Composer, Conductor. He is often called "The Father of Modernism" in music. Stravinsky's radical innovations in rhythm and color, and his original approach to all the fundamentals of his art, opened up vast new territories of sound in the West. No other major composer of his time worked in as many different styles, reinventing each as he went along, or had a more pervasive effect on his contemporaries. A 1998 Time magazine poll ranked him among the 100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century. Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum, Russia, the son of a noted operatic bass singer. Although he studied piano from childhood, his parents wanted him to become an attorney and he read law for eight terms at the University of St. Petersburg. At age 20 he decided he wanted to become a composer. By luck he was introduced to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who was impressed enough to accept him as a private pupil; their lessons continued until Rimsky's death in 1908. In 1906 he married a first cousin, Katerina Nossenko, despite an imperial statute prohibiting such marriages; they would have four children. His early orchestral piece "Fireworks" (1909) caught the attention of impresario Serge Diaghilev, and he was brought to Paris as a music arranger for the new Ballets Russes. The first three ballets he wrote for Diaghilev - "The Firebird" (1910), "Petrushka" (1911), and the landmark "The Rite of Spring" (1913) - made Stravinsky an international celebrity and remain his best known works. He spent most of the World War I years in Switzerland, and with revolution and civil war making a return to Russia unfeasible, he moved to Paris in 1920. The following year he began a liason with Russian-born dancer and artist Vera De Bosset; she left her husband for him, and for 18 years the composer split his time between his family and Vera. The sickly Mrs. Stravinsky was apparently resigned to the arrangement. His association with the Ballets Russes continued, but his efforts to assert his creative independence from the possessive Diaghilev strained their relationship, which ended acrimoniously in 1928. Stravinsky became a French citizen in 1934, but his last years in his adopted country were unhappy. His failure to win election to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1935, and the fact that most of his important commissions were now coming from America, made him feel underappreciated there. Tuberculosis claimed his daughter Ludmila in 1938 and his wife some months later, while the composer himself was quarantined with the disease. His mother died in June 1939. With the outbreak of World War II Stravinsky fled to New York, where Vera soon joined him. They married in 1940 and settled in Los Angeles. He became an American citizen in 1945. By this time he was acknowledged as one of the greatest living composers and after the war he kept well in the public eye, conducting concerts of his music around the world and making stereo recordings of all his major works for the Columbia label. Celebrations of Stravinsky's 80th birthday in 1962 included a White House dinner held in his honor by President John F. Kennedy, but for him the real highlight was an official invitation to visit the Soviet Union - the first time he had returned to his homeland in nearly 50 years. He conducted concerts in Moscow and Leningrad and was received by Premier Khrushchev. After three decades in Los Angeles Stravinsky moved to New York City in 1969, taking an apartment at the Essex House, overlooking Central Park. He died there at 88. For all the distance he traveled as an artist, Stravinsky never forgot his debt to Diaghilev. In later life he made annual pilgrimages to his mentor's gravesite in Venice, and after his death he was buried in the same cemetery, as close as possible to the man who had launched his epochal career. Historians roughly divide Stravinsky's output into three periods: the Russian, neoclassical, and serialist. His versatility often bewildered critics, but from beginning to end he was faithful to his overriding creative principle: "A general revision of both the basic values and the primordial elements of the art of music". Nothing is predictable in a Stravinsky score, either in the material or its development, and he determined never to repeat himself from one composition to the next. His formidable technical gifts were honed to perfection through his study with Rimsky-Korsakov, the major influence of his early years, especially in his reliance on Russian folk and fairy tale tradition and the ingenuity of his orchestration. "The Firebird" was both his brilliant debut and the last gasp of Russian Nationalism as Rimsky and the other members of the "Mighty Five" (Mussorgsky, Borodin, etc.) knew it. With "Petrushka" the mature Stravinsky stepped out from the wings; it is a piece rife with irony, with forays into polytonality and an almost postmodern collage-like use of folk tunes. "The Rite of Spring" is one of those sui generis creations - comparable to Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony or, in painting, Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" - after which art was never the same again. Stravinsky did not set out merely to portray an ancient Russian pagan ritual glorifying the earth; he wanted listeners to feel the physical and emotional sensations that would accompany such a ritual. He achieved this with a savage (yet elegantly controlled) sensory overload of disorienting asymmetrical rhythms, pounding percussion, and instruments that were made to play well beyond their normal registers (such as the opening bassoon solo). New York Times critic Paul Griffiths later noted, "By means of syncopation and rapid changes of metre Stravinsky did away with the regular pulse which had governed almost all Western music since the Renaissance". The unprecedented assault of the music, in tandem with the rawness of Nijinsky's choreography, provoked a riot at its Paris premiere (May 29, 1913), one of the most notorious scandals in performing arts history. None of Stravinsky's subsequent opuses had the revolutionary impact of "The Rite", but he continued to set himself artistic challenges in such works as the operas "The Nightingale" (1914) and "Renard" (completed 1916, premiered 1922). He worked on a "civilized" answer to "The Rite", the choral ballet "Les Noces" ("The Wedding"), for nearly a decade, beginning in 1914; its rhythmic experiments were even more advanced, but it was only after an arduous process of trial and error that he decided to reinforce this aspect with an orchestra of four pianos and percussion. By the time Diaghilev (its dedicatee) mounted the premiere in 1923, "Les Noces" had passed its historical moment and Stravinsky had moved on to other things, though it remains one of his greatest masterpieces. The narrated chamber ballet "The Soldier's Tale" (1918) was Stravinsky's first step towards a new "international" style, incorporating jazz and café dance music, and he entered his "neoclassical" period with the ballet "Pulcinella" (1920). The latter started out as a bit of hackwork for Diaghilev - a dance arrangement of pieces by or attributed to the late Baroque composer Pergolesi - but its repercussions were profound. Stravinsky discovered that the economy and restraint of 18th Century music were perfectly suited to his quest for a dispassionate, "objective" means of expression, and that he could create music for the future by reinterpreting the models of the past. This template would serve him for 30 productive years. His major neoclassical works include the short comic opera "Mavra" (1922); the Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1923); the Piano Concerto (1924); the opera-oratorio "Oedipus Rex" (1927); the ballets "Apollon musagete" (1928) and "Orpheus" (1948), both choreographed by George Balanchine; the Violin Concerto (1931); the "Dumbarton Oaks Concerto" (1938); the "Ebony Concerto" (1945), another jazz-inflected work, written for clarinetist and bandleader Woody Herman; the Mass (1948); and three symphonies, all written for American orchestras: the Symphony of Psalms (Boston, 1930), the Symphony in C (Chicago, 1940), and the Symphony in Three Movements (New York, 1945). The crowning achievement of his neoclassical phase is the opera "The Rake's Progress" (1951), to a libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kalman. Stravinsky was long opposed to the 12-tone or serial technique of composer Arnold Schoenberg and his followers, and in the interwar years he and Schoenberg were figureheads in polemical battles between neoclassicists and serialists. During the 1940s, when both men were living as virtual neighbors in Los Angeles, they studiously avoided each other. But after Schoenberg's death in 1951, Stravinsky's assistant and confidant Robert Craft encouraged him to delve into the New Viennese School and he found himself particularly intrigued with the music of Anton Webern. To the astonishment of the music world, the septuagenarian Stravinsky changed roads and began composing in a modified serial technique: "In Memoriam Dylan Thomas" (1954), the choral "Canticum Sacrum" (1956), and the ballet "Agon" (again with choreography by Balanchine, 1957). He then wrote the choral "Threni" (1958), "Movements" for piano and orchestra (1959), the short television opera "The Flood" (1962), and the "Variations for Orchestra" (1964) in a complete 12-tone style. There is an elegiac spirit to much of this music and his last important work, the "Requiem Canticles" (1966), was written with himself in mind.
Composer, Conductor. He is often called "The Father of Modernism" in music. Stravinsky's radical innovations in rhythm and color, and his original approach to all the fundamentals of his art, opened up vast new territories of sound in the West. No other major composer of his time worked in as many different styles, reinventing each as he went along, or had a more pervasive effect on his contemporaries. A 1998 Time magazine poll ranked him among the 100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century. Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum, Russia, the son of a noted operatic bass singer. Although he studied piano from childhood, his parents wanted him to become an attorney and he read law for eight terms at the University of St. Petersburg. At age 20 he decided he wanted to become a composer. By luck he was introduced to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who was impressed enough to accept him as a private pupil; their lessons continued until Rimsky's death in 1908. In 1906 he married a first cousin, Katerina Nossenko, despite an imperial statute prohibiting such marriages; they would have four children. His early orchestral piece "Fireworks" (1909) caught the attention of impresario Serge Diaghilev, and he was brought to Paris as a music arranger for the new Ballets Russes. The first three ballets he wrote for Diaghilev - "The Firebird" (1910), "Petrushka" (1911), and the landmark "The Rite of Spring" (1913) - made Stravinsky an international celebrity and remain his best known works. He spent most of the World War I years in Switzerland, and with revolution and civil war making a return to Russia unfeasible, he moved to Paris in 1920. The following year he began a liason with Russian-born dancer and artist Vera De Bosset; she left her husband for him, and for 18 years the composer split his time between his family and Vera. The sickly Mrs. Stravinsky was apparently resigned to the arrangement. His association with the Ballets Russes continued, but his efforts to assert his creative independence from the possessive Diaghilev strained their relationship, which ended acrimoniously in 1928. Stravinsky became a French citizen in 1934, but his last years in his adopted country were unhappy. His failure to win election to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1935, and the fact that most of his important commissions were now coming from America, made him feel underappreciated there. Tuberculosis claimed his daughter Ludmila in 1938 and his wife some months later, while the composer himself was quarantined with the disease. His mother died in June 1939. With the outbreak of World War II Stravinsky fled to New York, where Vera soon joined him. They married in 1940 and settled in Los Angeles. He became an American citizen in 1945. By this time he was acknowledged as one of the greatest living composers and after the war he kept well in the public eye, conducting concerts of his music around the world and making stereo recordings of all his major works for the Columbia label. Celebrations of Stravinsky's 80th birthday in 1962 included a White House dinner held in his honor by President John F. Kennedy, but for him the real highlight was an official invitation to visit the Soviet Union - the first time he had returned to his homeland in nearly 50 years. He conducted concerts in Moscow and Leningrad and was received by Premier Khrushchev. After three decades in Los Angeles Stravinsky moved to New York City in 1969, taking an apartment at the Essex House, overlooking Central Park. He died there at 88. For all the distance he traveled as an artist, Stravinsky never forgot his debt to Diaghilev. In later life he made annual pilgrimages to his mentor's gravesite in Venice, and after his death he was buried in the same cemetery, as close as possible to the man who had launched his epochal career. Historians roughly divide Stravinsky's output into three periods: the Russian, neoclassical, and serialist. His versatility often bewildered critics, but from beginning to end he was faithful to his overriding creative principle: "A general revision of both the basic values and the primordial elements of the art of music". Nothing is predictable in a Stravinsky score, either in the material or its development, and he determined never to repeat himself from one composition to the next. His formidable technical gifts were honed to perfection through his study with Rimsky-Korsakov, the major influence of his early years, especially in his reliance on Russian folk and fairy tale tradition and the ingenuity of his orchestration. "The Firebird" was both his brilliant debut and the last gasp of Russian Nationalism as Rimsky and the other members of the "Mighty Five" (Mussorgsky, Borodin, etc.) knew it. With "Petrushka" the mature Stravinsky stepped out from the wings; it is a piece rife with irony, with forays into polytonality and an almost postmodern collage-like use of folk tunes. "The Rite of Spring" is one of those sui generis creations - comparable to Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony or, in painting, Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" - after which art was never the same again. Stravinsky did not set out merely to portray an ancient Russian pagan ritual glorifying the earth; he wanted listeners to feel the physical and emotional sensations that would accompany such a ritual. He achieved this with a savage (yet elegantly controlled) sensory overload of disorienting asymmetrical rhythms, pounding percussion, and instruments that were made to play well beyond their normal registers (such as the opening bassoon solo). New York Times critic Paul Griffiths later noted, "By means of syncopation and rapid changes of metre Stravinsky did away with the regular pulse which had governed almost all Western music since the Renaissance". The unprecedented assault of the music, in tandem with the rawness of Nijinsky's choreography, provoked a riot at its Paris premiere (May 29, 1913), one of the most notorious scandals in performing arts history. None of Stravinsky's subsequent opuses had the revolutionary impact of "The Rite", but he continued to set himself artistic challenges in such works as the operas "The Nightingale" (1914) and "Renard" (completed 1916, premiered 1922). He worked on a "civilized" answer to "The Rite", the choral ballet "Les Noces" ("The Wedding"), for nearly a decade, beginning in 1914; its rhythmic experiments were even more advanced, but it was only after an arduous process of trial and error that he decided to reinforce this aspect with an orchestra of four pianos and percussion. By the time Diaghilev (its dedicatee) mounted the premiere in 1923, "Les Noces" had passed its historical moment and Stravinsky had moved on to other things, though it remains one of his greatest masterpieces. The narrated chamber ballet "The Soldier's Tale" (1918) was Stravinsky's first step towards a new "international" style, incorporating jazz and café dance music, and he entered his "neoclassical" period with the ballet "Pulcinella" (1920). The latter started out as a bit of hackwork for Diaghilev - a dance arrangement of pieces by or attributed to the late Baroque composer Pergolesi - but its repercussions were profound. Stravinsky discovered that the economy and restraint of 18th Century music were perfectly suited to his quest for a dispassionate, "objective" means of expression, and that he could create music for the future by reinterpreting the models of the past. This template would serve him for 30 productive years. His major neoclassical works include the short comic opera "Mavra" (1922); the Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1923); the Piano Concerto (1924); the opera-oratorio "Oedipus Rex" (1927); the ballets "Apollon musagete" (1928) and "Orpheus" (1948), both choreographed by George Balanchine; the Violin Concerto (1931); the "Dumbarton Oaks Concerto" (1938); the "Ebony Concerto" (1945), another jazz-inflected work, written for clarinetist and bandleader Woody Herman; the Mass (1948); and three symphonies, all written for American orchestras: the Symphony of Psalms (Boston, 1930), the Symphony in C (Chicago, 1940), and the Symphony in Three Movements (New York, 1945). The crowning achievement of his neoclassical phase is the opera "The Rake's Progress" (1951), to a libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kalman. Stravinsky was long opposed to the 12-tone or serial technique of composer Arnold Schoenberg and his followers, and in the interwar years he and Schoenberg were figureheads in polemical battles between neoclassicists and serialists. During the 1940s, when both men were living as virtual neighbors in Los Angeles, they studiously avoided each other. But after Schoenberg's death in 1951, Stravinsky's assistant and confidant Robert Craft encouraged him to delve into the New Viennese School and he found himself particularly intrigued with the music of Anton Webern. To the astonishment of the music world, the septuagenarian Stravinsky changed roads and began composing in a modified serial technique: "In Memoriam Dylan Thomas" (1954), the choral "Canticum Sacrum" (1956), and the ballet "Agon" (again with choreography by Balanchine, 1957). He then wrote the choral "Threni" (1958), "Movements" for piano and orchestra (1959), the short television opera "The Flood" (1962), and the "Variations for Orchestra" (1964) in a complete 12-tone style. There is an elegiac spirit to much of this music and his last important work, the "Requiem Canticles" (1966), was written with himself in mind.
Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/995/igor-stravinsky: accessed
), memorial page for Igor Stravinsky (17 Jun 1882–6 Apr 1971), Find a Grave Memorial ID 995, citing Cimitero di San Michele, Venice,
Città Metropolitana di Venezia,
Veneto,
Italy;
Maintained by Find a Grave.
Add Photos for Igor Stravinsky
Fulfill Photo Request for Igor Stravinsky
Photo Request Fulfilled
Thank you for fulfilling this photo request. An email has been sent to the person who requested the photo informing them that you have fulfilled their request
There is an open photo request for this memorial
Are you adding a grave photo that will fulfill this request?
Oops, some error occurred while uploading your photo(s).
Oops, something didn't work. Close this window, and upload the photo(s) again.
Make sure that the file is a photo. Photos larger than 8Mb will be reduced.
All photos uploaded successfully, click on the <b>Done button</b> to see the photos in the gallery.
General photo guidelines:
Photos larger than 8.0 MB will be optimized and reduced.
Each contributor can upload a maximum of 5 photos for a memorial.
A memorial can have a maximum of 20 photos from all contributors.
The sponsor of a memorial may add an additional 10 photos (for a total of 30 on the memorial).
Include gps location with grave photos where possible.
No animated GIFs, photos with additional graphics (borders, embellishments.)
You are only allowed to leave one flower per day for any given memorial.
Memorial Photos
This is a carousel with slides. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate, or jump to a slide with the slide dots. Use Escape keyboard button or the Close button to close the carousel.
Quickly see who the memorial is for and when they lived and died and where they are buried.
Show Map
If the memorial includes GPS coordinates, simply click 'Show Map' to view the gravesite location within the cemetery. If no GPS coordinates are available, you can contribute by adding them if you know the precise location.
Photos
For memorials with more than one photo, additional photos will appear here or on the photos tab.
Photos Tab
All photos appear on this tab and here you can update the sort order of photos on memorials you manage. To view a photo in more detail or edit captions for photos you added, click the photo to open the photo viewer.
Flowers
Flowers added to the memorial appear on the bottom of the memorial or here on the Flowers tab. To add a flower, click the Leave a Flower button.
Family Members
Family members linked to this person will appear here.
Related searches
Use the links under See more… to quickly search for other people with the same last name in the same cemetery, city, county, etc.
Sponsor This Memorial
Remove advertising from a memorial by sponsoring it for just $5. Previously sponsored memorials or famous memorials will not have this option.
Share
Share this memorial using social media sites or email.
Save to
Save to an Ancestry Tree, a virtual cemetery, your clipboard for pasting or Print.
Edit or Suggest Edit
Edit a memorial you manage or suggest changes to the memorial manager.
Have Feedback
Thanks for using Find a Grave, if you have any feedback we would love to hear from you.
You may not upload any more photos to this memorial
"Unsupported file type"
Uploading...
Waiting...
Success
Failed
This photo was not uploaded because this memorial already has photos
This photo was not uploaded because you have already uploaded photos to this memorial
This photo was not uploaded because this memorial already has photos
This photo was not uploaded because you have already uploaded photos to this memorial
Invalid File Type
Uploading 1 Photo
Uploading 2 Photos
1 Photo Uploaded
2 Photos Uploaded
Added by
GREAT NEWS! There is 1 volunteer for this cemetery.
Sorry! There are no volunteers for this cemetery. Continuing with this request will add an alert to the cemetery page and any new volunteers will have the opportunity to fulfill your request.
Enter numeric value
Enter memorial Id
Year should not be greater than current year
Invalid memorial
Duplicate entry for memorial
You have chosen this person to be their own family member.
Reported!
This relationship is not possible based on lifespan dates.
0% Complete
Saved
Sign in or Register
Sign in to Find a Grave
Sign-in to link to existing account
There is a problem with your email/password.
There is a problem with your email/password.
There is a problem with your email/password.
We encountered an unknown problem. Please wait a few minutes and try again. If the problem persists contact Find a Grave.
We’ve updated the security on the site. Please reset your password.
Your account has been locked for 30 minutes due to too many failed sign in attempts. Please contact Find a Grave at [email protected] if you need help resetting your password.
This account has been disabled. If you have questions, please contact [email protected]
This account has been disabled. If you have questions, please contact [email protected]
Email not found
Please complete the captcha to let us know you are a real person.
Sign in to your existing Find a Grave account. You’ll only have to do this once—after your accounts are connected, you can sign in using your Ancestry sign in or your Find a Grave sign in.
We found an existing Find a Grave account associated with your email address. Sign in below with your Find a Grave credentials to link your Ancestry account. After your accounts are connected you can sign in using either account.
Please enter your email to sign in.
Please enter your password to sign in.
Please enter your email and password to sign in.
There is a problem with your email/password.
A system error has occurred. Please try again later.
A password reset email has been sent to EmailID. If you don't see an email, please check your spam folder.
We encountered an unknown problem. Please wait a few minutes and try again. If the problem persists contact Find a Grave.
Password Reset
Please enter your email address and we will send you an email with a reset password code.
Registration Options
Welcome to Find a Grave
Create your free account by choosing an option below.
or
Ancestry account link
To create your account, Ancestry will share your name and email address with Find a Grave. To continue choose an option below.
or
If you already have a Find a Grave account, please sign in to link to Ancestry®.
New Member Registration
Email is mandatory
Email and Password are mandatory
This account already exists, but the email address still needs to be confirmed. Resend Activation Email
Your password is not strong enough
Invalid Email
You must agree to Terms and Conditions
Account already exists
Please check the I'm not a robot checkbox
Internal Server error occurred
If you want to be a Photo Volunteer you must enter a ZIP Code or select your location on the map
You must select an email preference
We have sent you an activation email
Your new password must contain one or more uppercase and lowercase letters, and one or more numbers or special characters.
We just emailed an activation code to
Please check your email and click on the link to activate your account.
cemeteries found in will be saved to your photo volunteer list.
cemeteries found within miles of your location will be saved to your photo volunteer list.
cemeteries found within kilometers of your location will be saved to your photo volunteer list.
Within 5 miles of your location.
Within 5 kilometers of your location.
0 cemeteries found in .
0 cemeteries found.
Add a cemetery to fulfill photo requests
You can customize the cemeteries you volunteer for by selecting or deselecting below.
Search above to list available cemeteries.
Getting location…
Loading...
Loading...
No cemeteries found
Find a Grave Video Tutorials
Default Language
Translation on Find a Grave is an ongoing project. If you notice a problem with the translation, please send a message to [email protected] and include a link to the page and details about the problem. Thanks for your help!
Preferred Language
We have set your language to based on information from your browser.