The Rite

Igor Stravinsky's father was a bass singer in Saint Petersburg, and through him his son became familiar with opera and concert literature at an early age. He was a pupil of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov from 1902-08. His international breakthrough came with the ballets L'Oiseau de feu (The Firebird), Petrushka and Le Sacre du printemps, written for Serge Diaghilev's ballet company Ballets Russes in Paris. The latter, whose premiere was an unprecedented scandal (mainly due to the choreography), became one of the classics of 20th century music, but with its gigantic orchestra and orgiastic depiction of a pagan human sacrifice is unique in Stravinsky's production.

During World War I, Igor Stravinsky lived in Switzerland and France, and after the Russian Revolution his exile became permanent; he only returned to Russia on a visit in 1962.

The war led to a reduction in his instrumentation, and works such as the song ballets Renard and Les Noces have a chamber music accompaniment. They utilise elements of Russian folklore, as does the anti-opera L'Histoire du soldat (The Story of a Soldier), which also incorporates popular music such as tango and ragtime.

Selected works of Igor Stravinsky
Ballets
The Firebird (Ildfuglen), 1910
Petrushka, 1911
The Rite of Spring, 1913
L'Histoire du soldat (The Story of a Soldier), 1918
Pulcinella (to music by G.B. Pergolesi and others), 1920
Fox, 1922
The Wedding, 1923
Apollo Musagetes, 1928
The Fairy's Kiss (Feens kys), 1928
Card game (Kortspil), 1937
Orpheus, 1948
Agon, 1957
Operas
Le Rossignol (The Nightingale, after Hans Christian Andersen), 1914
Mavra, 1922
Oedipus Rex (opera-oratorio), 1927
The Rake's Progress, 1951
Orchestral works
Symphonies for wind instruments, 1920
Dumbarton Oaks concert, 1938
Symphony in three movements, 1946
Symphony in C, 1948
Concerto for piano and winds, 1924
Capriccio for piano and orchestra, 1930
Violin Concerto, 1931
Ebony Concerto for clarinet and jazz band, 1946
Movements for piano and orchestra, 1960
Vocal music
Hymn Symphony, 1930
Mass, 1948
Cantata, 1952
Canticum Sacrum, 1956
Threni, id est: Lamentationes Jeremiae prophetae, 1958
A Sermon, A Narrative And A Prayer, 1961
Requiem canticles, 1967
In memoriam Dylan Thomas, 1954
Chamber Music
Three pieces for string quartet, 1914
Ragtime for 11 winds, 1918
Octet, 1924
Septet, 1953
In the interwar years, Igor Stravinsky made his living composing on commission and touring the US and Europe with his own works as a pianist and conductor. The ballet Pulcinella marked the beginning of a neoclassical phase in which, after the surrealist works of the 1910s, he sought objectivity in the forms and stylistic features of early art music (see neoclassical). The works from this period are not pastiches; they depict the mannerisms of the chosen styles in a way similar to Pablo Picasso's cubist paintings.

Igor Stravinsky found models in Johann Sebastian Bach (the concerto Dumbarton Oaks), Peter Tchaikovsky (the ballet Le Baiser de la fée), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (the opera The Rake's Progress) and in the Viennese classical sonata form (Symphony in C).

In 1939 he moved to the United States, where he became a citizen in 1945. He recorded almost his entire output on disc, after 1948 with the help of conductor Robert Craft (1923-2015), with whom he published a series of books featuring conversations between the two. Craft's interest in the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton von Webern was instrumental in Stravinsky developing his own variant of serialism.

His late works include both twelve-tone compositions (such as the ballet Agon) and movements inspired by the Darmstadt School's dotted style (Movements for piano and orchestra). In Canticum Sacrum, for example, serial technique appears alongside features from Renaissance music by Carlo Gesualdo and Claudio Monteverdi, among others.

Igor Stravinsky's use of serialism is in some ways as distant as his use of music by Bach, but his late works, many of which are religious rituals such as Requiem canticles or epitaphs for dead loved ones such as In memoriam Dylan Thomas, have a more direct expression than many earlier works. This may be reflected in his shift in personality from the cool man of the world of the interwar years to the smiling, all-embracing figure of old age.

Igor Stravinsky conducted many of his works, which he also recorded on disc in large numbers. Over time, conducting has developed into a musical discipline in its own right, requiring both special talent and training. Not every composer is therefore the best interpreter of his own music, but there are notable exceptions. Here Stravinsky is seen conducting a performance of the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, which he wrote in 1926-27.
© Gyldendal publishing house
Igor Stravinsky conducted many of his works, which he also recorded on disc in large numbers. Over time, orchestral conducting has developed into a se... | Read more
Aesthetics and compositional technique
In his memoirs Chroniques de ma vie (1935; History of my Life, 1943) and Poétique musicale (1942; Musical Poetics, 1947), Igor Stravinsky formulated an anti-subjective, anti-romantic aesthetic: the composer is a craftsman or inventor who creates objects by researching the material, and music cannot and should not express anything. He did not have a compositional style; styles were part of the material that he subjected to technical processing.

In clear opposition to tradition, he sought to create an inorganic music. His forms are not based on thematic and harmonic development, but are constructed from static cells that are repeated in irregular patterns. The harmony moves seamlessly between relatively simple tonal elements and strongly dissonant fields; even in several of his serial works there are tonal orientation points.

The virtuosic instrumentation is clear and dry, sometimes wry, with a preference for winds and percussion. In the vocal works, he distances himself from the text by, among other things, declaiming it against the accents. In his dramatic works, he created distance between music and action, partly by having the action performed by dancers while the text is performed by singers in the orchestra (as in Renard), and partly by avoiding any psychological empathy with the characters, who, like the chosen girl in Le Sacre, unwillingly perform a fated ritual.

Through these approaches, Igor Stravinsky gave his works an alienating effect. In his ironically distanced disposition towards all styles of music history, he anticipated postmodernism. Stravinsky was the first to receive the Léonie Sonning Music Prize in 1959.