Was He the Composer of the Century?

The 20th century has barely passed, but the urge to sum it up is strong. When it comes to assessing its music and music makers, the early returns are beginning to come in, and Igor Stravinsky shows all the signs of being crowned the composer of the era.

He was actually a child of the 19th century, born near Russia’s St. Petersburg in 1882. He came to sudden international prominence in Paris with three ballets created for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes--”Firebird” (1910), “Petrouchka” (1911) and, especially, “The Rite of Spring.”

World War I and the ensuing Russian revolution--with which he was out of sympathy--cut him off from his homeland, so he began a life of exile, living in Switzerland, Paris and, starting in 1939, the United States.

Los Angeles was his home for most of his years in the U.S., but ill health toward the end of his life propelled him to seek treatment in New York, where he died in 1971.

His three ballets for the Ballets Russes remain his most popular pieces, but throughout his life, he created an astonishing variety of works. These ranged from the austere but powerful opera/oratorio “Oedipus Rex,” and “Symphony of Psalms,” which he dedicated “to the glory of God,” through the jazz-inspired “Ebony Concerto” and neoclassical pieces that include “Apollon Musagete,” which was used for the Balanchine ballet “Apollo.” He even embraced 12-tone composition--pioneered by another candidate for the 20th century composer sweepstakes, Arnold Schoenberg--with late works such as “Agon” and “Canticum sacrum.”

In the opening months of the 21st century, much of this output will be celebrated and reconsidered in festivals and performances across the country. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is engaged in a monthlong Stravinsky festival (through March 12), and will be taking two of the programs to New York’s Lincoln Center as part of an extensive Stravinsky festival there, through May 13.

The Kansas City Symphony began a three-month Stravinsky festival in Missouri in January. Michael Tilson Thomas led the San Francisco Symphony in a monthlong Stravinsky festival two years ago and will be taking a recent Stravinsky program to Carnegie Hall later this month, where Stravinsky will be on the agenda throughout the spring.

So why is Stravinsky getting such a ride? Why is he the chosen one? When you ask musicians, scholars, orchestra programmers and music directors, a few themes emerge: His chameleon quality; his borrowing from every kind of source, high and low; his ability to adapt and persevere--all make him quintessentially modern, quintessentially relevant. His music, and his life, resonate.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

Music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic

“He may be the most important artist of any kind who ever lived in this city. The breadth and the depth of his productions are quite amazing. The influence he had not only on his fellow musicians, but also on [other] art forms is major. His music is performed everywhere and his music is undergoing a continuous re-analysis and reevaluation. All these things together are signs of a very major figure.

“What is amazing to me is how little-known his music still is, apart from the three or four or five most popular pieces. [For the festival], I tried to put together programs that would highlight the lesser-known Stravinsky or the almost completely unknown Stravinsky with more popular pieces that are part of the repertoire, just to give the audience an idea of the full scope of his compositions’ styles and idioms.

“His orchestration is a subject of endless fascination. The other thing that puts Stravinsky in sort of a separate corner is, of course, rhythm. Stravinsky never, ever wrote a rhythmically uninteresting piece of music in his entire life. His rhythm does things that nobody else’s rhythm does. It has almost an independent life.”

Joseph Horowitz

Musicologist, former executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the organizer of the Kansas City Symphony Stravinsky festival

“All this attention is uncanny. It’s a catch-up act, actually. Finally, in 2001, enough time has expired that we’ve begun to look at the repertoire of the 20th century as something other than a novelty. Stravinsky is the most influential and prominent composer of the period in question, so he’s the major beneficiary of this attention.

“Because of his propensity to reinvent himself, it’s fun to program him. You can program him and incorporate a lot of diversity. He’s like a thieving magpie, a chronic borrower from such a diversity of sources. This becomes a fascinating study in itself and also makes him perpetually elusive.

“In fact, I don’t think there will ever be a definitive reading of this man because he’s such a chameleon. He’s tantalizingly elusive, which is a function of his propensity to continually reinvent himself.”

Steve Reich

American Minimalist composer

“The reasons he’s great are many. Listeners are swept away by his music, and intellectual appreciation is not what’s bringing them back for more. It’s a basic, musical gut-level appreciation of what the man is doing.

“When I was a student in the late ‘60s, there was still a stylistic culture war between those who supported Stravinsky and those who supported Schoenberg. This could be traced back to Wagner, passing on to Schoenberg, and Debussy, passing on to Stravinsky. Wagner was leading to a pathway where harmony is dead, there’s no such thing as a tonal center.

Debussy was saying, ‘Well, it’s very shopworn, but how about another way of dealing with it?’

“Stravinsky followed [Debussy], saying, ‘We just can’t keep doing the [everyday harmonies] we’ve been doing, but we can add modal operations, dissonances like you haven’t experienced ever, and still get the feeling that [we’re] going somewhere.’

“He proved that the Schoenberg tradition is flatter. It lives in a dark corner. It’s nothing people could listen to. It’s just not going to have that kind of audience, not now, not ever.

“Of course, [young composers] can learn from him. You’d be a fool not to learn from him. He was one of the greatest orchestrators that ever lived. You can learn rhythmic structure--how to put together changing meters; he is a model of that particular technique. They can still learn the lesson that given even the number of diatonic notes, the possibilities of combining them are literally infinite. Or, whatever the number is, it’s enough to keep us going forever.”

Christopher Hailey

Musicologist, visiting professor at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute in Vienna, curator of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Stravinsky festival

“He’s an ongoing presence of such varied impulses and style--we have to try to see him as a whole. [How was someone] who literally began almost a [lifetime] of exile in 1920 and lived through a series of cultures able to interact creatively with virtually every situation he was in? That [answer] is important to us as a nation of immigrants.

“There are still many questions about Stravinsky [in America]. Since he lived here beginning in 1945, memories of people in Southern California are still very fresh. [The Philharmonic festival discussions] focus on people who worked and interacted with him. We’re hoping we can bring out a sense of Stravinsky’s immediacy to Southern California and how he responded to this environment. He had an impact here through recordings, through the concertsof his music, interacting with musicians, artists, the Hollywood crowd. He lived longer in Los Angeles than any place in his life. He embraced it. He went to the movies here. He went to Farmers Market for lunch. He loved the popular aspect of the culture. He watched his television. He was open to all these influences around him.”

Robert Craft

Conductor; co-author of five books of conversations and commentaries together with Stravinsky; translated and annotated three volumes of Stravinsky correspondence; and published four books of Stravinsky photographs and documents

“A completely different generation is paying attention to Stravinsky now. They’re born to the concentration, intensity and the rhythmic life of [his] music. It suits the temper of the times. It has this vitality.

“I would never say anything against [composer Arnold] Schoenberg, whom I love equally, but Schoenberg, when he came to Los Angeles, brought Vienna with him. Stravinsky did not bring Europe with him. He was interested in everything in America. He wrote in American idioms.

“I think myself Schoenberg goes deeper. There is a depth of imagination and dimension that is more concentrated in Schoenberg. But it doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

“A characteristic of Stravinsky’s music is that it’s full of joy. It is completely upbeat. Not to make a pun, he always conducted on his toes. He was always a beat ahead. His antennae were ahead of anyone else’s.”

William Kraft

Conductor, timpanist who played under Stravinsky’s direction in the 1950s and ‘60s

“Why Stravinsky? It’s crazy. He turns out to be accessible after all these years.

“He was terrific to work with. The guys loved him. He would always call us, ‘My dears, my dears.’

“He was so crucial. It was an epiphany to hear ‘Rite of Spring,’ ‘Petrouchka’ and even ‘Firebird.’ My generation and those surrounding us were completely bowled over. So we expected to have these brilliant, colorful big works coming out of him. Then, after the war, for him to go to the small things--it took us awhile to get used to the Octet and the neoclassical things. We felt he let us down.

“That’s a psychoanalytic matter, why he never developed [one] style and a legacy that was recognizable. Any composer who is really known is known because of the consistency--Sibelius, Rachmaninoff, Webern. That’s [another] crazy thing about Stravinsky.”

Louis Andriessen

Dutch composer, author (in collaboration with Elmner Schonberger) of “The Apollonian Clockwork on Stravinsky”

“I esteem him very highly. He has been very influential all my [compositional] life, [because he allowed] you to have a free approach to material you would like to use. He makes less distinction between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ music. This is an element which I find very important for young composers these days. Absolutely nobody can know what direction the world will go, [but] I regard him as pointing to the future in the long term.”

Richard Taruskin

Stravinsky scholar and professor of music at UC Berkeley

“He was an enormously influential composer. That doesn’t make him the greatest composer. I hate these sweepstakes. I don’t think it matters who was the greatest. I don’t think you can define such a word except from a point of view. It has to be a meaningful comparison. Certainly that Stravinsky is being paid all this attention indicates his influence.”

Stephen Walsh

British Stravinsky biographer

“I think idolatry is always bad. Personally, I think Stravinsky is the great, best 20th century composer. But I’m not keen on that kind of thing. I certainly agree it’s much better to have a pluralistic approach to these things.

“Still, it’s good that we can still admire these great figures and love their work on a big scale. It’s symptomatic of the time. I think we need these heroes.

“The late works, the serial ones, haven’t been much played in England. There’s something wonderful about them. I’ll be interested in what happens to these works in the next decade. They can only go up. Some are fairly entertaining.”

Peter Sellars

Opera and theater director

“Stravinsky basically looked through the trash and found God, and the 20th century is obsessed with trash. Like every exile, he had to fight and claw his own way. He wrote music that no one wanted to hear [then] and was the most well-paid composer alive. In a century of excess, Stravinsky refused to go beyond what he could verify. His music is about everything happening now. It insists on the present tense.”

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One Life, Many Cultures

June 17, 1882: Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky born near St. Petersburg, Russia; son of a principal bass at the Kirov Theater.

1890: Begins to study piano; most important teacher will be Rimsky-Korsakov, beginning in 1905

1906: Marries Catherine Nossenko; they will have four children together

1910: Has first major success: the ballet “The Firebird,” commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev, premiered by Ballets Russe in Paris. “Petrouchka” follows, cementing his revolutionary sound and his fame. Takes up residence in Switzerland by 1911.

1913: “The Rite of Spring,” also for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russe, famously causes a riot at its premiere at the Thea^tre des Champs-Elysees in Paris.

1919: Begins work on ballet “Pulcinella,” which heralds neoclassic style.

1920: Settles in France; becomes a French citizen in 1934.

1921: Takes Vera Sudeikin as his mistress; they marry when Nossenko dies in 1939.

1923: “The Wedding” premieres.

1925: Makes first American tour.

1926: Rejoins the Russian Orthodox Church, a move that will be reflected in several compositions over the next decade.

1927: Collaborates with Jean Cocteau on “Oedipus Rex.”

1929: Finishes “Apollo,” his last ballet for Diaghilev and his first collaboration with George Balanchine.

1930: “Symphony of Psalms,” a commission of the Boston Symphony, premieres.

1934: “Persephone” premieres.

1938: Willingly conducts in Germany until the annexation of Austria; his music is included in Nazi “Degenerate Music” exhibition.

1939: Immigrates to the U.S. with Sudeikin; Nossenko dies.

1940: Marries Sudeikin; moves to Hollywood.

1945: Becomes U.S. citizen; “Ebony Concerto,” written for Woody Herman, premieres; “Symphony in Three Movements,” a response to World War II, premieres.

1951: Largest work, “The Rake’s Progress,” premieres, as neoclassicism is being overshadowed by serialism and 12-tone music pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg.

1951-1966: Embraces serialism (“Agon,” 1957), works with composer-conductor Robert Craft, who interviews him for five volumes of “conversations”; becomes, in critic Terry Teachout’s words, an “icon for rent.”

1969: In declining health, moves to New York City.

April 6, 1971: Dies; is buried near Diaghilev in Venice.