Biography
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), born in Oranienbaum near Saint Petersburg and later naturalised French and then American, is among the supreme composers of the twentieth century and transformed Western music more radically than any contemporary except Schoenberg. His early ballets for Sergei Diaghilev—The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913)—established polyrhythmic complexity and dissonant harmony as foundational elements of musical modernism. His subsequent work moved through neoclassicism (Pulcinella, Oedipus Rex, the Symphony of Psalms, The Rake's Progress) to serialism in his final decades under Robert Craft's influence. Stravinsky fled Russia for Switzerland in 1914, moved to Paris in 1920, and settled in Los Angeles in 1939 where he lived until 1962. He died in New York and was buried on San Michele island in Venice, near Diaghilev.
On Stagelog
Loading stats...