Igor Stravinsky on Music Theory Print

A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer

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History#

Stravinsky began work on A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer in Hollywood in 1960, and finished it on 31 January 1961. The score is dedicated to the Swiss conductor Paul Sacher, who commissioned it—the third movement bears an additional dedication: “In memoriam the Reverend James McLane (†1960)”. It was published later in the same year, and the work’s first performance was given by the Basler Kammerorchester, conducted by the dedicatee, on 23 February 1962 in Basel.

Abraham and Isaac (Stravinsky)

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History#

When the Israel Festival Committee asked Stravinsky for a new work, he decided to set the story of Abraham and Isaac to a text in Hebrew, a language with which he was not familiar. The philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, who was a friend of the composer, helped Stravinsky to understand the sounds and structure of the text. Work was begun in 1962 and the score, which is dedicated to the people of the State of Israel, was completed on 3 March 1963. The work was premiered on 23 August 1964 in Binyanei Ha’Ooma, Jerusalem, by Ephraim Biran, baritone, and the Israel Festival Orchestra, conducted by Robert Craft.

Agon (ballet)

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Form#

Stravinsky laid out the ballet in twelve parts, with four large sections each consisting of three dances. A prelude and two interludes occur between the large sections, but this does not fundamentally affect the twelve-part design because their function is caesural and compensatory: *I. # Pas-de-quatre (4 male dancers) # Double pas-de-quatre (8 female dancers) # Triple pas-de-quatre (4 male + 8 female dancers) *Prelude *II. (First pas-de-trois: 1 male, 2 female dancers) #Sarabande-step (1 male dancer) #Gaillarde (2 female dancers) #Coda (1 male, 2 female dancers) *Interlude *III. (Second pas-de-trois: 2 male, 1 female dancers) #Bransle simple (2 male dancers) #Bransle gay (1 female dancer) #Bransle double (2 male, 1 female dancers) *Interlude *IV. #Pas-de-deux (1 male, 1 female dancer) #Four Duos (4 male, 4 female dancers) #Four Trios (4 male, 8 female dancers)

Apollo (ballet)

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Music#

Stravinsky began composing Apollo on 16 July 1927 and completed the score on 9 January 1928. He composed for a refined instrumental force, a string orchestra of 34 instrumentalists: 8 first violins, 8 second violins, 6 violas, 4 first cellos, 4 second cellos and 4 double basses. The commission from the Library of Congress and underwritten by Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge paid him $1,000 for the piece, which was required to use only six dancers, require a small orchestra, and last no more than half an hour, but allowed him free choice of subject. Stravinsky had been thinking of writing a ballet on an episode in Greek mythology for some time and decided to make Apollo, leader of the muses, its central figure while reducing the number of muses from nine to three. They were Terpsichore, personifying the rhythm of poetry and the eloquence of gesture as embodied in the dance; Calliope, combining poetry and rhythm; and Polyhymnia, representing mime. Stravinsky originally titled the work Apollon musagète, the French transliteration of Apollo Musagetes. This is one of the many classical epithets of Apollo and signifies the god’s mythological role as the leader of the Muses and the divine patron of music and dance. Stravinsky wrote for a homogeneous ensemble of bowed string instruments, substituting contrasts in dynamics for the contrasts in timbre he employed in Pulcinella. The ballet takes its inspiration from the grand tradition of French 17th- and 18th-century music, in particular that of Lully, a source Stravinsky returned to when composing Agon in 1957. The prologue begins with dotted rhythms in the style of a French overture. The work relies on a basic rhythmic cell, presented at the beginning of the work, which Stravinsky transforms by subdivisions of successive values that become increasingly complex. Stravinsky revised the score slightly in 1947. In 1963, he indicated he intended to make further changes, particularly with respect to double-dotting many of the dotted-rhythm passages in Baroque style.

Ave Maria (Stravinsky)

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Composition#

Stravinsky, though in his later years came to be a practicing member of the Russian Orthodox Church, showed little interest in his own religious and spiritual research in his early adult years and only returned to the fold in 1926, after sixteen years outside the Communion, when he started attending religious services held by Russian emigrants living in Paris. It was at this time that Stravinsky started composing short pieces for unaccompanied chorus based on Orthodox texts. Ave Maria was the last of the three pieces to have survived during this period, the other two being Otche Nash (1926) and Credo (1932). The original manuscript by Stravinsky was then kept by fellow musician Nadia Boulanger, who later claimed Ave Maria was one of her favorite pieces to conduct, possibly because of its accessibility. She kept, at least, two versions: the actual, handwritten autograph, and two pages of a photostat of the autograph, paid for by Stravinsky himself. The latter is now kept in Lyon. Ave Maria was finished in Paris, France, on 4 April 1934, and is known to have been played for the first time on 18 May 1934 at the Salle Gaveau, in Paris, as part of a memorial concert to American composer Blair Fairchild. It was originally written using texts in Slavic. In March 1949, however, since Stravinsky was struggling to earn money after moving into the United States, he decided to revise these three pieces and published them as a set, which later came to be known in recordings as Three Russian Sacred Choruses. As many other US compositions, it was published by Boosey & Hawkes. This time, he used Latin texts on all three pieces. These three pieces, together with his Mass, are the only liturgical pieces Stravinsky wrote.

Babel (Stravinsky)

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Composition#

Babel was written on commission from Nathaniel Shilkret, a conductor, composer and music director, who asked Stravinsky to contribute to a collaborative work titled Genesis Suite, based on the early chapters of the Book of Genesis. Although Shilkret’s intention was to create a descriptive suite, using representational music on aesthetic as well as religious grounds, Stravinsky relied on abstract musical form to present the biblical text in a more objective manner, believing that he should not make any attempts at dramatically portraying the voice of God. Arnold Schoenberg’s Prelude was the first piece in the set, whereas Stravinsky’s Babel was the last, on the subject of the building and destruction of the Tower of Babel. Stravinsky wrote his cantata on words taken from Genesis 11:1–9, in April 1944. Even though Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, and Sergei Prokofiev were also commissioned pieces for this suite, some of the pieces were never finished.

Berceuses du chat

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Songs#

The titles of the four songs are: The French titles for songs 2 to 4 are not translations; nos 2 and 3 are poetic titles, no. 4 is the French incipit. The cat is a male cat – кот, not кошка (koshka).

History#

The Berceuses du chat were composed in 1915/16 while Stravinsky was living in Clarens, Switzerland, during World War I. Helmut Kirchmeyer states that the texts are based on Russian folksongs, but the melodies are Stravinsky’s. and subsequently reissued by J. W. Chester (London) in 1923 with Russian, French (by Ramuz) and German (by , 1878–1931) texts.

Bluebird Pas de Deux

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Composition#

This arrangement was initially commissioned by Lucia Chase, the founding director of the Ballet Theatre, in January 1941. The commission called for a short arrangement of the four parts of No. 25, Pas de deux de l’Oiseau bleu et la Princesse Florine, in Act III of Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty. Though, initially, Tchaikovsky intended this to be a pas de quatre, Marius Petipa changed it in the original production, hence Stravinsky’s title. This was Stravinsky’s first commission as an expatriate in the United States. Stravinsky re-scored the piece in a few days and, according to his confidant Robert Craft, he enjoyed his work. Given the fact that only portions of the score had gotten to the United States by this time, and were only available in the form of piano reductions, this was a re-orchestration on the part of Stravinsky, which is why it is often entitled a “re-scoring” by other Stravinsky experts. This was not the first time Stravinsky orchestrated a segment from The Sleeping Beauty, as he also orchestrated a very brief solo variation in Act II (No. 15b) and the Entr’acte that opened the following scene (No. 18). On this occasion, the arrangement was composed as commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev. However, in the case of Bluebird, Stravinsky had to adapt to the company’s orchestra’s condition, as it had been depleted by the military draft just months before the US involvement in World War II. Bluebird Pas de Deux was eventually published by Schott Music and, later, by Chester Music.

Cantata (Stravinsky)

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Canticum Sacrum

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Text#

Stravinsky selected all of his texts except the opening dedication from the Latin Vulgate. They are presented here in an English translation: * Dedicato: “To the City of Venice, in praise of its Patron Saint, the Blessed Mark, Apostle” * Part I, Euntes in mundum: “Go into the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15) * Part II, Surge, aquilo: “Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits. I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk: eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved. (Song of Songs 4:16, 5:1) * Part III, Ad Tres Virtutes Hortationes **Caritas: “And thou shalt love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” (Deuteronomy 6:5) / “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loves is born of God, and knows God.” (1 John 4:7) **Spes: “They that trust in the Lord shall be as mount Zion” / “I waited patiently for the Lord” (Psalms 125:1, 130:5–6) **Fides: “I believed, therefore have I spoken: I was greatly afflicted.” (Psalms 116:10) * Part IV, Brevis Motus Cantilenae: “Jesus said to him, If you can, all things are possible to him that believes. And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, ‘Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!’” (Mark 9:23–24) * Part V, Illi autem profecti: “And they went forth, and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following. Amen.” (Mark 16:20)

Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra

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History#

The Allegro capriccioso movement that would become the finale was begun first, in Nice on Christmas Day 1928, and provided the musical material from which the other movements grew. It was followed by the second movement, completed at Echarvines, near Talloires, on 13 September 1929, and then by the opening Presto. The orchestration of the first movement was completed on 26 October and that of the last movement on 9 November 1929. The premiere took place in the Salle Pleyel, Paris, on 6 December 1929, with the Orchestre symphonique de Paris conducted by Ernest Ansermet (who had founded the orchestra that winter season) and featuring the composer at the piano. The next year, Stravinsky made a commercial recording of the work as soloist, with the Straram Orchestra, conducted by Ernest Ansermet. Beginning in the mind-1930s, Stravinsky’s son Soulima often performed it as soloist, most often with his father conducting. In 1949 Stravinsky corrected a number of misprints and omissions in the score, and this version was published in 1952. Unfortunately, a few new mistakes were added in this new edition, the most important of which was a change of the tempo marking at rehearsal number 14 from the original dotted-quaver = 88 to 80, which contradicts the specification that the semiquavers remain the same. Amongst other influences on the Capriccio, Stravinsky very much had in mind Carl Maria von Weber, whom he described as “a prince of music”. The three movements are played attacca (without interruption) and take just under twenty minutes to perform.

Circus Polka

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Composition#

Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine first met in 1925, as Balanchine, who just had started working for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, choreographed the ballet version of Stravinsky’s Le chant du rossignol. This was the start of a long friendship and many years of collaboration, which continued after both emigrated to the United States in the 1930s. In late 1941, the Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus made Balanchine the unusual proposal to do the choreography for a ballet involving the circus’s famous elephant group in the spring of the following year in New York. Balanchine immediately suggested bringing in Stravinsky, much to the delight of the circus company. However, Stravinsky was only contacted by phone on January 12, 1942. Balanchine would later recount the conversation as follows: : Although Stravinsky was busy with other projects at the time, he negotiated a high fee with the Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus for a short instrumental, which he composed within a few days. The piano version of Circus Polka, subtitled “For a Young Elephant” as an allusion to the phone conversation with Balanchine, was finished on February 5, 1942. Although the piece is, according to its name, a polka, it does contain a number of changes in rhythm. It only sounds like a polka towards the end, but this part is actually a borrowing from Franz Schubert’s Marche Militaire No. 1 in D major, D. 733. Stravinsky always denied that this was a parody of the Marche Militaire. He later called the whole piece a satire, the musical equivalent to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s drawings, but his notes do not reflect this. By the time the ballet was performed, Stravinsky was no longer involved with the project. The arrangement of the piece for an organ and a concert band was done by David Raksin. Balanchine choreographed the Circus Polka for fifty elephants and fifty human dancers, led by the cow elephant Modoc and by Balanchine’s wife at the time and principal ballerina Vera Zorina respectively. The elephants, including the bulls, were decked out in pink ballet tutus. Reporters were at first concerned that Stravinsky’s music might cause the elephants to panic. Balanchine was eventually able to teach Modoc the choreography. The show, advertised as a “choreographic Tour de Force”, premiered at Madison Square Garden on 9 April 1942. The performance was successful and the crowd was particularly enthusiastic about Balanchine’s extraordinary ballet. After this debut, Ringling Brothers performed the ballet another forty-two times, but Stravinsky did not attend any of the shows.

Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (Stravinsky)

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Orchestration#

The concerto, as described in its name, is scored for solo piano accompanied by an ensemble of wind instruments. The instrumentation of the wind section is what would be found in a standard symphony orchestra: two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, two bassoons (second bassoon doubling contrabassoon), four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, and tuba. The work also calls for a section of double basses (divided in 3) and a timpani player (4 drums recommended). Although combining winds and piano was unusual at the time, the form had been explored earlier in the twentieth century and would be explored later.

Concerto for Two Pianos (Stravinsky)

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Composition#

Stravinsky decided that, after composing his Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, he wanted to explore the capabilities of the piano as a solo instrument. Stravinsky had in mind a piece for which no orchestra would be needed (in case he lived in a city where no resident orchestra was actually established) and which could be played by himself and his son, Soulima Stravinsky. He began to work on a piece which would be the first movement of the Concerto in 1931 in Voreppe after finishing his Violin Concerto, although he found himself unable to complete a composition for which two pianos would play simultaneously and fully complement each other. He then took a break and took up the concerto again after finishing his Duo Concertant and Persephone, even though he was interrupted again due to an appendectomy. Having figured out that he had given a three-year break to his composition, and this could result in a radical difference between its first movement and the rest of the work, he opted for asking Pleyel et Cie to build him a double piano, one appended to the back part of the other. Pleyel could eventually invent it, so Stravinsky finished the Concerto in 1935. In 1963, Stravinsky stated in a conversation with American conductor Robert Craft in their book Dialogues and a Diary (1963) that “the Concerto is perhaps my ‘Favorite’ among my purely instrumental pieces.”

Concerto in D (Stravinsky)

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Movements#

The concerto has three movements:

References#

Sources * * * * * * * *

External links#

- - , SCM Chamber Orchestra, September 2015, Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium of Music

Concerto in E-flat "Dumbarton Oaks"

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Music#

Composed in Stravinsky’s neoclassical period, the piece is one of Stravinsky’s two chamber concertos (the other being the Concerto in D, for strings, 1946). It is scored for a chamber orchestra of flute, B clarinet, bassoon, two horns, three violins, three violas, two cellos, and two double basses. The three movements are: They are performed without a break, totaling roughly 12 minutes. The concerto was heavily inspired by J.S. Bach’s set of Brandenburg Concertos, and was the last work Stravinsky completed in Europe, started in spring 1937 at the Château de Montoux near Annemasse, near Geneva, Switzerland, and finished in Paris on March 29, 1938.

Danses concertantes

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Balanchine versions#

The title of Stravinsky’s orchestral work makes clear his intention that it be used for dance performance. George Balanchine (1904–1983), his friend and colleague, took him at his word, creating two versions of a ballet set to his music: one for the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo in 1944 and one for the New York City Ballet in 1972.

1944 version#

Balanchine choreographed Danses concertantes as his first new work for the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo at the beginning of his two-year association with that company as choreographer. He began work on it in early summer of 1944, while the company was performing in Song of Norway, an operetta for which he had created dances and a ballet, in Los Angeles and San Francisco. With scenery and costumes designed by Eugene Berman, Danses concertantes had its premiere on 10 September 1944 at New York’s City Center of Music and Drama, with Robert Balaban as conductor. The cast was headed by Alexandra Danilova and Frederic Franklin, the brilliant and popular stars of the company. An effervescent work, it began and ended with parades. “Between them,” one observer wrote, “came several rhythmically quirky pas de trois for company soloists and a demanding pas de deux for Danilova and Franklin. The fourth variation was danced by Maria Tallchief, Nicholas Magallanes. and Mary Ellen Moylan. Critical reception was mixed. John Martin, an advocate of modern dance, pronounced it “a clever, somewhat mathematical job of choreography, almost totally devoid of dancing.” An opposing view was put forth by Edwin Denby, a balletomane, who praised the “joyousness” of the piece.

Danses concertantes (Stravinsky)

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History#

Danses concertantes was commissioned by the Werner Janssen Orchestra of Los Angeles, and was intended not for the stage but for concert performance. Stravinsky nevertheless cast it in the form of an abstract ballet, completing the score on 13 January 1942. It was published later that year by Associate Music Publishers in New York. Stravinsky conducted the first performance, with the Werner Janssen Orchestra, in Los Angeles on 8 February 1942. The French premiere, in February 1945 on the second of an extended series of concerts devoted to Stravinsky’s work, was met by vocal protests from a group of students from Olivier Messiaen’s class, including Serge Nigg and Pierre Boulez, who found Stravinsky’s neoclassicism intolerably old-fashioned. Although this has been interpreted as a championing of postwar serialism, in fact it was Messiaen’s music that fired the young composers’ imagination, not Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique.

Double Canon (Stravinsky)

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History#

Although it is a memorial piece for the painter Raoul Dufy, who had died on 23 March 1953, the Double Canon is not a personal tribute, for the two men had never met. The work originated as a duet for flute and clarinet, composed in Venice in September 1959 as a souvenir piece in response to a request for an autograph. Later expanded for string quartet, it had its first performance at a Stravinsky festival in New York, either on 20 December 1959, or else on 10 January 1960 in a concert also featuring the premiere of the Movements for piano and orchestra.

Duo Concertant (ballet)

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Choreography#

Duo Concertant is danced by a man and a woman, alongside a pianist and a violinist, both onstage. In the first of five movements, Cantilena, the dancers simply stand and listen to the music. According to Mazzo, Balanchine told her, “Now we’re going to have them listen.” Mazzo was stunned by the emotional ending, “It was quite unusual for Balanchine in his Stravinsky ballets.”

Production#

Stravinsky and Balanchine collaborated for many years until the former’s death in 1971. The latter then decided to have the New York City Ballet hold the week-long Stravinsky Festival to honor the composer. There were at least 20 premieres, Duo Concertant was made on Kay Mazzo and Peter Martins.

Ebony Concerto (Stravinsky)

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History#

Stravinsky’s engagement with jazz dates back to the closing years of the First World War, the major jazz-inspired works of that period being L’histoire du soldat, the Ragtime for eleven instruments, and the Piano-Rag-Music. Although traces of jazz elements, especially blues and boogie-woogie, can be found in his music throughout the 1920s and 1930s, it was only with the Ebony Concerto that Stravinsky once again incorporated features of jazz into a composition on a far-reaching scale. The title was originally suggested to Stravinsky by Aaron Goldmark, of Leeds Music Corporation, who had negotiated the commission and suggested the form it should take. The composer explained that his title does not refer to the clarinet, as might be supposed, but rather to Africa, because “the jazz performers I most admired at that time were Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, and the guitarist Charles Christian. And blues meant African culture to me.” The official blurb published with the score says that Stravinsky had been so impressed with recordings of the Herman band, such as “Bijou”, “Goosey Gander”, and “Caldonia”, that, when asked, he agreed to write a piece for them with a solo clarinet part for Herman. However, according to Herman’s trumpeter and arranger Neal Hefti, this story may be somewhat embroidered. Hefti and his trumpeter colleague, Pete Candoli, were both great fans of Stravinsky’s music, so after Hefti returned to the band after six months spent in California working in the film industry, Candoli wanted to know if he had met the great man. Hefti had not, but pretended he had done so, and he embellished his story by claiming, “I played him the records of the Herman band , and he thinks they’re great.” The rumor quickly spread, and within two days the publisher Lou Levy of Leeds Music had arranged for Herman to contact Stravinsky (who probably had never heard the Herman band up to that point), and this led to the commission of the concerto. Once having accepted the commission, Stravinsky decided to create a jazz-based version of a concerto grosso, with a blues as the slow movement. If he had not previously heard them, he now listened to recordings of the Herman band, and went so far as to consult a saxophonist in order to learn how the instrument is fingered. The project nearly foundered when a publicity story was published in September 1945, claiming a “collaboration” between Stravinsky and Herman. Stravinsky withdrew from the agreement until his lawyer, Aaron Sapiro, convinced him that no offense had been intended. The score of the first two movements was delivered to Herman on November 22, 1945, and the finale followed on December 10. In February 1946 the composer chose Walter Hendl, assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, to conduct the premiere at Carnegie Hall the following month, but Stravinsky himself first rehearsed the band—backstage at New York’s Paramount Theatre, where they were appearing at the time. Herman found the solo part frighteningly difficult, and did not feel that Stravinsky had really adapted his writing to the jazz-band idiom. Instead, he “wrote pure Stravinsky”, and the band did not feel at all comfortable with the score initially. “After the very first rehearsal, at which we were all so embarrassed we were nearly crying because nobody could read, he walked over and put his arm around me and said, ‘Ah, what a beautiful family you have.’”

Elegy (Stravinsky)

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Choreography#

Elegy was later choreographed as a neoclassical ballet by George Balanchine. He made three versions of the ballet, which premiered in 1948, 1966, and 1982 respectively. The first version, a pas de deux, premiered on April 28, 1948 at the City Center of Music and Drama, during a Ballet Society performance, with dancers Tanaquil Le Clercq and Pat McBride, and violist Emanuel Vardi. Stravinsky described this version as a preview of a pas de deux from the ballet Orpheus. The second version is a solo premiered on July 15, 1966 at the Philharmonic Hall, performed by dancer Suzanne Farrell and violist Jesse Levine, in a program about Stravinsky directed by Lukas Foss. The New York City Ballet premiered it later that month with the same cast. The last version, again with Farrell, premiered on June 13, 1982 at the New York State Theater, as part of NYCB’s Stravinsky Centennial Celebration, with Warren Laffredo playing the viola on stage. Balanchine died the following year. It was not revived until 2012 at the Vail Dance Festival, danced by Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Carla Körbes. Artistic director of the festival Damian Woetzel learned the choreography via tapes of Farrell, then taught it to Körbes. In 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the festival streamed video of the 2012 performance online.

Elegy for J.F.K.

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Composition background#

After the outbreak of World War II and his emigration to Los Angeles, California, in 1939, Stravinsky continued to work within the neo-classical framework he had adopted since about 1920 (following his Russian period of 1907–1919), but beginning in the early 1950s turned to various serial techniques, which he used until his death in 1971.

Music overview and analysis#

Elegy for J. F. K. is scored for baritone or mezzo-soprano accompanied by three clarinets (two B clarinets and an alto clarinet in E), and is a twelve-tone serial composition. The text, in four haiku stanzas each of 17 syllables, was written at Stravinsky’s request by W. H. Auden in memory of assassinated President John F. Kennedy, and Stravinsky chose to repeat the opening stanza at the end. Elegy makes use of various textural changes to accommodate the changes in vocal register. The piece is in ternary form, just like the poem, meaning that material is repeated in the first and last nine measures. Various compositional elements suggest the severity of the topic such as the frequent use of da capo, the perfect fifth D–A in the clarinets from mm. 7–8, and the repeated tritone G–D throughout. Stravinsky composed the vocal line first, only adding the accompaniment afterward—a working method he likened to Schoenberg’s in the Phantasie for violin and piano. The row Stravinsky uses for the Elegy, is remarkable for the three tritones that occur in the first half. This row is related to the two rows Stravinsky previously used in the Bransles movement of Agon and at the words “Te Deum” in The Flood, by reordering the six pitch-class dyads in each row. A twelve-tone analysis of this piece shows some patterns of the style. As in all twelve-tone music, there is a mathematical relationship between the prime, inverted, and retrograde series. For example, the melody pitches in mm. 1–8 are P 0 , and the harmonic pitches that the clarinets play are RI 0 (D, C, A, A, G, F, B, C, F, E, D, and G), with some repeated pitches and the perfect fifth of D and A played in mm. 7 and 8. Stravinsky uses the P 0 form in all of the measure rows except mm. 9–13 which uses RI 0 . The words for these measures have the lyrics “Why then? Why there? / Why thus, we cry, did he die?”

Epitaphium (Stravinsky)

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History#

Stravinsky had been the honoured guest of Prince Max Egon zu Fürstenberg, patron of the Donaueschinger Musiktage, during the 1957 and 1958 festivals. When the prince died in April 1959, Stravinsky was asked to write a short composition in his memory. The result was “Epitaphium”, which received its premiere on 17 October 1959, on one of that year’s three concerts, each of which included a newly composed musical tribute to the prince. The other two pieces were by Pierre Boulez (Tombeau, for soprano and instrumental ensemble, which later became the final movement of Pli selon pli) and Wolfgang Fortner (Parergon zu den Impromptus, for soprano and orchestra).) In the history of Stravinsky’s compositional style, the “Epitaphium” is important as the first work in which he ordered the harmony serially throughout. In earlier works he had used twelve-tone rows for melodic construction, with only the occasional harmonic exception.

Fanfare for a New Theatre

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Composition and premiere#

This composition was written for the opening ceremony of the New York State Theater, as a part of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. “Lincoln” being the company’s administrator, Lincoln Kirstein, and “George” fellow entrepreneur and choreographer George Balanchine. Theodore Weis and Ronald K. Anderson were the performers.

Analysis#

The fanfare takes approximately 40 seconds to perform and is one of Stravinsky’s major miniatures.

External links#

- Work details, Boosey & Hawkes

Feu d'artifice

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Composition#

Stravinsky composed Feu d’artifice as a wedding present for Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s daughter Nadezhda and Maximilian Steinberg, who had married a few days before her father’s death. Feu d’artifice helped develop Stravinsky’s reputation as a composer, although it is not considered representative of his mature work. The work has some hints of bitonality but is for the most part similar in style to that of Rimsky-Korsakov who, at the time, was his teacher and mentor. It has the form of a scherzo but is still labeled “orchestral fantasy” because of its short length. Alexander Siloti conducted the premiere on 6 February 1909. The accepted story is that Stravinsky got the commission from Sergei Diaghilev to write The Firebird (1910) in part because Diaghilev heard this piece of music and was impressed with its orchestration. However, Diaghilev had already commissioned Stravinsky to orchestrate two pieces of Chopin (the Grande valse brillante and Nocturne in A flat) for the ballet Les Sylphides. Feu d’artifice was used as the opener of the opening night of the BBC Proms 2009.

Five Easy Pieces (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

The Five Easy Pieces were commissioned by French patroness Eugène Murat in November 1916. The original offer was to publish Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet, which he refused to do. However, he agreed to publish several short pieces, among them Renard, Berceuses du chat and the soon to be composed Five Easy Pieces under the Geneva-based company run by Adolphe Henn. Stravinsky composed each of the movements of the collection in only one day in his house in Morges. The first movement, Andante was composed on January 4, 1917; the third movement, Balalaika, which was also Stravinsky’s favorite piece in the set, was composed on February 6, 1917; the fourth one, Napolitana, was composed on February 21, 1917; the fifth one, Galop, was composed on February 28, 1917. After this, he took a break which took him more than expected, and finished the second piece, Española, on April 3, 1917, just one day before shipping all the compositions for publication. All the compositions were published later that same year, and this set was premiered in Paris on February 9, 1918.

Funeral Song

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Early history#

Stravinsky composed the work in 1908, upon the death of his teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. It received its first performance on 17 January 1909 at the Grand Hall of the St Petersburg Conservatory, in a memorial programme for Rimsky-Korsakov. The orchestra of Count Sheremetev performed the work, conducted by Felix Blumenfeld. The score was lost after the first performance. Stravinsky later called the work “the best of my works before The Firebird, and the most advanced in chromatic harmony.” Paul Griffiths commented on Stravinsky’s recollections of the work as follows, at a time when the manuscript was still considered to be lost: ‘Here already is one of the central lessons of Stravinsky’s music. As for those larger moments that are the complete works, what might have been the next step is missing, since the Chant funebre is lost. Stravinsky’s own recollection in the 1930s was of a piece in which “all the solo instruments of the orchestra filed past the tomb of the master in succession, each laying down its own melody as its wreath against a deep background of tremolo murmurings simulating the vibrations of bass…”’

Greeting Prelude

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Surprise#

One of the few events that interrupted Igor Stravinsky’s work on The Rake’s Progress in 1950 were engagements to conduct two concerts at the inaugural Aspen Festival in July. During a rehearsal, he was taken aback when his downbeat did not produce the result he expected: I started a rehearsal of Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony, but instead of the doleful Russian horn melody, I heard this happy little tune (“Happy Birthday to You”). I had no idea what happened and did not understand the point (which was that one of the orchestra players had just become a father); until a certain time had been spent in diplomacy, in fact, I was actually piqued. Stravinsky had been unfamiliar with “Happy Birthday to You”, but remembered it after this occasion. The following year, in June 1951, he encountered the song again when Samuel Barber asked him to harmonize it as a 75th birthday present for Mary Louise Curtis. He complied and composed a two-part canon based on the melody.

Jeu de cartes (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Structure#

The ballet’s three scenes are referred to as “deals” in the score. It can be further partitioned by its tempo markings: 1. First Deal (Première donne) * Introduction. Alla breve * Pas d’action. Meno mosso * Dance variation. Moderato assai * Dance of the Joker. Stringendo * Waltz-Coda. Tranquillo 2. Second Deal (Deuxième donne) * Introduction. Alla breve * March. Marcia * Variation I. Allegretto * Variation II * Variation III * Variation IV * Variation V. Sostenuto e pesante * Coda. Più mosso * Reprise of March. Marcia * Ensemble. Con moto 3. Third Deal (Troisième donne). * Introduction. Alla breve * Waltz. Valse * Battle between Spades and Hearts. Presto * Final Dance * Coda. Tempo del principio

Jewels (ballet)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Costumes#

The costumes were created by Balanchine’s long-time collaborator Barbara Karinska, who created a distinct look for each different act: romantic, calf-length tulle skirts for Emeralds, fabric that flared at the hips of both men and women in Rubies, and the flat, classical tutu of the Imperial Russian Ballet for Diamonds. The costumes were such finely crafted pieces of art in their own right that some of them have been exhibited in museums and in theatre lobbies. Even Claude Arpels of Van Cleef & Arpels, who suggested the idea of a ballet based on gems to the choreographer, was impressed with her attention to finding the finest trim that would accurately represent the true glitter of genuine gemstones. Additionally, Karinska’s painstaking work is credited with making the costumes last despite the sweat and strain of dancing in them. Her designs, needlework and choice in fabrics made them both durable and danceable, illustrating that the bodies inside the costumes were deserving of her utmost respect. When questioned about her attention to her almost extravagant detail she replied, “I sew for girls and boys who make my costumes dance; their bodies deserve my clothes.”

L'Histoire du soldat

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Music#

L’Histoire du soldat is scored for clarinet, bassoon, cornet (often played on trumpet), trombone, percussion, violin and double bass. Because the music is rife with changing time signatures, performances of L’Histoire are often led by a conductor. L.Histoire du soldat shows Stravinsky’s absorption of a wide range of musical influences: the pasodoble in the Marche royale; the tango, the waltz and ragtime, as played by Joseph to cure the Princess; klezmer in the instrumentation and textures; Luther’s Ein feste Burg in the Petit choral; and Bach in the Grand choral. According to the musicologist Danick Trottier, these influences are linked to a certain extent to Stravinsky’s experiences and first successes in the cosmopolitan Paris of the early 1910s, a cultural caital for artists and musicians during La Belle Époque. Reinhart continued his support of Stravinsky’s work in 1919 by funding a series of concerts of his recent chamber music. These included a suite of five numbers from L’Histoire du soldat arranged for clarinet, violin, and piano in a nod to Reinhart, an amateur clarinetist. This was first performed on 8 November 1919, also in Lausanne. Stravinsky later created a suite scored for all seven original instruments. In 1918-19 he wrote an independent third version of the work, not a transcription, for piano solo, published in 1922.

Le baiser de la fée

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Themes#

In his conversations with Robert Craft, Stravinsky did not specify which Tchaikovsky pieces he drew upon, but “Danses suisses” quotes one of the more easily identifiable Tchaikovsky themes, the “Humoresque” from Two Pieces, Opus 10 (1871). The musicologist David Drew provided several musical sources in his liner notes for the 1963 Decca recording of the ballet by Ernest Ansermet: * Scene I: Andante. Figures from Op. 19 No. 4 and the Barcarolle ‘Juin’ from Op. 37 bis * Vivace agitato. Figure from Op. 54 No. 7 * Scene II: Tempo giusto. Humoresque Op. 10 No. 2 and Reverie du Soir, Op. 19 No. 1 * Valse. Natha-Valse, Op. 51 No. 4 * Scene III: Allegretto grazioso. Scherzo humoresque Op. 19 No. 2 * Doppio movimento. Feuillet d’Album Op. 19 No. 3 * Pas de deux. Nocturne, Op. 19 No. 4, Più mosso section * Scene—Andante non tanto. None but the lonely heart, Op. 6 No. 6 “In addition to the above, Robert Craft—joint author with Stravinsky of Expositions and Developments, the composer’s third volume of autobiographical musings—supplies the following titles:” * Scherzo à la Russe, Op. 1 No. 1 for piano * Painfully and Sweetly, Op. 6 No. 3 for voice and piano * The Mujik plays the harmonica, Op. 39 No. 12 for piano * In the Village, Op. 40 No. 7 for piano * Danse russe, Op. 40 No. 10 for piano * Salon valse, Op. 51 No. 1 for piano * Lullaby on a storm (Berceuse), Op. 54 No. 10 for voice and piano * Serenade, Op. 63 No. 6 for voice and piano

Le chant du rossignol

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Opera#

Stravinsky’s first opera, The Nightingale was based on Hans Christian Andersen’s 1843 fairy tale of the same name and was set to a Russian-language libretto in three acts told from the point of view of a fisherman. The poème symphonique derives its material mostly from the latter two acts, which were completed in 1914 after Stravinsky had established himself as a ballet composer and five years after he had completed the first act. He was in fact unsure about returning to The Nightingale at all, and this doubt may have led him to create the purely instrumental poème symphonique; in his autobiography he writes:

Les noces

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

Stravinsky conceived of Les noces in 1913. By October 1917 he had completed it in short score to a libretto he himself had written using Russian wedding lyrics taken mainly from songs collected by Pyotr Kireevsky and published in 1911. During this long gestation its orchestration changed dramatically. Stravinsky at first planned to use forces similar to those of The Rite of Spring. A later idea was to use synchronised roll-operated instruments, including the pianola; this he abandoned when partially completed because the Paris firm of Pleyel et Cie was late in constructing the two-keyboard cimbaloms, later known as luthéals, he required. Stravinsky settled only in 1923, six years after his short score, on the following forces: soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor and bass vocal soloists; mixed chorus; unpitched percussion; and pitched percussion, notably four pianos. The decision exemplified his growing penchant for stripped down, clear and mechanistic sound-groups in the decade after The Rite (although he was never again to produce such an extreme sonic effect solely with percussion). He reminisced in 1962: “When I first played The Wedding to Diaghilev … he wept and said it was the most beautiful and most purely Russian creation of our ballet company . I think he did love The Wedding more than any other work of mine. That is why it is dedicated to him.”

Lied ohne Name

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

This short sketch was written in 1918, although some sources also mention 1917. The sketches of Lied ohne Name were found along with the sketches for Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet, whose first movement was dated October 11–14, 1918, in Morges. Since both works are notated in identical handwriting and page layout, some scholars suggest that Stravinsky worked on both pieces close to each other in the fall of 1918. It was a composition that Stravinsky discarded and abandoned, never revisiting it again or using it as original material in other compositions. The work remained unpublished until 1979, after the composer’s death, it was published in the bassoon method Learn as you Play, by Peter Wastall. It was published by Boosey & Hawkes and was reprinted again, this time separately, in 1997.

Mass (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

Stravinsky completed the Gloria on December 20, 1944 and finished the Kyrie at about the same time. His work on the Mass was then interrupted for several years in which his wrote his Symphony in Three Movements, Ebony Concerto, Concerto in D, and the ballet Orpheus. He resumed work on it in the fall of 1947 and completed it March 15, 1948. On February 26, 1947, Irving Fine conducted the Kyrie and Gloria, accompanied by two pianos. The first complete performance occurred on October 27, 1948 in Milan. Ernest Ansermet conducted members of the chorus and orchestra of La Scala.

Mavra

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Synopsis#

:Place: Russian village :Time: Circa 1840 Parasha is in love with her neighbour, Vassili, a young hussar, but they have difficulty in meeting. After they sing a duet, Vassili leaves, and then Parasha’s mother enters. She is lamenting the difficulty of finding a new maid-servant after their prior maid-servant, Thecla, died. The mother orders her daughter to find a new maid-servant. Parasha comes up with a scheme to smuggle Vassili into her house disguised as Mavra, a female maid-servant. The ruse initially succeeds, and Parasha and Vassili are happy at being under the same roof. Parasha and her mother go out for a walk. At one moment, Vassili shaves. The ladies return, disconcerted to see their new maid-servant shaving. Vassili escapes out the window, her mother faints, the next door neighbour rushes in to try to help, and Parasha laments the loss of her young love.

Movements for Piano and Orchestra

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Commission and Premiere#

Stravinsky wrote Movements for pianist , who premiered it at a Stravinsky Festival in New York’s Town Hall on January 10, 1960, with the composer conducting. It was commissioned for $15,000 by Swiss industrialist Karl Weber, Margrit Weber’s husband. Weber had asked for a work of between 15 and 20 minutes in length, but Stravinsky initially produced a compressed piece lasting barely half as long.

Analysis#

Stravinsky breaks the orchestra down into chamber-sized sections with the piano acting as a pivot between these, creating the type of subtle and gestural textures favored by Webern in his Concerto for Nine Instruments (Op. 24) and Variations for Orchestra (Op. 30), the latter a work much admired by Stravinsky. The highly constructed nature of the twelve-tone idiom he uses draws all its thematic material from one tone-row, which the piano gives in one non-linear gesture right at the opening: E F B A A D C B C F G and F. As it turns out, this tone-row will be presented complete only a couple of times. Mostly it is broken into small bits and served in slightly varied orderings. The technique of Klangfarbenmelodie can thus clearly be heard, particularly in the opening of the piece, whose gestural phrase mimics that of Webern’s Op. 24. Stravinsky himself described the harmonic structure of Movements as “anti-tonal”. Traditional references to triadic harmonic structures are banished in favor of a near-total line-based idiom, and conventional ostinati and harmonic considerations are replaced by an atonal contrapuntal texture characterized by gestures, inner unity, and adherence to serial forms more pervasive than before in Stravinsky’s career.

Movements for Piano and Orchestra (ballet)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Choreography#

Movements for Piano and Orchestra is set to the composition of the same name by Stravinsky, a friend of Balanchine. However, conductor Hugo Fiorato once said, “Who… would listen to Movements of Stravinsky by itself?… I don’t think I would. But when you hear Movements and you see Movements through Balanchine’s eyes and what he has added to the score, it suddenly becomes an amazingly exciting work.” Movements is performed by a lead couple and a corps de ballet consisting of six women. New York Times critic Allen Hughes noted the two leads “are generally engaged in the kind of Balanchine duets that explores the variety of poses for two. It is, in fact, as if Balanchine had examined all the statuary in the world and has summed up all the pose possibilities in this work. Yet the result is not static.” Author Richard Buckle noted the corps “alone moves during the terse intermediate sections connecting the five movements and which backs up the principals in the remainder of the ballet.” They are often divided to two trios, and “assume an extraordinary variety of poses, like eccentric modern versions of the Three Graces.” Responding to Balanchine’s choreography, Stravinsky wrote: To see Balanchine’s choreography of Movements is to hear the music with one’s eyes, and this visual hearing has been a greater revelation to me, I think, than to anyone else. The choreography emphasizes relationships of which I had hardly been aware – in the same way – and the performance was like a tour of a building for which I had drawn the plans but never explored the result. Balanchine approached the music by identifying some of the more familiar marks of my style, and as I heard him fastening on my tiniest repeated rhythm or sustaining group, I knew he had joined the work to the corpus of my music, at the same time probably reducing the time lag of its general acceptability by as much as a decade. I owe him even more for another aspect of the revelation: his dramatic point is a love parable – in which ballet is it not? – but the coda had a suggestion of myth that reminded me of the ending of Apollo.

Octet (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

According to Stravinsky, he composed the Octet fairly rapidly in 1922. After completing the first movement, he composed the waltz that would become the fourth variation of the middle movement. Only after composing this waltz did the idea come to him that it might be a good subject for a variation movement. The seventh variation, a fugato, especially pleased Stravinsky, and the following third movement grew out of this final variation (Stravinsky and Craft 1963, 71). One biographer concludes that Stravinsky began composing the Octet after returning from Germany to Biarritz late in the autumn of 1922, and completed the score on 20 May 1923. However, the sketch materials reveal a more complex chronology. Twelve measures of what would become the waltz variation were composed in 1919, and the fugato variation was the first complete section to be composed, in January 1921. There is an early five-page draft of uncertain date for the beginning of the Allegro section in the first movement, at that time planned for piano and wind orchestra. The main segments of the first movement were drafted in sketches dated between 12 July and 8 August, and the full score of the movement was completed on 16 August 1922. Two days later, Stravinsky began work on the second movement by adding the previously composed fugato, and then the waltz fragment, slightly expanded. The waltz coincidentally contains the same intervals as the opening of the fugato, and on 23 August 1922, he created the theme and titled the movement “Thème avec variations monométriques”. Variation D was begun next, but work was interrupted and Stravinsky finished it only on 18 November, followed by the “ribbons of scales” variation A on 1 December, variation B on 6 December, and variation C on 9 December. The Finale was completed in Paris on 20 May 1923. The score was revised by the composer in 1952. The published score does not carry a dedication, though Stravinsky said it was dedicated to Vera de Bosset. Stravinsky himself conducted the premiere of the Octet on one of Serge Koussevitzky’s concerts at the Paris Opera House on 18 October 1923. This was the first time he had conducted a premiere of a new piece, though not the first time he had conducted his music in public. The cavernous space cannot have been ideal for presenting such a chamber-music work, but Stravinsky later expressed satisfaction with the balance of the sound at that performance. The very first recording that Stravinsky made was of the Octet: a private recording, probably made for his own study purposes, which is now lost.

Ode (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

In February 1943, upon the personal urging of Orson Welles, Stravinsky began work on a short-lived project composing music for 20th Century Fox’s Jane Eyre. He copied a number of melodies he had selected from an early 19th century American collection of British folk songs, and began to make notes on the film’s scenario. Emerging from this was background music for a hunting scene in the film, which incorporated a sketch the composer had labeled “Song for Bessie.” After Bernard Herrmann replaced him in Jane Eyre, Stravinsky recycled this music into what eventually became the “Eclogue” to the Ode. While visiting New York City in April of that year, Serge Koussevitzky presented the composer with a commission for a new orchestral work in memory of his wife, Natalia. Stravinsky’s fee would be paid by the conductor’s newly established Koussevitzky Foundation. The score was completed in July 1943. Stravinsky sent the finished Ode to Koussevitzky on July 9. He described the music’s first part as “a praise to the departed,” and its central section as a “concert champêtre, t hat i s , music at the heart of nature, the principle which your wife defended with such passion and which you realized so brilliantly in Tanglewood.” Of the closing “Epitaph” the composer said that it was a “headstone inscription … which will conclude my song in memory of the departed.” Koussevitzky replied on July 21 that he was “deeply touched and grateful” for the music. Two weeks before the score’s debut, Stravinsky assured Koussevitzky that the score and parts he had sent for the Ode were “carefully corrected” by him. Nevertheless, a number of errors committed by the music copyists and the composer himself had escaped his notice. The resulting “mild cacophony” heard in the closing moments of its world premiere on October 8, his wife Vera noted, left Stravinsky feeling “sad because it was badly played”. Although he apologized profusely to Koussevitzky in private for his “ridiculous inattentiveness” in proofreading the Ode, Stravinsky never publicly acknowledged any culpability in the botched premiere.

Oedipus rex (opera)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Performance history#

Oedipus rex is sometimes performed in the concert hall as an oratorio, similarly to its original performance in the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris on 30 May 1927, and at its American premiere the following year, given by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Harvard Glee Club. It has also been presented on stage as an opera, the first such performance being at the Vienna State Opera on 23 February 1928. It was subsequently presented three times by the Santa Fe Opera in 1960, 1961, and 1962 with the composer in attendance. In January 1962 it was performed in Washington, D.C., by the Opera Society of Washington (now the Washington National Opera) with the composer conducting. In 1960 at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, a production by Colin Graham, directed by Michel Saint-Denis, conducted by Colin Davis and designed by Abd’Elkader Farrah. Oedipus was sung by Australian tenor Ronald Dowd with actor Michael Hordern as narrator. Although the performance’s narration was in English, the company moved from its normal English-language practice and the singing remained in the original Latin. This was part of a double bill, the second opera being Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle. A production directed by Julie Taymor starring Philip Langridge, Jessye Norman, Min Tanaka, and Bryn Terfel was performed at the Saito Kinen Festival Matsumoto in Japan in 1992 and filmed by Taymor for television. Another filmed rendition survives from 1973, conducted by Leonard Bernstein during his sixth and last lecture for the Charles Eliot Norton chair at Harvard University.

Orpheus (ballet)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Structure#

The original cast consisted of 30 dancers: Orpheus; Eurydice; the Dark Angel of Death; Apollo; the leader of the Furies; the leader of the Bacchantes; eight women Bacchantes; nine women in various roles (Friends to Orpheus, Furies, Pluto, Satyr, and Nature Spirits); and seven men as Lost Souls. The action is divided into three tableaux and twelve dance episodes: (I. Tableau): Orpheus Weeps for Eurydice; Air de Danse; Dance of the Angel of Death; Interlude. (II. Tableau): Pas des furies; Air de danse (Orphée)/Interlude/Air de danse, conclusion; Pas d’action; Pas de deux; Interlude; Pas d’action. (III. Tableau): Apothéose d’Orphée.

Perséphone (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Roles#

Eumolpe, tenor René Maison
Perséphone, ballerina Ida Rubinstein
Demetra-Dometer, ballerina Krakowska
Mercure, dancer Anatole Viltzak
Pluton, dancer
Démophoon, dancer

Synopsis#

The melodrama tells the story of the Greek goddess Persephone, in three parts:

References#

;Sources * *Holden, Amanda (Ed.). The New Penguin Opera Guide. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2001.

Petrushka (ballet)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Russian puppets#

Petrushka is a puppet. He is a character known across Europe under different names: Punch in England, Polichinelle in France, Pulcinella in Italy, Kasperle in Germany, and Petrushka in Russia. He is a trickster, rebel, and wife-beater. He enforces moral justice with a wooden club, speaks in a high-pitched, squeaky voice, and argues with the devil. His plays are formulaic and subversive. They repeat key scenes from one play to another. The plays usually end with a dog, a policeman, or the devil dragging him away. Empress Anna Ivanovna brought marionettes to Russia in the 18th century. They were an amusement for the aristocracy. Rod puppets were an Asian import. They performed religious plays, mostly at Christmas. But Petrushka was a hand puppet. He was loved by the common people. He performed in street theatres and other open-air venues in small portable booths or behind screens that could be easily assembled and disassembled. After the Russian Revolution, Soviet authorities forced Petrushka indoors to be better monitor his subversiveness.

Piano Sonata (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

Stravinsky composed this sonata when he was in Biarritz and Nice in the summer of 1924. He finished it on 21 October that year. According to Robert Cummings at AllMusic, it was first performed by the composer at the Donaueschingen Festival on 26 July 1925. It was eventually edited by Albert Spalding and published by Boosey & Hawkes in 1925. It is dedicated to the Princess Edmond de Polignac, Winnaretta Singer.

Piano Sonata in F-sharp minor (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

This piano sonata was kept in his portfolio together with his Scherzo in G minor for piano, a fairly short composition, when he was consulting his teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov about his ambition to be a composer. It was eventually composed partly in Saint Petersburg and partly in Pavlovka, in Samara. Both the sonata and the scherzo were dedicated to fellow pianist and contemporary Nicolas Richter, who played it in private to Rimsky-Korsakov in 1905 and subsequently gave a performance in public as a premiere the same year. Prior to his death, it was thought all Stravinsky’s compositions prior to the Symphony in E had been lost when he left Russia in 1914, with the exception of The Mushrooms Going to War, the manuscript of which remained with him until his death. Stravinsky even referred to this piano sonata in his autobiography Memories and Commentaries as “the lost – fortunately lost – piano sonata”, for he considered it was just an imitation of late Beethoven. He was not informed, even when he returned to Russia in 1962, visiting Moscow and Leningrad, that most of his early compositions, including this sonata, were in the safekeeping of the Leningrad State Public Library. They were eventually published posthumously in 1973. However, this work remained obscured until Stravinsky’s widow, Vera de Bosset, authorised its publication.

Pribaoutki

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Songs#

The titles of the four songs are: # “Kornílo” (“Uncle Kornilo”) # “Natashka” (“Little Natalie”) # “Polkovnik” (“The Colonel”) # “Starets i zayats” (“The Old Man and the Hare”)

Instrumentation#

Pribaoutki is written for low voice and instrumental ensemble. Stravinsky is said to have preferred a male singer, although the work is commonly performed by mezzo-soprano or contralto. The eight-member ensemble consists of: flute, oboe (doubling English horn), clarinet, bassoon, violin, viola, cello, and double bass.

Pulcinella (ballet)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

Diaghilev wanted a ballet based on an early 18th-century commedia dell’arte libretto and music then believed to have been composed by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. This attribution has since been proved to be spurious. Some of the music may have been by Domenico Gallo, Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer, Carlo Ignazio Monza and Alessandro Parisotti. Conductor Ernest Ansermet wrote to Stravinsky in 1919 about the project. The composer initially did not like the idea of music by Pergolesi, but once he studied the scores, which Diaghilev had found in libraries in Naples and London, he changed his mind. Stravinsky adapted the older music to a more modern style by borrowing specific themes and textures, but interjecting his modern rhythms, cadences, and harmonies. Pulcinella marked the beginning of Stravinsky’s second phase as a composer, his neoclassical period. He wrote: Pulcinella was my discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look, of course—the first of many love affairs in that direction—but it was a look in the mirror, too. The ballet was revived and revised by New York City Ballet’s balletmasters George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins for their 1972 Stravinsky Festival. They both danced in the performance, Robbins in the title role, and were joined in the premier by Francisco Moncion, who danced the role of The Devil.

Pulcinella Variations

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Original cast#

Original cast: *Sterling Hyltin *Sara Mearns *Tiler Peck *Brittany Pollack *Indiana Woodward *Jared Angle *Andrew Scordato *Gonzalo Garcia *Anthony Huxley

Videography#

In 2020, in response to the performance cancellation due to the coronavirus pandemic, the New York City Ballet released a recording of Pulcinella Variations, filmed in 2018 with most of the original cast returning, except Mearns, Pollack and Angle, whose roles were danced by Miriam Miller, Emilie Gerrity and Russell Janzen.

Quatre études, Op. 7 (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Structure#

The four movements are listed as: These four études are focused on difficult and irregular rhythmical structures for pianists, countering tuplets with other rhythmically regular forms or other rhythmical structures that involve certain difficulty for performers. The first étude in C minor, dedicated to (Etienne Mitoussow), consists of a regular with triplets against quintuplets or even septuplets at some point. The second étude in D major, dedicated to Nikolay Richter (Nicolas Richter), is in and opposes sixteenth notes against quadruplets and quintuplets. The third in E minor, dedicated to Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov, doesn’t require much effort or experience in polyrhythm, while the long legato melody is in the middle voice and the accompaniment figures are in the upper registers. The main trait of the fourth étude in F major, which is dedicated to , is its syncopation, present throughout the étude. Although much of this music is still derivative of Chopin, Scriabin, and Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky’s own voice asserts itself in the percussive final étude.

Renard (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

In April 1915, Winnaretta Singer, Princesse Edmond de Polignac, commissioned Stravinsky to write a piece that could be played in her salon. She paid the composer 2,500 Swiss francs. The work was completed in Morges, Switzerland in 1916, and Stravinsky himself made a staging plan, trying to avoid any resemblance to conventional operatic staging. He created, rather, a new form of theatre in which the acrobatic dance is connected with singing, and the declamation comments on the musical action. However, the piece was never performed in the salon of the princess. It was not in fact staged until 1922. The premiere, performed in a double bill with Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty, was given on 18 May 1922 by the Ballets Russes at the Théâtre de l’Opéra, Paris. It was conducted by Ernest Ansermet with choreography by Bronislava Nijinska, who also danced the title role, and decorations and costumes by Mikhail Larionov. Stravinsky was not happy with the revival, saying, " it was ruined chiefly by some jugglers Diaghilev had borrowed from a circus." Stravinsky regretted Chagall’s refusal of a commission to do the sets.

Requiem Canticles

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Orchestration#

Requiem Canticles is scored for contralto and bass soloists, mixed chorus, and an orchestra consisting of 3 flutes (3rd doubles on piccolo), alto flute, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani (2 performers), 2 percussionists (xylophone, vibraphone, and tubular bells), harp, piano, celesta, and strings.

Structure#

The piece consists of nine short movements: Joseph N. Straus has discussed in detail Stravinsky’s particular application of serial technique in the work, and his devising and use of a system of “rotational arrays” and “four-part arrays” in composing the work. David Smyth has noted Stravinsky’s incorporation of the “B–A–C–H” (B–A–C–B) motif in the work. Requiem Canticles is characteristic of Stravinsky’s twelve-tone practice in that he preferred the inverse-retrograde (IR) to the typical retrograde-inverse (RI):

Scènes de ballet (Ashton)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Creation, choreography and design#

Ashton’s choreography is along classical lines, in the tradition of Marius Petipa’s 19th-century works. Instead of Petipa’s symmetry, however, Ashton used a system of Euclidean geometry, with geometric theorems adapted to serve as floor patterns for the dancers. As a result, the ballet is unusual in that it makes sense from all angles, as Ashton himself explained, “I wanted to do a ballet that could be seen from any angle – anywhere could be front, so to speak. So I did these geometric figures that are not always facing front – if you saw Scènes de ballet from the wings, you’d get a very different but equally good picture.” The ballet was originally designed by André Beaurepaire, a young Frenchman who was heavily influenced by Picasso. His collaboration with Ashton was not an easy one, given the choreographer’s wish for what Parry calls “Baroque Parisian fantasy”. Eventually, two sets were agreed upon: a green-grey viaduct that was supposed to give way, at the apotheosis, to a white pavilion made up of guns, bones, and limbs. In the event this proved impractical, and since the ballet’s second performance the viaduct has been used on its own, although at the premiere Ashton went with the pavilion. Nor were Beaurepaire’s designs for the costumes quite to Ashton’s liking: though the choreographer retained his designer’s hats, bracelets and chokers he discarded the men’s hats and altered the colour of the tights from blue-gray to pink. Pearls and diamonds were added to the women’s costumes, while the men’s costumes were simplified. The prima ballerina was given a colour combination of yellow and black to suit Margot Fonteyn.

Scènes de ballet (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Music#

Scènes de ballet is a score of between 16 and 18 minutes duration, written in 1944. It was commissioned by Billy Rose for a Broadway revue. The music occasioned one of the best-known Stravinsky anecdotes. Rose telegraphed Stravinsky: " YOUR MUSIC GREAT SUCCESS STOP COULD BE SENSATIONAL SUCCESS IF YOU WOULD AUTHORISE ROBERT RUSSELL BENNETT RETOUCH ORCHESTRATION STOP BENNETT ORCHESTRATES EVEN THE WORKS OF COLE PORTER. " To which Stravinsky telegraphed back: " SATISFIED WITH GREAT SUCCESS. " The score is in nine sections. The timings are those of the composer’s 1963 recording. *Introduction 0:52 *Danses (Corps de ballet & Ballerina) 4:34 *Pantomime 2:08 *Pas de deux 2:49 *Pantomime 0:31 *Variations (Danseur & Ballerina) 2:24 *Pantomime 0:27 *Danses (Corps de ballet) 1:03 *Apothéose 2:12

Scherzo (Stravinsky)

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Composition#

In 1902, when Stravinsky composed the piece, he was studying law at St. Petersburg University. He met Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s son Vladimir there. At this time, Stravinsky’s ambition was to become a composer, since his father, Fyodor Stravinsky, was also a successful bass opera singer, but studied law out of being pressured into it by his family. However, he started coming to Nikolai’s house in order to learn composition and orchestration. Very few juvenalia works from this period still remain, but some of them, presumably the ones he kept in his portfolio, survived. This was the case for his Piano Sonata in F-sharp minor and, also, this scherzo. After composing just a handful of works in these years, Stravinsky would not produce anything significant, but continued to attend private classes with Rimsky-Korsakov until the latter’s death in 1908. In Dialogues, Stravinsky noted that Rimsky-Korsakov’s biographer had mentioned a 1903 concert of his pieces, but he stated “I have no recollection of these bagatelles”. With the fall of the Russian Empire most of these early works were presumed to be lost or kept hidden somewhere. Stravinsky himself went to Russia many years later, but nobody seemed to know that the manuscripts of most of his early works were in the safekeeping of several public libraries in the Soviet Union. The manuscript score for the Scherzo was held in the Leningrad State Library in the archives of the pianist Nicholas Richter (1879–1944). Richter was an old acquaintance of Stravinsky and the dedicatee of the Scherzo. The first known publication of the score was a facsimile of the holograph which appeared in Valery Smirnov’s 1970 book Tvorcheskoye formirovaniye I. F. Stravinskovo (The Formative years of I. F. Stravinsky). The Scherzo did not receive any formal premiere. According to musicologist Charles M. Joseph, there has been speculation that it may have been performed privately for Rimsky-Korsakov in the summer of 1902 when Stravinsky was hoping to be accepted as his pupil. There is no evidence that Richter ever publicly performed the work, although he is known to have premiered the Piano Sonata in F sharp minor, another of Stravinsky’s pieces which were dedicated to him.

Scherzo à la Russe (ballet)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Production#

Stravinsky and Balanchine collaborated for many years until the former’s death in 1971. The latter then decided to have the New York City Ballet hold the week-long Stravinsky Festival to honor the composer. There were at least 20 premieres, One of the ballets made for the festival is set to Scherzo à la Russe, which Stravinsky wrote in 1925, for a film project that was abandoned.

Performances#

Scherzo à la Russe premiered on June 21, 1972, at the New York State Theater.

Scherzo à la russe (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

Stravinsky had been going through economical problems since he moved to America, partially because he lost the royalties from his works in Europe and had to compose more works to exploit them in America. The Scherzo à la russe was first conceived as a work for film use, as it was intended to be featured in The North Star. When the film project was aborted, Stravinsky decided to re-orchestrate it for Paul Whiteman Band. The only two conditions were: the piece had to be easy-listening and it had to fit on a 78 rpm disc. This version for jazz orchestra was premiered in 1944 by Blue Network but, according to Stravinsky scholar Eric Walter White, it didn’t seem to be a success. Stravinsky decided to arrange it again in 1945 for symphony orchestra for it to be published and premiered in 1946 at San Francisco.

Scherzo fantastique

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History#

In July 1907, Stravinsky wrote to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov that he planned a “fantastic scherzo”, to be called Bees. He started work on it in the same month and completed it on 30 March 1908. Rimsky-Korsakov saw the score and liked it, but he died in 1908 and never heard the work performed. Stravinsky dedicated the work to Alexander Siloti, who conducted the first performance on 6 February 1909 at the Siloti Concerts in St Petersburg. Stravinsky’s Feu d’artifice (Fireworks) received its first performance at the same concert. Sergei Diaghilev was present and was impressed by this music, leading him to offer Stravinsky the first of his commissions for ballet music. The score was first published around 1909 by the Russian sheet music publisher P. Jurgenson. Stravinsky later claimed that he conceived the Scherzo Fantastique as abstract music. On 10 January 1917 it was performed as a ballet blanc at the Paris Opera House, with choreography by Léo Staats to a scenario based on Maeterlink’s essay “La Vie des Abeilles” (the life of the bees). Stravinsky had not authorised this performance, and Maeterlinck objected to it.

Septet (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Analysis#

The Septet stands at a stylistic turning point in Stravinsky’s œuvre, between the neoclassical period ending with his opera, The Rake’s Progress, and the final, serial phase. All of the Septet is characterized by highly contrapuntal textures, but the first movement remains close to Stravinsky’s earlier manner, whereas the remaining two exhibit his emerging new style. Stravinsky’s adoption of serial techniques, here and in the Ricercar II of the Cantata (1952), caught nearly everyone by surprise at that time. The first movement is in sonata-allegro form, with a first theme group in the winds in the key of A, characteristically hesitating between major and minor and strongly recalling the opening of Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto (1938). The second theme is in the piano, with a series of syncopated E-minor chords, and is followed by a developmental fugue for the winds and strings. The recapitulation has the first theme in its original key but the second now in D minor, and the movement closes with a short coda. The main theme of this movement anticipates the pitch material of the second and third movements, as its recurring thematic motto is the same as the first five notes of the tone-row used in the Passacaglia and Gigue. The second movement, according to Robert Craft, “is everything, … the Passacaglia, that’s where the big change occurs”. The second movement is actually a repetition of the note-pattern of the Passacaglia, a set of nine variations over a bass theme consisting of a series of sixteen notes. The movement ends with a coda, or tenth variation, but the ninth variation is the climax, “an utter marvel”, according to Craft, “because all seven instruments are playing the same pianissimo and you must hear every note and you do hear every note”. Stravinsky uses the bass theme similarly to Schoenberg’s twelve-note series. The upper parts consist of various sorts of canons using the same sequence sixteen notes, with imitation at various intervals, by inversion, retrograde, and inversion of the retrograde.

Serenade (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Structure#

Serenade in A lasts about twelve minutes and is in four movements: Despite its title, the work is in neither A major nor A minor. According to Eric White, A is not the “key” of the work, but rather the music radiates from and tends towards A as a “tonic pole”. Thus, the first and the last chord of each movement contains the note A, either as the root, third, or fifth of a triad. According to Stravinsky, the piece was conceived “in imitation of the of the eighteenth century, which was usually commissioned by patron princes for various festive occasions, and included, as did the suites, an indeterminate number of pieces”. Therefore, the movement titles are meant to evoke the specific parts of such festive celebration. From the pianist’s perspective, “Hymne” is related to Frédéric Chopin’s Ballade No. 2, while the reflects Stravinsky’s Russian heritage.

Stravinsky Violin Concerto (ballet)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background and production#

Balanchine first choreographed a work to Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto in 1941 for the Wassily de Basil’s company Original Ballet Russe, titled Balustrade, with costumes and sets designed by Pavel Tchelitchew. In his previous Stravinsky ballets, Balanchine usually followed a plot. However, Balustrade is completely plotless, and was Balanchine’s response to the Violin Concerto. The ballet premiered on January 22, 1941 at Fifty-first Street Theatre, New York, with a cast led by Tamara Toumanova, Paul Petroff and Roman Jasinski. Stravinsky himself conducted while Samuel Dushkin played the violin. Balustrade had only been performed three times. However, Stravinsky called it “one of the most satisfactory visualisations of any of my works”. The festival featured 20 premieres, with the women in leotards and black footless tights, men in white T-shirts and black tights. Stravinsky Violin Concerto was regarded as one of the “masterworks” out of the festival. After Balanchine died, the world rights of Stravinsky Violin Concerto and five other ballets went to von Aroldingen.

Symphonies of Wind Instruments

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Instrumentation#

The Symphonies was originally scored for an ensemble of 24 wind instruments: 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), alto flute, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, alto clarinet in F, 3 bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, and tuba. The 1947 revision requires 23 players: 3 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, 3 bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, and tuba.

Symphony in C (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

The Symphony was written between 1938 and 1940 on a commission from American philanthropist Mrs. Mildred Barnes Bliss. It was a turbulent period of the composer’s life, marked by illness and deaths in his immediate family. In 1937, Stravinsky was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which had already forced his wife and two daughters to a sanatorium in Switzerland. Stravinsky’s daughter Ludmilla and wife Yekaterina died of their illnesses in November 1938 and March 1939, respectively, followed by Stravinsky’s own quarantine and the death of his mother Anna in June 1939. Stravinsky was still mourning the deaths of his family members when World War II forced him to leave Europe. He had written the symphony’s first two movements in France and Switzerland. Stravinsky wrote the third movement in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the fourth movement in Hollywood, after his emigration to the United States. The symphony was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Stravinsky on November 7, 1940. Stravinsky disclaimed any link between his personal experiences and the symphony’s content.

Symphony in E-flat (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

The score bears the dedication “To my dear teacher N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov”. A private performance was given on 27 April 1907 by the St. Petersburg Court Orchestra conducted by H. Wahrlich, in a concert that also included the first performance of Faun and Shepherdess. Stravinsky later recalled that both Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov considered the orchestration “too heavy”. The first public performance was conducted by Felix Blumenfeld on 22 January 1908. A revised version was conducted by Ernest Ansermet on 2 April 1914, and the composer conducted this version in his later performances.

Symphony in Three Movements

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

In 1943, Stravinsky had begun work on rescoring his ballet The Rite of Spring. Although the project was left incomplete, his revisit to this earlier composition appears to have influenced the symphony. The ostinatos and shock tactics of the last movement, for example, recalls the “Glorification of the Chosen One” and “Sacrificial Dance” from The Rite, and some woodwind passages are reminiscent of the ballet’s introduction. On the other hand, there are passages forecasting the opera The Rake’s Progress, notably the openings of the slow movement and the finale. Material is drawn from projects that Stravinsky had abandoned or reorganized. The piano’s presence in the first movement stems from a piano concerto that was left incomplete. Music for harp is prominent in the second movement, using themes he had written for the film adaptation of Franz Werfel’s novel The Song of Bernadette. Stravinsky was initially informally approached for the writing of the film score. On 15 February 1943 he started writing music for the “Apparition of the Virgin” scene. In the event, no contract was ever signed with him, and the project went to Alfred Newman, who won an Oscar. The third movement unites the first two movements by giving equal emphasis to piano and harp.

Symphony in Three Movements (ballet)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Production#

Balanchine and Stravinsky had collaborated for many years until the latter’s death in 1971. As a tribute to the composer, Balanchine decided to have his company, the New York City Ballet, hold the weeklong Stravinsky Festival. The festival included 22 premieres, One of Stravinsky’s works chosen for the festival was Symphony in Three Movements, which was written during the Second World War for different aborted film projects, though he admitted it referenced the war. Balanchine’s assistant Barbara Hagan recalled Sara Leland, another original cast member and a newly promoted principal dancer, “was a quick learner”, while “Balanchine really struggled with Symphony with regard to tempos”, therefore Balanchine used Leland to demonstrate the steps to the corps de ballet.

Symphony of Psalms

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

According to Stravinsky, the commission for the work came about from “a routine suggestion” from Koussevitzky, who was also Stravinsky’s publisher, that he write something “popular” for orchestra without chorus. Stravinsky, however, insisted on the psalm-symphony idea, which he had had in mind for some time. The choice of Psalm 150, however, was in part because of the popularity of that text. The symphony was written in Nice, and Echarvines near Talloires, which was Stravinsky’s summer home in those years. The three movements are performed without break, and the texts sung by the chorus are drawn from the Vulgate versions in Latin. Unlike many pieces composed for chorus and orchestra, Stravinsky said that it is not “a symphony in which I have included psalms to be sung.” On the contrary, “it is the singing of psalms that I am symphonizing.” Although the piece was written for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the world premiere was actually given in Brussels by the Société Philharmonique de Bruxelles on December 13, 1930, under the direction of Ernest Ansermet. The American premiere of the piece was given soon afterwards by Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with the chorus of the Cecilia Society (trained by Arthur Fiedler) on December 19, 1930. The first recording was made by Stravinsky himself with the Orchestre des Concerts Straram and the Alexis Vlassov Choir at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on February 17 and 18, 1931. One reviewer wrote, “The choir, throaty, full-blooded, darkly, inwardly passionate, sing with liturgical conviction and intensity in a memorable performance.”

Tango (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

After settling in Hollywood, Stravinsky was unable to bring the money he earned from his royalties of his works in Europe to America, due to copyright issues and ambiguities. When he found himself with financial difficulties, he decided to write new compositions entirely in America in order to exploit them, with the exclusive intention of making money. Tango, which was the first work entirely written in America, is one of those works.

Tarantella (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

Stravinsky began to take piano lessons in his youth, although when these started is unclear. According to a biographical résumé the composer wrote in March 1908, he commenced lessons in 1891 or early 1892 with Alexandra Snyetkova, the daughter of a violinist in the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra. The personal accounts of his father, Fyodor, first mentions lessons in May 1892, which were conducted informally by an interim governess. Richard Taruskin and Stephen Walsh both wrote that lessons did not begin until late 1893. By 1899, when Stravinsky transferred to another teacher for piano lessons, he had developed enough skill to play Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1, as well as sonatas and works by Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Muzio Clementi, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, and Robert Schumann. The “Tarantella” emerged from this period. Musicologist Graham Griffiths says that it was possibly modeled after examples of tarantellas composed by Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Sigismund Thalberg, among others. It may also have been a late product of the 19th-century Russian interest in tarantellas exemplified in works by Alexander Dargomizhsky, César Cui, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Griffiths speculates that the work originated as an improvisation inspired by the composer’s outings with his cousin in search of tarantulas at the family estate in the Podolia region. Taruskin believed that its dedication to “D. Rudnev”, which suggests that it was a gift, may have preserved the manuscript from being lost. It was eventually given to the Russian Public Library in Leningrad. There it was discovered by musicologist Valery Smirnov, who published excerpts from it in 1970. It is Stravinsky’s earliest surviving attempt at composition.

The Cage (ballet)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Plot#

Among a tribe of female insect that preys on their male counterparts, The Novice, the daughter of The Queen, is born, and her membranous covering is removed. She is confronted by the First Intruder, a male insect, and she reflexively stabs him and cracks his neck until he dies. The tribe celebrates that she has been initiated. The Second Intruder appears, and this time the tribe leave her to kill him. However, the two fall in love and mate. The tribe returns and the couple attempts to hide, but are discovered. The tribe attacks the Second Intruder, and finally, the Novice is overcome by animal instincts and kills him. The Novice is embraced by the Queen, while the rest of the tribe salutes her.

The Firebird

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

Igor Stravinsky began studying composition with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1902. He completed several works during his time as a student, including his first performed work, Pastorale (1907), and his first published work, the Symphony in E-flat (1907), which the composer categorized Opus 1. In February 1909, a performance of his Scherzo fantastique and Feu d’artifice in Saint Petersburg was attended by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who was intrigued by the vividness of Stravinsky’s works. Diaghilev founded the art magazine Mir iskusstva in 1898, but after it ended publication in 1904, he turned towards Paris for artistic opportunities rather than his native Russia. In 1907, Diaghilev presented a five-concert series of Russian music at the Paris Opera; the next year, he staged the Paris premiere of Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of Boris Godunov. By 1909, Diaghilev had connected with Michel Fokine, Léon Bakst, and Alexandre Benois, and gained enough money to start his independent ballet company, the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev commissioned Stravinsky to orchestrate music by Chopin for the ballet Les Sylphides, and the composer was finished by March 1909. Fokine was a renowned dancer, receiving first prize in his class upon graduation from the Imperial Theatre School in 1898; he subsequently entered the Mariinsky Ballet as a soloist and was promoted to lead dancer of the company in 1904. Fokine was dissatisfied with the ballet tradition of glamorous appeals to the audience and interruptions from viewers; he felt that dramatic dance should be strictly displayed with no interruption of illusion, and that the music should be closely connected to the theme. His 1907 ballets The Dying Swan and Les Sylphides were very successful and established Fokine as a competitor to other prominent choreographers. In 1908, Benois, a member of Diaghilev’s Mir iskusstva circle and friend of Fokine’s, arranged for the dancer to prepare a repertoire for the Ballets Russes’ 1909 season as the company’s first lead choreographer; the season was very successful, and Diaghilev began organizing plans for the 1910 season soon after.

The Flood (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Text#

The narrative of The Flood juxtaposes the story of the Creation with that of Noah. The text was compiled by Robert Craft using material from Genesis and the York and Chester cycles of mystery plays. Excerpts from the Te Deum are sung by the chorus.

Scoring#

The work is scored for tenor soloist (Lucifer/Satan), two bass soloists (God), several spoken parts (a narrator, Satan, Eve, Noah, a caller, Noah’s wife, son of Noah), chorus (SAT) and a large orchestra of 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), alto flute, 2 oboes, cor anglais, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones (1st doubling alto trombone), tuba, percussion (timpani, bass drum, cymbals, xylorimba, and 3 tom-toms), harp, celesta, piano, and strings. The Flood was published in 1963 by Boosey & Hawkes.

The Nightingale (opera)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

Stravinsky began work on the opera in 1908 but put it aside after receiving the next year the commission from Sergei Diaghilev for the ballet The Firebird. He returned to it in 1913 after he had completed three ballets for Diaghilev, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring being the others. Act 1, set at the seashore, was mostly complete by 1909; acts 2 and 3, set at court, were finished in early 1914. Stravinsky was no doubt aware of the advances in his style and technique during the intervening years. In 1917, Stravinsky created a separate concert work, a symphonic poem, from music from the opera. It was published in 1921 as Chant du Rossignol (Song of the Nightingale).

The Owl and the Pussy Cat (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

Stravinsky had been familiar with Edward Lear’s poem “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” before he set it to music. It had been the first English poem his wife Vera memorized. In 1961, she learned that a French translation by Frances Steegmuller had been published by the New Yorker. She was not able to acquire it until July 1965, when Lillian Libman, Stravinsky’s representative, brought her a copy. Vera presented it to Stravinsky, who then read it. Stravinsky did not begin work on the song until after completing the Requiem Canticles in 1966, though the Los Angeles Times Walter Arlen wrote that Stravinsky withheld work on the song to ensure “the mass for the dead would not be his final work”. Robert Craft said that Stravinsky did not inform Vera of the song’s existence until it was complete; he may have had her voice in mind while composing it: The elegant fowl kept the composition a secret, in any case, until he had sung and played it for his feline love, not in a pea-green boat, of course, but in his sound-proof roost. Stravinsky dedicated the song to Vera. On the score’s title page he drew his own rendering of Lear’s illustration of the poem, to which he added waves in order to convey that his “music was probably rocking the boat”. He gave the manuscript and sketches for the song to Craft on March 31, 1968, in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of their friendship.

The Rake's Progress

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Performance history#

It was first performed at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice on 11 September 1951, with Robert Rounseville as Tom Rakewell, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf as Anne Trulove, and Otakar Kraus as Nick Shadow. It was first given in Paris at the Opéra-Comique on 18 June 1952, under the baton of André Cluytens and produced by Louis Musy. The American premiere was on 14 February 1953, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, conducted by Fritz Reiner and produced by George Balanchine. Although the BBC had previously produced a studio recording (broadcast on 2 January 1953), and the Glyndebourne Opera mounted a staged production at the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh in August 1953, the first staging in England was by the same company at the Glyndebourne Festival itself, opening on 15 July 1954. In 1957, it was a part of the first season of the Santa Fe Opera under the direction of John Crosby, who persuaded the composer to attend rehearsals. Stravinsky returned to the SFO each summer through 1963. In 1961, Ingmar Bergman produced the opera at the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm, where it opened on 22 April. The noteworthy 1975 Glyndebourne Festival Opera production was directed by John Cox, used sets and costumes were designed by David Hockney, and starred Leo Goeke as Tom Rakewell. In 2010 the Berlin Staatsoper debuted Krzysztof Warlikowski’s production, which transported the action from England to America and set it in the 20th century. The production was full of references to American culture, such as Andy Warhol. in 2015, the Utah Opera produced the opera with the costumes and set designed by David Hockney, first seen at Glyndebourne in 1975. Utah Symphony music director Thierry Fischer conducted, with stage direction by Roy Rallo, who assisted John Cox during San Francisco Opera’s 2000 revival. Also, in 2015, Portland Opera presented the David Hockney production. Conductor was Ari Pelto and with the major roles taken by Jonathon Boyd, David Pittsinger, Maureen McKay and Angela Niederloh.

The Rite of Spring

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

Igor Stravinsky was the son of Fyodor Stravinsky, the principal bass singer at the Imperial Opera, Saint Petersburg, and Anna, née Kholodovskaya, a competent amateur singer and pianist from an old-established Russian family. Fyodor’s association with many of the leading figures in Russian music, including Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Mussorgsky, meant that Igor grew up in an intensely musical home. In 1901 Stravinsky began to study law at Saint Petersburg University while taking private lessons in harmony and counterpoint. Stravinsky worked under the guidance of Rimsky-Korsakov, having impressed him with some of his early compositional efforts. By the time of his mentor’s death in 1908, Stravinsky had produced several works, among them a Piano Sonata in F minor (1903–04), a Symphony in E major (1907), which he catalogued as “Opus 1”, and a short orchestral piece, Feu d’artifice (“Fireworks”, composed in 1908). In 1909 Feu d’artifice was performed at a concert in Saint Petersburg. Among those in the audience was the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who at that time was planning to introduce Russian music and art to western audiences. Like Stravinsky, Diaghilev had initially studied law, but had gravitated via journalism into the theatrical world. In 1907 he began his theatrical career by presenting five concerts in Paris; in the following year he introduced Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov. In 1909, still in Paris, he launched the Ballets Russes, initially with Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. To present these works Diaghilev recruited the choreographer Michel Fokine, the designer Léon Bakst and the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. Diaghilev’s intention, however, was to produce new works in a distinctively 20th-century style, and he was looking for fresh compositional talent. Having heard Feu d’artifice he approached Stravinsky, initially with a request for help in orchestrating music by Chopin to create new arrangements for the ballet Les Sylphides. Stravinsky worked on the opening Nocturne in A-flat major and the closing Grande valse brillante; his reward was a much bigger commission, to write the music for a new ballet, The Firebird (L’oiseau de feu) for the 1910 season. The Firebird was premiered on 25 June 1910, with Tamara Karsavina in the main role, and was a great public success. This ensured that the Diaghilev–Stravinsky collaboration would continue, in the first instance with Petrushka (1911) and then The Rite of Spring.

Three Easy Pieces (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

Stravinsky’s Three Easy Pieces can be understood as an example of Gebrauchsmusik, that is, music that was conceived and composed specifically for some purpose, and not for its own sake. In this case, Stravinsky wrote this set and 1917 Five Easy Pieces especially for educational purposes. After completing his Valse des fleurs, which is similar to them in the sense that they were composed for his little children to play with him, Stravinsky decided to write pieces for four hands to teach them how to play the piano. The set was composed in Clarens, in 1914 and 1915 and was presented and first performed by José Iturbi, on April 22, 1918. It was eventually published in 1917.

Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I (Preferably Clarinet in A)#

The first piece started out as a song Stravinsky began writing in 1916. It is marked “Sempre e molto tranquillo”, or “Always piano and very peaceful”. The tempo is marked at = 52, making it by far the slowest of the three pieces. It is made up of a long, plodding series of quarter and eighth notes, adorned by the occasional grace notes and often interrupted by a breath mark. The lower register of the clarinet is explored here, with many leaps going from the upper to the lower registers of the instrument. The last measure is marked “poco più e poco più mosso”, or “A little more forte and a little more motion”. This last measure is to be played much quicker and at a louder dynamic so as to create a contrast with the rest of the piece. A sustained concert C ends the first piece in a long fade-out.

Three Pieces for String Quartet

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

As most of the works by Igor Stravinsky, this three-movement work was arranged from a four-hands one-piano version, from which the final revised version of 1918 derives and differs in some respects. The manuscript (originally titled IStravinsky. Trois pièces pour quatuor à cordes – reduction pour piano à quatre mains par moi, IStr.) contained no movement titles for any of the three pieces. However, with the passing of time, Stravinsky rearranged these three movements for large orchestra, together with his Étude pour pianola, and premiered the whole collection as Quatre études in 1928. The term string quartet in the title refers to string quartet more as an ensemble, rather than a genre. Therefore, the work challenges the traditional notion of string quartet with its implied musical form and idiom. As music critic Paul Griffiths points out,

Threni (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

Stravinsky composed Threni between the summer of 1957 and the spring of 1958, beginning it on 29 August 1957 at the piano of the nightclub in the hotel where he was staying in Venice, and completing it before 27 March 1958. It was first performed on 23 September 1958 in the hall of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. The composer conducted soloists Ursula Zollenkopf, Jeanne Deroubaix, Hugues Cuénod, Richard Robinson, Charles Scharbach, and Robert Oliver, the NDR Chor, and the NDR Sinfonieorchester. He dedicated the performance to Alessandro Piovesan, director of the Venice Biennale, who had recently died. The first Paris performance, on 14 November 1958, was disastrous. According to Stephen Walsh, Boulez failed to obtain adequate performers, and those he could obtain broke down several times. The audience response was polite at first, but when Stravinsky refused to return and take a bow, it gradually descended into jeers. Stravinsky said he would never conduct in Paris again. He felt humiliated by what he called a “scandalous concert”, writing in his diary immediately after the performance that it was the “unhappiest concert of my life” and blaming Boulez for it. Craft adds that Boulez had promised to rehearse Threni, but failed to do so. Stravinsky nevertheless had a share in the blame for not canceling the concert despite the pleas of family and friends, including his wife and Nadia Boulanger. Conceding that the performance was a “catastrophe”, Boulez nevertheless insisted that he had in fact participated in the piano rehearsals, together with Stravinsky, whom he had tried in vain to persuade to be firmer with the singers. He concluded that Stravinsky “was not a good conductor; he was a terribly lousy conductor”, and the singers’ problems were compounded because “the orchestra had been ill-prepared by Craft”. While agreeing that the singers were “absolutely awful”, Boulez protested they had been chosen not by himself, but by an agent in charge of the Aix-en-Provence festival. Stravinsky himself conducted the first recording in January 1959 with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. This recording has been reissued several times since, and is part of Sony’s 2007 release of Stravinsky’s works. Boosey & Hawkes first published Threni in 1958. Conducting from this score is difficult because of a shortage of bar lines. Asked by Craft about this, Stravinsky said, “The voices are not always in rhythmic unison. Therefore, any bar lines would cut at least one line arbitrarily”. He recommended that the conductor “merely count the music out as he counts out a motet by Josquin”. But a revised edition, with several changes to the barring as well as some corrections, was issued in 1965. Stravinsky had already used twelve-tone technique earlier in the 1950s, in Canticum Sacrum (1955) and in Agon (1957). But neither of these is exclusively dodecaphonic, as Threni is.

Trois mouvements de Petrouchka

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

Sergei Diaghilev, who had commissioned The Firebird from Stravinsky for his new ballet company, the Ballets Russes, had expected Stravinsky would follow the ballet with another dance work, The Rite of Spring. The idea for such a work had occurred to Stravinsky while still working on The Firebird, but Stravinsky felt the need to write something unrelated to the theater and conceived an orchestral work in which the piano would have a prominent part: Stravinsky himself used the word Konzertstück for the composition. Stravinsky relates that he had in mind a distinct picture of a puppet who tried the patience of the orchestra with “diabolical cascades of arpeggios.” In turn, the orchestra retaliates with trumpet blasts and after reaching a climax, the conflict ends with the collapse of the puppet. Stravinsky recalled that after completing the piece, he searched vainly for an appropriate name for his puppet until he remembered Petrushka, a popular hero of country fairs everywhere. In the fall of 1910, Diaghilev came to visit Stravinsky, who at that time was living in Lausanne, Switzerland, expecting to hear the beginning of The Rite of Spring, but instead was greeted with Petrushka. Diaghilev immediately recognized the possibilities of developing this orchestral work into a full length stage work. Thus, the concert piece became the second part of the ballet Petrushka. The full score was completed on 11 May 1911, and on the following 13 June Petrushka was performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, under the baton of Pierre Monteux. Three Movements from Petrushka for the solo piano were composed ten years later for his friend, pianist Arthur Rubinstein, and are dedicated to him. Stravinsky is very explicit in stating that the movements are not transcriptions. He was not trying to reproduce the sound of the orchestra, but instead wished to compose a score which would be essentially pianistic even though its musical material was drawn directly from the ballet. Stravinsky also wanted to create a work which would encourage pianists to play his music, but it should be one in which they could display their technique, an objective he amply achieved.

Two Sketches for a Sonata

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

According to Robert Craft, Stravinsky worked on the sketches until January 25, 1968, at which point he put them aside because he had ambitions to compose a larger work wherein he could better realize some of the ideas in the “Two Sketches for a Sonata”: I had no sooner forbidden myself to use octaves in one piece than I saw what richness I could extract from them, and I used them in the next piece all the time. Stravinsky’s librarian reported that the work was projected to be for piano and instruments “with a solo section”. Pierre Souvtchinsky, who visited Stravinsky in October 1967, saw the sketches. He described them to Mariya Yudina as an “invention, sonata, and variations”, but was skeptical about their prospects for being completed. Musicologist Jonathan Cross wrote in his preface to the score for the “Two Sketches for a Sonata” that the music resembled the “sparse, concentrated style” of the Requiem Canticles and possess Stravinsky’s characteristic “rhythmic vitality”. How he intended to develop the sketches is unclear: He simply copied them out neatly and left them as a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been. Or perhaps, despite their title, he felt that they were complete in themselves, perfectly formed miniatures that required nothing more. We shall never know. Craft said that their brevity and incompleteness notwithstanding, the “Two Sketches for a Sonata” are a “perfectly formed composition” deserving of inclusion in Stravinsky’s canon. Cross said they “have their own understated beauty, a poignant summing-up of a life’s work.” In March 2021, the “Two Sketches for a Sonata” were published for the first time in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Stravinsky’s death. The manuscript is held in the archives of the Paul Sacher Foundation.

Valse des fleurs (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

Stravinsky’s music post-Rite of Spring in the 1910s was devoted to . This example of was specifically conceived for educational purposes, as he was trying to produce music either for four hands or two pianos intended for himself and his son, Soulima. For this reason, the “Valse des fleurs” is generally associated with other compositions for four hands from his Swiss period, such as the Three Easy Pieces (1915) and the Five Easy Pieces (1917). The brief (less than 1 minute) “Valse pour les enfants” of 1917, though not for four hands, is also in this vein of instructionally intended pieces. This composition was finished in Clarens, Switzerland, on August 30, 1914. Kept in the composer’s personal collection, it remained unperformed and unpublished for decades after its completion. However, fellow musician Robert Craft brought it to light when Soulima and Beveridge Webster played it as part of a Stravinsky concert that he organized in New York City’s Town Hall on February 26, 1949. As with most of his American works and works earlier than his American period published in the US with the express intention of making money, it was published by Boosey & Hawkes in facsimile in 1983.

Variations: Aldous Huxley in memoriam

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

Stravinsky began work on the Variations in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in July 1963, and completed the composition in Hollywood, California, on 28 October 1964. It was first performed in Chicago on 17 April 1965, by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Robert Craft. The score is dedicated to the memory of Stravinsky’s close friend Aldous Huxley, who died on 22 November 1963 (the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated), when composition of the Variations was in progress. Although not composed for the purpose, Stravinsky’s music was twice choreographed for the New York City Ballet by George Balanchine, a first version in 1966, and a second version in 1982, both times under the title Variations.

Violin Concerto (Stravinsky)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Conception#

The Violin Concerto was commissioned by Blair Fairchild, an American composer, diplomat, and the patron of the young Polish violinist Samuel Dushkin. Willy Strecker of B. Schotts Söhne, Stravinsky’s music publisher at the time (and also a friend of Dushkin’s), asked Stravinsky to compose a concerto for Dushkin. Though Stravinsky was reluctant, citing unfamiliarity with the instrument, Strecker assured the composer that Dushkin would consult about technical matters. Stravinsky noted in his autobiography that Dushkin’s availability for such advice was a factor in his undertaking the Violin Concerto. He also sought the opinion of composer and violist Paul Hindemith, who allayed Stravinsky’s fears, suggesting that his unfamiliarity with the instrument might help him come up with new possibilities. Stravinsky met with Dushkin at Strecker’s residence in Wiesbaden and decided to go ahead.

Zvezdoliki

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Igor Stravinsky on Music Theory Print

A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer

History#

Abraham and Isaac (Stravinsky)

History#

Agon (ballet)

Form#

Apollo (ballet)

Music#

Ave Maria (Stravinsky)

Composition#

Babel (Stravinsky)

Composition#

Berceuses du chat

Songs#

History#

Bluebird Pas de Deux

Composition#

Cantata (Stravinsky)

Further reading#

Canticum Sacrum

Text#

Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra

History#

Circus Polka

Composition#

Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (Stravinsky)

Orchestration#

Concerto for Two Pianos (Stravinsky)

Composition#

Concerto in D (Stravinsky)

Movements#

References#

External links#

Concerto in E-flat "Dumbarton Oaks"

Music#

Danses concertantes

Balanchine versions#

1944 version#

Danses concertantes (Stravinsky)

History#

Double Canon (Stravinsky)

History#

Duo Concertant (ballet)

Choreography#

Production#

Ebony Concerto (Stravinsky)

History#

Elegy (Stravinsky)

Choreography#

Elegy for J.F.K.

Composition background#

Music overview and analysis#

Epitaphium (Stravinsky)

History#

Fanfare for a New Theatre

Composition and premiere#

Analysis#

Further reading#

External links#

Feu d'artifice

Composition#

Five Easy Pieces (Stravinsky)

Composition#

Funeral Song

Early history#

Greeting Prelude

Surprise#

Jeu de cartes (Stravinsky)

Structure#

Jewels (ballet)

Costumes#

L'Histoire du soldat

Music#

Le baiser de la fée

Themes#

Le chant du rossignol

Opera#

Les noces

Composition#