Igor Stravinsky

One of the most remarkable minds ever applied to music, Stravinsky was a master of masks. His ballets Petrushka (1911) and Pulcinella (1920) and the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927) all have puppets or masked characters as protagonists. A professed anti-Romantic, he insisted that music could express nothing, yet powerful feelings often stir in the background and occasionally erupt: in elemental fury in the revolutionary The Rite of Spring (1913) or in startlingly intense longing, toward the end of the ballet The Fairy’s Kiss (1928). Stravinsky was born near St. Petersburg in 1882, and his first masterpieces, beginning with the ballet The Firebird (1910), are steeped in the melodic contours and the complex pulses of Russian folk music. The stunning rhythmic innovations of The Rite of Spring have their roots in his native soil. After he left Russia permanently in 1917, settling first in Paris and Switzerland, then in the U.S., he retained the influence of Russian folk and liturgical music. This is experienced in the choral-orchestral Symphony of Psalms (1930), and even in the intensely ironic neo-classical works he produced after World War I, from the chamber composition Octet (1923) and Concerto in E-Flat Major "Dumbarton Oaks" (1938), through to his strangely moving operatic masterpiece The Rake’s Progress (1951). He continues to be an inspiring influence for composers, not only in classical music, but also in jazz, rock and pop.