Œdipus Rex - Igor Shtrafinscy (1927)

STEPHEN WALSH

Stravinsky, Igor
1. Background and early years, 1882–1905.

Stravinsky was in Russian terms a nobleman; his parents were ‘dvoryanine’ or, as we might say, gentry. His mother, Anna Kholodovskaya, was one of four daughters of a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Estates in Kiev, a respectable if dull man who educated his daughters in the correct, somewhat prim manner of the provincial 19th century. Anna grew up a good domestic singer and fluent pianist, a well-organized if strait-laced wife and mother. Her husband, Fyodor Ignat'yevich Stravinsky, whom she married in Kiev (against her widowed mother's wishes) in 1874 when she was still only 19 and he 30, descended from a long line of Polish grandees, senators and landowners. But since the partition of Poland in the 1790s the Stravinskys had come down in the world, lost their lands and gradually migrated southwards into a remote region of what is now south-eastern Belarus'. Fyodor's father, Ignaty, was a working agronomist of vaguely disreputable habits, a womanizer (according to his composer grandson) who eventually left and divorced his Russian wife, and a bad businessman who bequeathed to his youngest son little beyond a determination not to let his own family life disintegrate in the same way.

If there was music in Ignaty Stravinsky's house it was provided by his wife, Aleksandra Skorokhodova, who had an attractive singing voice. But it was probably never a strikingly musical household, and it was only gradually that, while studying law in the mid-1860s in Odessa, Kiev and (when money started running out) Nezhin, Fyodor discovered a talent for singing. Eventually he won a scholarship to the Conservatory in St. Petersburg, and in 1876 he made his début at the Mariinsky Theatre (as Mephistopheles in Gounod's Faust). By the time his and Anna's third son, Igor, was born (at the nearby Baltic summer resort of Oranienbaum) in 1882, Fyodor had taken the Russian operatic world by storm and was being widely discussed as the finest bass-baritone of his generation.

Music was thus a part of the working environment in the large second-floor flat on the Kryukov Canal, a stone's throw from the Mariinsky, which was to be Igor's home for the next 27 years.