7 Igor Stravinsky 7The Wedding, a ballet cantata begun by Stravinsky in 1914
and completed in 1923, is based on the texts of Russian
village wedding songs. The “farmyard burlesque” Renard
(1916) is similarly based on Russian folk idioms, while The
Soldier’s Tale (1918), a mixed-media piece using speech,
mime, and dance accompanied by a seven-piece band,
eclectically incorporates ragtime, tango, and other mod-
ern musical idioms in a series of highly infectious
instrumental movements. After World War I the Russian
style in Stravinsky’s music began to fade, but not before it
had produced another masterpiece in the Symphonies of
Wind Instruments (1920).
Shift to Neoclassicism
The compositions of Stravinsky’s first maturity—from
The Rite of Spring in 1913 to the Symphonies of Wind
Instruments in 1920—make use of a modal idiom based
on Russian sources and are characterized by a highly
sophisticated feeling for irregular metres and syncopation
and by brilliant orchestral mastery. But his voluntary exile
from Russia prompted him to reconsider his aesthetic
stance, and the result was an important change in his
music—he abandoned the Russian features of his early
style and instead adopted a Neoclassical idiom. Stravinsky’s
Neoclassical works of the next 30 years usually take some
point of reference in past European music—a particular
composer’s work or the Baroque or some other historical
style—as a starting point for a highly personal and unorth-
odox treatment that nevertheless seems to depend for its
full effect on the listener’s experience of the historical
model from which Stravinsky borrowed.
The Stravinskys left Switzerland in 1920 and lived in
France until 1939, and Stravinsky spent much of this time
in Paris. (He took French citizenship in 1934.) Having lost