![]() ![]() Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Dylan Thomas. Music critic Bernard Holland claimed Stravinsky was especially fond of British writers, who visited him in Beverly Hills, "like W. He was drawn to the growing cultural life of Los Angeles, especially during World War II, when writers, musicians, composers, and conductors settled in the area. For a while, he maintained a circle of contacts and émigré friends from Russia, but he eventually found that this did not sustain his intellectual and professional life. Stravinsky had adapted to life in France, but moving to America at the age of 58 was a very different prospect. Stravinsky felt the warmer Californian climate would benefit his health. After a period of travel, the two moved into a home in Beverly Hills, California before they settled in Hollywood from 1941. Vera arrived in January 1940 and the couple married on 9 March in Bedford, Massachusetts. During his first two months in the US, Stravinsky stayed at Gerry's Landing, the home of art historian Edward W. Stravinsky arrived in New York City on 30 September 1939 and headed for Cambridge, Massachusetts to fulfil his engagements at Harvard. Stravinsky himself spent five months in hospital at Sancellemoz, during which time his mother also died. Ludmila died in late 1938, followed by his wife of 33 years, in March 1939. Upon his return to Europe, Stravinsky left Paris for Annemasse near the Swiss border to be near his family, after his wife and daughters Ludmila and Milena had contracted tuberculosis and were in a sanatorium. Stravinsky later remembered this last European address as his unhappiest. Stravinsky made his American debut as conductor in April 1937 in New York City, directing his three-part ballet Jeu de cartes, itself a commission for Lincoln Kirstein's ballet company with choreography by George Balanchine. The pair completed a tour of Europe and South America in 1936. His only composition of that year was the Concerto for Two Solo Pianos, which was written for himself and his son Soulima using a special double piano that Pleyel had built. The composer used his citizenship to publish his memoirs in French, entitled Chroniques de ma Vie in 1935, and underwent a US tour with Samuel Dushkin. Later in that year, they left Voreppe to live on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris, where they stayed for five years. In June 1934, the couple acquired French citizenship. However, composers including Ravel, Bartók, and Reynaldo Hahn found much to admire in the score's craftsmanship, even alleging to detect the influence of Arnold Schoenberg.įrom 1931 to 1933, the Stravinskys lived in Voreppe, a commune near Grenoble in southeastern France. The opera had only lukewarm success with the public and the critics, apparently because its delicacy did not meet their expectations following the tumultuous Rite of Spring. Diaghilev agreed for the Ballets Russes to stage it. The work premiered in Paris in May 1914, after the Moscow Free Theatre had commissioned the piece for 10,000 rubles but soon became bankrupt. Stravinsky took up residence nearby, where he completed The Nightingale. After her delivery, Nosenko was discovered to have tuberculosis and was confined to a sanatorium in Leysin in the Alps. On 15 January 1914, Stravinsky and Nosenko had their fourth child, Marie Milène (or Maria Milena). For the rest of the summer he focused on his first opera, The Nightingale (Le Rossignol), based on the same-titled story by Hans Christian Andersen, which he had started in 1908. He left in July 1913 and returned to Ustilug. Shortly after the premiere, Stravinsky contracted typhoid from eating bad oysters and he was confined to a Paris nursing home. ![]() His compositions of this period shared traits with examples of his earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells, and clarity of form and instrumentation. In the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serial procedures. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms (concerto grosso, fugue, and symphony) and drew from earlier styles, especially those of the 18th century. His "Russian phase", which continued with works such as Renard, L'Histoire du soldat, and Les noces, was followed in the 1920s by a period in which he turned to neoclassicism. ![]() The latter transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky's enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Serge Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. ![]()
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