Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky was born on 17 June 1882 (5 June by the old Russian calendar) at Oranienbaum, a seaside resort near St Petersburg where his family spent the summer. His father, Fyodor, was one of the most famous bass singers at the Mariinsky Theatre, and the boy grew up amid rehearsals and his father’s huge library. He took piano lessons from the age of nine, but his parents, who did not think him gifted enough for a musical career, steered him towards law.

In 1901 he began studying law at the University of St Petersburg. There he became friends with Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov, the composer’s son. In 1902 he showed his first compositions to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who agreed to give him private lessons. For six years the master taught him orchestration and became like a second father to him after Fyodor Stravinsky’s death in 1902. In 1906 Igor married his cousin Catherine Nossenko; they had four children.

In 1909 the impresario Sergei Diaghilev heard two short orchestral pieces by Stravinsky in St Petersburg and commissioned a ballet for his company, the Ballets Russes, then triumphing in Paris. The Firebird, premiered at the Paris Opéra in 1910 and based on a Russian fairy tale, was an instant triumph: at twenty-eight Stravinsky became famous. Petrushka followed (1911), the story of a fairground puppet that comes to life, with its famous chords in two superimposed keys, and then The Rite of Spring.

On 29 May 1913 the premiere of The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, caused one of the greatest scandals in the history of music. The ballet, depicting pagan rites of ancient Russia in which a young girl dances herself to death to celebrate spring, bewildered audiences with its violent, irregular rhythms, its dissonances and its choreography. The audience hissed, shouted and fought; the music could no longer be heard. A year later, performed in concert, the Rite was acclaimed. It is now regarded as one of the founding works of modern music.

During the First World War Stravinsky settled in Switzerland. Cut off from Russia, where the 1917 revolution cost him his property, he composed works for small forces, such as The Soldier’s Tale (1918), with the writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, about a soldier who sells his violin to the devil. In 1920 he moved to France. With the ballet Pulcinella (1920), based on eighteenth-century music attributed to Pergolesi, he began his “neoclassical” period, revisiting forms of the past through modern eyes.

In the 1920s and 1930s he composed the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927), on a Latin text by Jean Cocteau, the ballet Apollon musagète and the Symphony of Psalms (1930), and pursued a career as pianist and conductor. He became a French citizen in 1934. But in 1938–39 he lost his eldest daughter, his wife and his mother, all three to tuberculosis. At the start of the Second World War he emigrated to the United States, where he married the painter Vera de Bosset and settled in Hollywood. He became an American citizen in 1945.

He composed the opera The Rake’s Progress (1951), after William Hogarth’s engravings, and then, past seventy, embraced the serial technique of Schoenberg and Webern that he had long opposed. In 1962 he returned to Russia for the first time in forty-eight years and was welcomed triumphantly. He died in New York on 6 April 1971, aged eighty-eight, and was buried in Venice on the island of San Michele, near Diaghilev. He is regarded as one of the most influential composers of the twentieth century.