Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (1882–1971) was a Russian-born American composer. He was regarded as not only the most cosmopolitan of Russian artists but also the greatest composer of the twentieth century.
Born near St. Petersburg to a family of opera singers, Stravinsky began studying music at the age of twenty after finishing a university law course. In 1910, the thirty-year-old left tsarist Russia and settled in Paris. In 1939, as the Nazi army was pressed forward on France, he relocated to the United States and became a citizen in 1945.
Stravinsky wrote more than one hundred compositions. His ballets The Firebird (1910) and The Rite of Spring (1913) surprised Parisian audiences with their irregular rhythms and recurrent dissonances. Subsequently, Stravinsky created a neoclassical style exemplified by the opera The Rake’s Progress (1948–51) and experimented with the serialism compositional technique in such works as the cantata Threni (1958.)
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I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.
—Igor Stravinsky
Topics: Failure, Wisdom, Mistakes, Knowledge
A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
—Igor Stravinsky
Topics: Music
Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.
—Igor Stravinsky
Topics: Sin
Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.
—Igor Stravinsky
Topics: Money
I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.
—Igor Stravinsky
Topics: Present, The Present
To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
—Igor Stravinsky
Topics: Listening
The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one
—Igor Stravinsky
Topics: Freedom
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
—Igor Stravinsky
Topics: Music
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
—Igor Stravinsky
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
—Igor Stravinsky
Topics: Love
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