Musicians - Igor Stravinsky

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	Musicians - Igor Stravinsky

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (Russian: ) (June 17, 1882 – April 6, 1971) was a Russian-born composer of modern classical music. He became a French citizen, and later an American citizen. He composed in the primitivist, 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 daring and innovative 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 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 Alexis Roland-Manuel, Stravinsky composed a theoretical work entitled Poetics of Music. In it, he famously claimed that music was incapable of "expressing anything but itself". Robert Craft transcribed several interviews with the composer, which were published as Conversations with Stravinsky.

A quintessentially cosmopolitan Russian, Stravinsky was one of the most influential composers and artists of 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.

Biography

Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov), near St. Petersburg, Russia. Brought up 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 Fyodor Stravinsky 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 Nikolai 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 two further works for the Ballets Russes—Petrushka (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 Rimsky-Korsakov, to Petrushka'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 " them all to hell". (He succeeded: the 1913 première of Le sacre du printemps was probably the most famous riot in music history.)

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 he also collaborated with Pablo Picasso (Pulcinella, 1920), Jean Cocteau (Oedipus Rex, 1927) and George Balanchine (Apollon Musagete, 1928).

Relatively short of stature and not conventionally handsome, Stravinsky was nevertheless photogenic, as many pictures show. He was still young when, on 23 January 1906, he married his cousin Katerina Nossenko whom he had known since early childhood. Their marriage endured for 33 years, but the true love of his life, and later his partner until his death, was his second wife Vera de Bosset (1888-1982). 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. One of his sons, Soulima Stravinsky, was also a composer, but is little known compared to his father.

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 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.

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