Igor Stravinsky, the composer who reinvented himself twice and still could not escape the evening of May 29, 1913

Igor Stravinsky

Photo: George Grantham Bain Collection / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 17, 1882 Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov), Russia
Died	April 6, 1971 (88)
Occupation	Composer
Awards	Named by Time magazine among the 100 most important people of the 20th century

The arguments started before the curtain was fully up. On the evening of May 29, 1913, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, the audience at the premiere of the Ballets Russes’ new production began countering each other — some booing the moment the dancers appeared, others shushing the boos, then booing the shushers — until Vaslav Nijinsky had to stand in the wings shouting bar numbers at his dancers who could no longer hear the orchestra. Igor Stravinsky watched from backstage. By morning, he had typhoid fever. Within a decade, The Rite of Spring had entered the canon. He would spend the next fifty years trying, and failing, to be understood as the composer of anything else.

Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882, in Oranienbaum — a small town on the Gulf of Finland west of Saint Petersburg where the tsar kept a summer palace and the air carried, he recalled later, something permanently official. His father, Fyodor Stravinsky, sang bass at the Imperial Opera, and Igor grew up with professional musicians passing through the house. He began piano lessons at nine, studied law briefly at university without conviction, and in 1902 arranged an introduction to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov — the single most consequential act of his early life. Rimsky-Korsakov advised him against the conservatory and became his private teacher instead, reviewing compositions by hand, shaping Stravinsky’s ear for orchestral color in a way no classroom could have managed. When Rimsky-Korsakov died in June 1908, Stravinsky composed a Funeral Song in memoriam and buried, alongside his teacher, the last chapter of his apprenticeship.

The commission from Sergei Diaghilev arrived the following year. Diaghilev was assembling the Ballets Russes for a Paris season and needed a composer who understood Russian folk material and could deliver something new. Stravinsky was twenty-seven, largely unknown outside Saint Petersburg. The premiere of The Firebird on June 25, 1910, at the Palais Garnier made him famous overnight. A second commission, Petrushka, followed in 1911, deepening his reputation for rhythmic invention and harmonic surprise. Then came the evening that would shadow everything else.

What happened at the premiere of The Rite of Spring is often described as a riot. Contemporary accounts are more careful: the audience divided against itself, some shocked by Nijinsky’s choreography and the work’s radical stacking of irregular rhythms, others offended by the objectors. Around forty people were ejected. The second part was watched in relative silence. The term “riot” does not appear in contemporary 1913 reviews — it emerged in accounts of a 1924 revival, over a decade later, which tells you something about how quickly legend overtook fact. Stravinsky went home ill. The world had already decided he was a revolutionary, a verdict he would spend decades simultaneously accepting and contesting.

The Ballets Russes partnership dissolved with the First World War. Living first in Switzerland, then in France, Stravinsky began a pivot so abrupt that his former admirers read it as abandonment. Pulcinella (1920), a response to a Diaghilev commission drawing on music attributed to Pergolesi, was not a folk ballet but a deliberate dialogue with the eighteenth century — ironic, cool, anti-expressive. It announced what would be called the neoclassical period, lasting three decades. Symphony of Psalms (1930), commissioned for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s fiftieth anniversary and setting Latin psalms without violins or violas, had a liturgical severity that audiences accustomed to his earlier explosions did not easily recognize as the same hand. Oedipus Rex (1927), with a libretto by Jean Cocteau translated into Latin, introduced a theatrical stillness — masked, static — that was the opposite of everything the 1913 audience had found unsettling.

The critical response to this period was sometimes openly hostile. Pierre Boulez, who would later become among the most rigorous interpreters of Stravinsky’s music, initially dismissed the neoclassical works as pastiche. Others argued that the composer who had shaken the concert hall in 1913 was now retreating into academicism. This misreading was the one Stravinsky found most useful to ignore. He was not retreating; he was doing what he had always done, which was thinking about what the past might be used for rather than against.

By the early 1950s, the argument reopened. After a period of close engagement with the late works of Anton Webern, guided partly by his assistant and collaborator Robert Craft, Stravinsky began his third and final transformation. He was past seventy. In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954), a setting for tenor and string quartet, was his first fully serial composition. Agon (1957), arranged for George Balanchine’s choreography at the New York City Ballet, fused twelve-tone procedures with French baroque court dances — galliards, sarabands, bransles — in a combination that argued the serial language was not a cage but another room. Critics who had attacked the neoclassical turn now attacked the serial turn with comparable conviction, accusing Stravinsky of imitating Webern at an age when he should have been summing up. He replied in interviews with characteristic precision that his accusers were, in their turn, imitating critics from decades before.

His personal life was quieter in its complications than his musical ones, though not simple. He married Catherine Nosenko, his first cousin, in January 1906 in a ceremony arranged outside Saint Petersburg — cousin marriage being legally prohibited, the witnesses being two of Rimsky-Korsakov’s sons. Catherine became his principal copyist and first listener. She contracted tuberculosis in 1914 and spent the next twenty-five years in slow decline. From the early 1920s, Stravinsky maintained a relationship with Vera de Bosset, a painter and former dancer; he and Vera married in March 1940, the year after Catherine died. He had returned to Russian Orthodoxy in 1926, a reconversion that some regarded as difficult to reconcile with the circumstances of his personal life and that Stravinsky declined to discuss at length.

In September 1962, he returned to the Soviet Union for the first time in forty-eight years. The meetings with Nikita Khrushchev and Dmitri Shostakovich were formal; the concerts in Moscow and Leningrad were received with an intensity that surprised him. Earlier that year, President John F. Kennedy had invited him to a White House dinner in honor of his eightieth birthday. He had been an American citizen since 1945, living first in Los Angeles and then in New York. He died in New York on April 6, 1971, at eighty-eight, of pulmonary edema. His final major work, Requiem Canticles (1966), was performed at his own funeral.

Vera survived him by eleven years. They are buried together at the Isola di San Michele in Venice — where Diaghilev also lies, in a coincidence that either closes the circle or confirms that circles were always Stravinsky’s preferred form. The Rite of Spring is performed somewhere in the world several times per week. Whether the arguments about what it means have fully settled is, in certain circles, still a matter of debate.

Selected Recordings

Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1940)
Petrouchka (1950)
Renard (1951)
The Rite of Spring (1951)
Stravinsky: The Firebird Ballet Suite / Borodin: Symphony no. 2 (1952)
Oedipus Rex (1953)
Der Feuervogel, Ballettsuite / Gesang Der Nachtigall, Sinfonische Dichtung (1958)
Hovhaness: Mysterious Mountain / Prokofiev: Lieutenant Kije Suite / Stravinsky: The Fairy's Kiss Divertimento (1958)
Suite Italienne / Sonata (1959)
The Firebird (Complete Ballet) (1960)
Stravinsky Conducts – Symphony of Psalms / Symphony in C (1964)
Joan Carroll singt (1971)

Tags: singers, composers, Igor Stravinsky, Petrushka, Sergei Diaghilev, Symphony of Psalms

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