Igor Stravinsky
1907-1967
Russian Ballets
1910-1913
Explosive rhythmic innovation and orchestral color for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Each successive ballet pushed further from Romantic convention toward a visceral, primitivist energy that would reshape Western music.
A young composer's dazzling calling card that turned Russian fairy tale into orchestral cinema, its final hymn rising with an inevitability that makes the supernatural feel earned.
The birth of musical montage, where a puppet's heartbreak plays out against carnival cacophony and the Petrushka chord cracks tonality in two like a funhouse mirror.
The earthquake that split Western music into before and after, where pounding asymmetric rhythms and screaming dissonance turn a pagan sacrifice into the sound of modernity devouring its own past.
Neoclassical Turn
1920-1951
Formal restraint and sacred austerity after the maximalist early period. Stravinsky stripped his language to its essentials, finding new expressive power through deliberate limitation and archaic models.