The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the 29-volume second edition. Grove Music Online /General Editor – Stanley Sadie. Oxford University Press. 2001.

Stravinsky, Igor (Fyodorovich)

(b Oranienbaum [now Lomonosov], nr St Petersburg, 5/17 June 1882; d New York, 6 April 1971). Russian composer, later of French (1934) and American (1945) nationality. One of the most widely performed and influential composers of the 20th century, he remains also one of its most multi-faceted. A study of his work automatically touches on almost every important tendency in the century's music, from the neo-nationalism of the early ballets, through the more abrasive, experimental nationalism of the World War I years, the neo-classicism of the period 1920–51 and the studies of old music which underlay the proto-serial works of the 1950s, to the highly personal interpretation of serial method in his final decade. To some extent the mobile geography of his life is reflected in his work, with its complex patterns of influence and allusion. In another sense, however, he never lost contact with his Russian origins and, even after he ceased to compose with recognizably Russian materials or in a perceptibly Slavonic idiom, his music maintained an unbroken continuity of technique and thought.

1. Background and early years, 1882–1905.

2. Towards ‘The Firebird’, 1902–09.

3. The early Diaghilev ballets, 1910–14.

4. Exile in Switzerland, 1914–20.

5. France: the beginnings of neo-classicism, 1920–25.

6. Return to the theatre, 1925–34.

7. Last years in France: towards America, 1934–9.

8. USA: the late neo-classical works, 1939–51.

9. The proto-serial works, 1951–9.

10. Final years, 1959–71.

11. Posthumous reputation and legacy.

WORKS

WRITINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

STEPHEN WALSH

Stravinsky, Igor

1. Background and early years, 1882–1905.

Stravinsky was in Russian terms a nobleman; his parents were ‘dvoryanine’ or, as we might say, gentry. His mother, Anna Kholodovskaya, was one of four daughters of a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Estates in Kiev, a respectable if dull man who educated his daughters in the correct, somewhat prim manner of the provincial 19th century. Anna grew up a good domestic singer and fluent pianist, a well-organized if strait-laced wife and mother. Her husband, Fyodor Ignat'yevich Stravinsky, whom she married in Kiev (against her widowed mother's wishes) in 1874 when she was still only 19 and he 30, descended from a long line of Polish grandees, senators and landowners. But since the partition of Poland in the 1790s the Stravinskys had come down in the world, lost their lands and gradually migrated southwards into a remote region of what is now south-eastern Belarus'. Fyodor's father, Ignaty, was a working agronomist of vaguely disreputable habits, a womanizer (according to his composer grandson) who eventually left and divorced his Russian wife, and a bad businessman who bequeathed to his youngest son little beyond a determination not to let his own family life disintegrate in the same way.

If there was music in Ignaty Stravinsky's house it was provided by his wife, Aleksandra Skorokhodova, who had an attractive singing voice. But it was probably never a strikingly musical household, and it was only gradually that, while studying law in the mid-1860s in Odessa, Kiev and (when money started running out) Nezhin, Fyodor discovered a talent for singing. Eventually he won a scholarship to the Conservatory in St Petersburg, and in 1876 he made his début at the Mariinsky Theatre (as Mephistopheles in Gounod's Faust). By the time his and Anna's third son, Igor, was born (at the nearby Baltic summer resort of Oranienbaum) in 1882, Fyodor had taken the Russian operatic world by storm and was being widely discussed as the finest bass-baritone of his generation.

Music was thus a part of the working environment in the large second-floor flat on the Kryukov Canal, a stone's throw from the Mariinsky, which was to be Igor's home for the next 27 years. Fyodor sang not only repertory parts but also new roles, some written for him, like the Mayor in Rimsky-Korsakov's May Night. Leading lights of the St Petersburg operatic world came and went in the Kryukov flat. Fyodor knew not only Rimsky-Korsakov but also Borodin and Musorgsky, as well as prominent music journalists like Nikolay Findeyzen, and conductors like Nápravník. Fyodor also accumulated a large library, partly a bibliophile's collection, partly a working archive of scores and other materials relating to the parts he was studying. Igor inherited his mother's fluency as a piano sight-reader and had access to his father's scores: the Russian repertory, of course (including figures such as Dargomïzhsky and Serov), Mozart, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Gounod, Bizet, Verdi, Boito and the Wagner of Rienzi and Lohengrin, among many others. A photograph of Igor in his mid-teens shows him at his desk surrounded by the icons of a musical passion, including montages of portraits of the great composers and a low relief of Beethoven. His early enthusiasm for Wagner is attested by a surviving notebook from 1896 with an entry on Parsifal: ‘1877 – wrote text, 1879 – composed opera in rough, 1882 – orchestrated whole of Parsifal’, with a drawing of ‘Bayreuth’ in the form of a castle, and information about the dates of composition of Tristan. Whether or not Igor attended any Wagner in his youth, he must often in his teens have witnessed his father's performances in a wide range of other operas from the comfort of a family box. He certainly went to the 50th anniversary performance of Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila in November 1892 (with his father as Farlaf), possibly even to the première production of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty almost three years before that; and ballet matinées must have been a fairly common treat.

Nothing survives, however, of any compositions of his own before 1898, and there was in all probability no talk of a musical career until at least that stage. Early piano lessons with a certain Aleksandra Snetkova were probably no more than a normal part of an upper middle-class domestic education, since Igor (like his brothers) was educated by governesses at home until he was 11. Teenage summer-holiday letters to his parents are more about the books he has read, the plays he has acted in and the sketches he has drawn than about music-making. But then music may already have become a touchy subject by the time he was 17; and it is transparent that Igor constructed his letters home, loving as they are, specifically to gratify his parents' expectations.

In the 1890s the family began to spend long summer holidays with Kholodovsky aunts and uncles on their estates in trans-Volgan Samara (Pavlovka) and Ukraine, and after the death of Igor's eldest brother, Roman, in 1897 Fyodor and Anna summered routinely at one Ukrainian estate (Pechisky), where the adored Roman was buried, while Igor and (sometimes) his younger brother, Gury, preferred the other, Ustilug (in Volhynia), where there were lively female cousins and a less funereal atmosphere. This entailed long rail journeys for the boys, for which they were required to account in meticulous detail, and it also meant regular and painstaking health bulletins from Ustilug. Stravinsky's lifelong obsession with illness, medicine and doctors doubtless sprang from this source. And it was not wholly unjustified, since tuberculosis was endemic in the Kholodovskys, and Igor and his surviving older brother Yury were both sufferers (to the extent that Igor spent the summers of 1903–4 with his Samaran aunt and uncle at Pavlovka, talking about music – of which they were passionate amateurs – and drinking huge quantities of koumiss, the Tartar fermented mare's milk, which was supposed to be good for the lungs). Like most well-to-do Russians, the Stravinskys also visited German spas and Swiss mountain resorts. Such holidays were traditional and, in some ritualistic sense, precautionary. But in 1902, Fyodor fell terminally ill with cancer, and the German trip that summer was no holiday and certainly no precaution, but a desperate, ultimately unavailing quest for treatment (which included the new Röntgen method). Igor, however, was able to put it to another use.

Stravinsky, Igor