![]() He was soon to be isolated in a more literal sense also. From now on he was seldom to modify his abrasive manner, conscious that he was standing alone, and so needed to protect himself with his own brand of sharp defensiveness. ![]() Previously unprepossessing, Stravinsky developed a waspish resistance to the attacks that come with being under the spotlight. Did Coco Chanel have an affair with Igor Stravinsky?.Then followed the eruptive, earth-stamping power of The Rite of Spring, with its legendary first-night audience riot at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in May 1913, and the realisation that the advent of this composer had changed the course of musical history. Within a year the asymmetric rhythms and incisive orchestral colours of Petrushka had announced Stravinsky’s mature style. The Ballets Russes’s first performance of this brought the young composer instant world fame, but he was not content to repeat its broad-brushed, shimmering virtuosity. Planning a parallel ballet company, and needing a new work for its 1910 season, Diaghilev took a chance and commissioned Stravinsky to compose The Firebird. In the audience at the first performance of these was Serge Diaghilev, the impresario of the Opéra Russe company that was the talk of cultural life in Paris. The ‘real’ Stravinsky began to materialise in two orchestral works from 1908: the strikingly inventive Scherzo fantastique and the brilliantly scored Fireworks. The music shows the influences of Tchaikovsky, Glazunov and Rimsky himself, but no pronounced personality of its own. A year later, however, he changed his mind and accepted Stravinsky as a private pupil, who by 1905 was able to complete an impressive Symphony in E flat. Rimsky-Korsakov didn’t think so either, when Stravinsky showed him some piano pieces at the St Petersburg Conservatoire in 1902. At that stage, as he himself conceded, he had not composed anything that indicated major talent. Stravinsky did not retrospectively berate his father, however, for having insisted that young Igor should study law rather than music. The relationship with his parents seems to have been extremely fractious. His father was principal bass at the Mariinsky Opera in St Petersburg, and his mother was a good pianist, so he grew up in a world of high-level music-making. Surprisingly, his early years showed no real sign of the meteoric achievements to come. A White Russian of upper-middle class ancestry, born into a time-warped, backward-looking society, he adapted with remarkable success to life in the 20th-century West. Gifted with an insistently exploratory mind, Stravinsky was also rooted in tradition – first in the folk music and sacred chant of Russia’s countryside and Orthodox Church that were among his earliest childhood memories, then in European art music from the Baroque age and earlier. And he is: the case for Stravinsky as his century’s paramount composer seems stronger than ever. ‘Stravinsky remains’ is one solution, but there is also a sense of ‘Stravinsky is ever with us’. This is how Pierre Boulez, one of the leaders of the post-war musical avant garde, titled his rhythmic analysis of The Rite of Spring in 1953.
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