Biography Of Igor Stravinsky Essay, Research Paper

Igor Stravinsky

(1882 – 1971)

Igor Stravinski was the son of a leading bass at the

Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg,. He began two of

the major strains of contemporary music. His early

work, like the Symphony No. 1, was influenced by

Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Later he inclined toward the

music of the French impressionists Claude Debussy and

Maurice Ravel, represented in pieces like Fireworks,

The Faun, the Shepherdess, and the major ballet

Firebird. Firebird’s success led to two more ballets

for Diaghilev’s Ballets russes: Petrouchka and Le Sacre

du Printemps, both famous pieces of the twentieth-century

music.

World War I disrupted the activities of the Ballets

Ruses and caused Stravinsky to seek refuge in

Switzerland. He did not return to Russia until 1962,

though his works of 1914-18 are almost mostly Russian

folk tales and songs: Les noces (’The Wedding’ Renard

(a soldiers tale). In the early 1920s he avoided string

instruments because of their expressive nuances,

preferring the wind, percussion, piano and even

pianola. But he returned to the full orchestra to crate

Handel-Verdi imagery of the opera-oratorio Oedipus rex,

and then wrote for strings alone in Apollon musagete

(1928). In 1939, Stravinsky moved to the USA, followed

by Vera Sudeikina, his love since 1921 and who was to

be his second wife (his first wife and his mother had

both died earlier the same year). In 1940 they settled

in Hollywood, were he worked on music intended for

films, orchestral pieces, including the Symphony in

Three Movements (1945). The later 1940s were devoted

to The Rake’s Progress, he continued to compose into

his mid-80s, also conducting concerts and making many

gramophone records of his music.