Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum, near Saint Petersburg, in June 1882, the son of a leading bass at the Mariinsky Theatre. He read law at Saint Petersburg University from 1901 while studying composition privately with Rimsky-Korsakov from 1903 — the only composition teacher he ever had. His early orchestral works attracted Diaghilev’s attention in 1909, and the three ballets composed for the Ballets Russes — *The Firebird* (1910), *Petrushka* (1911) and *The Rite of Spring* (1913) — established him within four years as the most-discussed living composer.

His career divides into the three stylistic periods he himself acknowledged. The Russian period (to roughly 1920) included those ballets, *Les Noces*, and *L’Histoire du soldat*. The neoclassical period (1920–51) — *Pulcinella* (1920), the *Octet* (1923), *Oedipus Rex* (1927), the *Symphony of Psalms* (1930), the *Symphony in C* (1940) and *The Rake’s Progress* (1951) — worked with eighteenth-century forms in a personal twentieth-century idiom. The serial period from 1952 onwards (*Cantata*, *Threni*, *Movements*, *Requiem Canticles*) absorbed Webern’s twelve-tone technique into a style that remained recognisably his own. He moved from Russia to Switzerland in 1914, to France in 1920, and to the United States in 1939.

Stravinsky became a French citizen in 1934 and an American citizen in 1945. He died in New York in April 1971 and was buried in San Michele, Venice. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his orchestral, ballet and stage work.