The Professional Career of Igor Stravinsky
The Professional Career of Igor Stravinsky
Stravinsky’s relations with his various publishers would make a fitting subject for a long-running TV soap opera, complete with courtroom dramas, emotional farewells, some embarrassing contractual wrangles, and of course background music based on the ‘Ronde des princesses’ in The Firebird. The association with Chester Music would certainly provide some of the best episodes. Stravinsky landed in Chester’s lap after the First World War, a conflict which, among other things, played havoc with international publishing. And he remained with them until he signed an agreement with Editions Russes de Musique (ERM) in September 1923. Before the war he had first been taken up by the Moscow house of Jurgenson, who published The Firebird, and then by Koussevitsky’s recently founded ERM, who brought out Petrushka and the piano-duet score of The Rite of Spring, and had its full score in proof when war broke out and put paid to their Russian operation for good. After the Revolution in 1917 Jurgeson’s firm was nationalized. However, his German office continued to function, and Jurgeson later (apparently without telling the composer) sold the rights in The Firebird to the Leipzig house of Robert Forberg a conjunction which recalls Stravinsky’s American train as Mr Fireberg). This transaction subsequently gave rise to a lawsuit between Forberg and Chester.
Meanwhile Stravinsky had been stranded in Switzerland by the outbreak of hostilities. “It seems,” he had written to Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov in 1912 whilst working on The Rite of Spring, “as if not two but twenty years have passed since The Firebird was composed.” What must he have felt in August 1914? A mere five years earlier he had been an all but unknown Russian composer, living and working in his native St. Petersberg, a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, certainly, but with no major successes to his name. Though his music had been played – thanks to the good offices of his teacher – he had had no independent recognition until Serge Diaghilev heard two of his orchestral works in February 1909 and decided to commission some arrangements from him for the 1909 Paris season of the Ballets Russes. Not until the autumn did the crucial Firebird commission materialise.
Stravinsky certainly seems to have felt no qualms or anxieties about this turn in his fortunes. Yet even he must have been surprised by the scale of his success when The Firebird had its first performance in Paris...