Composer | IGOR STRAVINSKY
One of the most important and influential 20th century composers, Stravinsky was born 17 June 1882 and brought up in the Russian capital St Petersburg, where his father was a bass singer at the Imperial Maryinsky Theatre. A lonely schoolboy, he studied piano, music theory and composition from an early age, but was sent to study law at St Petersburg University in 1901, leaving in 1906, after his father’s death, to study music privately with Rimsky-Korsakov who became a second father to him. In 1906 he married his cousin Katya Nosenko, who bore him four children.
Stravinsky shot to international fame with his brilliant score for Fokine’s The Firebird (1910), followed by further commissions for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: Petrushka (1911), The Rite of Spring (1913) and Le Rossignol (1914). The Stravinskys had been dividing their time between their estate in the Ukraine and home in Switzerland, when World War One and the Russian Revolution prevented their return to Russia, and they settled in Brittany and then Paris, becoming French citizens in 1934. In the interwar years, until the 1939 death from tuberculosis of his wife Katya, Stravinsky lived a double life, between his family in Biarritz and Nice, and his lover and later second wife, Vera de Bosset, whom he met in 1921. These years also saw Stravinsky develop a neo-classical style in Pulcinella (1920), Apollo and Oedipus Rex (1927), Symphony of Psalms (1930), Dumbarton Oaks Concerto (1937) and two symphonies.
In 1939, at the age of 57, Stravinsky emigrated to the United States, where he married Vera in 1940 and settled happily in West Hollywood, becoming a US citizen in 1945. After his 1951 opera The Rake’s Progress, Stravinsky became influenced by the twelve-tone serial experiments initiated by Schoenberg. Stravinsky’s fruitful collaboration with Balanchine produced such major ballets as Agon (1957). He continued travelling, composing and conducting, returning to Russia in 1962 for the first time since 1914, to give concerts in Leningrad and Moscow. In 1969 he moved to New York, where he died of heart failure, aged 88, on 6 April 1971, and is buried, near Diaghilev, in Venice’s San Michele cemetery.