Igor Stravinsky Timeline

Born 5 June (17 June New Style) at Oranienbaum, on the gulf of Finland thirty miles from St. Petersburg, where his father, a leading operatic bass at the Maryinsky Theatre, has rented a dacha.

Meets his cousin and future wife, Catherine Nossenko, at her father’s estate at Ustilug, western Ukraine.

Goes to school (2nd St. Petersburg Gymnasium), having previously been taught - like his three brothers - by tutors in the family apartment. First piano lessons. Attends 50th anniversary performance of Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila at Maryinsky, probably the first opera he has seen.

First trip abroad, with his parents to Bad Homburg, near Frankfurt.

Death of his older brother Roman

Begins law studies at St. Petersburg University and, privately, music theory lessons with Akimenko, who is soon replaced by Kalafaty.

Visits Rimsky-Korsakov in Heidelberg and shows him his compositions. Death of his father from cancer.

Starts his first large-scale work, a piano sonata, at his uncle’s Samara estate (Pavlovka). Informal work with Rimsky at his dacha at Krapachukha.

Conducts cantata for Rimsky’s 60th birthday at a party in the Rimsky flat.

Begins regular study with Rimsky

Marries Catherine Nossenko

First public performances: The Faun and the Shepherdess and part of the Symphony in E flat, at rehearsal concerts of the Petersburg Court Orchestra

Death of Rimsky-Korsakov

Serge Diaghilev hears premiere of Scherzo fantastique and a private performance of Fireworks; Stravinsky contributes Chopin orchestrations to Diaghilev’s Paris production of Les Sylphides.

First visit to Paris for the Ballets Russes premiere of The Firebird, where he meets Debussy, Ravel, and other notables. After its triumph, decides to winter in Switzerland (Clarens) and the south of France (Beaulieu).

Completes Petrushka in Rome. Paris premiere of Petrushka with Nijinsky, designs by Benois. Summer at Ustilug, but winter again at Clarens, composing The Rite of Spring.

First London Firebird. Attends Bayreuth Festival (Meistersinger and Parsifal). First visit to Venice, where he plays part of Rite to Diaghilev. Last St. Petersburg visit for fifty years. In Berlin with the Ballets Russes, meets Schoenberg and attends Pierrot Lunaire.

First visit to London. Near riot at Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring. Contracts typhoid from a bad oyster. Final summer at Ustilug.

Catherine’s tuberculosis erupts after the birth of fourth child. Completes Nightingale for Moscow Free Theatre, which disbands before the work can be staged. Conducting début (Montreux). Flying visit to Ustilug and Kiev before war breaks out. Works at Salvan and Clarens on Les Noces and Russian songs.

First meetings with the Futurists in Rome and Milan. Meets C.F. Ramuz. Moves to Morges (Lausanne). More Russian songs, and starts Renard. Conducts Firebird in Geneva and Paris.

With Ballets Russes in Spain. Completes Renard.

Scherzo fantastique staged in Paris as a ballet about bees. February revolution in Russia. Meets Picasso in Rome. Death of brother Gury in Romania. Completes first version of Les Noces. Bolshevik revolution finally cuts Stravinsky off from Russia.

Financial hardship. Collaborates with Ramuz on The Soldier’s Tale, but the flu epidemic prevents all but the Lausanne performance. War ends. His sister-in-law and family reach Morges and move in with the Stravinskys.

Pulcinella staged in Paris. Moves from Switzerland, via Brittany, to Coco Chanel’s villa in Garches (Paris). Composes Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Paris revival of The Rite, with choreography by Massine.

Row with Diaghilev over payments, but hardship eased by donations from America. Starts Pulcinella.

Meets and falls in love with Vera Sudeikina. Moves with family to Biarritz, but takes studio at Maison Pleyel (Paris), with whom he signs a contract to cut piano rolls of his works. In London for The Rite and premiere of Symphonies of Wind, and later for Diaghilev’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. Begins Mavra.

Vera separates from her husband. Diaghilev stages Renard and Mavra. Starts Octet. Spends autumn in Berlin and meets his mother off a Soviet boat at Stettin. In Berlin, meets Pierre Souvtchinsky and George Antheil. Visited in Paris by Mayakovsky.

Les Noces completed and staged. With Vera to Weimar for Bauhaus Soldier’s Tale, meets Busoni, Kandinsky and (probably) Klee. Conducts Paris premiere of the Octet and, for the first time, a whole concert of his works.

Publishes ‘Some ideas about my Octuor’. Completes and premieres Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments. First concert tours, conducting in Belgium and Spain, and playing the concerto in Copenhagen, Warsaw, Holland, Germany, Switzerland and Marseille. Paris stage premiere of Soldier’s Tale. Moves with his family from Biarritz to Nice.

First US concert tour. Signs first recording contract (with Brunswick). Plays Sonata in Venice. Embarks on Oedipus Rex with Jean Cocteau. His niece Tanya from Leningrad spends a year with the family in Nice.

Conducts Rite of Spring for the first time. Return to (Orthodox) communion. First journey by air (from Paris to Croydon).

Oedipus Rex completed, and premiered (as an oratorio) by Diaghilev. Plays Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments in London. Summer at Echarvines, on the Lac d’Annecy. Begins Apollo to a commission from Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge.

Stage premieres of Oedipus Rex in Vienna, and in Berlin (under Klemperer, attended by the composer). Apollo staged in Washington and by Diaghilev in Paris (choreography by Balanchine). Records Petrushka and Firebird for Columbia, and composes The Fairy’s Kiss for Ida Rubinstein.

Composers and premieres Capriccio (under Ansermet in Paris). Death of Diaghilev. Records The Rite of Spring.

Composes Symphony of Psalms (first performances in Brussels and Boston). Summer at Charavines, near Grenoble. First meeting with the violinist Samuel Dushkin for whom he starts a concerto.

Moves from Nice to Voreppe, near Grenoble. Conducts Violin Concerto with Dushkin in Berlin.

First concert tour in duo with Dushkin, for whom he composes the Duo concertant and various arrangements.

Hitler becomes German Chancellor. Collaboration with André Gide on Persephone. Moves from Pleyel into a Paris apartment (rue Viète).

Persephone premiered in Paris. Takes French cititzenship. Moves with his whole family from Voreppe into a large Paris apartment in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

Second US tour (with Dushkin). Publication of first volume of autobiography (Chroniques de ma vie). Premieres (with his son Soulima) the Concerto for two pianos. Meets Mussolini in Rome. Marriage of his daughter Lyudmilla with Yury Mandelstam. Catherine, in the advanced stages of tuberculosis, spends much time in a sanatorium in Sancellemoz (Haute-Savoie).

Unsuccessful candidacy for the Académie des Beaux-Arts. South American tour. Composes Jeu de cartes for Lincoln Kirstein’s American Ballet.

Third US tour, including premiere of Jeu de cartes in New York (with Balanchine). Much of the year is spent with his family either in Sancellemoz or at the nearby Château de Monthoux at Annemasse. Lyudmilla also ill with tuberculosis. Dispute with Ansermet over cuts to Jeu de cartes.

Dumbarton Oaks concerto premiered in Washington under Boulanger. Stravinsky figures in Nazi exhibition of ‘Degenerate Music’ in Düsseldorf. Lyudmilla dies in Paris while Stravinsky is in Italy. Begins Symphony in C.

Catherine dies in Paris. Stravinsky himself spends months at Sancellemoz, preparing his Harvard lectures with Roland-Manuel. Death of his mother. Leaves for New York just after outbreak of war. First set of Charles Eliot Norton lectures in Harvard, and concerts in several US cities.

Vera arrives in the USA, and they marry in Bedford (Massachusetts). Completes Harvard lectures. Applies for US citizenship. Settles in Beverly Hills (Los Angeles). Symphony in C is finished and performed in Chicago, under the composer.

Moves to West Hollywood, but tours US widely conducting his own music, including the new symphony. Death of his brother Yury in Leningrad.

Completes Danses concertantes, and works on a variety of occasional pieces, including what will become part of the Symphony in Three Movements

Composes Ode in memory of Natalie Koussevitsky, and revises ‘Danse sacrale’ in The Rite of Spring. Works on film projects, none of which comes to fruition.

More occasional works, including Babel and the Scènes de Ballet. But also composes, on a new religious impulse, the 'Kyrie' and 'Gloria' of the Mass.

End of the war. Stravinsky completes Symphony in Three Movements for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Igor and Vera become US citizens.

Concerts in Cuba and Mexico, as well as across the USA. Revises Petrushka and starts Orpheus for Kirstein’s Ballet Society. Visits Turner, Hogarth and Constable exhibition in Chicago.

Correspondence with the 23 year-old Robert Craft about the unpublished Symphonies of Wind Instruments, which Stavinsky is revising. Begins collaboration with W.H. Auden on The Rake’s Progress.

Completes Mass. First meeting with Craft. Orpheus premiered (New York).

Dissociates himself from the Soviet peace delegation including Shostakovich. Craft moves in with the Stravinskys and becomes in effect the composer’s assistant and musical secretary.

US travel, both professional and leisure

Completes The Rake’s Progress. Returns to Europe for the first time since 1939 to conduct the premiere in Venice. Concerts in Germany and Italy. In Germany he hears the music of the European avant-garde, including Boulez.

Encounters with chamber works by Schoenberg and Webern which Craft is rehearsing in Los Angeles. European tour. Takes part in the ‘Oeuvre du XXème siècle’ festival in Paris, at which he hears Berg’s Wozzeck and Boulez’s Structures, and conducts a tableau vivant staging of Oedipus Rex with Cocteau as Speaker and designer. Completes Cantata.

US premiere of The Rake at the New York Met. Completes Septet. Meets Dylan Thomas with a view to an operatic collaboration, but Thomas dies six months later. First notations for Agon.

Interrupts Agon to compose In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, which Craft conducts at the Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles. Third European tour. Receives gold medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society in London.

Starts Canticum Sacrum for the Venice Biennale.

Resumes Agon. Conducts Canticum Sacrum and Vom Himmel hoch in St. Mark’s, Venice, by dispensation of Cardinal Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII. In Berlin, suffers a stroke while conducting the Symphony in C.

Visit of Boulez to Los Angeles. Agon completed. European tour. Starts work on a new Biennale commission, Threni, in Venice, and conducts Agon at the Domaine Musical in Paris. Visits Dartington Summer School. Early versions of Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (Craft).

Conducts Threni in the Scuola di San Rocco, Venice.

Boulez conducts Threni in Munich. Stravinsky tours Japan, completes Movements, and conducts at the Edinburgh Festival.

Tours of South America and Italy, during which Stravinsky is carried out of the Hotel Bauer-Grünwald in a Venice flood. Writes Monumentum pro Gesualdo and starts A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer for Paul Sacher.

Invited to the USSR in the following year. The Flood commissioned for CBS television. Stravinsky’s most extensive world tour, covering Europe, eastern Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

Dines with Kennedy at the White House. Completes The Flood (which goes out on TV with interruptions for shampoo ads). Tours South Africa, then Europe, where he spends his 80th birthday in Hamburg. After a brief return to New York, embarks on tour of Israel and USSR, his first return since 1914.

Completes Abraham and Isaac. First staging of The Flood (Hamburg). Attends (part of) Monteux’s 50th anniversary Rite of Spring in the Albert Hall (London). Begins orchestral Variations. Assassination of Kennedy.

Moves to a larger, more accessible house in the same West Hollywood street. Premiere of Abraham and Isaac in Jerusalem, under Craft. Finishes Elegy for JFK and the Variations.

Introitus in memory of T.S. Eliot. Begins Requiem Canticles for Princeton University. Continues punishing conducting schudule in his 83rd year, including a European tour. CBS film by Rolf Liebermann.

Last full year of conducting tours, which he is advised by his doctor to give up. Premiere of Requiem Canticles under Craft (Princeton).

Conducts for the last time (Toronto). Is twice hospitalised, with bleeding ulcers and a thrombosis.

Arranges Two Sacred Songs of Hugo Wolf. Flies to Zürich and receives from his eldest son the manuscript full score of The Rite of Spring, presented to him by Boosey and Hawkes on his 80th birthday.

Arranges Bach Preludes and Fugues. Moves from Hollywood to New York.

In a state of extreme physical decline, flies to Europe and settles for the summer at Evian (on the French shore of Lake Geneva), where he is visited by members of his family and photographed by Lord Snowdon.

Dies in New York (6 April). After a funeral service in New York, his body is transported to Venice and buried there on the island of San Michele.