Some scholars divide Stravinsky’s works into three periods: The Russian Period, the Neoclassical Period, and the Serialist Period. During the Russian Period, his compositional style was shaped by his mentor, Rimski-Korsakov, he was commissioned by Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet, and he incorporated elements of Russian folk music. During the Neoclassical Period, he redirected his compositional style toward European traditions. During the Serialist Period, he worked with variants of the twelve-tone technique, sometimes moving into atonal or posttonal compositions.
The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music gives this overview:
In the course of his exceptionally long creative life he employed a wide variety of styles and techniques, including rhythmic and and melodic ostinatos, elements of jazz, the diatonicism of the so-called neoclassical works, extremes of dissonance sometimes resulting from the juxtaposition of diatonic elements, and the serialism of works composed after 1952.
The Schüler Duden identifies both impressionistic and expressionistic strands in Stravinsky’s work.
In this schema, the Russian Period would be approximately from 1907 to 1919, the Neoclassical Period from 1920 to 1954, and the Serialist Period from 1954 to 1968.
But this system of categorizing Stravinsky’s work into three periods is probably oversimplified. First, it ignores entirely the thematic content manifested in the lyrics and librettos of the vocal work, and the titles, subtitles, and explanatory comments given to the instrumental work. Second, it ignores how Stravinsky morphed his style within each of the alleged periods. Third, it ignores the overlap and transformation from one period to another. There are possibly other ways in which this schema of his compositional history is overly simplistic.
Yet it can serve at least as an introduction to the development of Stravinsky’s writing. Eric Walter White gives an overview of the early phase:
Stravinsky’s apprentice works, written under the supervision of Rimski-Korsakov, included a Symphony in E♭ (1905 - 1907) and groups of songs. Shortly after Rimski-Korsakov’s death in 1908, Stravinsky’s Scherzo Fantastique and Fireworks were heard at an orchestral concert by Sergei Diaghilev, who was so favorably impressed that he asked him to write a ballet score for the 1910 season of the Russian ballet. This was The Firebird (first performance, Paris, 1910), in which Stravinsky showed how fully he had assimilated the romantic idiom and orchestral palette of his master. The success of The Firebird was so complete that he became known overnight as one of the most gifted of the younger composers, and Diaghilev was anxious to secure his continued cooperation. Petrouchka followed in 1911. The first performance of The Rite of Spring (Paris, May 29, 1913) caused a near-riot in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, but this, in the long run, did much to consolidate Stravinsky’s growing reputation. The following year Diaghilev’s company produced his first opera, The Nightingale, in Paris and London. The vocal score of The Wedding, a dance cantata based on Russian peasant wedding customs, was written during 1914-17, though it took another six years to discover the right instrumental formula.
Stravinsky’s work on The Wedding began in late 1913, and he finalized the score only in 1923, a full decade later, marking a process which cuts across the boundary between the proposed Russian Period and the proposed Neoclassical Period.
In any case, Stravinsky took his music in different directions over the decades, steering it into various compositional techniques at assorted times.
Not only his musical style changed markedly from time to time; his spiritual life, which often shaped his music, took its twists and turns over the decades.
As historian Patrick Kavanaugh writes, Stravinsky, born in 1882, began with a form of religion which was more-or-less typical for Russians of the time:
In the church of his childhood, Stravinsky had been required to read the Bible. He began criticizing and rebelling against the church when he reached his teens, and he parted ways with orthodoxy for nearly three decades.
Lurching away from the faith of the Russian Orthodox Church, he was infatuated for a time by paganism, as Patrick Kavanaugh narrates:
In his early twenties, Stravinsky became the private student of Russian composer Rimski-Korsakoff. Soon, his genius came to be recognized by the musical world. He gained international attention with the premieres of three great ballets, commissioned by Diaghilev, the renowned director of the Russian Ballet. These works, Firebird; Petrushka; and the indomitable Rite of Spring, subtitled “Pictures of Pagan Russia,” remain in the repertoire of every major orchestra in the world today.
The larger Romantic and Romanticist era in which Stravinsky found himself at the beginning of his career was often fascinated with the paganism of pre-Christian Europe, and, for Rimski-Korsakov and Stravinsky, the paganism of pre-Christian Russia. Some artists espoused it whole-heartedly, while others did not personally adopt it, but found that it provided material for artworks. Richard Wagner would be an example.
After distancing himself from Russian Orthodoxy, pagan themes certainly appear in Stravinsky’s work. It will be left as an exercise for the reader to determine whether he personally adopted some form of paganism, or whether he merely used pagan elements artistically.
It is clear that Stravinsky later returned to Christianity. In contrast to his childhood experiences, in which the faith was to some extent imposed on him perhaps more than it was embraced by him, in his later reengagement with the faith was more autonomous. He participated in Christianity with his passion, intellect, and energy. While bonded to the Russian Orthodox Church, he acknowledged the full smorgasbord of Christianity, including Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Lutheranism.
This reconnection with Christianity seems to have happened not at some specific point, but over a period of time, in the 1920s, as Patrick Kavanaugh explains:
Stravinsky’s early ballets explore secular and even pagan subjects that offer no clue as to the personal religious faith he possessed later in life. These great works were written when Stravinsky was in his late thirties and had long since abandoned the Russian Orthodox faith of his upbringing. Yet in the mid 1920s, Stravinsky experienced a permanent conversion to Christianity.
There seems to have been a gradual shift from an infatuation with paganism to a re-exploration of Christianity:
Late in life he would explain, “For some years before my conversion, a mood of acceptance had been cultivated in me by a reading of the Gospels and by other religious literature.”
Stravinsky seems to have steered his career as a composer and his intellectual exploration of faith through a complex series of phases. To him, the two journeys were one.
