Page 257 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)
Despite his diminutive stature, Igor Stravinsky (Figure 15.6) was a protean warrior for the avant-garde who commanded attention—and an audience— wherever he went. (As a student in 1966, your author had a lengthy, but con- fusing, conversation with him—was the composer too old or the student
too young?) Possessing an uncanny ear for sonority, Stravinsky cre-
ated masterpieces in many genres: opera, ballet, symphony, con-
certo, church Mass, and cantata. His versatility was such that he
could set to music a classical Greek drama (Oedipus Rex, 1927)
one day and write a ballet for elephants (Circus Polka, 1942)
the next. Throughout his long life, he traveled with the fashion-
able set of high art. Although reared in St. Petersburg, Russia,
he later lived in Paris, Venice, Lausanne, New York, and Holly-
wood. Forced to become an expatriate by the Russian Revolu-
tion (1917), he took French citizenship in 1934, and then, having
moved to the United States at the outbreak of World War II, he
became an American citizen in 1945. He counted among his
friends painter Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), and designer Coco Chanel (1883-1971). On his eightieth birthday, in 1962, he was honored by President John F. Kennedy at the White House and, later in the same year, by Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev in the Kremlin. When he died in New York at the age of eighty-eight, cosmopolitan Stravinsky was the world’s most famous composer, perhaps the last “high end art” composer to receive such worldwide recognition.
Like Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky rose to international fame as a composer of ballet music. In 1908, his early scores caught the attention of Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929), the legendary impresario (producer) of Russian opera and bal- let (Figure 15.7). Diaghilev knew he could make money by exporting Russian ballet to Paris, at that time the artistic capital of the world. So he formed
a dance company, called the Ballets russes (Russian Ballets), and hired, over the course of time, the most progressive artists he could find: Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse for scenic designs, and Claude Debussy
and Stravinsky, among others, as composers. Stravinsky soon be-
came the principal composer of the company, and the Ballets russes
became the focus of his musical activity for the next ten years. Ac-
cordingly, the decade 1910–1920 has become known as Stravinsky’s
Russian ballet period.
Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913)
Igor Stravinsky composed three important early ballet scores for Diaghilev’s dance company: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). All are built on Russian folk tales—a legacy of musical nationalism (see Chapter 14)—and all make use of the large, colorful orchestra of the late
Figure 15.6
Igor Stravinsky may have looked studious, but he enjoyed life among the glitterati of twentieth- century art and culture. The film Coco and Igor (2009) links him romantically with French fashion designer Coco Chanel, founder of the House of Chanel.
igor stravinsky (1882–1971) 235 Copyright 201 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
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Figure 15.7
Sergei Diaghilev in New York in 1916. Diaghilev’s creation, the modern dance company he called Ballets russes, has been immortal- ized by the award-winning film Ballets Russes (2005).
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Lebrecht Music & Arts © Mary Evans Picture Library/The Image Works
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