Igor Stravinsky: The Revolutionary Who Composed the Soundtrack of the 20th Century

When it comes to creative longevity, brilliance in a variety of styles and near-universal fame, Igor Stravinsky is almost unrivalled among 20th century artists. The career of the musically restless Stravinsky is a dizzying and exciting journey across many countries and decades – from tsarist Russia at the end of the 19th century to Southern California in the 1960s.

Broad-minded and cosmopolitan in spirit, he has made a name for himself as a conductor and pianist, in addition to the acclaim he has received for his compositions.

He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a crater on Mercury named after Stravinsky, and was posthumously awarded a Grammy for lifetime achievement in 1987.

His musical expression was extremely diverse, combining irreconcilable elements of Russian folklore with impressionism, jazz and expressionism, and indelibly influencing Russian and world music.

Igor Stravinsky, one of the great modernists of the 20th century, has been compared to the painter Pablo Picasso for his restless inventiveness and originality, and his exploration of different styles. In his sixty years as a composer, he was never predictable and was always trying something new.

Stravinsky was small and slight of stature with disproportionately large hands, which he called “handyman’s hands”, but despite his somewhat awkward stature he was a charismatic personality.

He is one of the most creative composers, with a legacy of more than 7 500 pages of scores. He worked tirelessly, sometimes for eighteen hours at a stretch, and even at his advanced age his normal working day lasted ten hours, although he was plagued throughout his life by illnesses ranging from jaundice and typhoid fever to open stomach wounds and unbearable headaches with insomnia. The rows of medicine bottles that surrounded his dinner plate once prompted the poet W.H. Auden to remark that ‘the best business would be to have a pharmacy next to Stravinsky’s flat’. However, his remarkable energy and love of life overcame his illness and helped him into a fruitful old age.

Early life in the Russian Empire

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was born on 17 June 1882 in Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov), a small Russian resort on the Gulf of Finland, where his family spent their holidays.

The Stravinsky family was of Polish-Russian descent, his mother coming from a family of Polish noblemen and landed gentry. Igor, the third in a family of four boys, spent his youth in nearby St Petersburg, the capital of Tsarist Russia, in an environment steeped in art. He later recalled that he was very lonely in his strict family environment, as his soul mates were only his older brother Yuri and their German nanny, who brought up the Stravinsky boys with great love.

The mother, who was cold and distant and prone to outbursts of emotionally driven illnesses, was overly concerned for the health of her children, especially the tiny Igor, and would not allow him to take part in any outdoor sports or games, so he too developed an excessive concern for his health and later hypochondria.

His mother’s fear was well-founded. St Petersburg in the late 19th century was a veritable petri dish of pathogens, including tuberculosis, smallpox and cholera, epidemics of which often struck the city.

Igor’s father, Fyodor Ignatyevich Stravinsky, a renowned opera singer, and his mother, Anna Kolodovsky, an excellent pianist, had high intellectual standards. Their home, with its remarkable library, attracted many of the prominent artists of the time, such as Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky, and the young Stravinsky grew up in the cultural atmosphere of Russian modernism.

At the age of nine, he began taking music theory and piano lessons, and regularly attended performances at the famous Imperial Mariinsky Theatre, where his father had performed. The boy was amazed by the grandeur of the orchestra, and seeing the great Tchaikovsky conducting began a lifelong interest in ballet.

Despite the boy’s obvious talent for music, his father Fyodor rejected his son’s early attempts at composition and discouraged the ailing Igor from formal study of music theory. At his request, the young Stravinsky enrolled at the law faculty after graduating from high school, but he was not tempted by a career as a lawyer and was bored by his studies. In his spare time he arranged and played works by other composers, and also wrote his own compositions, which he did not perform in public.

At university, he befriended fellow student Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov, the youngest son of the then leading Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Vladimir introduced him to his father, who looked at some of Igor’s compositions and noticed the young man’s talent. He was impressed enough to agree to take Stravinsky as a private pupil, but at the same time advised him not to enrol at the conservatoire, where the conservative Rimsky-Korsakov served as professor of composition, as a rigid academic education could stifle Igor’s sense of improvisation.

The relationship between teacher and pupil developed into a close friendship and Rimsky-Korsakov assumed a fatherly role in Igor’s life, especially after Fyodor’s death in 1902.

His friendship with Rimsky-Korsakov also opened the way for Stravinsky to enter the musical life of St Petersburg, and he began to attend social events where works by avant-garde artists were presented. He was particularly enthusiastic about Debussy’s music, which seemed to be a unique and self-contained sound world. But Rimsky-Korsakov, who disliked “modern” music, warned him, “It is better not to listen to it, you might get used to it and end up liking it.”

The beginnings of a musical career

The Rimsky-Korsakov family soon became Igor’s second family. The house of the great composer was an extremely creative artistic environment, where eminent musicians such as Lyadov, Glazunov, Chaliapin, Stasov and Blumenfeld met, made music and discussed art.

Igor’s decision to devote himself entirely to music was helped by Bloody Sunday in 1905, which closed the university for two months. The event, in which the Tsarist army fired on peaceful protesters who were trying to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas II in the Winter Palace demanding improved working conditions and the introduction of political freedoms, prevented Stravinsky from passing his final exams in law, and he received only a partial diploma.

He became engaged to his cousin Katerina Nosenko, with whom he had become close in his childhood and who was a great support during his unhappy school years.

Despite the opposition of the Orthodox Church, which did not approve of marriages between first cousins, and without the permission required by Orthodox law, Igor and Katerina were married in early 1906. Soon after, Theodore and, in 1908, Ljudmila were born.

Theodore once mentioned an unusual event from the very beginning of his life. “I don’t remember it myself, but I heard a funny story from my father about what it was like when I was born. My mother was sick and did not have enough milk. My father put an advert looking for a breastfeeding mother and when he got a reply he went to the recruitment agency and there were a few young girls in the queue with their breasts bared. Each of the girls squeezed some milk into a glass, which my father tasted and, based on an assessment, chose the most suitable candidate to be my breastfeeder.”

Katerina, a talented painter and an excellent musician herself, encouraged her husband’s work and was a valuable help to him. She was the first to read his scores and faithfully copied them for him.

Stravinsky drew up a plan to build a house in the remote village of Ustilugu in the Ukraine, near his wife’s family home, and he and his family spent almost every summer there until 1914, when the war cut them off from Russia. In this paradise for creativity, as he called the estate in Ustilugu, he wrote many of his early works. When the weather turned colder, the Stravinsky family and their entire household, which included nannies, governesses, a cook, aunts and uncles, and Igor and Katerina’s mother, moved to warmer Switzerland or to the French Riviera.

Russia was the scene of a remarkable cultural movement in the early 20th century. The St Petersburg Musical Society, called Evenings of Contemporary Music, existed between 1901 and 1912 and was dedicated to performing and popularising European and Russian chamber music from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Stravinsky, who regularly attended concerts organised by the Society, met leading composers, writers, poets and artists from St Petersburg. On 27 December 1907, together with Steinberg and Gnesin, he appeared at the concert of the Evening of Contemporary Music, the first time that Stravinsky’s music had been performed before a paying audience.

Every meeting of the Society, whose programme defied the Russian traditionalists and strongly defended freedom of musical expression, was also reported in the press.

Stravinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov continued private lessons until the master’s death in 1908, which was difficult for Igor, who felt a filial love for him, to accept. Deeply saddened and shaken, he wrote an orchestral Funeral Song in memory of his spiritual mentor, which was performed only once and then considered lost from the October Revolution until 2014, when a librarian found it on a back shelf at the St Petersburg Conservatoire. Stravinsky had lost track of many of the scores he had left on the family estate after moving to the West.

The Fantastic Scherzo and the Fireworks, his first two orchestral works, were performed in St Petersburg in February 1909 in a concert that marked a turning point in the young composer’s career. Among the audience was the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, director of the Ballets Russes, a travelling group of artists that brought together the greatest talents from all artistic disciplines in an ensemble whose work revolutionised the arts and, not least, classical ballet, turning it into a theatrical spectacle.

So impressed was Diaghilev by the music of a relatively unknown young man that he commissioned him to write some orchestrations for the 1909 ballet season, and Stravinsky was happy to take them on.

The Musical Olympus

For 1910 Diaghilev planned a series of performances to be staged in Paris, showcasing Russian culture through opera, art and dance. With his Ballets Russes, he wanted to stage a ballet inspired by the Russian myth of the firebird, and he remembered the talented young Stravinsky, who could provide the music for his original ballet productions, as he did not want to repeat the successes of others.

The ballet The Firebird, choreographed by Mikhail Fokine, premiered on 25 June 1910 at the Paris Opera. The lead role was originally intended for the ballerina Anna Pavlova, but she refused it because she could not reconcile herself to Stravinsky’s avant-garde score. Throughout her life, Pavlova had little regard for anything else that departed from the salon ballet music of the 19th century.

If Boris Kochen, Diaghilev’s later secretary, is to be believed, Vaclav Nijinsky asked the impresario to entrust him with the lead role, as he was eager to dance on his tiptoes, a rarity for a male dancer even today. But Diaghilev, despite his innovative spirit, refused this shocking proposal for the time. The lead role was then given to the ballerina Tamara Karsavina, who had “perfect technique and infinite grace”.

The audience was captivated and the door to the world’s musical Olympus opened for the then twenty-eight-year-old composer. Although the score retains the influence of Rimsky-Korsakov, it is characterised by Stravinsky’s personal style, which incorporated unusual rhythms into the music. Debussy, Ravel and Schmitt enthusiastically embraced the young Russian composer and Stravinsky joined the Parisian artistic circles of the time.

As Katerina was pregnant, the Stravinsky family spent the summer in western France, and in September they moved to Clarens in Switzerland, where their second son, Soulima, was born.

In 1911, Stravinsky confirmed his fame at the Châtelet Theatre in Paris with the second part of his ballet trilogy, Petrushka, in which three puppets perform a story of love and jealousy. The ingenious creative triumvirate of composer Stravinsky, choreographer Fokine and set and costume designer Benois created a masterpiece that has become one of the symbols of Russian culture, even though at the first rehearsal of the orchestra the musicians started laughing out loud because they found the music of Petrushka incredibly funny. Conductor Pierre Monteux needed all his gifts of persuasion to explain to his colleagues that Stravinsky’s music should not be taken as a joke.

Fokine, who redefined ballet with his choreography of Petrushka, described Stravinsky’s score as “sounds that torment the ear, but at the same time stimulate the imagination and stir the soul”. Vaclav Nijinsky danced the title role, bringing all his genius and grace to his interpretation of the puppet.

The perfect fusion of music, choreography and set design made Petrushka one of the Ballets Russes’ most popular productions, although on the night of the premiere, right up to the last minute before the curtain went up, Stravinsky, Fokine and Benois were still discussing the ballet’s final scene. The dancers complained that the stage was too crowded and that they did not have enough room to dance, and the musicians complained that the music was too difficult to play. To top it all off, Benois threatened to take all the costumes if he wasn’t paid immediately.

The curtain still had not risen and the audience was getting impatient. Diaghilev ran to the dressing room where his loyal friend and patron of the arts Misia Sert was and asked her to lend him some money to pay for the costumes. After a few minutes, she brought the money and the curtain could finally rise.

The ballet that started the mess

This time Nijinsky took over the choreography for the new ballet, but Stravinsky was not impressed with his work. He admired Nijinsky as a dancer, but regretted that this “poor boy has no basic ideas about music”.

Nijinsky had similar problems with Stravinsky during the choreography, recalling that they wasted a lot of time because of the composer’s belief that he was the only one who knew everything about music. The young choreographer wished that Stravinsky had “talked more about his music for Rite of Spring, rather than giving lectures on music theory”.

The premiere of the ballet The Rite of Spring took place on 29 May 1913 at the beautiful new Champs-Elysées theatre in Paris.

What actually happened on that scandalous night will always be somewhat of a mystery, as reports at the time contradict each other. Was it the choreography that disturbed people or the music? Did they really have to call the police?

It is certain that the audience was shocked. Stravinsky’s music was against all the rules of what music should be. The score was so different from anything heard before that the musicians were already wondering in rehearsals whether there had been a typographical error.

The music was unremittingly loud, and already in the opening melody the bassoon assaulted the ears of the astonished listeners at its highest and most unpleasant volume, followed by thundering percussion and screaming brass.

Then there was the wild and primitive dance which, according to some observers, was the one that really caused a scandal that night. When the curtain rose, the audience saw a row of “Lolitas with long tendons and bent knees, jumping up and down”, as Stravinsky later commented, and they seemed to be twitching more than dancing. The classical dancers were reaching upwards, defying gravity, while Nijinsky’s dancers seemed to be pulled towards the ground.

As the music grew into a frenzy of dissonance, the dancers began to move, and their strange, stamping steps and the awkward poses Nijinsky forced them into defied all the standards of gracefulness that the audience had come to expect from ballet dancers. Nijinsky imagined the movements of ancient tribes, so the dancers’ steps were heavy, earthy and primal. For most of the performance they were facing away from the audience and there was no story to follow.

Given all this, it is not surprising that there was a scandal. Almost immediately after the first opening bars, the audience erupted and the hall erupted in whistles, insults, shouts and laughter.

Some shouted with rage because they felt that this “non-ballet” was ridiculing and insulting them, while others defended him because they understood that what they were seeing and hearing was as revolutionary as the writings of Nietzsche and Freud, the discoveries of Einstein and the paintings of Cézanne and Picasso.

Stravinsky was so angry that he stormed out of the hall and went backstage to help the dancers and Nijinsky, who “with a face as white as a shirt, shouted like a helmsman”, and to help keep the rhythm, because the noise made by the audience meant that the dancers could no longer hear the music.

“The storm had blown up”, the composer said in a later interview. He believed that the audience had “come for Scheherazade or Cleopatra, but they had seen The Rite of Spring” and were therefore upset by the degree of dissonance in the score, the jerky movements of the dancers and the sudden sound of the wind instruments. “I went out, I said, ‘go to hell’ … they were very naive and stupid people.”

Diaghilev, who was also backstage, ordered the lights to be turned on and off in a fruitless attempt to calm the “barbaric” audience.

The primitivism of the dance was also disturbing to the French writer Jacques Rivière. After the premiere, he wrote that the dancers were like caged animals who never tire of banging their heads against the bars.

Stravinsky and Nijinsky never worked together again.

Perhaps the noise at the premiere was a sign of unrest, a feeling that the world had lost its foothold and that barbarism would soon be unleashed on the streets. Given that the First World War was about to break out, this feeling was not so very wrong.

Among the excited crowd sat the famous fashion designer Coco Chanel. She watched the chaos on and around the stage and was fascinated by the person who had caused the scandal. Coco smelled everything new and progressive, so the audience’s displeasure could not hide her talent for Stravinsky. Despite attempts to see the courageous genius after the performance, the meeting never took place. Stravinsky was too worried about his failure and had neither the desire nor the spiritual strength to chat. The two charismatic figures did not meet and their paths diverged for a while.

Life in Switzerland

Shortly after the premiere, Stravinsky contracted typhoid fever from eating spoiled oysters. His recovery was “painful and frustratingly slow”, and then, as usual, he spent the rest of the summer with his family in Ustilug.

Due to exhaustion after giving birth to her daughter Milena in early 1914 and symptoms of tuberculosis, Katerina had to go to Leysin for three months for treatment at a health resort high in the Alps. Stravinsky settled with his family and large household near the sanatorium, and it was there that he befriended Jean Cocteau.

In Leysin he completed his first opera, The Nightingale, based on the story of the same name by Hans Christian Andersen. The work was premiered under Diaghilev’s patronage on 26 May 1914 in Paris, after initially being commissioned by the Moscow Free Theatre, which soon went bankrupt. The opera was received rather lukewarmly by the public and critics, probably because it was too tender and did not live up to their expectations after the tumultuous Rite of Spring.

Katerina had recovered sufficiently by May to return to Clarens, where she and Igor decided not to return to Ustilug that summer.

In July 1914, Europe was on the brink of war and Stravinsky briefly travelled to his home in Ustilug to gather his belongings and transfer them to Switzerland, where he returned just before the country’s borders were closed for the war. He did not set foot on Russian soil again until October 1962, at the age of 80.

Stravinsky, who was unfit for mobilisation because of health problems and therefore did not have to return to Russia, moved from Clarence to Morges, near Lausanne on the shores of Lake Geneva, in June 1915, where he tried to support his growing number of Russian relatives on his diminishing income.

Before the end of the war, the Bolshevik Revolution took place and Stravinsky, left without any “Russian” property, realised that their voluntary exile had become definitive. With the communist takeover, Russia had become for him a foreign country, which he despised without limits, and he began to define himself as a “citizen of the world”. This realisation gave him homesickness and a passionate enthusiasm for Russian folk songs.

In the years after the First World War, Stravinsky was burdened by even greater financial difficulties, as Russia and its successor, the USSR, did not accede to the Berne Convention, which made it difficult for the composer to collect royalties, and the Ballets Russes, Stravinsky’s other source of income, also fell on hard times, as the theatres were closed.

While composing The Soldier’s Tale, an hour-long music-theatre work for seven instruments, three actors and a dancer, Stravinsky turned to the Swiss philanthropist Werner Reinhart for financial help. Reinhart largely financed the first performance, which took place in Lausanne in September 1918.

The Soldier’s Tale was a great success, but Stravinsky’s hopes for the financial success of the tour were quickly dashed. The influenza epidemic of 1918 also hit Switzerland and, in addition to Stravinsky and his entire family, several performers fell ill and the tour had to be abandoned.

In gratitude for the financial help, Stravinsky dedicated the story to Reinhart and gave him the original manuscript, and Reinhart continued to support him.

Friendship with Picasso

Igor Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso met in Italy in 1917 and over the next three years engaged in a successful artistic dialogue. Their lifelong friendship was cemented by their mutual admiration and interest in each other’s creative talents. Brought together by Diaghilev, the two artists immediately hit it off and became fascinated by Naples’ rich classical past.

They collected kitsch souvenirs, postcards and 19th-century watercolours from second-hand dealers. Drunken evenings were followed by puppet shows and commedia dell’arte performances. On one of these debauched evenings, they were arrested for urinating in the gallery. According to an anecdote, they were only released when a policeman heard them both being addressed as “maestro”.

Stravinsky and Picasso cemented their friendship by exchanging small works of art. The composer created a musical sketch for clarinet on hotel telegram paper, capturing his friend’s cubist style, and gave it to him, while Picasso drew a number of portraits of Igor Stravinsky, including one that attracted the unwanted attention of the Swiss border police, who almost confiscated the sketch. When Stravinsky was returning to Switzerland, the border guards were convinced that it was a map of secret military bases.

In the years after the First World War, Stravinsky renewed his ties with the Ballets Russes, but they were much looser. The collaboration between Stravinsky and Picasso culminated in the production of the ballet Pulcinella, commissioned by Diaghilev. Stravinsky orchestrated the pieces, attributed to the 18th-century Italian composer Pergolesi, while Picasso designed the sets and costumes for the ballet, which premiered on 15 May 1920 at the Paris Opera.

With Pulcinella, based on the commedia dell’arte, a form of Italian popular theatre in the 17th and 18th centuries, Stravinsky approached early music in a revolutionary way. The work marked the beginning of neoclassicism and the Russian style in Stravinsky’s music began to fade. He abandoned the large orchestras that had once been necessary for his ballets, using wind instruments and piano, and turned to chamber music and vocal compositions.

The genius composer was increasingly thinking of leaving Switzerland to give his career a new impetus. As commissions for new compositions dried up as a result of the war, he was forced to earn his living as a performer, and many of the works he composed in the 1920s and 1930s were written for his own use and performed as a concert pianist or conductor.

The Stravinsky family first considered moving to the capital of Italy, but instead moved to France.

A cocktail of Russian vodka and French perfume

Seven years after the scandalous premiere of The Rite of Spring, Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel met again at a Ballets Russes rehearsal. The fashion designer had broken social rules in her life and work, which led Diaghilev to notice her and invite her to join his circle of creative stalwarts. Coco gladly accepted, offering financial and artistic support to the impresario.

After moving from Switzerland, Stravinsky lived in poverty with his family and Russian household members in a modest apartment with shabby furniture in a small fishing village in Brittany, while looking for a new home in Paris.

Coco, who admired the Russian composer’s music, theatricality and personality, offered the artist, his wife, who was suffering from tuberculosis, and their four children refuge in her mansion, Bel Respiro, in the Paris suburbs.

She provided Stravinsky with a separate room with an expensive piano in which to write his masterpieces, and there he set about modernising Rite of Spring, as Chanel’s donation secured a new production of the ballet.

The mansion, filled with works of modern art and decorated in black and white, suggested that its owner was a strong and successful woman, while at the same time Coco embodied freedom and independence, which appealed to the Russian composer, who had grown up in a patriarchal environment, despite his inner reluctance.

The extreme physical attraction between the French designer and the Russian artist was mixed with his devotion to his wife and family, and there are rumours that Stravinsky was unable to resist the “demonic charm” of the self-confident high-fashion icon.

The artist’s words about Coco Chanel continue to shroud their alleged romance in a veil of secrecy: “This woman was shaped by her time and its history, but she also shaped that history. She had a perfect sense of style and was always feminine without trying in any way. This quality of hers was attractive. I’m sure I could have fallen in love with her, but she probably would have eaten me for breakfast.”

Katerina was already ill when she moved to Paris and hardly left the suburban mansion, while Stravinsky often visited Chanel at the Ritz in Paris. In the city, they were seen together at clubs and parties, and Stravinsky’s ailing wife was forced to meekly accept her husband’s infidelity, as music, the family’s financial situation and well-being were far more important than their marriage.

Coco developed a passion for Igor’s music, and he flourished creatively during his stay at the mansion. Biographers later wrote that she liberated Stravinsky sexually, which automatically translated into all segments of his life and led to an explosion of ideas hidden within him.

At this time Stravinsky signed a contract with the French piano manufacturing company Pleyel, which helped him collect royalties for his works and provided him with a regular monthly income. As part of the deal, the composer arranged some of his own compositions for their Pleyel pianos, often using all eighty-eight notes of the piano without taking into account that no one would be able to play them.

In March 1921, Stravinsky joined the Ballets Russes on a tour of Spain and England, to which he also invited Coco Chanel, who did not accept the invitation, having in the meantime begun an affair with Grand Prince Dmitri Pavlovich, the eccentric cousin of Nicholas II, the last Russian Tsar, and gone with him to Monte Carlo. Whether or not Chanel and Stravinsky had an intimate relationship, the daring fashion designer continued to support the Russian composer financially until 1927.

The Stravinsky family remained in the mansion until May 1921, when they moved to Anglet and then to Biarritz, a favourite resort of European royalty and an established refuge for many Russian emigrants from communism. The main reason for moving to the Basque coast was Katerina’s health, but it also “served Igor’s emotional relief, as Paris also meant love affairs”.

A decade of double life

If Stravinsky was ever in love with Coco Chanel, he certainly soon got over her, for in the summer of 1921 he fell in love with the charming dancer Vera de Bosset, who was married to the painter and stage designer Sergei Sudeikin. They soon spent every free moment together and began an affair which led Vera to leave her husband in the spring of 1922.

Despite the passionate love he felt for Vera, he remained married to Katerina and so, since moving to Biarritz, he has led a double life, torn between his family in the south of France and Vera in Paris or on tour. Stravinsky, who had somehow settled into an uneasy routine, was separated for thirteen years, until his wife’s death in 1939.

He spent all his mornings with his family locked in his study, part of his afternoons with his family, and then worked again until evening. Sometimes this routine was interrupted by visits, but the normal predictability of the day provided some calm to the composer’s restless life. Stravinsky’s work was interrupted by long conducting tours abroad or urgent trips to the capital for concerts, recordings, meetings with publishers or some less urgent reason to be with Vera. He then transformed himself into a rich Parisian living in luxury and enjoying the nightlife with intellectuals and artists.

Vera accompanied him on his tours; they travelled first class and stayed in the best hotels, as Stravinsky’s notoriety earned him high fees.

The widowed Katerina bore her husband’s infidelity “with a mixture of generosity, bitterness and understanding”, while at the same time, in spite of her illness, caring for his mother, who had emigrated from St Petersburg in 1922.

After several years of orchestration changes, Stravinsky completed The Wedding, a ballet in which he used folk poetry, in 1923. He later recalled: ‘The first time I played Svatba to Diaghilev, he cried and said it was the most beautiful and purest Russian creation. I think he really liked Svatba better than any of my other works. That’s why I dedicated it to him.”

Quite surprisingly for the time, The Wedding was choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska, Vaclav’s sister, and thus became the first female choreographer for a major ballet company. Despite the great success of the ballet, Stravinsky later said that their visions were at odds and that what he had in mind was definitely different from what Nijinska created on stage.

After the successful premiere of The Marriage, Stravinsky began to receive money from an unknown US patron who insisted on remaining anonymous, but a later student and assistant to the Russian maestro, Robert Craft, believed that the patron was the famous conductor Leopold Stokowski.

In September 1924, Stravinsky bought a house in Nice and befriended a Russian Orthodox priest, Father Nikolai, and returned to his faith, which had a profound influence on his stage and vocal music.

He experimented with jazz and small ensembles, and in May 1927 premiered the religiously inspired opera oratorio King Oedipus, with a libretto in Latin, and the following year staged his last ballet, Apollon musagchte (Apollo, the lover of the muses), which he had staged with Stravinsky, in collaboration with Diaghilev. The ballet was commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, the American patron of the arts, for a contemporary music festival in Washington, the first of the commissions that began to “rain” from America.

Stravinsky also accepted a commission from Ida Rubinstein for a ballet, The Kiss of the Fairy, based on music by Tchaikovsky, which upset Diaghilev, who accused the composer of treason for using classical material. Unfortunately, there was no opportunity for the two men to settle their dispute, and when Diaghilev died in Venice in August 1929, the two friends had not spoken to each other for six months. Stravinsky was deeply saddened because, despite their many quarrels, he and Diaghilev had been very close.

The political mood in Germany, which had until then been the most reliable platform for the latest music, turned against everything modern and foreign after the founding of the Rajha Cultural Chamber in 1933. The music of some modern composers was banned, as it was said to contain Jewish and communist influences and “overseas” admixtures.

In 1938, the works of Stravinsky, who was known for his atonality, were also included in the list of “degenerate art”. This upset the composer to the point that he sent a complaint to the German authorities, in which he wrote: “My opponents go so far as to insinuate that I am a Jew, ignoring the fact that my ancestors were members of the Polish nobility.” He added that he hated Bolshevism, that Soviet monster.

The Nazi Chamber of Culture took note of his protest and replied, “We are pleased to inform you that your position in Germany has been fully restored.”

Stravinsky’s attitude to Hitler and Mussolini, whom the composer had openly admired before the Second World War, remains questionable, since he was a convinced monarchist all his life, hated the Bolsheviks and Communism from the start, and felt contempt for liberals, democrats and atheists.

Stravinsky was also criticised in his homeland for his modernism, which was not supported by the ruling regime in Russia, and he “disappeared” from the scene particularly noticeably under Stalin and his successors. This period lasted for a good thirty years.

In 1934, the Stravinskis became naturalised French citizens, a fact Igor celebrated by publishing his somewhat dubious memoirs in French in his autobiography, Chronicle of My Life, published the following year.

Due to financial worries, he began a parallel career as a conductor and piano soloist, and was joined on tours by his younger son Soulima, who as a pianist became an accomplished interpreter of his father’s music.

Katerina was constantly ill and, needing more advanced medical care than the country doctors could provide, they moved to Paris to the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a street that Stravinsky later said was the last and saddest European address he had ever lived on.

His wife’s tuberculosis was becoming more and more serious and threatening, which weighed heavily on Igor’s heart and probably also on his conscience.

In 1938, Stravinsky, who coughed up blood profusely during an American tour, as well as his daughters Milena and Lyudmila, fell ill with tuberculosis. The latter succumbed to the disease the same year, aged twenty-nine. Just three months later, Katerina also died of tuberculosis, and in June 1939, Igor’s mother, while the composer was recovering from tuberculosis in the Sancellemoz sanatorium; he lost three of his closest relatives within six months.

The American “sunshine” period

During his five-month stay in hospital, Stravinsky tried to overcome his poor health and unbearable sadness by burying himself in his work, as commissions from America poured in. These commissions came at an important time, as Europe was then once again on the brink of world war and Stravinsky was facing increasing financial difficulties. As he became increasingly unhappy, he began to think about moving to America.

He called 1939 “the tragic year of my life”, but at the end of that year he accepted an invitation from Harvard University to give a series of lectures on the poetics of music and sailed off to his most “sunny” period.

Soon after his arrival in the USA, his lover Vera de Bosset joined him and they were married on 9 March 1940. They bought a house in the Hollywood Hills, and from then on their happiness was never shaken.

Stravinsky followed European politics and commented that “war can never be good for art. Musicians are mobilised. Life is messed up.” His Symphony in Three Movements, premiered in 1946, was a comment on the horrors of the Second World War.

Los Angeles, where many writers, musicians, conductors and poets settled, was vibrant with cultural life during the Second World War, and he and his wife Vera, who became naturalised American citizens at the end of 1945, created a new circle of friends.

In 1948, Stravinsky met the young musicologist Robert Craft, who became his interpreter, chronicler, musical assistant and collaborator. The realisation that he was considered an exhausted composer plunged Stravinsky into a great creative depression, from which, with Craft’s help, he moved into the serial technique of composition originally conceived by his rival, Arnold Schoenberg.

In 1951 he completed his last neoclassical work, the opera The Fate of the Desolationist, with a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, based on etchings by William Hogarth, and the first composition based entirely on serial techniques was Dylan Thomas’s In Memoriam from 1954.

He was constantly composing, directing, writing, experimenting, teaching and recording. In fact, he began to record almost all his works in an effort to ensure that they were performed accurately.

In January 1962, President John F. Kennedy hosted a dinner in Stravinsky’s honour to celebrate his 80th birthday. At the dinner, which took place at the height of the Cold War, Kennedy presented the famous Russian-born composer with a special medal in recognition of “the recognition his music has achieved throughout the world”.

The dinner was extremely formal, far too formal for Stravinsky’s taste, as it turned out; he too was bored – and drank. The evening ended badly, with the guest of honour getting so drunk that he almost had to be taken out of the party prematurely.

Stravinsky, who said that water was only good for washing your feet, once exclaimed: “My God, I like drinking whisky so much that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-viski.”

In later life, the composer always carried a bottle of his favourite 30-year-old Ballantine’s whisky with him and sipped from it regularly. A doctor in Los Angeles is said to have once advised him to drink a lot of whisky, because it was the best thing, and Stravinsky was happy to follow this advice. He used whisky as a palliative for bad criticism and even to take medicine.

In September 1962 he accepted an invitation from the Union of Soviet Composers and returned to Russia for the first time since 1914 to conduct six concerts in Moscow and Leningrad (formerly St Petersburg). During his three-week visit he met the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and a number of prominent Soviet composers, including Dmitri Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian.

When he was preparing for this trip, he asked that Ustilug be included in the list of places he would visit. Unfortunately, the local authorities refused. A few years later, the Soviet authorities also refused a similar request from a film crew preparing a documentary on Stravinsky who wanted to film in Ustilug.

At the age of eighty-four, the vital composer produced his last major work, the Requiem Canticles, written in the knowledge that his life had entered its final phase.

Long periods of travelling began to affect his health and from 1967 he suffered several strokes, for which he was frequently hospitalised. By this time, Stravinsky’s normal fee for a performance had risen to $10 000 (today’s value is about $90 000). Any offers to conduct concerts that would require him to fly, on the advice of his doctors, he usually declined.

The exception was a concert at Massey Hall in Toronto, Canada, in May 1967, where he conducted the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in the physically relatively undemanding Pulcinella Suite. He was becoming increasingly fragile and for the only time in his career he conducted seated. It was the last time he ever appeared as a conductor.

Stravinsky and his wife moved to a luxury apartment in New York in 1969, where the composer died on 6 April 1971 of pulmonary oedema and heart failure.

Stravinsky was a migrant cosmopolitan to the end, which is why he is buried neither in Russia nor in France nor in the USA, but in the San Michele cemetery in Venice, the city he loved best, not far from the grave of Sergei Diaghilev, who first introduced his music to the world.

Legacy

Igor Stravinsky’s distinctive musical style is the result of many cultural and historical factors, in addition to his undeniable genius. In addition to mastering all the styles that came before him, he developed a style of his own and turned the tide of musical history with it.

His involvement with ballet, the most glamorous of the arts, which uses the human body to express story and emotion, brought him under the public eye at an early age. He was adored by the media and became the popular subject of countless newspaper articles, magazine features and television documentaries; his music even appeared in the Hollywood film Walt Disney’s Fantasia.

He has co-authored eight highly cited books on his controversial theories of music and produced theatre works with such famous writers as W.H. Auden, Jean Cocteau and André Gide.

Stravinsky was a multifaceted, wild and impulsive personality, often overwhelmed by visions and inspirations that he simply had to translate into music. He was known for his characteristic use of rhythm, which, in the words of composer Philip Glass, “pushed him over the bar lines”.

He was a tireless myth-maker, giving interviews over the six decades of his career that were always “charming, skilful, highly graphic and uncompromisingly self-deprecating”. Stravinsky was not only a self-proclaimed cosmopolitan, but a composer whose sensibility remained deeply Russian throughout his life.

He earned a reputation as a daring breaker of tradition, for his music contains a multitude of styles that constantly overlap and are sometimes difficult to classify.

He was often misunderstood by the public, critics did not know what to think, and only a few progressive intellectuals supported him. But Stravinsky was adored nonetheless.

The Russian-born composer wrote in his dialogues: “I like writing music more than music itself. I was born at the wrong time, but I survived.”

It is a comfort to those who rank him in the highest place that they can assume that God said, “Let there be a Stravinsky.” And Stravinsky was, and he was good.