Igor Stravinsky
Russian composer (1882–1971) / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky[lower-alpha 1] (17 June [O.S. 5 June] 1882 – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer and conductor with French citizenship (from 1934) and United States citizenship (from 1945). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century and a pivotal figure in modernist music.
Igor Stravinsky | |
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Born | (1882-06-17)17 June 1882 Oranienbaum, Saint Petersburg, Russia |
Died | 6 April 1971(1971-04-06) (aged 88) New York City, US |
Occupations |
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Works | List of compositions |
Signature | |
Stravinsky's father was an established bass opera singer, and Stravinsky grew up taking piano and music theory lessons. While studying law at the University of Saint Petersburg, he met Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and studied under him until Rimsky-Korsakov's death in 1908. Stravinsky met the impresario Sergei Diaghilev soon after, who commissioned Stravinsky to write three ballets: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913), the last of which brought him international fame after the near-riot at the premiere, and changed the way composers understood rhythmic structure.
Stravinsky's compositional career is divided into three periods: his Russian period (1913–1920), his neoclassical period (1920–1951), and his serial period (1954–1968). Stravinsky's Russian period was characterised by influence from Russian styles and folklore. Renard (1916) and Les noces (1923) were based on Russian folk poetry, and works like L'Histoire du soldat blended these folktales with popular musical structures, like the tango, waltz, rag, and chorale. His neoclassical period exhibited themes and techniques from the classical period, like the use of the sonata form in his Octet (1923) and use of Greek mythological themes in works like Apollon musagète (1927), Oedipus rex (1927), and Persephone (1935). In his serial period, Stravinsky turned towards compositional techniques from the Second Viennese School like Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954) was the first of his compositions to be fully based on the technique, and Canticum Sacrum (1956) was his first to be based on a tone row. Stravinsky's last major work was the Requiem Canticles (1966), which was performed at his funeral.
While some composers and academics of the time disliked the avant-garde nature of Stravinsky's music, particularly The Rite of Spring, later writers recognized his importance to the development of modernist music. Stravinsky's revolutions of rhythm and modernism influenced composers like Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Béla Bartók, and Pierre Boulez, all of whom "felt impelled to face the challenges set by [The Rite of Spring]," as George Benjamin wrote in The Guardian.[1] In 1998, Time magazine named Stravinsky one of the 100 most influential people of the century. Stravinsky died of pulmonary edema on 6 April 1971 in New York City.
Early life, 1882–1901
Stravinsky was born on 17 June 1882 in the town of Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov), on the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland, 25 mi (40 km) west of Saint Petersburg.[2][3] His father, Fyodor Ignatievich Stravinsky, was an established bass opera singer in the Kiev Opera and the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg and his mother, Anna Kirillovna Stravinskaya (née Kholodovskaya; 1854–1939), a native of Kiev, was one of four daughters of a high-ranking official in the Kiev Ministry of Estates. Igor was the third of their four sons; his brothers were Roman, Yury, and Gury.[4] The Stravinsky family was of Polish and Russian heritage,[5] descended "from a long line of Polish grandees, senators and landowners".[6] It is traceable to the 17th and 18th centuries to the bearers of the Sulima and Strawiński coat of arms. The original family surname was Sulima-Strawiński; the name "Stravinsky" originated from the word "Strava", one of the variants of the Streva river in Lithuania.[7][8]
On 10 August 1882, Stravinsky was baptised at Nikolsky Cathedral in Saint Petersburg.[4] Stravinsky's first school was the Second Saint Petersburg Gymnasium, where he stayed until his mid-teens. Then, he moved to Gourevitch Gymnasium, a private school, where he studied history, mathematics, and languages (Latin, Greek, French, German, Slavonic, and his native Russian).[9] Stravinsky expressed his general distaste for schooling and recalled being a lonely pupil: "I never came across anyone who had any real attraction for me."[10]
At around eight years old, he attended a performance of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet The Sleeping Beauty at the Mariinsky Theatre, which began a lifelong interest in ballets and Tchaikovsky.[11] Stravinsky took to music at an early age and began regular piano lessons at age nine, followed by tuition in music theory and composition.[12] By age fourteen, Stravinsky mastered Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 1, and at age fifteen finished a piano reduction of a string quartet by Alexander Glazunov, who reportedly considered Stravinsky unmusical and thought little of his skills.[11]
Education and first compositions, 1901–1909
Despite Stravinsky's enthusiasm and ability in music, his parents expected him to study law. In 1901, he enrolled at the University of Saint Petersburg, studying criminal law and legal philosophy, but attendance at lectures was optional and he estimated that he turned up to fewer than fifty classes in his four years of study.[13]
In 1902, Stravinsky met Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov, a fellow student at the University of Saint Petersburg and the youngest son of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Nikolai at that time was arguably the leading Russian composer, and he was a professor at Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Stravinsky wished to meet him to discuss his musical aspirations. He spent the summer of 1902 with Rimsky-Korsakov and his family in Heidelberg, Germany. Rimsky-Korsakov suggested to Stravinsky that he should not enter the Saint Petersburg Conservatory but continue private lessons in theory.[14]
By the time of his father's death in 1902, Stravinsky was spending more time studying music than law.[13] His decision to pursue music full time was helped when the university was closed for two months in 1905 in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, which prevented him from taking his final law exams.[15] In April 1906, Stravinsky received a half-course diploma and concentrated on music thereafter.[16] In 1905, he had begun studying with Rimsky-Korsakov twice a week and came to regard him as a second father.[13] These lessons continued until Rimsky-Korsakov's death in 1908.[17] Stravinsky completed his first composition during this time, the Symphony in E-flat, catalogued as Opus 1. In 1908, soon after Rimsky-Korsakov's death, Stravinsky composed Funeral Song, Op. 5, which was performed once and then considered lost until its re-discovery in 2015.[18]
In August 1905, Stravinsky became engaged to his first cousin, Yekaterina Gavrilovna Nosenko. In spite of the Orthodox Church's opposition to marriage between first cousins, the couple married on 23 January 1906.[19][20] They lived in the family's residence at 66 Krukov Canal in Saint Petersburg before they moved into a new home in Ustilug, which Stravinsky designed and built, chosen because Stravinsky had spent many summers there as a child with his father-in-law.[21][19][22] Stravinsky worked on many of his early compositions there, including Funeral Song, the revision of Feu d'artifice, The Nightingale, and some parts of The Rite of Spring.[23][24] It is now a museum with documents, letters, and photographs on display, and an annual Stravinsky Festival takes place in the nearby town of Lutsk.[25][26] The couple had two children, Fyodor and Ludmila, who were born in 1907 and 1908, respectively.[22]
Ballets for Diaghilev and international fame, 1909–1920
By 1909, Stravinsky had composed two more pieces, Scherzo fantastique, Op. 3, and Feu d'artifice (Fireworks), Op. 4. In February of that year, both were performed in Saint Petersburg at a concert that marked a turning point in Stravinsky's career. In the audience was Sergei Diaghilev, a Russian impresario and owner of the Ballets Russes who was struck with Stravinsky's compositions. He commissioned Stravinsky to write some orchestrations for the 1909 ballet season, which were finished by April of that year. While planning for the 1910 ballet season, Diaghilev wished to stage a new ballet from fresh talent that was based on the Russian fairytale of the Firebird. After Anatoly Lyadov was given the task of composing the score, he informed Diaghilev that he needed about one year to complete it. Diaghilev then asked the 28-year-old Stravinsky, who had already begun work on the score in anticipation of the commission.[27] At about 50 minutes in length, The Firebird was revised by Stravinsky into concert suites in 1919 and 1945.[28]
The Firebird premiered at the Opera de Paris on 25 June 1910 to widespread critical acclaim and Stravinsky became an overnight sensation.[29][30] As his wife was pregnant, the Stravinskys spent the summer in La Baule in western France. In September, they moved to Clarens, Switzerland, where their second son, Soulima, was born.[31] The family would spend their summers in Russia and winters in Switzerland until 1914.[32] Diaghilev commissioned Stravinsky to score a second ballet for the 1911 Paris season. The result was Petrushka, based on the Russian folk tale featuring the titular character, a puppet, who falls in love with another, a ballerina.[33] Though it failed to capture the immediate reception that The Firebird had following its premiere at Théâtre du Châtelet in June 1911, the production continued Stravinsky's success.[34]
It was Stravinsky's third ballet for Diaghilev, The Rite of Spring, that caused a sensation among critics, fellow composers, and concertgoers. Based on an idea thought up by Stravinsky while composing Firebird, the production features a series of primitive pagan rituals celebrating the advent of spring.[35] Stravinsky's score contained many novel features for its time, including experiments in tonality, metre, rhythm, stress and dissonance. The radical nature of the music and choreography caused a near-riot at its premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913.[36][37]
Shortly after the premiere, Stravinsky contracted typhoid from eating bad oysters and he was confined to a Paris nursing home. He left in July 1913 and returned to Ustilug.[38] For the rest of the summer he focused on his first opera, The Nightingale, based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen, which Stravinsky had started in 1908.[39] On 15 January 1914, Stravinsky and Nosenko had their fourth child, Marie Milène (or Maria Milena). After her delivery, Nosenko was discovered to have tuberculosis and was committed to a sanatorium in Leysin in the Alps. Stravinsky took up residence nearby, where he completed The Nightingale.[40][41] The work premiered in Paris in May 1914, after the Moscow Free Theatre had commissioned the piece for 10,000 roubles but soon became bankrupt. Diaghilev agreed that the Ballets Russes to stage it.[42][43] 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.[41] However, composers including Maurice Ravel, Béla Bartók, and Reynaldo Hahn found much to admire in the score's craftsmanship, even claiming to detect the influence of Arnold Schoenberg.[44]
In April 1914, Stravinsky and his family returned to Clarens.[45] Stravinsky was ineligible for military service in the World War due to his history of typhoid.[32] Stravinsky managed a short visit to Ustilug to retrieve personal items just before borders were closed.[46] In June 1915, he and his family moved from Clarens to Morges, a town six miles from Lausanne on the shore of Lake Geneva. The family lived there (at three different addresses), until 1920.[47] In December 1915, Stravinsky made his conducting debut at two concerts in aid of the Red Cross with The Firebird.[48] The war and subsequent Russian Revolution in 1917 made it impossible for Stravinsky to return to his homeland.[49]
Stravinsky began to struggle financially in the late 1910s. When Russia (and its successor, the USSR) did not adhere to the Berne Convention and the aftermath of World War I left countries in ruin, royalties for performances of Stravinsky's pieces stopped coming.[50][51] Stravinsky, seeking financial assistance, approached the Swiss philanthropist Werner Reinhart, who agreed to sponsor him and largely underwrite the first performance of L'Histoire du soldat in September 1918.[52] In gratitude, Stravinsky dedicated the work to Reinhart and gave him the original manuscript.[51] Reinhart supported Stravinsky further when he funded a series of concerts of his chamber music in 1919.[53][54] In gratitude to his benefactor, Stravinsky dedicated his Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet to Reinhart, who was an amateur clarinettist.[55] Stravinsky travelled to Paris to attend the premiere of Pulcinella by the Ballets Russes on 15 May 1920, returning to Switzerland afterwards.[56]
Life in France, 1920–1939
In June 1920, Stravinsky and his family left Switzerland for France, first settling in Carantec for the summer while they sought a permanent home in Paris.[57][58]
They soon heard from the couturière Coco Chanel, who invited the family to live in her Paris mansion until they had found their own residence. The Stravinskys accepted and arrived in September.[59] Stravinsky and Chanel quickly became lovers, but the affair was short and ended in May 1921.[60] She helped secure a guarantee for a revival production of The Rite of Spring by the Ballets Russes from December 1920 with an anonymous gift to Diaghilev that was claimed to be worth 300,000 francs.[61]
In 1920, Stravinsky signed a contract with the French piano manufacturing company Pleyel. As part of the deal, Stravinsky transcribed most of his compositions for their player piano, the Pleyela. The company helped collect Stravinsky's mechanical royalties for his works and provided him with a monthly income. In 1921, he was given studio space at their Paris headquarters where he worked and entertained friends and acquaintances.[62][63][64] The piano rolls were not recorded, but were instead marked up from a combination of manuscript fragments and handwritten notes by Jacques Larmanjat, musical director of Pleyel's roll department. During the 1920s, Stravinsky recorded Duo-Art piano rolls for the Aeolian Company in London and New York City.[65]
Stravinsky met Vera Sudeikin in Paris in February 1921,[66] while she was married to the painter and stage designer Serge Sudeikin, and they began an affair that led to Vera Sudeikin leaving her husband in the spring of 1922.[67]
In May 1921, Stravinsky and his family moved to Anglet, a town close to the Spanish border.[68] Their stay was short-lived as by autumn, they had settled to nearby Biarritz and Stravinsky completed his Trois mouvements de Petrouchka, a piano transcription of excerpts from Petrushka for Artur Rubinstein. Diaghilev then requested orchestrations for a revival production of Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty.[69] From then until his wife's death in 1939, Stravinsky led a double life, dividing his time between his family in Anglet, and Vera Sudeikin in Paris and on tour.[70] Nosenko reportedly bore her husband's situation "with a mixture of magnanimity, bitterness, and compassion".[71]
In June 1923, Stravinsky's ballet Les noces premiered in Paris and performed by the Ballets Russes.[72] In the following month, he started to receive money from an anonymous patron from the US who insisted on remaining anonymous and only identified themselves as "Madame". They promised to send him $6,000 in the course of three years, and sent Stravinsky an initial cheque for $1,000. Stravinsky's later student Robert Craft believed that the patron was the famed conductor Leopold Stokowski, whom Stravinsky had recently met, and theorised that the conductor wanted to win Stravinsky over to visit the US.[72][73]
In September 1924, Stravinsky bought a new home in Nice.[74] Here, the composer re-evaluated his religious beliefs and reconnected with his Christian faith with help from a Russian priest, Father Nicholas.[75] He also thought of his future, and used the experience of conducting the premiere of his Octet at one of Serge Koussevitzky's concerts the year before to build on his career as a conductor. Koussevitzky asked Stravinsky to compose a new piece for one of his upcoming concerts; Stravinsky agreed to a piano concerto. The Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments was first performed in May 1924 with Stravinsky as the soloist.[76] The piece was a success, and Stravinsky secured himself the exclusive rights to perform the work for the next five years.[77] Stravinsky visited Catalonia six times, and the first time, in 1924, after holding three concerts with the Pau Casals Orchestra at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, he said, "Barcelona will be unforgettable for me. What I liked most was the cathedral and the sardanas".[78] Following a European tour through the latter half of 1924, Stravinsky completed his first US tour in early 1925, which spanned two months.[79] It opened with Stravinsky conducting an all-Stravinsky programme at Carnegie Hall.[80]
In 1926, Stravinsky rejoined the Orthodox Church, having been moved by a ceremony at the Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua while on a spring concert tour.[81][82] In May 1927, Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex premiered in Paris. The funding of its production was largely provided by Winnaretta Singer, Princesse Edmond de Polignac, who paid 12,000 francs for a private preview of the piece at her house. Stravinsky gave the money to Diaghilev to help finance the public performances. The premiere at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt received a negative reaction, believed by the painter Boris Grigoriev to be due to its tameness compared to The Firebird, which irked Stravinsky, who had started to become annoyed at the public's fixation on his early ballets.[83] In the summer of 1927, Stravinsky received a commission from Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, his first from the US. A wealthy patron of music, Coolidge requested a thirty-minute ballet score for a festival to be held at the Library of Congress, for a $1,000 fee.[84] Stravinsky accepted and wrote Apollo, which premiered in 1928.[85]
After Diaghilev's death in 1929, Stravinsky continued touring across Europe, playing the premiere of his Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra at the Salle Pleyel on 6 December and performing it in many European towns afterwards.[86] Stravinsky toured for most of 1930 to 1933, also composing his Symphonies of Wind Instruments upon a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and his Violin Concerto in D for Samuel Dushkin.[87] After touring the latter with Dushkin, Stravinsky was inspired to transcribe some of his works for violin and piano, later touring these transcriptions at "recitals" with Dushkin.[88] On 30 May 1934, the Stravinskys acquired French nationality by naturalization.[89] Later in that year, they moved to a house on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris, where they stayed for five years.[86][90][91] The composer used his citizenship to publish his memoirs in French, entitled Chroniques de ma Vie in 1935. His only composition of that year was the Concerto for Two Solo Pianos, which was written for himself and his son Sviatoslav using a special double piano that Pleyel had built. The pair completed a tour of Europe and South America in 1936.[90] In April 1937, he directed his three-part ballet Jeu de cartes, a commission for Lincoln Kirstein's ballet company in New York City with choreography by George Balanchine.[92]
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.[93] Ludmila died in late 1938, followed by his wife of 33 years, in March 1939.[94] Stravinsky himself spent five months in hospital at Sancellemoz,[95] during which time his mother also died.[94] During his later years in Paris, Stravinsky had developed professional relationships with key people in the United States: he was already working on his Symphony in C for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and he had agreed to accept the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry of 1939–1940 at Harvard University and while there, deliver six lectures on music as part of the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Lectures.[96][97][98]
Life in the United States, 1939–1971
Early US years, 1939–1945
Stravinsky arrived in New York City on 30 September 1939 and headed for Cambridge, Massachusetts, to fulfil his engagements at Harvard. During his first two months in the US, Stravinsky stayed at Gerry's Landing, the home of art historian Edward W. Forbes.[99] Vera Sudeikin arrived in January 1940 and the couple married on 9 March in Bedford, Massachusetts. After a period of travel, the two moved into a home in Beverly Hills, California, before they settled in Hollywood from 1941. Stravinsky felt the warmer Californian climate would benefit his health.[100] Stravinsky had adapted to life in France, but moving to America at the age of 58 was a very different prospect. 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. 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. The music critic Bernard Holland claimed Stravinsky was especially fond of British writers, who visited him in Beverly Hills, like W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and later Dylan Thomas: "They shared the composer's taste for hard spirits – especially Aldous Huxley, with whom Stravinsky spoke in French."[101] Stravinsky and Huxley had a tradition of Saturday lunches for west coast avant-garde and luminaries.[102]
In 1940, Stravinsky completed his Symphony in C and conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at its premiere later that year.[103] At this time, Stravinsky began to associate himself with film music; the first major film to use his music was Walt Disney's animated feature Fantasia (1940) which includes parts of The Rite of Spring rearranged by Leopold Stokowski to a segment depicting the history of Earth and the age of dinosaurs.[104] Orson Welles urged Stravinsky to write the score for Jane Eyre (1943), but negotiations broke down; a piece used in one of the film's hunting scenes was used in Stravinsky's orchestral work Ode (1943). An offer to score The Song of Bernadette (1943) also fell through; Stravinsky considered the terms were too much in the producer's favour. Music he had written for the film was later used in his Symphony in Three Movements.[104]
Stravinsky's unconventional dominant seventh chord in his arrangement of the "Star-Spangled Banner" led to an incident with the Boston police on 15 January 1944, and he was warned that the authorities could impose a $100 fine upon any "re-arrangement of the national anthem in whole or in part".[lower-alpha 3] The police, as it turned out, were wrong. The law in question forbade using the national anthem "as dance music, as an exit march, or as a part of a medley of any kind",[105] but the incident soon established itself as a myth, in which Stravinsky was supposedly arrested, held in custody for several nights, and photographed for police records.[106]
On 28 December 1945, the Stravinskys became naturalised US citizens.[107] Their sponsor and witness was the actor Edward G. Robinson.[108]
Last major works, 1945–1966
On the same day Stravinsky became an American citizen, he arranged for Boosey & Hawkes to publish rearrangements of several of his compositions and used his newly acquired American citizenship to secure a copyright on the material, thus allowing him to earn money from them.[109] The five-year contract was finalised and signed in January 1947 which included a guarantee of $10,000 per for the first two years, then $12,000 for the remaining three.[110]
In late 1945, Stravinsky received a commission from Europe, his first since Perséphone, in the form of a string piece for the 20th anniversary for Paul Sacher's Basle Chamber Orchestra. The Concerto in D premiered in 1947.[108][111] In January 1946, Stravinsky conducted the premiere of his Symphony in Three Movements at Carnegie Hall in New York City. It marked his first premiere in the US.[112] In 1947, Stravinsky was inspired to write his English-language opera The Rake's Progress by a visit to a Chicago exhibition of the same-titled series of paintings by the eighteenth-century British artist William Hogarth, which tells the story of a fashionable wastrel descending into ruin. W. H. Auden and writer Chester Kallman worked on the libretto. The opera premiered in 1951 and marks the final work of Stravinsky's neoclassical period.[113] While composing The Rake's Progress, Stravinsky met Robert Craft, whom Stravinsky invited to his home in Hollywood as a personal assistant.[114] Craft soon became Stravinsky's "closest friend, his confident, amanuensis, spokesman and fellow conductor," as Jay Harrison wrote in the New York Herald Tribune.[115] Craft encouraged the composer to explore serial music and the composers of the Second Viennese School, beginning Stravinsky's third and final distinct musical period, which lasted until his death.[116][117][118]
In 1953, Stravinsky agreed to compose a new opera with a libretto by Dylan Thomas, which detailed the recreation of the world after one man and one woman remained on Earth after a nuclear disaster. Development on the project came to a sudden end following Thomas's death in November of that year. Stravinsky completed In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, a piece for tenor, string quartet, and four trombones, in 1954.[119] Stravinsky composed his cantata Canticum Sacrum for the International Festival of Contemporary Music in Venice, to which he dedicated the work, and it premiered on 13 September 1956.[120] The work inspired the Norddeutscher Rundfunk to commission the musical setting Threni in 1957, which was premiered by their orchestra and chorus on 23 September 1958.[121][122] In 1959, Craft interviewed Stravinsky for an article titled Answers to 35 Questions, in which Stravinsky corrected a number of myths surrounding him and discussed his relationships with many of his collaborators. The article was later expanded into a book, and over the next four years, three more books of this fashion were published due to Craft's initiative.[123]
In 1961, the Stravinskys and Craft travelled to London, Zürich and Cairo on their way to Australia where Stravinsky and Craft conducted all-Stravinsky concerts in Sydney and Melbourne. They returned to California via New Zealand, Tahiti, and Mexico.[124][125] In January 1962, during his tour's stop in Washington, D.C., Stravinsky attended a dinner at the White House with President John F. Kennedy in honour of his 80th birthday, where he received a special medal for "the recognition his music has achieved throughout the world".[126][127] In September 1962, Stravinsky returned to Russia for the first time since 1914, accepting an invitation from the Union of Soviet Composers to conduct six performances in Moscow and Leningrad. During the three-week visit he met with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and several leading Soviet composers, including Dmitri Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian.[128][129] Stravinsky did not return to his Hollywood home until December 1962 in what was almost eight months of continual travelling.[130] Following the assassination of Kennedy in 1963, Stravinsky completed his Elegy for J.F.K. in the following year. The two-minute work took the composer two days to write.[131]
By early 1964, the long periods of travel started to affect Stravinsky's health. His case of polycythemia worsened and his friends noticed that his movements and speech had slowed.[131] In 1965, Stravinsky agreed to have David Oppenheim produce a documentary film about himself for the CBS network. It involved a film crew following the composer at home and on tour that year, and he was paid $10,000 for the production.[132] The documentary includes Stravinsky's visit to Les Tilleuls, the house in Clarens where he wrote the majority of The Rite of Spring. The crew asked Soviet authorities for permission to film Stravinsky returning to his hometown of Ustilug, but the request was denied.[133] In 1966, Stravinsky completed his last major work, the Requiem Canticles.[134] His final attempt at composition, Two Sketches for a Sonata, existed in a manuscript of short piano fragments. The sketches were published by Boosey & Hawkes in 2021.[135]
Final years and death, 1967–1971
In March 1967, Stravinsky conducted L'Histoire du soldat with the Seattle Opera. By this time, Stravinsky's typical performance fee had grown to $10,000. However, after Stravinsky's conducting became "erratic" and "vague" as one reviewer described it, Craft cancelled all concerts that required Stravinsky to fly.[136] An exception to this was a concert at Massey Hall in Toronto in May 1967, where he conducted the relatively physically undemanding Pulcinella suite with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Unbeknownst to him, it was his final performance as conductor.[137][138] While backstage at the venue, Stravinsky informed Craft that he believed he had suffered a stroke.[136] In August 1967, Stravinsky was hospitalised in Hollywood for bleeding stomach ulcers and thrombosis which required a blood transfusion.[139]
By 1968, Stravinsky had recovered enough to resume touring across the US with him in the audience while Craft took to the conductor's post for the majority of the concerts. In May 1968, Stravinsky completed the piano arrangement of two songs by Hugo Wolf for a small orchestra.[140] In October, the Stravinskys and Craft travelled to Zürich to sort out business matters with Stravinsky's family.[141] The three considered relocating to Switzerland as they had become increasingly less fond of Hollywood, but they decided against it and returned to the US.[142]
In October 1969, after close to three decades in California and Stravinsky being denied to travel overseas by his doctors due to ill health, the Stravinskys secured a two-year lease for a luxury three bedroom apartment in Essex House in New York City. Craft moved in with them, effectively putting his career on hold to care for the ailing composer.[143] Among Stravinsky's final projects was orchestrating two preludes from Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, but it was never completed.[144] In June 1970, he travelled to Évian-les-Bains by Lake Geneva where he reunited with his eldest son Fyodor and niece Xenia.[145]
On 18 March 1971, Stravinsky was taken to Lenox Hill Hospital with pulmonary edema where he stayed for ten days. On 29 March, he moved into a newly furnished apartment at 920 Fifth Avenue, his first city apartment since living in Paris in 1939. After a period of well-being, the edema returned on 4 April and Vera Stravinsky insisted that medical equipment should be installed in the apartment.[146] Stravinsky soon stopped eating and drinking and died at 5:20 a.m. on 6 April at the age of 88. The cause on his death certificate is heart failure. A funeral service was held three days later at Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel.[144] [147] In accordance with his wishes, he was buried in the Russian corner of the cemetery island of San Michele in Venice, several yards from the tomb of Sergei Diaghilev,[148][149] having been brought there by gondola after a service at Santi Giovanni e Paolo led by Cherubin Malissianos, Archimandrite of the Greek Orthodox Church.[148][150] During the service, his Requiem Canticles and organ music by Andrea Gabrieli were performed.[151]