Igor Stravinsky was born June 17th, 1882 in Oranienbaum, Russia, just outside of St. Petersburg. His father was a bass singer who had built a successful operatic career for himself first in Kiev, Ukraine and then in St.Petersburg. As a young child, Stravinsky loved music. He attended many ballets and operas, and began piano lessons at the age of nine. He added harmony and counterpoint training a few years later(Nousiainen). Although his love for music was evident, his parents refused to let him purs

All in all, Igor Stravinsky was a true musical genius and innovator of the twentieth century. While what we know about him may be controversial, his legacy as the man who changed the face of music three times throughout his career will forever be with us. “The Rite of Spring provoked riots in 1913 with its primeval rhythmicism; his sardonic neoclassicism rekindled a taste for the baroque; and his late twelve note serialism made arid tunelessness almost popular. Style, however, was Stravinsky’s mask- his personality was willfully obscured”(Lebrecht). We may not know all the details of his private life, but we do know the particulars of his musical genius. “Will the real Igor Stravinsky ever stand up?” Lebrecht asks doubtingly, “It may well be that when a successful biographer finally removes the fixed mask, he will find no human face behind it”.

In 1920, he was reunited with Serge Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe, but they were on a much looser basis because with a traveling group like the Ballet Russe there could be no guarantee of permanence. He composed two ballets for them in his new neoclassical style: “Pulcinella” and “Apollo Musagetes”(Nousiainen). Pablo Picasso, one of Stravinsky’s friends, was essential in the composition of “Pulcinella”. Regular correspondence was held between the two, and Picasso was also influential in the set design and costuming for the ballet(Stravinsky and Craft 184-185). But when Diaghilev died in 1929, the ballet company folded, leaving Stravinsky without the backbone the Ballet Russe had been of his career(Nousiainen).

As opposed to tonal music, serial music has a mathematical scheme for achieving a sense of order and gives complete equality to all twelve chromatic pitches. “To begin with, his serial essays were cautious experiments carried out within a framework of tonal music, featuring note rows and procedures involving inversion, retrogression, and retrograde inversion”(Nousiainen). Compositions created in this style include: “Agon” and “Canticum Sacrum”. In the late fifties and sixties, Stravinsky began to create compositions based entirely on serial music such as “Threni”, “Variations”, and “Requiem Canticles”(Nousiainen). Following the composition of “Requiem Canticles” and a move to New York City, Stravinsky became ill and began to slow down his compositional endeavors. He died on April 6th, 1971, and was buried in Venice on the island of San Michele, also the resting place of Serge Diaghilev(Hadzovic).

Rimsky-Korsakov organized several concerts in St. Petersburg that would showcase the work of his students. In 1909, Stravinsky’s “Scherzo Fantastique” and “Fireworks” premiered at one of these concerts. In attendance that night was Serge Diaghilev who had just formed the Ballet Russe with dancer Vaclav Nijinsky and choreographer Mikhail Fokine. Following the concert, Diaghilev approached Stravinsky and asked him to write a ballet for his troupe based on the legend of Firebird. Lucky for Stravinsky, the composer originally commissioned to compose Firebird had failed to meet the deadline(Hadzovic). This was Stravinsky’s big break. “The Firebird” would eventually become one of Stravinsky’s most well-known and successful works. “The Firebird” was first preformed in Paris in 1910. The ballet was a tr

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