Over the next four years, Stravinsky and his family lived in Russia during the summer months and spent each winter in Switzerland. Shortly following the premiere of The Rite of Spring , Stravinsky contracted typhoid from eating bad oysters, and was confined to a Paris nursing home, unable to depart for Ustilug until 11 July. During the remainder of the summer, Stravinsky turned his attention to completing his first opera, The Nightingale usually known by its French title Le Rossignol , which he had begun in that is, before his association with the Ballets Russes.
The work had been commissioned by the Moscow Free Theatre for the handsome fee of 10, roubles. The Stravinsky family returned to Switzerland as usual in the fall of After her delivery, Katya was discovered to have tuberculosis and confined to the sanatorium at Leysin, high in the Alps.
Igor and the family took up residence nearby, and he completed Le Rossignol there on 28 March. In April, they were finally able to return to Clarens. By then, the Moscow Free Theatre had gone bankrupt.
Le Rossignol enjoyed only lukewarm success with the public and the critics, apparently because its delicacy did not meet their expectations of the composer of The Rite of Spring. In July, with war looming, Stravinsky made a quick trip to Ustilug to retrieve personal effects including his reference works on Russian folk music.
He returned to Switzerland just before national borders closed following the outbreak of World War I. The War and subsequent Russian Revolution made it impossible for Stravinsky to return to his homeland, and he did not set foot upon Russian soil again until October In June , Stravinsky and his family moved from Clarens to Morges, a town 6 miles south-west of Lausanne on the shore of Lake Geneva.
The family continued to live there at three different addresses until Stravinsky struggled financially during this period. Russia and its successor, the USSR did not adhere to the Berne convention and this created problems for Stravinsky when collecting royalties for the performances of all his Ballets Russes compositions.
Stravinsky blamed Diaghilev for his financial troubles, accusing him of failing to live up to the terms of a contract they had signed. In gratitude, Stravinsky dedicated the work to Reinhart and gave him the original manuscript. Reinhart supported Stravinsky further when he funded a series of concerts of his chamber music in included was a suite from Histoire du soldat arranged for violin, piano and clarinet, which was first performed on 8 November , in Lausanne.
In gratitude to his benefactor, Stravinsky also dedicated his Three Pieces for Clarinet October—November to Reinhart, who was an excellent amateur clarinetist.
On 8 June, the entire family left Morges for the last time, and moved to the fishing village of Carantec in Brittany for the summer while also seeking a new home in Paris. Stravinsky formed a business and musical relationship with the French piano manufacturing company Pleyel. Pleyel essentially acted as his agent in collecting mechanical royalties for his works and provided him with a monthly income and a studio space at its headquarters in which he could work and entertain friends and business acquaintances.
Patronage was never far away. In the early s, Leopold Stokowski gave Stravinsky regular support through a pseudonymous benefactor. Stravinsky met Vera de Bosset in Paris in February , while she was married to the painter and stage designer Serge Sudeikin, and they began an affair that led to Vera leaving her husband. Katya, to whom he had been married for 33 years, died of tuberculosis a year later, in March Stravinsky himself spent five months in hospital, during which time his mother died.
During his later years in Paris, Stravinsky had developed professional relationships with key people in the United States: he was already working on his Symphony in C for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and he had agreed to deliver the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University during the —40 academic year. Vera followed him in January, and they were married in Bedford, Massachusetts, on 9 March Stravinsky settled in West Hollywood.
These dance scenes with song and music describe a Russian peasant wedding. Fox commissioned by the Princess de Polignac was written between and Stravinsky inaugurated his trestle theatre, with dancers and acrobats improvising on stage. Also inspired by Russian folktales, this ballet features a fox who attacks a cock by disguising himself first as a nun, then as a beggar.
A cat and a goat try to stop him and eventually kill him. The Bolshevik Revolution of deprived Stravinsky permanently of his fortune. No longer receiving royalties from his Russian publisher, the composer now found himself in a precarious financial situation, forced to continue to write for a living. The war making large-scale performances improbable, this work, intended for a travelling theatre, would be on a much smaller scale.
The two friends assumed that it would be given in small rooms. Despite his previous glory on the great stages of Paris, the composer enjoyed the more modest exercise. For the libretto, he turned again to the stories of Afanassiev. The text, written in a style that reflects both the poem and the tale, is not sung but spoken. The work premiered in Lausanne in September under the baton of Ernest Ansermet.
Soon after the war ended, Diaghilev began to revive his company, making contact with Stravinsky. Pulcinella, composed in Morges between , is a modern work — and the audience loved it.
Having been influenced by Russian folklore and then by jazz, Stravinsky now discovered the music of the past. With the war over, the brilliant composer contemplated leaving Switzerland to give a new boost to his career. Having considered Rome, the family Stravinsky instead uprooted to Paris. After his exile in Switzerland during the war, Stravinsky settled for 20 years in France, where musical activity was intense.
The return of the composer on the Parisian scene took place on May 15, with the creation of Pulcinella at the Opera. Stravinsky revived traditional musical forms concerto grosso, fugue, symphony and his work took a new turn. Stravinsky now abandoned the great orchestras once required for his ballets, using wind instruments and piano, and turned to chamber music and vocal compositions. Stravinsky became one of the instigators of Neoclassicism, a movement also adopted by such composers as Darius Milhaud, Aaron Copland and Serge Prokofiev.
Stravinsky constructed his scores according to classical forms, but they clearly bore his signature. For just over three years, the Stravinsky family moved to Biarritz, on the Basque coast. Here, the composer completed Wedding Les Noces , a work begun in , in which he was still using Russian folklore.
But he renounced the orchestra originally planned that called for more than four pianos and a percussion ensemble. In the same period, the French piano manufacturer, Pleyel, signed a contract with Stravinsky, providing him with a work studio. The Aeolian Company of New York repeated this agreement in This project became Mavra, a parody of opera bouffe.
Faced with this criticism he wrote:. To make it perfectly clear, what they want is out of date for me and to follow them would be to do violence to myself. Octet required a reduced number of musicians and its use of counterpoint was a look back to Bach. Octet was the first in a long series of instrumental compositions making use of this process. Concerto is composed in three movements according to the classical model. From , Stravinsky divided his activities between composing, conducting and performing.
Prompted by Koussevitsky, he began a parallel career as performer and conductor that lasted 15 years. He conducted numerous tours throughout Europe with his pianist son, Soulima. Shortly thereafter, beginning in , Stravinsky made his first trip to the United States where he signed a contract as conductor and soloist for a tour of two months.
The American public, already well aware of his work, welcomed him warmly. Stravinsky continued to tour frequently throughout Europe as a conductor. Stravinsky wanted to compose once again a large-scale work based on a Latin text.
Oedipus Rex is a work that is both confusing and austere, its characters stand like statues keeping their movements to a minimum. The music focuses on the drama of the story and includes motifs of the Baroque era inspired by Handel. His renewed religious sentiment was also felt in two ballets, Apollon Musagete and Persephone Apollon Musagete later known as Apollo was the last ballet staged by Diaghilev one year before his death and the dissolution of the Ballets Russes.
It is a classical ballet in which the composer celebrates the apotheosis of string instruments. The performance of this work marks the beginning of a close collaboration between Stravinsky and the choreographer George Balanchine. Persephone, a melodrama in three parts also based on Greek mythology, was composed for the Ida Rubinstein ballet company.
This text is assigned to a speaker, a tenor, and a chorus mixed and children , accompanied by an orchestra whose melodic charm is undeniable. In , Stravinsky made the acquaintance of the violinist Samuel Dushkin with whom he collaborated on Concerto pour Violon, commissioned by the composer, Blair Fairchild, followed by a sonata for violin and piano, Duo Concertante.
In , Stravinsky moved to Paris in after two years spent in Voreppe, near Grenoble and acquired French nationality. His second son, Soulima, began a career as a pianist, interpreting the works of his father. Stravinsky wrote Concerto for two pianos alone Concerto pour deux pianos seuls in so that they could perform together in public.
A new ballet, inspired by the scenario of a poker game, followed Persephone. The first performance took place on April 27, at the Metropolitan Opera under his direction. In the spring of that year, Stravinsky began work on a concerto for chamber orchestra, ordered by wealthy American patrons, Mr. Bliss, on the occasion of their wedding 30th anniversary.
Stravinsky then, in , composed his Symphony in C Symphonie en ut for the 50th anniversary of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Tuberculosis struck the Stravinsky family with three deaths : his eldest daughter Ludmila November , his wife Catherine March and his mother Anna June Stravinsky interrupted his work. Nadia Boulanger then informed Stravinsky that Harvard University had chosen him for its prestigious Poetry Chair for the year for a series of lectures on his conception of music.
America welcomed the composer as a prestigious guest. With demands on his time from all sides, Stravinsky decided to settle on the new continent. He wrote, directed, recorded and lectured incessantly and continued to create performances worldwide.
At the beginning of , he married his second wife, Vera de Bosset. Stravinsky and his new wife moved to Beverly Hills, then bought a house in Hollywood, a home where Stravinsky would remain for a long period of his life. In December , he obtained U. Los Angeles, during the war, had a rich cultural life with many expatriate artists and intellectuals settled there. Stravinsky built a new circle of friends. He enjoyed, among others, the company of such English writers as Aldous Huxley and W.
Auden, with whom he later collaborated, as well as the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. The post-war years were serene for Stravinsky who now enjoyed good health and was free of financial worries.
Arriving in the United States, Stravinsky had already begun his t Symphonie en Ut , completed in Produced by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, it is his most important symphonic work. His first American composition was Tango , inspired by his trips to Mexico. In , his arrangement of the American national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner, for mixed choir and orchestra led to his arrest during its performance in Boston. His father helped him learn the love of music. His first musical education began at the age of nine with piano lessons, studying music theory, and attempting composition.
Petersburg, Stravinsky was lived and attached with music. He also started taking piano lessons when he was 9 years old and continued on with musical notation and composition instruction. All throughout his early life he studied music. However, although he had been brought. While The Firebird, similar to Petrushka and The Rite Of Spring, is unquestionably one of Stravinsky's masterpieces, if considered strictly historically it can be, with some justice, viewed as warmed-over Rimsky-Korsakov the device of contrasting.
When one thinks of a ballet they hear soft rhythmic notes and see elegantly dancing ballerinas softly tip-toeing around the stage. However, a couple of motivated artists in literally planned to change the design of ballet, music and dance forever.
The original title as it translates from Russian to French is; Le Sacre. Stravinsky managed to bring an earthy and wild tone to an orchestra that audiences were used to being so elegant and high class.
The symbol of spring to the Russian culture represents their new year with the revival of the crops and unity that was crucial to living. Embodying the gathering of people with their relationship with the Earth, Stravinsky brought music. Music was one of the last art forms touched by the neoclassicism idea, and even then it only occurred several decades into the 19th century.
Of all the neoclassical composers, Igor Fyodorvich Stravinsky is the one that is the most well known in the music world for his contributions to the creation of the style.
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