From then until the death of Katerina in Stravinsky led a deft 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 Patronage too was never far away.
In the early s 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. Stravinsky proved adept at playing the part of "man of the world", acquiring a keen instinct for business matters and appearing relaxed and comfortable in many of the world's major cities.
Paris , Venice , Berlin , London and New York all hosted successful appearances as pianist and conductor. Most people who knew him through dealings connected with performances spoke of him as polite, courteous and helpful. For example, Otto Klemperer , who knew Schoenberg well, said that he always found Stravinsky much more co-operative and easy to deal with. At the same time he had a disregard of his social inferiors: Robert Craft was embarrassed by his habit of tapping a glass with a fork and loudly demanding attention in restaurants.
He comissioned Stravinsky to write a ballet for his theater; so in , Stravinsky traveled to Paris. That ballet ended up being the famous L'Oiseau de Feu. He returned to Paris in to write more ballets as well as many other works.
He moved to the United States in and became a naturalized citizen in He continued to live in the United States until his death in , unsuccessfully writing music for films. Stravinsky had adapted to life in France , but moving to America aged 58 was a very different prospect. When he planned to write an opera with W. Auden , the need to acquire more familiarity with the English-speaking world coincided with his meeting the conductor and musicologist Robert Craft. Craft lived with Stravinsky until his death, acting as interpreter, chronicler, assistant conductor and factotum for countless musical and social tasks.
Stravinsky's taste in literature was wide and reflected his constant desire for new discoveries. At the end of his life he was even setting Hebrew scripture in Abraham and Isaac. His grave is close to the tomb of his long-time collaborator Diaghilev. Stravinsky's life had encompassed most of the 20th Century , including many of its modern classical music styles, and he influenced composers both during and after his lifetime.
Stravinsky's career largely falls into three distinct stylistic periods. Most of his compositions can be placed in one of the three. The first of Stravinsky's major stylistic periods excluding some early minor works was inaugurated by the three ballets he composed for Diaghilev. The ballets have several shared characteristics: they are scored for extremely large orchestras; they use Russian folk themes and motifs; and they bear the mark of Rimsky-Korsakov's imaginative scoring and instrumentation.
The first of the ballets, L'oiseau de feu , is notable for its unusual introduction triplets in the low basses and sweeping orchestration. Petrushka , too, is distinctively scored and the first of Stravinsky's ballets to draw on folk mythology. But it is the third ballet, The Rite of Spring , that is generally considered the apotheosis of Stravinsky's "Russian Period". Here, the composer draws on the brutalism of pagan Russia, reflecting these sentiments in roughly-drawn, stinging motifs that appear throughout the work.
There are several famous passages in the work, but two are of particular note: the opening theme played on a bassoon with notes at the very top of its register, almost out of range; and the thumping, off kilter eighth-note motif played by strings and accented by French horns on off-rhythms See Le sacre du printemps The Rite of Spring for a more detailed account of this work. The next phase of Stravinsky's compositional style, slightly overlapping the first, is marked by two works: Pulcinella and the Octet for wind instruments.
Both of these works feature what was to become a hallmark of this period; that is, Stravinsky's return, or "looking back", to the classical music of Mozart and Bach and their contemporaries. This " neo-classical " style involved the abandonment of the large orchestras demanded by the ballets. In these new works, written roughly between and , Stravinsky turns largely to wind instruments, the piano, and choral and chamber works.
Some larger works from this period are the three symphonies: the Symphonie des Psaumes Symphony of Psalms , Symphony in C and Symphony in Three Movements Apollon , Persephone and Orpheus also mark Stravinsky's concern, during this period, of not only returning to "Classic" music but also returning to "Classic" themes: in these instances, the mythology of the ancient Greeks. The pinnacle of this period is the opera The Rake's Progress completed in This opera, written to a libretto by Auden and based on the etchings of Hogarth , encapsulates everything that Stravinsky had perfected in the previous 20 years of his neo-classic period.
The music is direct but quirky; it borrows from classic tonal harmony but also interjects surprising dissonances; it features Stravinsky's trademark off-rhythms; and it harkens back to the operas and themes of Monteverdi , Gluck and Mozart. After the opera's completion Stravinsky never wrote another "neo-classic" work and instead began writing the music that came to define his final stylistic change. Only after the death of Arnold Schoenberg , the inventor of the twelve tone system , in did Stravinsky begin making use of the technique in his own works.
No doubt, Stravinsky was aided in his understanding of, or even conversion to, the twelve tone method by his confidant and helper Robert Craft, who had long been advocating the change.
He composed smaller pieces, including the piano version of three dances from Petrouchka. Later, when his son was grown up, he composed a Concerto for two solo pianos for himself to play with his son. He did not compose any more for the Ballets Russes, but he did compose Oedipus rex as a special tribute to them.
This work was a mixture of opera and oratorio. The words were in Latin and were written by Jean Cocteau. It was performed as a concert performance. Diaghilev was annoyed, but then he died in and the Ballets Russes company no longer carried on.
In Stravinsky, who belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church, had a deep religious experience which effected his music. Stravinsky met the violinist Dushkin and composed a Violin Concerto as well as the Duo concertante for violin and piano which the two musicians played together at many concerts. He became more and more in demand in the United States and wrote several works for American people.
He was offered a job as professor at Harvard University. At this time a lot of his family were ill. Then his daughter died, his wife died and his mother died. He was ill himself. Stravinsky was immediately invited to conduct many concerts in America. Vera arrived in America four months later and she and Stravinsky were married in Bedford, Massachusetts. They applied for American citizenship and settled in Hollywood.
He was quite short of money and he accepted any invitation to compose music. He even accepted a private pupil. Stravinsky composed a mass. It was not commissioned , he just wanted to compose it. It was performed in La Scala , Milan , in conducted by Ansermet. He then decided to compose a full-length opera in English. It was first performed in Venice in It is the best of his works in the neo-classical style. Another work from this period is his Symphony in C. It shows a different way of composing tonal music to the tonal works of classical composers.
He met a musician called Robert Craft who came to live with the family and helped Stravinsky sort out his compositions and papers. He was surprised to find that Stravinsky never visited Schoenberg, who only lived a few streets away. Soon Stravinsky started to use serialism in his own compositions.
Craft travelled with Stravinsky and helped him a great deal, for example, by conducting some of the concerts, or rehearsing the orchestras before Stravinsky came. In he was invited to the White House by President Kennedy. In the same year he returned to Russia for a visit. He had not been there for nearly half a century. It made Stravinsky very happy to know that Russians were interested in him again.
During his last years he became rather ill. Threni is one of his last compositions. It is a setting of the parts of the Lamentations of Jeremiah for voices and orchestra.
He composed other religious works including Requiem Canticles. In he moved with his family to New York where he died two years later. Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso collaborated on Pulcinella in Leaving the theater, Maurice Ravel hailed Rite as a work of genius.
Since then, it has become an indispensable classic, one of the pillars of 20th century music. A new musical aestheticism had been born. Did he not, in three years, create three masterpieces that put him at the pinnacle of fame? Use or reproductions strictly forbidden. After a brief stay in Russia, just before the conflict began, the composer was forced to leave the homeland that he would see again only in as a U.
During the war years, Igor Stravinsky chose to move to Switzerland rather than subject his family now including four children to the vagaries of a nomadic life. Exile from his homeland created in Stravinsky the desire and need to draw on Russian folk themes for his new compositions. The collections of old folk songs gathered during his final trip to Kiev fed much of his work during this period in Switzerland.
Begun in , Wedding was only completed in after a long process of instrumentation and many revisions. These dance scenes with song and music describe a Russian peasant wedding. Fox commissioned by the Princess de Polignac was written between and Stravinsky inaugurated his trestle theatre, with dancers and acrobats improvising on stage. Also inspired by Russian folktales, this ballet features a fox who attacks a cock by disguising himself first as a nun, then as a beggar.
A cat and a goat try to stop him and eventually kill him. The Bolshevik Revolution of deprived Stravinsky permanently of his fortune. No longer receiving royalties from his Russian publisher, the composer now found himself in a precarious financial situation, forced to continue to write for a living.
The war making large-scale performances improbable, this work, intended for a travelling theatre, would be on a much smaller scale. The two friends assumed that it would be given in small rooms. Despite his previous glory on the great stages of Paris, the composer enjoyed the more modest exercise.
For the libretto, he turned again to the stories of Afanassiev. The text, written in a style that reflects both the poem and the tale, is not sung but spoken.
The work premiered in Lausanne in September under the baton of Ernest Ansermet. Soon after the war ended, Diaghilev began to revive his company, making contact with Stravinsky. Pulcinella, composed in Morges between , is a modern work — and the audience loved it. Having been influenced by Russian folklore and then by jazz, Stravinsky now discovered the music of the past. With the war over, the brilliant composer contemplated leaving Switzerland to give a new boost to his career.
Having considered Rome, the family Stravinsky instead uprooted to Paris. After his exile in Switzerland during the war, Stravinsky settled for 20 years in France, where musical activity was intense.
The return of the composer on the Parisian scene took place on May 15, with the creation of Pulcinella at the Opera. Stravinsky revived traditional musical forms concerto grosso, fugue, symphony and his work took a new turn.
Stravinsky now abandoned the great orchestras once required for his ballets, using wind instruments and piano, and turned to chamber music and vocal compositions.
Stravinsky became one of the instigators of Neoclassicism, a movement also adopted by such composers as Darius Milhaud, Aaron Copland and Serge Prokofiev. Stravinsky constructed his scores according to classical forms, but they clearly bore his signature.
For just over three years, the Stravinsky family moved to Biarritz, on the Basque coast. Here, the composer completed Wedding Les Noces , a work begun in , in which he was still using Russian folklore. But he renounced the orchestra originally planned that called for more than four pianos and a percussion ensemble. In the same period, the French piano manufacturer, Pleyel, signed a contract with Stravinsky, providing him with a work studio.
The Aeolian Company of New York repeated this agreement in This project became Mavra, a parody of opera bouffe. Faced with this criticism he wrote:. To make it perfectly clear, what they want is out of date for me and to follow them would be to do violence to myself. Octet required a reduced number of musicians and its use of counterpoint was a look back to Bach. Octet was the first in a long series of instrumental compositions making use of this process. Concerto is composed in three movements according to the classical model.
From , Stravinsky divided his activities between composing, conducting and performing. Prompted by Koussevitsky, he began a parallel career as performer and conductor that lasted 15 years. He conducted numerous tours throughout Europe with his pianist son, Soulima. Shortly thereafter, beginning in , Stravinsky made his first trip to the United States where he signed a contract as conductor and soloist for a tour of two months. The American public, already well aware of his work, welcomed him warmly.
Stravinsky continued to tour frequently throughout Europe as a conductor. Stravinsky wanted to compose once again a large-scale work based on a Latin text. Oedipus Rex is a work that is both confusing and austere, its characters stand like statues keeping their movements to a minimum.
The music focuses on the drama of the story and includes motifs of the Baroque era inspired by Handel. His renewed religious sentiment was also felt in two ballets, Apollon Musagete and Persephone Apollon Musagete later known as Apollo was the last ballet staged by Diaghilev one year before his death and the dissolution of the Ballets Russes.
It is a classical ballet in which the composer celebrates the apotheosis of string instruments. The performance of this work marks the beginning of a close collaboration between Stravinsky and the choreographer George Balanchine. Persephone, a melodrama in three parts also based on Greek mythology, was composed for the Ida Rubinstein ballet company. This text is assigned to a speaker, a tenor, and a chorus mixed and children , accompanied by an orchestra whose melodic charm is undeniable.
In , Stravinsky made the acquaintance of the violinist Samuel Dushkin with whom he collaborated on Concerto pour Violon, commissioned by the composer, Blair Fairchild, followed by a sonata for violin and piano, Duo Concertante. In , Stravinsky moved to Paris in after two years spent in Voreppe, near Grenoble and acquired French nationality.
His second son, Soulima, began a career as a pianist, interpreting the works of his father. Stravinsky wrote Concerto for two pianos alone Concerto pour deux pianos seuls in so that they could perform together in public. A new ballet, inspired by the scenario of a poker game, followed Persephone.
The first performance took place on April 27, at the Metropolitan Opera under his direction. In the spring of that year, Stravinsky began work on a concerto for chamber orchestra, ordered by wealthy American patrons, Mr.
Bliss, on the occasion of their wedding 30th anniversary. Stravinsky then, in , composed his Symphony in C Symphonie en ut for the 50th anniversary of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Tuberculosis struck the Stravinsky family with three deaths : his eldest daughter Ludmila November , his wife Catherine March and his mother Anna June Stravinsky interrupted his work. Nadia Boulanger then informed Stravinsky that Harvard University had chosen him for its prestigious Poetry Chair for the year for a series of lectures on his conception of music. America welcomed the composer as a prestigious guest.
With demands on his time from all sides, Stravinsky decided to settle on the new continent. He wrote, directed, recorded and lectured incessantly and continued to create performances worldwide. At the beginning of , he married his second wife, Vera de Bosset. Stravinsky and his new wife moved to Beverly Hills, then bought a house in Hollywood, a home where Stravinsky would remain for a long period of his life.
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