THE RITES OF IGOR

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Son of the opera singer Fyodor Ignatievich Stravinsky (1843-1902) and the pianist Anna Kholodovskaya (1854-1939), Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was born on June 17th, 1882, in Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov), Russia. During his childhood, he became captivated after watching Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's (1840-1893) "The Sleeping Beauty" for the first time at the Mariinsky Theatre. As a young man, he abandoned a career in law to dedicate himself to musical studies under the guidance of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), an important composer of the time.

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While in Saint Petersburg, the entrepreneur and dance producer Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) attended a performance of Igor's original composition "Fireworks" in 1909. Deeply impressed, Diaghilev hired him to work on the production of "The Firebird" (1910) with the Ballets Russes. The excellent reception in Paris led to two more commissions: "Petrushka" (1911) and "The Rite of Spring" (1913). In the latter, Igor definitively inscribed the Stravinsky name as a temporal landmark of the 20th century, leaving a lasting impact on classical music that resonates to this day.

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In "The Rite of Spring," Stravinsky expressed the pagan ritual whereby peasants offer a young girl in sacrifice to a deity of spring for the continuation of the cycle of life. The composition contains rhythmic and harmonic structures that break with the patterns established in music up to that point. The novelty was provided by the harmony that moves between modal, bitonal, and polytonal, in a radical way, throughout the work. It is also important to highlight the constant changes in meter, irregular pulse, and the use of polyrhythm, also in a radical manner.

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When the Second World War began in 1939, Stravinsky moved from Europe to the United States, where he continued to influence music until his death in New York City in 1971.