Search results
His neoclassical period exhibited themes and techniques from the classical period, like the use of the sonata form in his Octet (1923) and use of Greek mythological themes in works including Apollon musagète (1927), Oedipus rex (1927), and Persephone (1935).
Mar 2, 2020 · Publication date. 1966. Topics. Craft, Robert -- Diaries, Stravinsky, Igor, 1882-1971, Craft, Robert, Music, Music -- History and criticism, Musique. Publisher. New York, A.A. Knopf. Collection. marygrovecollege; internetarchivebooks; americana; inlibrary; printdisabled. Contributor. Internet Archive. Language. English. Item Size. 670.0M.
- Overview
- Life and career
Igor Stravinsky was a Russian-born composer whose work revolutionized musical thought and sensibility in the 20th century. His fame rests on a few works, notably The Rite of Spring (1913), wherein he presented a new concept of music involving constantly changing rhythms and metric imbalances, a brilliantly original orchestration, and drastically dissonant harmonies.
What is Igor Stravinsky famous for?
Igor Stravinsky’s collaborations with Serge Diaghilev for the Ballet Russes, including The Firebird (1910), made him known overnight. Other compositions included The Rite of Spring (1913), which provoked one of the most famous first-night riots in the history of musical theatre, and The Rake’s Progress (1951).
What was Igor Stravinsky’s family like?
Igor Stravinsky’s father, Fyodor, was one of the leading Russian operatic basses of his day, and Igor’s mother, Anna, was a talented pianist. Igor married his cousin Catherine Nossenko and had four children. In 1940, after the deaths of his eldest daughter (1938), his wife (1939), and his mother (1939), he married Vera de Bosset.
How was Igor Stravinsky educated?
Stravinsky’s father was one of the leading Russian operatic basses of his day, and the mixture of the musical, theatrical, and literary spheres in the Stravinsky family household exerted a lasting influence on the composer. Nevertheless his own musical aptitude emerged quite slowly. As a boy he was given lessons in piano and music theory. But then he studied law and philosophy at St. Petersburg University (graduating in 1905), and only gradually did he become aware of his vocation for musical composition. In 1902 he showed some of his early pieces to the composer Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (whose son Vladimir was a fellow law student), and Rimsky-Korsakov was sufficiently impressed to agree to take Stravinsky as a private pupil, while at the same time advising him not to enter the conservatory for conventional academic training.
Rimsky-Korsakov tutored Stravinsky mainly in orchestration and acted as the budding composer’s mentor, discussing each new work and offering suggestions. He also used his influence to get his pupil’s music performed. Several of Stravinsky’s student works were performed in the weekly gatherings of Rimsky-Korsakov’s class, and two of his works for orchestra—the Symphony in E-flat Major and The Faun and the Shepherdess, a song cycle with words by Aleksandr Pushkin—were played by the Court Orchestra in 1908, the year Rimsky-Korsakov died. In February 1909 a short but brilliant orchestral piece, the Scherzo fantastique was performed in St. Petersburg at a concert attended by the impresario Serge Diaghilev, who was so impressed by Stravinsky’s promise as a composer that he quickly commissioned some orchestral arrangements for the summer season of his Ballets Russes in Paris. For the 1910 ballet season Diaghilev approached Stravinsky again, this time commissioning the musical score for a new full-length ballet on the subject of the Firebird.
The premiere of The Firebird at the Paris Opéra on June 25, 1910, was a dazzling success that made Stravinsky known overnight as one of the most gifted of the younger generation of composers. This work showed how fully he had assimilated the flamboyant Romanticism and orchestral palette of his master. The Firebird was the first of a series of spectacular collaborations between Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s company. The following year saw the Ballets Russes’s premiere on June 13, 1911, of the ballet Petrushka, with Vaslav Nijinsky dancing the title role to Stravinsky’s musical score. Meanwhile, Stravinsky had conceived the idea of writing a kind of symphonic pagan ritual to be called Great Sacrifice. The result was The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps), the composition of which was spread over two years (1911–13). The first performance of The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées on May 29, 1913, provoked one of the more famous first-night riots in the history of musical theatre. Stirred by Nijinsky’s unusual and suggestive choreography and Stravinsky’s creative and daring music, the audience cheered, protested, and argued among themselves during the performance, creating such a clamour that the dancers could not hear the orchestra. This highly original composition, with its shifting and audacious rhythms and its unresolved dissonances, was an early modernist landmark. From this point on, Stravinsky was known as “the composer of The Rite of Spring” and the destructive modernist par excellence. But he himself was already moving away from such post-Romantic extravagances, and world events of the next few years only hastened that process.
Britannica Quiz
Who Said It? Writers and Musicians Quiz
Stravinsky’s successes in Paris with the Ballets Russes effectively uprooted him from St. Petersburg. He had married his cousin Catherine Nossenko in 1906, and, after the premiere of The Firebird in 1910, he brought her and their two children to France. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 seriously disrupted the Ballets Russes’s activities in western Europe, however, and Stravinsky found he could no longer rely on that company as a regular outlet for his new compositions. The war also effectively marooned him in Switzerland, where he and his family had regularly spent their winters, and it was there that they spent most of the war. The Russian Revolution of October 1917 finally extinguished any hope Stravinsky may have had of returning to his native land.
Mar 5, 2024 · He absorbed the baroque music of George Frideric Handel (1685-1759), the Brandenburg period of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), and the giant choruses of Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901). These themes of old were then adapted and given Stravinsky's unique musical gestures so that the origins all but disappear.
- Mark Cartwright
Jul 1, 2000 · Instead of organically developing musical themes according to traditional concepts of tonality-based form, he assembled a suite of individual episodes in which tonal and bitonal harmonies are perceived by the listener as seemingly free-standing entities—more like the colors in a painting than the interlocking grammatical particles of a ...
Stravinsky has said, marking his rediscovery of the past, it was not without an advent. The creative period ushered in by Pulcinella seems in retrospect to have lasted for just over 30 years, from 1920 to 1951, from Stravinsky's 37th year to his 68th.
People also ask
Did Igor Stravinsky break the status quo in classical music?
What was Stravinsky's music like after the rite?
Did Stravinsky reorganize past events?
What did Stravinsky say about music?
What books did Igor Stravinsky write?
How many periods did Stravinsky have?
May 29, 2018 · Stravinsky, Igor Feodorovich (1882–1971) Russian composer who revolutionized 20th-century music. Stravinsky studied (1907–08) with Rimsky-Korsakov. His early ballets, The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911), were commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes.
