Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky wrote the piece that caused a riot at its premiere and then spent sixty years refusing to repeat himself. He was a law student in St Petersburg taking private lessons from Rimsky-Korsakov when Diaghilev, on the strength of one short orchestral piece, commissioned The Firebird for 1910; Petrushka followed in 1911 and The Rite of Spring in 1913. The Rite's premiere at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees produced shouting, fighting and police in the aisles - over Nijinsky's choreography as much as the score - and it is the standard example of an audience rejecting a work that was in the repertory within a decade. The war and the revolution cut him off from Russia and from his income; he never lived there again and became French and then American. What followed was three distinct manners. The neoclassical period from Pulcinella in 1920 through the Symphony of Psalms and The Rake's Progress reworked Baroque and Classical models with displaced accents and dry orchestration. Then, past seventy and after the death of Schoenberg, he took up serialism, which he had spent decades dismissing, and wrote Agon, Threni and the Requiem Canticles. He worked with Balanchine on and off for forty years, and their Apollo and Agon are among the foundations of American ballet. He is buried on San Michele in Venice, a few yards from Diaghilev. He conducted and recorded much of his own music, and the recordings are used as evidence about tempo. His conversations with Robert Craft, published in several volumes, are quoted constantly and their authorship is disputed. He wrote The Soldier s Tale in 1918 for seven players because nobody could afford an orchestra.

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