or tempo , creating a pastiche , a sort of musical equivalent of a Cubist painting. These passages are notable not only for this pastiche-quality but also for their length: Stravinsky treats them as whole and complete musical sections. Such techniques forshadowed by several decades the minimalist works of composers such as Terry Riley and Steve Reich . Neoclassicism It can be said that Stravinsky was the inventor of the 'neoclassic' style, a style that would be later adopted by composers as diverse as Sergei Prokofiev and Aaron Copland . Stravinsky announced his new style in 1923 with the stripped-down and delicately scored Octet for winds. The clear harmonies, looking back to the Classical music era of mozart and Bach , and the simpler combinations of rhythm and melody were a direct response to the complexities of the Second Viennese School . Stravinsky may have been preceded in these devices by earlier composers such as Erik Satie , but no doubt when Copland was composing his Appalachian Spring ballet he was taking Stravinsky as his model.

Certainly by the late 1920s and 1930s, Neoclassicism as an accepted modern genre was prevalent throughout art music circles around the world. Ironically, it was Stravinsky himself who announced the death of Neoclassicism, at least in his own work if not for the world, with the completion of his opera The Rake's Progress in 1951. A sort of final statement for the style, the opera was largely ridiculed as too 'backward looking' even by those who had lauded the new style only three decades earlier. Quotation and pastiche Stravinsky used the now very postmodern technique of direct musical quotation and pastiche as early as 1920 in his work Pulcinella. Here he uses the music of Pergolesi as source material, sometimes directly quoting it and other times simply reinventing it, to create a new and refreshing work. He used the same technique in the ballet The Fairy's Kiss of 1928. Here it is the music of Tchaikovsky , specifically Swan Lake , that Stravinsky uses as his source.

Such compositional 'borrowing' would come into vogue in the 1960s , as in the work Sinfonia by Luciano Berio . Use of folk material There were other composers in the early 20th century who collected and augmented their native folk music and used these themes in their work. Two notable examples are B�la Bart�k and Zolt�n Kod�ly . Yet in Le Sacre du Printemps we see Stravinsky again innovating in his use of folk themes. He strips these themes to their most basic outline, melody alone, and often contorts them beyond recognition with additive notes, inversions , diminutions , and other techniques. He did this so well, in fact, that only in recent scholarship, such as in Richard Taruskin's Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra 1 ( have analysts uncovered the original source material for some of the music in The Rite. Orchestral innovations The late 19th century and early 20th century was a time ripe with orchestral innovation. Composers such as Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler were well regarded for their skill at writing for the medium.

They, in turn, were influenced by the expansion of the traditional classical orchestra by Richard Wagner through his use of large forces and unusual instruments. Stravinsky continued this Romantic trend of writing for huge orchestral forces, especially in the early ballets. But it is when he started to turn away from this tendency that he began to innovate by introducing unique combinations of instruments. For example, in L'Histoire du Soldat (A Soldier's Tale) the forces used are clarinet , bassoon , tenor and bass trombone , double bass , cornet , violin and percussion , a very striking combination for its time (1918). This combining of distinct timbres would become almost a cliche in post- World War II classical music. Another notable innovation of orchestral technique that can be partially attributed to Stravinsky is the exploitation of the extreme ranges of instruments. The most famous passage is the opening of the Rite of Spring where Stravsinky uses the extreme reaches of the bassoon to simulate the symbolic 'awakening' of a spring morning. It must also be noted that composers such as Anton Webern , Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg were also exploring some of these orchestral and instrumental techniques in the early 20th century.

Yet their influence on succeeding generations of composers was equalled if not exceeeded by that of Stravinsky. Criticism 'The music of Le Sacre du Printemps baffles verbal description. To say that much of it is hideous as sound is a mild description. There is certainly an impelling rhythm traceable. Practically it has no relation to music at all as most of us understand the word.' Musical Times, London, August 1, 1913 (Slonimsky, 1953) 'All the signs indicate a strong reaction against the nightmare of noise and eccentricity that was one of the legacies of the war.... What has become of the works that made up the program of the Stravinsky concert which created such a stir a few years ago?

Practically the whole lot are already on the shelf, and they will remain there until a few jaded neurotics once more feel a desire to eat ashes and fill their belly with the east wind.' Musical Times, London, October 1923 (ibid.) Composer Constant Lambert (1936) described pieces such as L'Histoire du Soldat (A Soldier's Tale) as containing, 'essentially coldblooded abstraction'. Further, the 'melodic fragments in L'Histoire du Soldat are completely meaningless themselves. They are merely successions of notes that can conveniently be divided into groups of three, five, and seven and set against other mathematical groups', and the cadenza for solo drums is, 'musical purity...achieved by a species of musical castration'. He compares Stravinsky's choice of, 'the drabbest and least significant phrases', to Gertrude Stein 's: 'Everday they were gay there, they were regularly gay there everyday' ('Helen Furr and Georgine Skeene', 1922), 'whose effect would be equally appreciated by someone with no knowledge of English whatsoever'.

In his book Philosophy of Modern Music (1948) Theodor Adorno calls Stravinsky an acrobat, a civil servant, a tailor's dummy, hebephrenic, psychotic, infantile, fascist, and devoted to making money. Part of the composer's error, in Adorno's view, was his neo-classicism, but more important was his music's 'pseudomorphism of painting', playing off of le temps �space (space) rather than le temps dur�e (duration) of Henri Bergson . 'One trick characterizes all of Stravinsky's formal endeavors: the effort of his music to portray time as in a circus tableau and to present time complexes as though they were spatial. This trick, however, soon exhausts itself.' (1948) List of works Igor Stravinsky - Birmingham Royal Ballet Birmingham Royal Ballet Igor Stravinsky Composer The son of the great Russian bass Fyodor Stravinsky, Igor Fyodorivitch Stravinsky was born in Oraienbaum, near St Petersburg, Russia in 1882. His childhood was dominated by his father and older brother and he did not remember it fondly.

He studied Law at St Petersburg University from 1901, but increasingly began to indulge his musical interests. This led to him meet the composer Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, whose pupil he became in 1903. Two years later, he began work on his first symphony. In 1907 and 1908 respectively, he wrote the short orchestral works, Scherzo fantastique and Fireworks. These were performed in St Petersburg in 1909 and heard by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev. After first asking Stravinsky to arrange some Chopin piano pieces for him, he commissioned a ballet on an old Russian fairytale from the young composer, for his Ballets Russes. Given its premiere in 1910, The Firebird, with choreography by Fokine, was the result. It brought Stravinsky immediate fame and further commissions from Diaghilev. Stravinsky's next ballet, again choreographed by Fokine, was Petrushka (1911). Like The Firebird, it was a huge success and brought the composer international recognition.

However, his third ballet for the Ballets Russes was to cause one of the great theatrical scandals of the 20th century. Together, Stravinsky and Nicholas Roerich (who also designed the sets and costumes), came up with a scenario for a ballet based upon the rituals of ancient pagan Russia. With choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) was premiered on 29 May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris. Stravinsky's dissonant, violently rhythmical music and Nijinsky's angular, anti-balletic choreography quite literally caused a riot. The work was to receive six performances, three in Paris and three in London before Diaghilev struck it from the repertory. It was only revived, with new choreography by Massine, in 1920. The Rite of Spring was followed by Stravinsky's last Russian ballet, Les Noces (1914-17).

With the outbreak of the revolution in 1917, Stravinsky left behind the huge orchestral forces of his early ballets and concentrated on smaller, ragtime and popular-dance infuenced works, such as L'histoire du soldat (The Soldier's Tale, 1918). By 1920 he had developed a great interest in the music of the 18th century and the period from 1920 to 1951 is generally known as his neo-classical period. His next ballet for Diaghilev, and his first major neo-classical work, Pulcinella (1920), was based on the music of the 18th-century composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi.

Settling in France, he began writing works which evoked the spirit of 18th-century music, but which were unmistakably of the 20th century including, the Concerto for Piano and Winds (1923-4), Apollon Musagète (1927-28), the Violin Concerto (1931), Duo Concertant (1931-32), Jeu de cartes (1936), Dumbarton Oaks (1937-38), Circus Polka (1944), the Ebony Concerto (1945), the Concerto in D for Strings (1946) and the opera, The Rake's Progress (1951). Most of these works ultimately became ballets. During this period, he also wrote the ballet, Le Baiser de la fée (The Fairy's Kiss, 1928, revised 1950) based on music by one of his great musical icons, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

In 1939, to escape the war, the 57-year-old Stravinsky moved from Switzerland to America, finally settling in Los Angeles. Stravinsky's creative relationship with Balanchine had begun in 1928 with Apollon Musagète and continued throughout the 1930s and 40s. His first major American work was the Symphony in Three Movements (1945), later choreographed by Balanchine, closely followed by the ballet Orpheus (1947). Arnold Schönberg, the originator of 12-tone or Serial music, died in 1951. Soon after, Stravinsky became interested in his techniques, particularly as practised by his pupil, Anton Webern. This sudden and dramatic shift in his compositional style shocked many of his supporters, but encouraged by Robert Craft, his young and enthusiastic assistant, he began to compose serial works. These include the ballet Agon (1953), Canticum Sacrum (1955), Threni (1958), and Variations in memoriam Aldous Huxley (1963-64).

By the time of his death in New York in 1971, Stravinsky was a world-famous figure. He has been honoured with an 80th birthday dinner at the Whitehouse in 1962 and Time magazine listed him as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. He is now counted amongst the greatest and most prolific of ballet composers of the 20th century, and one of the most influential figures in the history of music. Igor Stravinsky Igor Stravinsky Understanding the Music: Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring Loading the player... Understanding the Music: Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring in premiere Loading the player... Understanding the Music: Stravinsky's The Firebird Loading the player... Watch an excerpt of Stravinsky's The Firebird Biography A Russian-American composer, born in 1882, Igor Stravinsky was worldly known as the greatest composer of the 20th century. His contributions to music were wide and varied. He studied music with Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov from 1903 to 1906.

He got famous on his performances, while commissioned with the impresario, Sergey Diaghilev. In 1939 he moved to United States of America and became a US citizen in 1945. Stravinsky’s ballet score, The Firebird (1910) was a huge success in Paris Opera, followed by Petrushka, performed during the Ballets Russes (1911) in Paris. Another outstanding work is The Rite of Spring which was a dynamic masterpiece. He worked on various pieces of ballet music, including piano piece by Frédéric Chopin for Les Sylphides. The Nightingale and The Soldier's Tale (1918) were some of his compositions while on exile in Switzerland during the War. In France, he diverted to neoclassical style and composed Oedipus Rex (1927) and the Symphony of Psalms (1930). His renewed tie with Diaghilev, resulted to his arrangement of Pulcinella (1920) and Apollo Musagetes (1928). From 1923-1935, he composed piano and wind instruments pieces.

The Rake's Progress (1948-51), Canticum Sacrum (1955) and the ballet Agon (1953-57) were larger scale works, where music moves from a modal and tonal beginning into a full serial score. After his work on Requiem Canticles (1966), a work as famous as his masterpieces and neo-classicals, his health failed. He died in 1971 and was buried in Venice.

Compositions Danses concertantes, for chamber orchestra Feu d'Artifice Le Chant du rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale) Le Sacre du printemps The Rite of Spring, played as two-piano arrangement (1913) Apollon Musagete, Ballet in Two Scenes Septet (Violin, Viola, Cello, Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn, Piano) Suite from The Firebird Stravinsky, Igor Fedorovich Encyclopedia > People > Literature and the Arts > Music: History, Composers, and Performers: Biographies Igor Fedorovich Stravinsky Stravinsky, Igor Fedorovich (ēˈgər fyôˈdərôˌvyĭch strəvĭnˈskē) [ key ], 1882–1971, Russian-American composer. Considered by many the greatest and most versatile composer of the 20th cent., Stravinsky helped to revolutionize modern music. Stravinsky's father, an actor and singer in St. Petersburg, had him educated for the law.

Music was only an avocation for Stravinsky until his meeting in 1902 with Rimsky-Korsakov, with whom he studied formally from 1907 to 1908. Stravinsky's First Symphony in E Flat Major (1907) is pervaded by the influence of Rimsky-Korsakov 's nationalistic style. The work of Stravinsky interested the ballet impressario Sergei Diaghilev , and Stravinsky's first strikingly original compositions— L'Oiseau de Feu ( The Firebird, 1910) and Petrouchka (1911)—were written for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris. In the ballet Le Sacre du printemps ( The Rite of Spring, 1913) he departed radically from musical tradition by using irregular, primitive rhythms and harsh dissonances. The audience at the premiere of the ballet reacted with riotous disfavor. However, in the following year the work was performed by a symphony orchestra, and ever since it has been recognized as a landmark and masterpiece of modern music.

At the beginning of World War I, Stravinsky moved to Switzerland, where he composed several works based on Russian themes, including the ballet Les Noces ( The Wedding, 1923). Influenced by 18th-century music, he embarked on an austere, neoclassical style in such works as the poetic dance-drama Histoire du Soldat ( The Soldier's Tale, 1918), the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927; text by Jean Cocteau after Sophocles), and the choral composition Symphonie de psaumes ( Symphony of Psalms, 1930). In the 1930s, Stravinsky toured throughout Europe and the United States as a pianist and conductor of his own works. He became a French citizen in 1934, but five years later he moved to the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1945.

Compositions of the 1940s include such diverse works as the Ebony Concerto (1946) for clarinet and swing band; the Third Symphony (1946) in three movements; the ballet Orpheus (1948); and a mass (1948) for voices and double wind quintet. After composing the opera The Rake's Progress (1951; inspired by Hogarth's engravings, with libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman), Stravinsky turned to experiments with serial techniques (see serial music ). In Cantata (1952) the new technique was evident, and in the chamber piece Septet (1953) he made the full transition to serialism. He continued to compose in this exacting style in the abstract ballet Agon (1957) and in Threni (1958), a work for voices and orchestra. His creative originality was undiminished in his late works, which display remarkable freshness, meticulous craftsmanship, and an experimental quality. Stravinsky's influence on 20th-century music is immeasurable.

He revitalized the rhythms of European music and achieved entirely new sonorities and blends of orchestral colors. A series of lectures he delivered at Harvard were published as Poétique musicale (1942, tr. Poetics of Music, 1948). Bibliography See his autobiography Chronicles of My Life (1935, tr. 1936); his Memories and Commentaries (1960), Expositions and Developments (1962), and Dialogues and a Diary (1963), all three written with R. Craft. See also biographies by R. Siohan (1959, tr. 1966), A. Dobrin (1970), P. Horgan (1972), R. Craft (1972), L. Libman (1972), and S. Walsh (2 vol., 1999–2006); studies by J. Pasler (1986), P. van den Toorn (1987), S. Walsh (1988), and C. M. Joseph (2001 and 2002).

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

Question: Which Russian composer, after writing "The Firebird" for the Russian ballet, became a US citizen in 1945?
Answer: Igor Stravinsky