Stravinsky

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Exerpts from the New York Times obituary of 7 April 1971

Igor Feodorovich Stravinsky was born in a suburb of St. 
Petersburg--Oranienbaum, a village where his parents were spending the 
summer--on June 17, 1882: St. Igor's Day. 
    
While completing "The Firebird," Stravinsky had a daydream about a pagan 
ritual in which a young girl danced herself to death. This was the genesis of 
"The Rite of Spring," a revolutionary work whose premiere on May 29, 1913, 
caused one of the noisiest scandals in the history of music.

An open dress rehearsal had gone quietly, but protests against the 
music--barbarous, erotic, unlike anything Paris had ever heard--began almost 
as soon as the curtain went up on opening night. 

Soon the Theatre des Champs-Elysees was in an uproar. Stravinsky hurried 
backstage to find Diaghliev flicking the house lights in an attempt to 
restore order and Nijinsky, the choreographer, bawling counts at the dancers 
from the wings. 

Stravinsky was furious; Diaghliev, who knew the value of publicity, said 
afterward that the crowd's reaction had been "exactly what I wanted." Less 
than a year later, Pierre Monteux conducted a concert version of the score in 
Paris and Stravinsky received a hero's ovation.
    
Stravinsky's power as a detonating force and his position as this century's 
most significant composer were summed up by Pierre Boulez, who becomes 
musical director of the New York Philharmonic next season:

"The death of Stravinsky means the final disappearance of a musical 
generation which gave music its basic shock at the beginning of this century 
and which brought about the real departure from Romanticism. 

"Something radically new, even foreign to Western tradition, had to be found 
for music to survive, and to enter our contemporary era. The glory of 
Stravinsky was to have belonged to this extremely gifted generation and to be 
one of the most creative of them all." 
    

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