Igor Stravinsky - Igor Stravinsky | Notable Biographies

(1882/06/17 - 1971/04/06)

Igor Stravinsky
Russian composer

He was born on June 17, 1882 in Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov). The son of a low level of the Imperial Opera in St. Petersburg.
He studied law at the University of this city, where he met the son of the Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who directed his first musical compositions.
In 1908 the Russian entrepreneur Sergei Diáguilev, proposes that you compose for his Ballets Russes. Fire bird (1910) and Petrushka (1911), had a resounding success for their rich orchestration and melodies that evoke traditional Russian music. However, at the premiere of the rite of spring (1913), it was not so lucky, the choreography avant-garde of Vaslav Nijinski, the dissonances and rhythms asymmetric provoked a reaction from the public so strong that not even the dancers could hear the Orchestra.
At the beginning of World War I settles in Switzerland, where it composes the soldier's tale (1918) for 7 instrumentalists, 3 actors, and a dancer, which warns the influence of jazz, as in Ragtime (1918) for 11 instruments and Piano ragmusic (1919). In 1920 he moved to Paris and creates his symphonies of wind instruments (1920), comic opera Mavra (1922) and the ballet-cantata wedding. This last work, composed for 4 pianos, percussion, and voice and influence of Russian traditional melodies, warns a release from the stresses of the dialogue which later characterized the rest of his work. He worked as pianist and conductor to help support his family. Thus began to compose works that conform to his pianistic skill, as the Concerto for piano and wind instruments (1924).
At the beginning of the Decade of 1920, he married the actress Vera de Bosset Soudeikine. To 1923 he began to compose his first neoclassical works, characterized by an ideal of objectivity which was in part a reaction against the emotional at the end of the romanticexcess. Works of this period are the oratorio Oedipus King (1927) with a latin text, version of J. Danielou on a text by Jean Cocteau inspired by Sophocles, melodrama Persephone (1934), for heedlessness, singers and Orchestra, with text by André Gide, inspired by the Greek myth, and Apolo Musageta ballet (1928, later titled Apollo) among other works written for the Russian choreographer George Balanchine.
In the mid-1920 he went through a spiritual crisis and in 1926 became religion Orthodox Russian. Shortly afterwards, in 1930, he composed the Symphony of Psalms, for chorus and Orchestra. In 1939 he moved to Hollywood (United States), there was thanks to various orders asCircus Polka (1942) made to be danced by circus elephants; Dances concertantes (1942) for Orchestra and scenes de ballet (1944) for a magazine of Broadway, Symphony in three movements (1945), mass (1948) and the opera of great success the rake's progress (1951, with libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman). In 1948 he meets the American director Robert Craft, who became his assistant musical and that encouraged him to listen to the music of the serialist, which dealt with the atonal melody as a series of tones no melodic or harmonic relationships and whose techniques were based on the twelve-tone system of Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg. Although Stravinsky had previously rejected the theories of Schönberg, he became interested in the music of his disciple, the Austrian composer Anton von Webern. Gradually began to use the techniques serial, integrating them in their own way in compositions such as the cantata Threni (1958), movements for piano and Orchestra (1959) and his last major composition, Requiem canticles (1966). In 1967, aged 80 and with a weak health, he directed his last recording.
Igor Stravinski died on April 6, 1971 in New York , and was buried in Venice.