Igor Stravinsky

Stravinsky's father was an established bass opera singer, and Stravinsky grew up taking piano and music theory lessons. While studying law at the University of Saint Petersburg, he met Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and studied under him until Rimsky-Korsakov's death in 1908. Stravinsky met the impresario Sergei Diaghilev soon after, who commissioned Stravinsky to write three ballets: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913), the last of which brought him international fame after the near-riot at the premiere, and changed the way composers understood rhythmic structure.


Stravinsky's compositional career is divided into three periods: his Russian period (1913–1920), his neoclassical period (1920–1951), and his serial period (1954–1968). Stravinsky's Russian period was characterised by influence from Russian styles and folklore. Renard (1916) and Les noces (1923) were based on Russian folk poetry, and works like L'Histoire du soldat blended these folktales with popular musical structures, like the tango, waltz, rag, and chorale. His neoclassical period exhibited themes and techniques from the classical period, like the use of the sonata form in his Octet (1923) and use of Greek mythological themes in works like Apollon musagète (1927), Oedipus rex (1927), and Persephone (1935). In his serial period, Stravinsky turned towards compositional techniques from the Second Viennese School like Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954) was the first of his compositions to be fully based on the technique, and Canticum Sacrum (1956) was his first to be based on a tone row. Stravinsky's last major work was the Requiem Canticles (1966), which was performed at his funeral.


While some composers and academics of the time disliked the avant-garde nature of Stravinsky's music, particularly The Rite of Spring, later writers recognized his importance to the development of modernist music. Stravinsky's revolutions of rhythm and modernism influenced composers like Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Béla Bartók, and Pierre Boulez, all of whom "felt impelled to face the challenges set by [The Rite of Spring]," as George Benjamin wrote in The Guardian.^[1] In 1998, Time magazine named Stravinsky one of the 100 most influential people of the century. Stravinsky died of pulmonary edema on 6 April 1971 in New York City.

Honours[edit]

Stravinsky received the Royal Philharmonic Society's gold medal in 1954,^[252] the Léonie Sonning Music Prize in 1959,^[253] and the Wihuri Sibelius Prize in 1963.^[254] On 25 July 1966, he was awarded the Portuguese Military Order of Saint James of the Sword.^[255] In 1977, the "Sacrificial Dance" from The Rite of Spring was included among many tracks around the world on the Voyager Golden Record.^[256] In 1982, the composer was featured on a 2¢ postage stamp by the United States Postal Service as part of its Great Americans stamp series.^[257] He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960^[258] and was posthumously inducted into the National Museum of Dance and Hall of Fame in 2004.^[259]


A number of major works were dedicated to Stravinsky, including En blanc et noir by Claude Debussy, Trois poèmes de Mallarmé by Maurice Ravel,^[260] and the revised version of La tragédie de Salomé by Florent Schmitt.^[261] The composer received five Grammy Awards and eleven total nominations.^[262] Three records of his works were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1993, 1999, and 2000, and he was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987.^{[263][264][265]}