Igor Stravinsky: The One Who Escaped

Igor Stravinsky was born in 1882, and lived until 1971.  Over the time span of his life, Communism was in full swing.  Both the regimes of Lenin and Stalin had run their course well before the composer's death in 1971.  But luckily for Stravinsky, and the music world, he largely escaped the repression of the Soviets.  Of course he was able to do this because he lived in France and America for most of his life, but Igor Stravinsky is still a distinctly Russian composer, and probably the best known too.

The young Igor grew up the son of relatively wealthy parents in St. Petersburg.  His father was a bass singer at the Mariinsky Theatre, but like many Russian composers before him, Stravinsky's parents wanted him to become a lawyer.  So Stravinsky entered law school at the St. Petersburg University, but had remarkably poor attendance.  It was obvious the young Stravinsky's heart lay somewhere else.  This somewhere was music.

Stravinsky spent the summers during his time at law school with Rimsky-Korsakov, who was effectively the leading Russian composer at the time.  Rimsky-Korsakov urged Stravinsky to not enter the St. Petersburg Conservatory and instead take private composition lessons.  Stravinsky regarded Rimsky-Korsakov as a second father (his own had died in 1905) and took lessons from him until his death in 1908.

Stravinsky's score to The Rite of Spring

It seems that now Stravinsky was an independent and capable composer.  His two early orchestral works of 1909, Scherzo fantastique, and Fireworks, were sufficiently brilliant enough to attract the attention of Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario of The Ballets Russes.

This led to three now famous commissions for Stravinsky, over the next five years.  All three were ballets for Diaghilev, and each one surpassed the last in their impact on the musical world.  These three works make up the core of what is known as Stravinsky's "Russian Period", where his music is influenced heavily by Russian folklore and peasant music.  But this music is nothing like the music of The Five.

The first work to emerge was The Firebird, based on Russian folk legends about a mythical bird of the same name.  This ballet proved that Stravinsky was not only an inventive and original composer, but a brilliant orchestrator as well.

The second was called Petrushka, and tells the story of a Russian puppet who comes to life, complete with emotions, even though he his made of straw.  Petrushka, composed in 1911, pushed the harmonic envelope at the time, enough to have a chord named after it.  The so-called "Petrushka" chord, a C major triad played simultaneously with a F# major triad, is used in the ballet to signal the appearance of the main character.

But Stravinsky's biggest success was yet to come.  The next year, the composer fulfilled his third commission from Diaghilev with The Rite of Spring, a brutal and violent work, depicting the pagan sacrifice of a young girl.  The work is ripe with irregular rhythms and dissonance, enough to cause an infamous scandal at its premiere in Paris.  Had this work been premiered some years later in Russia, Stravinsky would have surely been arrested, or worse.

Here is an excerpt from The Rite of Spring.  Note the sharp rhythms and chords used to convey a sense of savagery and ritual to this scene, "The Sacrificial Dance"

With the "success" of The Rite of Spring and his other ballets, Stravinsky was now a composer of international importance and influence.  And with the independence and clarity of mind that only a true artist can possess, Stravinsky turned away from his earlier style, and adopted an entirely new one, based on the classics of the 18th century.  The first work of this period was the ballet Pulcinella.

This "neo-classical" style of Stravinsky's lasted a long time, and saw some of the composers best work. During this time he wrote many articles about music and his theory of art.

Stravinsky after being arrested in the U.S.
for his arrangement of the national anthem

Here is a selection from the composer's 1936 autobiography:

I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc.  Expression has never been an inherent property of music.  That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality.  It is simply an additional attribute which . . . we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention -- in short, an aspect we have come to confuse, unconsciously or by force of habit, with its essential being....


People will always insist upon looking in music for something that is not there.  The main thing for them is to know what the piece expresses, and what the author had in mind when he composed it.  They never seem to understand that music has an entity of its own apart from anything that it may suggest to them....

A scene from the ballet Apollon Musagete

Stravinsky in his old age, still lively

Beginning in the 1950s, Stravinsky, who was now in his 70s, did something remarkable.  With all his success from 30 years of the neo-classical style, the composer decided to change styles for the third time.  Strangely, Stravinsky started composing in the style of serialism.

But Stravinsky didn't honor the objectivity that serialism claimed to give to music.  The music produced by Stravinsky in his unique serialist style tends to dwell on religious themes, from the ballad Abraham and Isaac to his Requiem Canticles for chorus and orchestra.  The latter work was even performed at his funeral in 1971.