Biography
On the evening of May 29, 1913, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris became the site of one of the most famous disturbances in the history of Western art. The premiere of The Rite of Spring — a ballet created by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes with choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky and music by a thirty-year-old Russian composer named Igor Stravinsky — provoked a riot in the audience before the curtain fell. Fistfights erupted in the stalls. Shouting drowned the orchestra. The composer himself reportedly fled backstage and held Nijinsky by the collar to prevent him from running on stage. The piece was perceived as an act of violence against musical civilization. It was, instead, the beginning of one.
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882, near St. Petersburg, Russia, into a musical household. His father, Fyodor Stravinsky, was a celebrated bass at the Imperial Opera, and the young Igor grew up surrounded by professional musicians. He studied piano from age nine and was sent to St. Petersburg University to study law — a conventional arrangement for a young man of his social class. But music was the gravitational center of his life, and by 1902 he had begun private composition lessons with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the supreme orchestral colorist of the Russian tradition. Rimsky-Korsakov would be his only formal composition teacher. He died in 1908, two years before the world heard what his student could do.
The impresario Sergei Diaghilev encountered Stravinsky's early orchestral works in 1909 and immediately commissioned a ballet score. The Firebird, premiered in Paris in June 1910, was a sensation. Petrushka followed in 1911. Both works demonstrated an astonishing command of orchestral color and rhythmic vitality that exceeded anything in the existing repertoire. But they were merely preparations for what came next. The Rite of Spring — a depiction of a pagan sacrifice in which a young girl dances herself to death — deployed polytonality, shifting meters, and asymmetric rhythms so radical that even trained musicians struggled to comprehend it at first hearing. The riot at its premiere became the founding myth of musical modernism.
"I heard, and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which The Rite passed."— Igor Stravinsky
What distinguished Stravinsky from every other major composer of the twentieth century was not the Rite alone but what happened afterward. Where other composers spent careers developing the implications of a single breakthrough, Stravinsky abandoned each style at its moment of greatest mastery and began again. In the late 1910s and 1920s, he turned from the lush orchestral richness of the Russian period to a spare, ironic neoclassicism — works like Pulcinella (1920), the Octet (1923), and the opera The Rake's Progress (1951) that engaged Baroque and Classical forms with detached wit. Critics who had championed the Rite were baffled. He had moved on.
Then, in the 1950s — when Stravinsky was already in his seventies — he did it again. He encountered the twelve-tone serial techniques developed by Arnold Schoenberg, whom he had publicly disdained for decades, and adopted them as his own compositional language. Works like Agon (1957) and Requiem Canticles (1966) demonstrated a composer still metabolizing new ideas at an age when most artists have long since stopped listening. He had now mastered and transcended three completely distinct compositional systems, each of which would have been sufficient to define a significant career.
"A good composer does not imitate; he steals."— Igor Stravinsky
Stravinsky fled Russia in 1914, lived in Switzerland during the war years, then settled in France, and finally emigrated to the United States in 1939, becoming an American citizen in 1945. His American years, spent largely in Los Angeles and New York, produced some of his finest late works and established him as the preeminent living composer in the eyes of American musical culture. He conducted, recorded prolifically, collaborated with poets including W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas, and documented his aesthetic thinking in a series of conversations with his assistant Robert Craft that remain essential reading for anyone interested in how musical intelligence operates. He died in New York City on April 6, 1971, at the age of eighty-eight, and was buried in Venice, near his longtime collaborator Diaghilev.
The legacy is uncontainable. The Rite of Spring appears on virtually every list of the most important musical compositions of the twentieth century. Its rhythmic innovations influenced jazz, rock, minimalism, and film music to a degree that is impossible to fully trace. But Stravinsky's deeper achievement was demonstrating that a major artistic intelligence need not be monolithic — that reinvention, executed with genuine craft rather than mere novelty-seeking, is among the highest forms of creative courage.