Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky — composer with roots in the Russian Empire

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was born on 17 June 1882 in Oranienbaum, a summer resort on the Gulf of Finland west of St Petersburg, now called Lomonosov. His father, Fyodor Stravinsky, was a leading bass of the Mariinsky Theatre; his mother, Anna Kholodovskaya, came from a Kiev landowning family. He grew up in the family's flat in St Petersburg, and a performance of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty at the Mariinsky when he was eight was his first experience of an orchestra.

At his parents' wish he studied law at St Petersburg University, while taking private lessons in composition from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who became his mentor. In 1906 he married his cousin Yekaterina Nosenko. His early orchestral pieces caught the attention of Sergei Diaghilev, who commissioned the score for The Firebird. Its premiere by the Ballets Russes in Paris in 1910 made him famous overnight, and it was followed by Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913), whose premiere provoked one of the most famous disturbances in the history of music.

In July 1914 he made a short trip to Russia to collect material for Les Noces and returned to Switzerland just before the war closed the borders. The revolution and civil war then made return impossible, and the family's property in Russia was lost. He moved to France in 1920, took French citizenship in 1934, and in 1939, after the deaths of his wife, eldest daughter and mother, went to the United States, where he married Vera de Bosset in 1940 and became an American citizen in 1945.

In the decades that followed he moved from Russian folk sources through neoclassicism to serial composition, and wrote the opera The Rake's Progress (1951) to a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. He remained among the most performed composers of the century, and conducted and recorded much of his own music.

In September 1962, at eighty, he accepted an official invitation to the Soviet Union, his first visit in forty-eight years. He conducted concerts in Moscow and Leningrad, met Shostakovich and Khachaturian, and was received by Nikita Khrushchev. He did not stay. He died in New York on 6 April 1971, aged eighty-eight, and was buried on the cemetery island of San Michele in Venice, near the grave of Diaghilev.

Tracing the roots — Lomonosov

Born in Lomonosov (Oranienbaum) near St. Petersburg in 1882 to operatic bass Fyodor Stravinsky, he was immersed in Russian musical life from birth. The Rite of Spring's Paris premiere in 1913 caused a riot — its savage rhythms and dissonant harmonies tearing up the rulebook of Western music. He spent the rest of his life in exile, carrying Russia within him.

Historical context

Russian Empire · c. 1721–1917

Lomonosov. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.

Map: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

A career defined by ambition