Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 38 views

    Stravinsky - Life

    Uploaded by

    piapetita
    Igor Stravinsky was a Russian composer born in 1882 whose works had a revolutionary impact on music before and after World War I. He studied law but was also privately tutored in music by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. His career was launched when Serge Diaghilev commissioned him to write the score for the 1910 ballet The Firebird, which was a huge success. The following year, Petrushka premiered and in 1913 The Rite of Spring caused a riot at its premiere with its radical style that marked Stravinsky as one of the leading modernist composers. He continued composing throughout his life, moving away from the post-Romantic style of early works.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Stravinsky - Life

    Uploaded by

    piapetita
    38 views2 pages
    Igor Stravinsky was a Russian composer born in 1882 whose works had a revolutionary impact on music before and after World War I. He studied law but was also privately tutored in music by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. His career was launched when Serge Diaghilev commissioned him to write the score for the 1910 ballet The Firebird, which was a huge success. The following year, Petrushka premiered and in 1913 The Rite of Spring caused a riot at its premiere with its radical style that marked Stravinsky as one of the leading modernist composers. He continued composing throughout his life, moving away from the post-Romantic style of early works.

    Original Description:

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    Igor Stravinsky was a Russian composer born in 1882 whose works had a revolutionary impact on music before and after World War I. He studied law but was also privately tutored in music by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. His career was launched when Serge Diaghilev commissioned him to write the score for the 1910 ballet The Firebird, which was a huge success. The following year, Petrushka premiered and in 1913 The Rite of Spring caused a riot at its premiere with its radical style that marked Stravinsky as one of the leading modernist composers. He continued composing throughout his life, moving away from the post-Romantic style of early works.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    38 views2 pages

    Stravinsky - Life

    Uploaded by

    piapetita
    Igor Stravinsky was a Russian composer born in 1882 whose works had a revolutionary impact on music before and after World War I. He studied law but was also privately tutored in music by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. His career was launched when Serge Diaghilev commissioned him to write the score for the 1910 ballet The Firebird, which was a huge success. The following year, Petrushka premiered and in 1913 The Rite of Spring caused a riot at its premiere with its radical style that marked Stravinsky as one of the leading modernist composers. He continued composing throughout his life, moving away from the post-Romantic style of early works.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 2

    Igor Stravinsky

    Igor Stravinsky, in full Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky, (born June 5 [June 17, New Style], 1882, Oranienbaum
    [now Lomonosov], near St. Petersburg, Russia—died April 6, 1971, New York, New York, U.S.), Russian-
    born composer whose work had a revolutionary impact on musical thought and sensibility just before
    and after World War I, and whose compositions remained a touchstone of modernism for much of his
    long working life. He was honoured with the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal in 1954 and the
    Wihuri Sibelius Prize in 1963. (Click here for an audio excerpt from Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for Clarinet.)

    Life and career

    Stravinsky’s father was one of the leading Russian operatic basses of his day, and the mixture of the
    musical, theatrical, and literary spheres in the Stravinsky family household exerted a lasting influence on
    the composer. Nevertheless his own musical aptitude emerged quite slowly. As a boy he was given
    lessons in piano and music theory. But then he studied law and philosophy at St. Petersburg University
    (graduating in 1905), and only gradually did he become aware of his vocation for musical composition. In
    1902 he showed some of his early pieces to the composer Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (whose son Vladimir
    was a fellow law student), and Rimsky-Korsakov was sufficiently impressed to agree to take Stravinsky as
    a private pupil, while at the same time advising him not to enter the conservatory for conventional
    academic training.

    Rimsky-Korsakov tutored Stravinsky mainly in orchestration and acted as the budding composer’s
    mentor, discussing each new work and offering suggestions. He also used his influence to get his pupil’s
    music performed. Several of Stravinsky’s student works were performed in the weekly gatherings of
    Rimsky-Korsakov’s class, and two of his works for orchestra—the Symphony in E-flat Major and The Faun
    and the Shepherdess, a song cycle with words by Aleksandr Pushkin—were played by the Court
    Orchestra in 1908, the year Rimsky-Korsakov died. In February 1909 a short but brilliant orchestral piece,
    the Scherzo fantastique was performed in St. Petersburg at a concert attended by the impresario Serge
    Diaghilev, who was so impressed by Stravinsky’s promise as a composer that he quickly commissioned
    some orchestral arrangements for the summer season of his Ballets Russes in Paris. For the 1910 ballet
    season Diaghilev approached Stravinsky again, this time commissioning the musical score for a new full-
    length ballet on the subject of the Firebird.

    The premiere of The Firebird at the Paris Opéra on June 25, 1910, was a dazzling success that made
    Stravinsky known overnight as one of the most gifted of the younger generation of composers. This work
    showed how fully he had assimilated the flamboyant Romanticism and orchestral palette of his master.
    The Firebird was the first of a series of spectacular collaborations between Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s
    company. The following year saw the Ballets Russes’s premiere on June 13, 1911, of the ballet Petrushka,
    with Vaslav Nijinsky dancing the title role to Stravinsky’s musical score. Meanwhile, Stravinsky had
    conceived the idea of writing a kind of symphonic pagan ritual to be called Great Sacrifice. The result was
    The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps), the composition of which was spread over two years (1911–
    13). The first performance of The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées on May 29, 1913,
    provoked one of the more famous first-night riots in the history of musical theatre. Stirred by Nijinsky’s
    unusual and suggestive choreography and Stravinsky’s creative and daring music, the audience cheered,
    protested, and argued among themselves during the performance, creating such a clamour that the
    dancers could not hear the orchestra. This highly original composition, with its shifting and audacious
    rhythms and its unresolved dissonances, was an early modernist landmark. From this point on,
    Stravinsky was known as “the composer of The Rite of Spring” and the destructive modernist par
    excellence. But he himself was already moving away from such post-Romantic extravagances, and world
    events of the next few years only hastened that process.

    You might also like