Stravinsky
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Igor Stravinsky is a towering figure of twentieth century music. Schoenberg’s twelve-tone atonality on the one hand and Stravinsky’s neo-classicism (the style in which he wrote a good deal of his music) on the other represent two major streams of compositional thought in the modern era. Both men, as a result of upheaval in Europe and Russia, made the United States their home but lived a short distance from each other in Los Angeles for years. Near the end of his career, and only after Schoenberg’s death, Stravinsky experimented with twelve-tone composition.
His life
Igor Stravinsky (1882 – 1971) Russian (and later, a naturalized French and American) composer, pianist and conductor is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century. His compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). The last of these transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky’s enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His “Russian phase” was followed in the 1920s by a period in which he turned to neoclassical music. The works from this period often paid tribute to the music of earlier masters, such as J.S. Bach and Tchaikovsky. They make use of traditional musical forms (concerto grosso, fugue and symphony). In the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serial procedures. His compositions of this period shared traits with examples of his earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells and clarity of form, of instrumentation and of utterance.
Life and career
Early life in the Russian Empire
Stravinsky was born 1882 near Saint Petersburg, the Russian imperial capital, and was brought up in Saint Petersburg. His father, Fyodor Stravinsky, was a bass singer at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. Stravinsky began piano lessons as a young boy, studying music theory and attempting composition. In 1890, he saw a performance of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Sleeping Beauty at the Mariinsky Theatre.
In the summer of 1902 Stravinsky studied with composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov whom he came to regard as a second father. His study continued until Rimsky’s death in 1908
In February 1909, two orchestral works, the Scherzo fantastique and Feu d’artifice (Fireworks) were heard by Sergei Diaghilev, who was at that time involved in planning to present Russian opera and ballet in Paris. Diaghilev was sufficiently impressed by Fireworks to commission Stravinsky to do some arrangements and then to compose a full-length ballet score, The Firebird. Stravinsky became an overnight sensation following the success of it’s premiere in Paris in June 1910. Over the next four years Stravinsky composed two further works for the Ballets Russes: Petrushka (1911), and Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring; 1913).
During the time he was writing Histoire du soldat (The Soldier’s Tale), Stravinsky approached the Swiss philanthropist Werner Reinhart for financial assistance. Reinhart funded a series of concerts of his chamber music in 1919. Included was the suite from Histoire du soldat arranged for violin, piano and clarinet. Leopold Stokowski gave Stravinsky regular support through a pseudonymous benefactor in the early 1920s,
Stravinsky became French citizen 1934 and moved to the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. During his later years in Paris, Stravinsky had developed professional relationships with key people in the United States: he was already working on his Symphony in C for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and he had agreed to deliver the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University during the 1939–40 academic year.
Life in the United States
In September 1939, the Stravinsky sailed for the United States. Stravinsky settled in West Hollywood, spending more time living in Los Angeles than any other city. Moving to America represented a siginificant change for Stgravinsky. He was drawn to the growing cultural life of Los Angeles, especially during World War II, when so many writers, musicians, composers and conductors, Otto Klemperer, Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel, George Balanchine and Arthur Rubinstein settled in the area. British writers such as “like W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Dylan Thomas who visited him in Beverly Hills,. They shared the composer’s taste for hard spirits—especially Aldous Huxley, with whom Stravinsky had a tradition of Saturday lunches for west coast avant-garde and luminaries.
Stravinsky’s unconventional dominant seventh chord in his arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner” led to an incident with the Boston police in 1944, and he was warned that the authorities could impose a $100 fine upon any “rearrangement of the national anthem in whole or in part.” The police, as it turned out, were wrong as the law in question merely forbade using the national anthem “as dance music, as an exit march, or as a part of a medley of any kind”. However the incident soon established itself as a myth, in which Stravinsky was supposedly arrested, held in custody for several nights, and photographed for police records.
Stravinsky’s Music
(Stravinsky’s output is typically divided into three general style periods: 1. a Russian period, 2. a neoclassical period, and 3. a serial period.)
1. Russian Period (c. 1907–1919)
Aside from a very few surviving earlier works, Stravinsky’s Russian period began with compositions undertaken under the tutelage of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, with whom he studied from 1905 until Rimsky’s death in 1908, including the orchestral works: Symphony in E-flat major (1907), Faun and Shepherdess (for mezzo-soprano and orchestra; 1907), Scherzo fantastique (1908), and Feu d’artifice (1908/9). These works clearly reveal the influence of Rimsky-Korsakov, they also reveal Stravinsky’s knowledge of music by Glazunov, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Dvořák, and Debussy, among others.
Below is a video of Dance of the Firebird from Stravinsky’s Fire bird ballet. Note the very impressionistic style of this work reminding one of the music of Debussy . The Rite of Spring presented later in this topic was composed only a few years later but radically different in its sometimes harsh primitive style.
h2. Neoclassical Period (c. 1920–1954)
Apollon (1928), Persephone (1933) and Orpheus (1947) exemplify not only Stravinsky’s return to the music of the Classical period, but also his exploration of themes from the ancient Classical world, such as Greek mythology. In 1951, he completed his last neo-classical work, the opera The Rake’s Progress, to a libretto by W. H. Auden that was based on the etchings of William Hogarth. It premiered in Venice that year and was produced around Europe the following year, before being staged in the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1953.
3. Serial Period (1954–1968)
In the 1950s, Stravinsky began using serial compositional techniques such as dodecaphony, the twelve-tone technique originally devised by Arnold Schoenberg. He first experimented with non-twelve-tone serial techniques in small-scale vocal and chamber works such as the Cantata (1952), the Septet (1953) and Three Songs from Shakespeare (1953). The first of his compositions fully based on such techniques was In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954). Agon (1954–57) was the first of his works to include a twelve-tone series and Canticum Sacrum (1955) was the first piece to contain a movement entirely based on a tone row. Stravinsky expanded his use of dodecaphony in works such as Threni (1958) and A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer (1961), which are based on biblical texts, and The Flood (1962), which mixes brief biblical texts from the Book of Genesis with passages from the York and Chester Mystery Plays.
Listen to In Memorian Dylan Thomas. Note the dissonance and total lock of tonal center, yet the work has motion and direction.
Innovation and Influence
Stravinsky has been called “one of music’s truly epochal innovators.” The most important aspect of Stravinsky’s work is the ‘changing face’ of his compositional style while always “retaining a distinctive, essential identity.”
Stravinsky with Wilhelm Furtwängler, German conductor and composer.
Stravinsky’s composition traits include motivic development (musical figures repeated in different forms throughout a composition or section of a work). In addition, additive motivic development where notes are subtracted or added to a motif without regard to consequent changes in meter. This technique can be found as early as the sixteenth century in the music of Cipriano de Rore, Lassus, Gesualdo etc. Stravinsky exhibited considerable familiarity with composers in this period..
The Rite of Spring is notable for its relentless use of ostinati. An example in the rite of Spring is the eighth note ostinato on strings accented by eight horns in “Augurs of Spring (Dances of the Young Girls).” The Rite contains passages where several ostinati clash against one another. Stravinsky was noted for his distinctive use of rhythm, especially in The Rite of Spring. According to the composer Philip Glass, “the idea of pushing the rhythms across the bar lines led the way to a rhythmic structure of music which became much more fluid and in a certain way spontaneous.” Glass mentions Stravinsky’s “primitive, offbeat rhythmic drive. ” According to Andrew J. Browne, “Stravinsky is perhaps the only composer who has raised rhythm in itself to the dignity of art.” Stravinsky’s rhythm and vitality greatly influenced the composer Aaron Copland.
Over the course of his career, Stravinsky called for a wide variety of orchestral, instrumental, and vocal forces, ranging from single instruments in such works as Three Pieces for Clarinet (1918) or Elegy for Solo Viola (1944) to the enormous orchestra of The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps; 1913) which Aaron Copland characterized as “the foremost orchestral achievement of the 20th century.” The three ballets composed for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes call for particularly large orchestras. In the original version of Petrushka (1911) the particularly prominent role of the piano is notable.
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It is hard to understate the impact of Rite of Spring on the music that came afterward. The jarring rhythms and the use of traditional instruments in non-traditional ways paved the way for the experiments of later composers.
Here is a scene by scene breakdown of the music we listen to. The music is telling, and the dancers are depicting a story. It is important that you know the specifics of that story. You should also remember that even though Rite of Spring consists of two parts, and we only have the first part on our playlist.
Primitivism and The Rite of Spring
Figure 1. Part of Nicholas Roerich’s designs for Diaghilev’s 1913 production of Le Sacre du printemps
Figure 1. Paul Gauguin, Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?), 1892.
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Like so many other movements of the early 20th century, primitivism had its origins in the visual arts. Painters like Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso became disillusioned with Western art traditions and sought inspiration in the works of indigenous cultures, untrained painters, and children’s art. They depicted their subjects using non-traditional perspectives. This link will take you to many examples of primitive art:
As composers tried to explore this same sense of non-Western perspective through music, they often emphasized the musical element of rhythm in their effort to express an ancient or aboriginal attitude. Although a large body of significant works in the primitive style does not remain in the concert repertoire, yet one of the greatest works of the early twentieth century does exhibit this style – Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The subject of this ballet is an imagined pagan, sacrificial rite in ancient Russia. It features jarring, repetitive rhythms and extensive use of percussion to evoke an older, less civilized time. In the visual arts primitivism had many important adherents who produced a large number of major works. When we speak of primitivism in music it is almost always in connection to Rite of Spring.
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The Rite of Spring (French: Le Sacre du printemps, Russian: «Весна священная»,Vesna svyashchennaya) is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky, with stage designs and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. When first performed, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913, the avant-garde nature of the music and choreography caused a sensation and a near-riot in the audience. Although designed as a work for the stage, with specific passages accompanying characters and action, the music achieved equal if not greater recognition as a concert piece, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential musical works of the 20th century.
Premier: The premier was May 29th 1913 The final rehearsal in the presence of members of the press and assorted invited guests all went peacefully according to Stravinsky. However, the critic of L’Écho de Paris, Adolphe Boschot, foresaw possible trouble; he wondered how the public would receive the work, and suggested that they might react badly if they thought they were being mocked.
On the evening of the premier the theatre was packed: “Never . . . has the hall been so full, or so resplendent; the stairways and the corridors were crowded with spectators eager to see and to hear.” Some eyewitnesses and commentators said that the disturbances in the audience began during the Introduction, and grew into a crescendo when the curtain rose on the stamping dancers in “Augurs of Spring.” But music historian Richard Taruskin asserts, “it was not Stravinsky’s music that did the shocking. It was the ugly earthbound lurching and stomping devised by Vaslav Nijinsky.” Stravinsky writes that the derisive laughter disgusted him, and that he left the auditorium to watch the rest of the performance from the stage wings. The demonstrations, he says, grew into “a terrific uproar” which, drowned out the voice of Nijinsky who was shouting the step numbers to the dancers.
Figure 3. Dancers in Nicholas Roerich’s original costumes. From left, Julitska, Marie Rambert, Jejerska, Boni, Boniecka, Faithful
Pierre Monteux, the conductor believed that the trouble began when the two factions in the audience began attacking each other, but their mutual anger was soon diverted towards the orchestra: “Everything available was tossed in our direction, but we continued to play on”. Around forty of the worst offenders were ejected—possibly with the intervention of the police, although this is uncorroborated. Through all the disturbances the performance continued without interruption. Things grew noticeably quieter during Part II, and by some accounts Maria Piltz’s rendering of the final “Sacrificial Dance” was watched in reasonable silence. At the end there were several curtain calls for the dancers, for Monteux and the orchestra, and for Stravinsky and Nijinsky before the evening’s programme continued.
Stravinsky’s score contains many novel features for its time, including experiments in tonality, metre, rhythm, stress and dissonance. Analysts have noted in the score a significant grounding in Russian folk music, a relationship Stravinsky tended to deny. The music has influenced many of the 20th-century’s leading composers, and is one of the most recorded works in the classical repertoire.
Synopsis and Structure
Stravinsky described The Rite of Spring as “a musical-choreographic work, [representing] pagan Russia . . . unified by a single idea: the mystery and great surge of the creative power of Spring”. In his analysis of The Rite, Pieter van den Toorn writes that the work lacks a specific plot or narrative, and should be considered as a succession of choreographed episodes.