Igor Stravinsky

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky, born on 17 June 1882 in Oranienbaum, Russia — a town later renamed Lomonosov, situated approximately 50 kilometers west of Saint Petersburg — was a composer and conductor who held French citizenship from 1934 and American citizenship from 1945. His Broadway credits include Flower Festival in Genzano, Petrouchka, The Moor's Pavane, Apollo, and Firebird. He died on 6 April 1971 in New York City from pulmonary edema.

Stravinsky came from a musically engaged household. His father, Fyodor Ignatyevich Stravinsky, sang bass at the Mariinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg, and his mother, Anna Kirillovna Stravinskaya, was an amateur singer and pianist. From the age of nine, Stravinsky took private piano lessons, and by his early teens he had mastered the solo part of Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 1 and transcribed a string quartet by Alexander Glazunov for solo piano. He attended performances at the Mariinsky Theater regularly from around age ten, and by sixteen was present at rehearsals there five or six days a week.

Although his parents directed him toward a legal career, Stravinsky enrolled at the University of Saint Petersburg in 1901 while pursuing studies in harmony and counterpoint. At university he befriended Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov, through whom he met the latter's father, the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, during a summer visit to Heidelberg in 1902. Rimsky-Korsakov agreed to advise Stravinsky personally on his compositions, a mentorship that continued until Rimsky-Korsakov's death in 1908. Following the closure of the university after the events of Bloody Sunday in January 1905, Stravinsky completed his studies with a half-diploma. Among his early works produced under Rimsky-Korsakov's guidance were a four-movement Piano Sonata and a large-scale Symphony, the first draft of which he finished in 1905.

Shortly after Rimsky-Korsakov's death, Stravinsky encountered impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who commissioned three ballets for the Ballets Russes's Paris seasons. The Firebird premiered in 1910, Petrushka in 1911, and The Rite of Spring in 1913. The premiere of The Rite of Spring provoked a near-riot in the audience and subsequently influenced the way composers approached rhythmic structure.

Stravinsky's compositional output is generally organized into three periods. His Russian period, spanning roughly 1913 to 1920, drew heavily on Russian folk styles and poetry; Renard (1916) and Les noces (1923) both incorporated Russian folk poetry, while L'Histoire du soldat (1918) blended folk elements with popular forms including the tango, waltz, ragtime, and chorale. His neoclassical period, from 1920 to 1951, engaged with classical forms and techniques, among them the sonata form in the Octet (1923) and Greek mythological themes in Apollon musagète (1927), Oedipus rex (1927), and Persephone (1935). His serial period, from 1954 to 1968, drew on twelve-tone techniques associated with the Second Viennese School. In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954) was his first composition fully based on that technique, and Canticum Sacrum (1956) was his first built on a tone row. His final major work, the Requiem Canticles (1966), was performed at his funeral.

Stravinsky's influence extended to composers including Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Béla Bartók, and Pierre Boulez. In 1998, Time magazine named him among the 100 most influential people of the century. He left behind six memoirs written with his friend and assistant Robert Craft, an earlier autobiography, and a series of lectures.