In the case of Igor Stravinsky, however, one might say that he matured several times — that he arrived at a complete expression of his style more than once, because during his career, he significantly changed his compositional technique. Indeed, those changes were related indirectly to changes in his life on an even grander level, and his compositional activity was merely one of many components of his life which were changed.
Eric Walter White describes one of Stravinsky’s many musical metamorphoses:
The compositions of his first maturity — from The Rite of Spring to the Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920) — make use of a modal idiom based on Russian sources and are characterized by a highly sophisticated feeling for irregular metres and syncopation and by brilliant orchestral mastery. His postwar decision not to return to Russia led to a break in style. Diaghilev’s request that he should adapt some music by Pergolesi for a commedia dell’arte ballet, Pulcinella (1919-20), helped him to review his attitude to the main European musical tradition, and the result was a series of works which seemed to be dominated by near-classical procedures. At the same time financial necessity forced him to develop a subsidiary career as pianist and conductor. The Concerto for piano and wind instruments (1923-24), Capriccio for solo piano and orchestra (1929), and the Concerto for two solo pianos (1934-35) were written to suit his ability as a solo pianist. The Violin Concerto (1931) was commissioned for Samuel Dushkin, the U.S. violinist, and Stravinsky conducted many performances of the work. Several ballet scores were written during this period: Apollo Musagetes (1928), the last ballet of his to be mounted by Diaghilev; The Fairy’s Kiss (1928), after music by Tchaikovsky, and Persephone (1933-34), both commissioned by Ida Rubenstein for her ballet company; and The Card Party (1936) for the American Ballet. The two peaks of this early neoclassical period are the opera Oedipus Rex (1926-27), on a Latin libretto, and the Symphony of Psalms (1930) on extracts from the Vulgate.
Stravinsky’s life can be seen as a series of geographical changes. Born in Russia in 1882, he lived there until the war began. The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music states that he “lived in Switzerland during World War I, in Paris, 1920-39; in the U.S. after 1939, principally in Hollywood, California, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1945.”
On a higher level, Stravinsky reshaped his spiritual worldview more than once over the course of his life, including a teenage rejection of the Russian Orthodoxy in which he was raised, and his reengagement with this same faith tradition as a young adult.
In the 1920s, Stravinsky began a gradual change as he reexamined Christianity in general and Orthodoxy in particular, as historian Patrick Kavanaugh writes:
Stravinsky began to speak openly of his convictions. In an interview in Brussels, the composer stated, “The more one separates oneself from the canons of the Christian church, the further one distances oneself from the truth … Art is made of itself, and one cannot create upon a creation, even though we are ourselves graftings of Jesus Christ.”
His spiritual change caused a change in his music:
He dedicated his next major composition, the Symphony of Psalms, to the glory of God. Like so many of the biblical passages this work contains, the Symphony of Psalms expresses an awakening sense of distance from the Creator, and the human choice to return to the Creator. “The first movement was written in a state of religious and musical ebullience,” Stravinsky explained. The second movement, Psalm 40, “is a prayer that the new canticle may be put into our mouths. The Alleluia [third movement] is that canticle.”
His early compositions included a number with pagan themes. Like many artists in the Romantic or Romanticist era, he was intrigued or infatuated with paganism.
Over time, however, there are fewer of the pagan-themed pieces and more pieces built around ideas or texts in which Christ is central. The Pater Noster, a choral piece from 1926, was perhaps an early signal. The choral Symphony of Psalms in 1930 marked the beginning of a steady production of spiritual music. Next were the Credo of 1932 and the Ave Maria of 1934. The Babel of 1944 explored a biblical theme not often addressed by composers. In 1948, Stravinsky wrote a full mass.
In 1951, he wrote a vaguely faustian opera, The Rake’s Progress, which dealt with God, the devil, and temptation.
Stravinsky dedicated the 1955 choral work Canticum Sacrum ad honorem Sancti Marci Nominis (the Canticle to Honor the Name of Saint Mark) “to the city of Venice, in praise of its patron saint, the blessed Mark, apostle.” The text is a collection of quotations from the Bible.
Threni, written in 1958, was both musically ambitious and textually ambitious. Stravinsky made a choral setting for a large portion of the biblical book of Lamentations.
The examples above will suffice. He wrote a number of other spiritual pieces. The trend over the course of his career is clear. In the last decades of his life, he wrote no pieces centered around pagan themes.
These compositions alone might not necessarily signify a spiritual development in Stravinsky’s life. But they are not alone. They were accompanied by habits which his friends noticed: he read, thought, and talked about spiritual topics, and intentionally spent time in prayer.
He was attached to his native Russian Orthodoxy, but, as the composition of a mass shows, he had a vision of a broader Christianity which included Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Lutheranism.
Stravinsky’s life advanced in a number of stages, musically, spiritually, and geographically.
