7 Igor Stravinsky 7commissioned from Stravinsky was Pulcinella (1920).
Apollon musagète, Stravinsky’s last ballet to be mounted by
Diaghilev, premiered in 1928, a year before Diaghilev’s
own death and the dissolution of his ballet company.
Later Years in the United States
In 1938 Stravinsky’s oldest daughter died of tuberculosis,
and the deaths of his wife and mother followed in 1939,
just months before World War II broke out. Early in 1940
he married Vera de Bosset, whom he had known for many
years. In autumn 1939 Stravinsky had visited the United
States to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at
Harvard University (later published as the The Poetics of
Music, 1942), and in 1940 he and his new wife settled
permanently in Hollywood, California. They became U.S.
citizens in 1945.
During the years of World War II, Stravinsky composed
two important symphonic works, the Symphony in C
(1938–40) and the Symphony in Three Movements (1942–45).
The Symphony in C represents a summation of Neo-
classical principles in symphonic form, while the Symphony
in Three Movements successfully combines the essential
features of the concerto with the symphony. From 1948
to 1951 Stravinsky worked on his only full-length opera,
The Rake’s Progress, a Neoclassical work (with a libretto by
W. H. Auden and the American writer Chester Kallman)
based on a series of moralistic engravings by the 18th-
century English artist William Hogarth. The Rake’s Progress
is a mock-serious pastiche of late 18th-century grand opera
but is nevertheless typically Stravinskyan in its brilliance,
wit, and refinement.
The success of these late works masked a creative
crisis in Stravinsky’s music, and his resolution of this crisis