Transgressive, ugly, caring, cosmopolitan and maybe bisexual.
Fifty years after his death, more information about
Igor Stravinski,
one of the most important and transcendent musicians of the 20th century, continues to come to light.
He was the author of classical ballets, but daring and innovative.
Small revolutions that reinvented the genre.
He was also a
pianist, director and writer.
He lived transgressing.
And
fleeing: from the Russian revolution first
and from World War II later.
He did not want to be the musician of tomorrow, as some cataloged him: "It is something absurd. I do not live in the past or in the future. I am in the present."
Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882 in Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov), Russia.
His father was an opera singer
and, although he initially chose law, he ended up focusing on composing and
was a student of Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov.
He managed to impress Sergei Diagilev, who would boost his career by commissioning him to perform various works and even a complete ballet:
The Firebird
, which in addition to making him famous, served him to
leave Russia for the first time
to go to Paris.
There he composed
Petrushka
(1911) and finally the transgressive
The Rite of Spring
, which caused
a great scandal at its premiere
in 1913: there were fist fights between the public and the police had to watch the second act.
And all because of the dissonances of the score and the surprising choreography.
In the audience was an
impressed Coco Chanel.
They would meet seven years later and it would be the starting point of an
intense relationship
between the designer and the composer.
THE SEDUCTOR
Short, ugly and not very photogenic,
Stravinsky was nevertheless a conqueror.
He was
married for 33 years to his cousin
Ekaterina Nosenko.
But he found true love in his
second wife, Vera de Bosset,
although for the first few years it was a complicated relationship.
It was the first part of the 1920s.
She was married
to the painter Serguei Sudeikin, so only
secret sex
was possible
.
In the end Vera left her husband, but Stravinsky would remain married to his wife until she died in 1939. So for more than a decade the composer
was with the two women.
Both were aware of the other's existence and
accepted it as inevitable.
Despite the polyamory in which his love life derived, Stravinsky was always a man very
focused on his family and raising his children.
He also loved the social life, and had the annoying habit of not letting an encounter pass without hitting the glass with a silverware to throw
endless toasts
, a very common custom in Russia and other countries.
Stravinski and Vera were finally married in New York, leaving the chaos of World War II behind.
There it also achieved popularity.
A
star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,
on Hollywood Boulevard, recalls the cosmopolitan Russian, who
died in New York
on April 6, 1971 at the age of 88, although he is buried in Venice, near Diagilev, his great professional support.
COCO CHANEL PASSION
Although
Stravinsky's heirs deny the romance
between the two, Chanel gave details to her biographer.
The movie
Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
was even shot in 2009
.
Chanel invited Stravinsky (who had traveled to France fleeing the Russian Revolution) to
live in her villa on the outskirts of Paris.
They soon begin an
affair
, which the composer's partner found out about.
According to the film, it was Coco
Chanel who ended
a relationship that inspired her in every way.
Stravinski was also riding a new wave of creativity as Chanel introduced her own groundbreaking creation,
Chanel No. 5 perfume
with her perfumer, Ernest Beaux.
Both creators fed back.
Coco Chanel, in her Paris apartment.Cecil Beaton / Condé NastGetty Images
Chris Greenhalgh, in his book on the couple (
Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
, Penguin Random House, 2009) tells how his love threatened to overcome work, family and his own life:
"His love story inspired his art.
His art defined a it was".
In fact, the break led the artist to the most moving moments in his new compositions.
BISEXUAL SO WHAT?
Precisely during his stay in Paris, the artist
frequented homosexual circles,
although apparently he did not stop showing off his success with women.
One of those who brought the issue to the table was the writer and musician Robert Craft through an article in
The Times
Literary Supplement
.
Craft was Stravinsky's confidant and literary collaborator in the last decades of his life, and is the author of the revealing essay
Stravinsky: Discoveries and Memories
, in which he already noted that "Stravinsky was exclusively in
an ambisexual phase
while writing
Petrushka
and other works. ".
Specialists have given considerable importance to
Stravinsky's possible homosexuality.
It could be one of the reasons for Stravinsky's intense antipathy towards Nijinsky, the choreographer of some of his works and at the same time Diagilev's lifelong lover.
But there is not much documentary evidence, beyond some letters crossed with friends and colleagues in which they say goodbye with "hugs and kisses."
"The tone and content instead resembles the kind of
close but platonic male friends
Stravinski had throughout his life, including with Craft," wrote Zachary Woolfe, music critic for
The New York Times.
In Craft's book it is claimed that he sent the composer Maurice Delage
a photo of himself naked and with an erection,
but there is no documentary proof of this.
Robert Craft himself pointed out in 1982 that Stravinski was a
convinced
monarchist
throughout his life.
The truth is that he
hated the Bolsheviks
even approaching fascism.
In 1930 he said: "I don't think
anyone venerates Mussolini more than I do. He
is the savior of Italy and hopefully Europe."
He had a private audience with Mussolini and told him that he "felt a fascist."
The USSR seemed a "monster" to him.
The performance of his music was prohibited in his country from 1933 to 1962. A year after the death of the genius, in 1972, the Soviet Minister of Culture, Ekaterina Fúrtseva, ordered Soviet musicians to "study and admire" music. by Stravinski.
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