Igor Stravinsky (born 1882; died 1971)
Igor Stravinsky was one of music's truly epochal innovators; no other composer of the twentieth century exerted such a pervasive influence or dominated his art in the way that Stravinsky did during his five-decade musical career.
Aside from purely technical considerations such as rhythm and harmony, the most important hallmark of Stravinsky's style is, indeed, its changing face. Emerging from the spirit of late Russian nationalism and ending his career with a thorny, individual language steeped in 12-tone principles, Stravinsky assumed a number of aesthetic guises throughout the course of his development, while always retaining a distinctive, essential identity.
Although he was the son of one of the Mariinsky Theater's principal basses and a talented amateur pianist, Stravinsky had no more musical training than that of any other Russian upper-class child. He entered law school, but also began private composition and orchestration studies with Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
By 1909, the orchestral works Scherzo
fantastique and
Fireworks had impressed Sergei Diaghilev enough for him to ask Stravinsky to orchestrate, and subsequently compose, ballets for his company. Stravinsky's triad of early ballets –
The Firebird (1909-1910),
Petrushka (1910-1911), and, most important,
The Rite of Spring (1911-1913) – did more to establish his reputation than any of his other works; indeed, the riot that followed the premiere of
The Rite is one of the most notorious events in music history.
Stravinsky and his family spent the war years in Switzerland, returning to France in 1920. His jazz-inflected essays of the 1910s and 1920s – notably,
Ragtime (1918) and
The Soldier's Tale (1918) – gave way to one of the composer's most influential aesthetic turns. The neo-Classical tautness of works as diverse as the ballet
Pulcinella (1919-1920), the Symphony of Psalms (1930) and – decades later – the opera
The Rake's Progress (1948-1951) made a widespread impact and had an especial influence upon the fledgling school of American composers that looked to Stravinsky as its primary model.
He had begun touring as a conductor and pianist, generally performing his own works. In the 1930s, he toured the Americas and wrote several pieces fulfilling American commissions, including the Concerto in E flat,
Dumbarton Oaks.
After the deaths of his daughter, his wife, and his mother within a period of less than a year, Stravinsky emigrated to America, settling in California with his second wife in 1940. His works between 1940 and 1950 show a mixture of styles, but still seem centered on Russian or French traditions. Stravinsky's cultural perspective changed, after Robert Craft became his musical assistant, handling rehearsals for Stravinsky, traveling with him, and later co-authoring his memoirs. Many credit Craft with helping Stravinsky accept 12-tone composition as one of the tools of his trade. Characteristically, though, he made novel use of such principles in his own music, producing works in a highly original vein: Movements (1958-1959) for piano and orchestra, Variations:
Aldous Huxley in Memoriam (1963), and the Requiem Canticles (1965-1966) are among the most striking. Craft prepared the musicians for the exemplary series of Columbia Records LPs Stravinsky conducted through the stereo era, covering virtually all his significant works. Despite declining health in his last years, Stravinsky continued to compose until just before his death in April 1971.
The Firebird Suite
Instrumentation: 4 flutes, 2 piccolos, 4 oboes (English horn), 2 clarinets, 2 bass clarinets, E-flat clarinet, 4 bassoons, 2 contrabassoons, 4 French horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani plus 4 percussion, 3 harps, celesta, piano, strings
The DPO last performed this piece in 2004, with Neal Gittleman conducting.
The premiere performance of Igor Stravinsky's first ballet,
The Firebird, by the Ballet Russe at the Paris Opera House on June 25, 1910 was the kind of sensational, career-changing event that a composer can really hope for only once in a lifetime. It is something of a tribute to Stravinsky's vitality that he managed to carve out several such sensations in just a few years. Stravinsky was almost instantly elevated from unknown status into the ranks of Europe's foremost up-and-coming musicians, and – following the practice of the day – he immediately set about expanding the success of the 45-minute ballet by extracting a 20-minute symphonic suite from it. This
Firebird Suite No. 1 (there would eventually be three suites in all) contains five movements of music taken from various places in the original score: 1) an Introduction (containing "The Enchanted Garden of Kashchei" and "Dance of the Firebird"), 2) "The Firebird's supplication," 3) "The Princesses' Game with the Golden Apples," 4) "The Princesses' Khorovod," and 5) the famous "Infernal Dance of Kashchei's Subjects."
While neither the orchestration nor the basic musical detail have undergone significant alterations during the translation from full score to symphonic suite, there are a few cuts in the middle of some of the movements. For instance, the Introduction contains musical numbers i through iv of the ballet, minus some 38 measures that appear only in the full score. There were new concert endings written for "The Firebird's Supplication" (which would otherwise lead directly into "The Appearance of the Thirteen," which of course doesn't appear at all in the Suite) and the scherzo-like "The Princesses' Game with the Golden Apples" (to solve a similar problem). The rest of the music, including the rambunctious "Infernal Dance" remains absolutely unchanged from its original 1910 incarnation – not at all the case with either the Second or the Third
Firebird Suites, in which Stravinsky makes marked changes, especially in the area of instrumentation.
Of course, these five movements of music can showcase only highlights from the ballet. We particularly miss the radiant
finale in the First Suite; thankfully, Stravinsky includes it in the Second. We can assume that only tradition and pressure from his publisher induced Stravinsky to cut up his work in such a way. He never drew concert suites from
Petrushka or T
he Rite of Spring, his next two ballets, the composer instead demanding, quite understandably, that we hear his music either in its entirety or not at all.
Biography by AMG
Composition Description by Blair Johnston
Source: All Media Guide
To Concert Page
