Composer Stravinsky 4 Letters

Composer Stravinsky 4 Letters – Igor Fedorovich Stravinsky was a Russian-born composer, pianist and conductor. He is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century.

Stravinsky’s compositional career was distinguished by stylistic diversity. He gained world fame for the first time thanks to three ballets commissioned by impresario Serge Diaghilev and performed for the first time in Paris by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: Firebird 1910, Petrushka 1911 and The Rite of Spring 1913. The latter changed the way composers thought about rhythmics. structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky’s enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design.

Composer Stravinsky 4 Letters

Following his “Russian phase”, which was continued by works such as Renard, L’Histoire du soldat and Les Noces, there was a period in the 1920s when he turned to neoclassicism. Works from this period usually used traditional musical forms: concerto grosso, fugue and symphony, as well as drew on earlier styles, especially in the 18th century. In the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serial procedures. His compositions from that period combined features with examples of his earlier work: rhythmic energy, building complex melodic ideas from several two or three-note cells, clarity of form and instrumentation.

Igor Stravinsky, A Correspondence.

Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882 in Oranienbaum on the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland, 40 km west of St. Petersburg. His father, Fiodor Ignatiewicz Stravinsky 1843–1902, was a recognized bass opera singer at the Kiev Opera and Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, and his mother, Anna Kiriłłowna Stravinska née Chołodowska; 1854–1939, a native of Kiev, was one of the four daughters of a high official in the Kiev Ministry of Property. Igor was the third of their four sons; his brothers were Roman, Yury and Gury. The Stravinsky family was of Polish and Russian descent, descended “from a long line of Polish magnates, senators and landowners”. It dates back to the 17th and 18th centuries to the holders of the coats of arms of Soulima and Stravinsky. The original family name was Soulima-Stravinsky; the name “Stravinsky” comes from the word “Strava”, one of the variants of the Streva River in Lithuania.

On August 10, 1882, Stravinsky was baptized at the Nikolsky Council in St. Petersburg. Until 1914, he spent most of his holidays in the city of Ustyugi, now in Ukraine, where his father-in-law owned a property. The first school of Stravinsky was the Second Gymnasium of Saint Petersburg, where he stayed until the age of a dozen. He then moved to the private Gourevitch Gymnasium where he studied history, math and six languages. Stravinsky expressed his general reluctance to learn and recalled that he was a lonely student: “I’ve never met anyone who really attracted me.”

Stravinsky took up music at an early age and began regular piano lessons at the age of nine, followed by music theory and composition. At the age of eight, he took part in the performance of the Tchaikovsky ballet The Sleeping Beauty at the Mariinsky Theater, which sparked a lifelong interest in ballets and the composer himself. At the age of fifteen, Stravinsky mastered Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 to perfection and completed the piano reduction of a string quartet by Alexander Glazunov, who reportedly considered Stravinsky non-musical and thought little about his skills.

Despite Stravinsky’s enthusiasm and musical skill, his parents expected him to study law, and he initially took up the subject. In 1901, he entered St. Petersburg University, studying criminal law and legal philosophy, but attending lectures was optional and he estimated that in four years of study he appeared in less than fifty classes. In 1902, Stravinsky met Vladimir, a fellow student at the University of Saint Petersburg and the youngest son of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Rimski-Korsakov at that time was probably a leading Russian composer and was a professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music. Stravinsky wanted to meet Vladimir’s father to discuss his musical aspirations. He spent the summer of 1902 with Rimski-Korsakov and his family in Heidelberg, Germany. Rimsky-Korsakov suggested to Stravinsky not to enter the Petersburg Conservatory, but to pursue private theory lessons.

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Until his father died of cancer in 1902, Stravinsky spent more time studying music than law. His decision to pursue his music career full-time helped him when the university closed for two months in 1905 in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, preventing him from passing his final legal exams. In April 1906, Stravinsky received his half-course diploma and concentrated on music. In 1905, he began studying with Rimsky-Korsakov twice a week and began to consider him his second father. These lessons continued until Rimsky-Korsakov’s death in 1908. During this time, Stravinsky completed his first composition, Symphony in E flat major, cataloged as opus 1. After Rimsky-Korsakov’s death, Stravinsky composed the Funeral Song, Op. 5, which was executed once and then declared missing until its rediscovery in 2015.

In August 1905, Stravinsky became engaged to his cousin, Katherine Gavrylivna Nosenko. Despite the Orthodox Church’s opposition to cousin marriages, the couple got married on January 23, 1906. They lived in the family residence on the Kryukov Channel 6 in St. Petersburg before moving into a new house in Ustyugi, which was designed and built by Stravinsky. and which he later called his “heavenly place.” He wrote many of his first compositions there. It is now a museum with documents, letters and photos on display, and the annual Stravinsky Festival is held in nearby Lutsk. The first two children of Stravinsky and Nosenko, Fyodor Theodor and Ludmila, were born in 1907 and 1908, respectively.

In 1909, Stravinsky composed two more pieces, the Fantastic Scherzo, Op. 3 and Feu d’artifice “Fireworks” op. 4. In February of this year, both were performed in Saint Petersburg at a concert that marked a turning point in Stravinsky’s career. In the audience was Sergei Diaghilev, a Russian impresario and owner of the Russian Ballets, who was delighted with Stravinsky’s compositions. He wanted to stage a mix of Russian opera and ballet for the 1910 season in Paris, including a new ballet from fresh talent, based on the Russian fairy tale of the Firebird. After Anatoly Lyadov was given the task of composing the score, he informed Diaghilev that he needed about a year to complete it. Diaghilev then asked the 28-year-old Stravinsky, who in no time provided him with satisfactory orchestrations for the previous season and agreed to compose the full music. The 50-minute long The Firebird was revised by Stravinsky for a concert performance in 1911, 1919 and 1945.

The premiere of Firebird took place at the Paris Opera on June 25, 1910 and met with widespread critical acclaim, and Stravinsky became an overnight sensation. As his wife was expecting a third child, the Stravinsky family spent the summer at La Baule in western France. In September, they moved to Clarens, Switzerland, where their second son, Sviatoslav Soulima, was born. The family spent summers in Russia and winters in Switzerland until 1914. Diaghilev commissioned Stravinsky to record the second ballet for the 1911 season in Paris. As a result, Petrushka was created, based on a Russian folk tale with the title character, a puppet who falls in love with another, a ballerina. Though it failed to capture the immediate acceptance of Firebird after its premiere at the Théâtre du Châtelet in June 1911, the production continued the success of Stravinsky.

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It was only Stravinsky’s third ballet for Diaghilev, The Rite of Spring, that caused a sensation among critics, fellow composers and concert-goers. Based on an original idea donated to Stravinsky by Nicholas Roerich, the production includes a series of primitive rituals to commemorate the arrival of spring, after which a young girl is chosen as an offering to the sun god Yarilo and dances to death. Stravinsky’s score contained many novelties for those times, including experiments with tonality, time signatures, rhythm, accent and dissonance. The radical nature of music and choreography caused almost a riot during its premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on May 29, 1913. The “Russian world” became synonymous with barbarism and attracted Europe at that time.

Shortly after the premiere, Stravinsky contracted typhus from eating bad oysters and was locked up in a Parisian nursing home. He left in July 1913 and returned to Ustiług. For the rest of the summer, he focused on his first opera, The Nightingale, Le Rossignol, based on a short story by Hans Christian Andersen of the same title, which he started in 1908. On January 15, 1914, Stravinsky and Nosenko had a fourth child, Marie Milene or Maria Milena. After giving birth, Nosenko was discovered to have tuberculosis and was confined to a sanatorium in Leysin in the Alps. Stravinsky lived nearby, where he graduated from Nightingale. The premiere of the work took place in Paris in May 1914, after the Free Moscow Theater ordered the work for 10,000 rubles, but it soon went bankrupt. Diaghilev agreed to be staged by Russian ballets. The opera is apparently just a summer success with audiences and critics