83 Facts About Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century and a pivotal figure in modernist music.

Igor Stravinsky met the impresario Sergei Diaghilev soon after, who commissioned the composer to write three ballets for the Ballets Russes's Paris seasons: The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring, the last of which caused a near-riot at the premiere due to its avant-garde nature and later changed the way composers understood rhythmic structure.

Igor Stravinsky died of pulmonary edema on 6 April 1971 in New York City, having left six memoirs written with his friend and assistant Robert Craft, as well as an earlier autobiography and a series of lectures.

Igor Stravinsky's mother, Anna Kirillovna Stravinskaya, was an amateur singer and pianist from an established family of landowners.

Igor Stravinsky's father, Fyodor Ignatyevich Stravinsky, was a famous bass at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, descended from a line of Polish landowners.

The name "Igor Stravinsky" is of Polish origin, deriving from the Strava river in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The family was originally called "Soulima-Igor Stravinsky", bearing the Soulima arms, but "Soulima" was dropped after Russia's annexation during the partitions of Poland.

Igor Stravinsky was baptized hours after birth and joined to the Russian Orthodox Church in St Nicholas Cathedral.

Constantly in fear of his short-tempered father and indifferent towards his mother, Igor Stravinsky lived there for the first 27 years of his life with three siblings: Roman and Yury, his older siblings who irritated him immensely, and Gury, his close younger brother with whom he said he found "the love and understanding denied us by our parents".

Igor Stravinsky was educated by the family's governess until age eleven, when he began attending the Second Saint Petersburg Gymnasium, a school he recalled hating because he had few friends.

From age nine, Igor Stravinsky studied privately with a piano teacher.

Igor Stravinsky later wrote that his parents saw no musical talent in him due to his lack of technical skills; the young pianist frequently improvised instead of practicing assigned pieces.

At university, Igor Stravinsky befriended Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov, son of the leading Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

The group occasionally attended chamber concerts oriented to modern music, and while Rimsky-Korsakov and his colleague Anatoly Lyadov hated attending, Igor Stravinsky remembered the concerts as intriguing and intellectually stimulating, being the first place he was exposed to French composers like Franck, Dukas, Faure, and Debussy.

Igor Stravinsky later wrote that his teachers' musical conservatism was justified, and helped him build the foundation that would become the base of his style.

In July 1901, Igor Stravinsky expressed infatuation with Lyudmila Kuxina, Nosenko's best friend, but after the self-described "summer romance" had ended, Nosenko and Igor Stravinsky's relationship began developing into a furtive romance.

The vivid color and tone of Igor Stravinsky's works intrigued Diaghilev, and the impresario subsequently commissioned Igor Stravinsky to orchestrate music by Chopin for parts of the ballet.

Igor Stravinsky later recollected that after the premiere and subsequent performances, he met many figures in the Paris art scene; Debussy was brought on stage after the premiere and invited Igor Stravinsky to dinner, beginning a lifelong friendship between the two composers.

The Igor Stravinsky family moved to Lausanne, Switzerland, for the birth of their third child, Soulima, and it was there that Igor Stravinsky began work on a for piano and orchestra depicting the tale of a puppet coming to life.

The resulting work, Petrushka, premiered in Paris on 13 June 1911 to equal popularity as The Firebird, and Igor Stravinsky became established as one of the most advanced young theater composers of his time.

Igor Stravinsky immediately shared the idea with Nicholas Roerich, a friend and painter of pagan subjects.

When Igor Stravinsky told Diaghilev about the idea, the impresario excitedly agreed to commission the work.

Additionally, Igor Stravinsky made a new concert suite from The Firebird and sold it to a London publisher in an attempt to regain copyright control over the ballet.

Diaghilev continued to organize Ballets Russes shows across Europe, including two charity concerts for the Red Cross where Igor Stravinsky made his conducting debut with The Firebird.

In September 1920, they relocated to the home of Coco Chanel, an associate of Diaghilev's, where Igor Stravinsky composed his early neoclassical work the Symphonies of Wind Instruments.

In 1921, Igor Stravinsky signed a contract with the player piano company Pleyel to create piano roll arrangements of his music.

Igor Stravinsky received a studio at their factory on the Rue Rochechouart, where he reorchestrated for a small ensemble including player piano.

Igor Stravinsky signed another contract in 1924, this time with the Aeolian Company in London, producing rolls that included comments about the work by Igor Stravinsky that were engraved into the rolls.

Igor Stravinsky stopped working with player pianos in 1930 when the Aeolian Company's London branch was dissolved.

In 1923, Igor Stravinsky finished orchestrating, settling on a percussion ensemble including four pianos.

Igor Stravinsky conducted the premiere of his Octet in 1923 and served as the soloist for the premiere of his Piano Concerto in 1924.

The Igor Stravinsky family moved again in September 1924 to Nice, France.

Igor Stravinsky had abandoned the Russian Orthodox Church during his teenage years, but after meeting Father Nicolas in 1926 and reconnecting with his faith, he began regularly attending services.

In 1925, Igor Stravinsky asked the French writer and artist Jean Cocteau to write the libretto for an operatic setting of Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus Rex in Latin.

The May 1927 premiere of his opera-oratorio Oedipus rex was staged as a concert performance since there was too little time and money to present it as a full opera, and Igor Stravinsky attributed the work's critical failure to its programming between two glittery ballets.

Furthermore, the influence from Russian Orthodox vocal music and 18th-century composers like Handel was not well received in the press after the May 1927 premiere; neoclassicism was not popular with Parisian critics, and Igor Stravinsky had to publicly assert that his music was not part of the movement.

Diaghilev's fury with Igor Stravinsky for accepting a ballet commission from someone else caused an intense feud between the two, one that lasted until the impresario's death in August 1929.

That year, Igor Stravinsky received another ballet commission from Ida Rubenstein for a setting of a poem by Andre Gide.

Between lectures, Igor Stravinsky finished the Symphony in C and toured across the country, meeting de Bosset upon her arrival in New York.

However, Stravinsky eventually joined popular Hollywood circles, attending parties with celebrities and becoming closely acquainted with European authors Aldous Huxley, W H Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Dylan Thomas.

Around the 1948 premiere of another Balanchine collaboration, the ballet Orpheus, the composer met the young conductor Robert Craft in New York; Craft had asked Igor Stravinsky to explain the revision of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments for an upcoming concert.

Igor Stravinsky finished the opera of the same name in 1951, and despite its widespread performances and success, the composer was dismayed to find that his newer music did not captivate young composers.

Igor Stravinsky completed In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, his first work fully based on the serial twelve-tone technique, the following year.

Igor Stravinsky did not return to Los Angeles until December 1962 after eight months of almost continual traveling.

Igor Stravinsky revisited biblical themes for many of his later works, notably in the 1961 chamber cantata A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer, the 1962 musical television production The Flood, the 1963 Hebrew cantata Abraham and Isaac, and the 1966 Requiem Canticles, the last of which was his final major composition.

The intense touring schedule began taking a toll on the elderly composer; January 1967 marked his last recording session, and his final concert came the following May An obviously very frail Igor Stravinsky made his final public conducting appearance on May 17,1967 at Massey Hall in Toronto, when he led the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in a performance of his Pulcinella Suite.

Much of Igor Stravinsky's music is characterized by short, sharp articulations with minimal rubato or vibrato.

Igor Stravinsky's music is often divided into three periods of composition: his Russian period, where he was greatly influenced by Russian artists and folklore; his neoclassical period, where he turned towards techniques and themes from the classical period; and his serial period, where he used highly structured composition techniques pioneered by composers of the Second Viennese School.

Only three works survive from before Igor Stravinsky met Rimsky-Korsakov in August 1902: "Tarantella", Scherzo in G minor, and The Storm Cloud, the first two being works for piano and the last for voice and piano.

Russian composers often used large orchestration to feature many different timbres, and Igor Stravinsky harnessed this idea in his first three ballets, often surprising the musicians and performers due to the orchestra's great force at certain moments.

The Firebird used a harmonic structure that Igor Stravinsky called "leit-harmony", a portmanteau of leitmotif and harmony used by Rimsky-Korsakov in his opera The Golden Cockerel.

Igor Stravinsky later wrote how he composed The Firebird in a state of "revolt against Rimsky", and that he "tried to surpass him with ponticello, col legno, flautando, glissando, and fluttertongue effects".

Igor Stravinsky defined his musical character in his second ballet Petrushka.

Igor Stravinsky used a folk tune from Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Snow Maiden, showing the former's continued reverence for his teacher.

Igor Stravinsky had begun to experiment with polytonality in The Firebird and Petrushka, but for The Rite of Spring, he "pushed [it] to its logical conclusion," as Eric Walter White described it.

The ballet Pulcinella was commissioned by Diaghilev in 1919 after he proposed the idea of a ballet based on music by 18th-century Italian composers like Giovanni Battista Pergolesi; by imposing a work based on the harmonic and rhythmic systems of late-Baroque era composers, Igor Stravinsky marked the start of his turn towards 18th-century music.

Igor Stravinsky's Octet uses the sonata form, modernizing it by disregarding the standard ordering of themes and traditional tonal relationships for different sections.

Igor Stravinsky pointed out how the opera contains numerous references to Greek mythology and other operas like Mozart's Don Giovanni and Bizet's Carmen, but still "embod[ies] the distinctive structure of a fairy tale".

Igor Stravinsky was inspired by the operas of Mozart in composing the music, particularly, but other scholars point out influence from Handel, Gluck, Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, Rossini, Donizetti, and Verdi.

The composer's treatment of the twelve-tone technique was unique: whereas Schoenberg's technique was very strict, disallowing repetitions of a tone row until it was complete, Igor Stravinsky repeated notes freely, even separating the row into cells and reordering the notes.

Igor Stravinsky first experimented with non-twelve-tone serial techniques in small-scale works such as the Cantata, the Septet and Three Songs from Shakespeare.

Igor Stravinsky used a number of concepts from earlier works in his serial pieces; for example, the voice of God being two bass voices in homophony seen in The Flood was previously used in.

The influence of other composers on Igor Stravinsky can be seen throughout this period.

Igor Stravinsky was heavily influenced by Schoenberg, not only in his use of the twelve-tone technique, but in the distinctly "Schoenbergian" instrumentation of the Septet and the similarities between Schoenberg's Klangfarbenmelodie and Stravinsky's Variations.

Igor Stravinsky used a number of themes found in works by Benjamin Britten, later commenting about the "many titles and subjects [I have shared] with Mr Britten already".

Igor Stravinsky worked with some of the most famous artists of his time, many of whom he met after achieving international success with The Firebird.

Igor Stravinsky displayed a taste in literature that was wide and reflected his constant desire for new discoveries.

Many of Igor Stravinsky's works, including The Firebird, Renard, and were inspired by Alexander Afanasyev's famous collection Russian Folk Tales.

An interest in the Latin liturgy began shortly after Igor Stravinsky rejoined the church in 1926, beginning with the composition of his first religious work in 1926, written in Old Church Slavonic.

Igor Stravinsky later used three psalms from the Latin Vulgate in his Symphony of Psalms for orchestra and mixed choir.

Igor Stravinsky first worked with the Swiss novelist Charles F Ramuz on in 1918, with whom he formed the idea and wrote the text.

Stravinsky befriended many other authors as well, including T S Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and Dylan Thomas, the last of whom Stravinsky began working with on an opera in 1953 but stopped due to Thomas's death.

Igor Stravinsky is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers of the 20th century.

Igor Stravinsky was not only recognized for his composing; he achieved fame as a pianist and as a conductor.

Igor Stravinsky was noted for his distinctive use of rhythm, especially in The Rite of Spring.

Igor Stravinsky's subsequent turn towards serialism further alienated him from audiences, and academics saw this stylistic shift as not innovative enough, since they believed the death of Schoenberg marked the end of twelve-tone music.

Igor Stravinsky's music continues to offer inspiration and a unique method to young composers.

Igor Stravinsky influenced composers like Elliott Carter, Harrison Birtwistle, and John Tavener.

Igor Stravinsky received five Grammy Awards and a total of eleven nominations for his recordings, with three of his albums being inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Igor Stravinsky was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987.

The first, A Conversation with Igor Stravinsky, was released in 1957 by NBC and produced by Robert Graff, who later commissioned and produced The Flood.

The 1965 National Film Board of Canada documentary Igor Stravinsky, directed by Roman Kroitor and Wolf Koenig, followed Igor Stravinsky conducting the CBC Symphony Orchestra in a recording of the Symphony of Psalms, with anecdotal interviews interspersed throughout.

The 1966 CBS documentary Portrait of Igor Stravinsky took the composer back to the Theatre des Champs-Elysees and to his old home in Clarens, Switzerland.