17th June: Igor Stravinsky

Today was the birthday of Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer whose works include The Rite of Spring, L'Oiseau de feu (The Firebird), Petrushka and The Fairy's Kiss. He was born in 1882.

1. His family was actually Polish by origin. The name "Stravinsky" originated from "Strava", a small river in eastern Poland, tributary to the Vistula. His family was originally called Soulima-Stravinsky, and they were landowners in eastern Poland.
2. His parents expected him to study law, not Music. He went to the University of Saint Petersburg in 1901 to study law but went to less than fifty lectures in four years. He didn't get to take his final exams because the university was closed for a while after Bloody Sunday. He apparently took this as a sign and concentrated on studying music after that.
3. His first opera was The Nightingale (usually known by its French title Le Rossignol).
4. Stravinsky married his first cousin, Yekaterina Gavrilovna Nosenko ("Katya"), even though marrying first cousins was frowned upon by the church. They'd been married fifteen years when Stravinsky met Vera de Bosset in Paris and started an affair with her. He moved his wife and family to Anglet, near Biarritz and for eighteen years carried on the affair whenever he was in Paris or on tour. When Katya died of TB he married Vera.
5. Rumour has it Vera wasn't his only affair. He allegedly had an affair with Coco Chanel as well. He and his family stayed in her mansion while looking for a home in Paris.
6. Stravinsky was fond of literature, and after he moved to America befriended several writers including W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Dylan Thomas and Aldous Huxley.
7. He got in trouble with the US police for his arrangement of their National Anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner. He was warned that the authorities could impose a $100 fine upon any "rearrangement of the national anthem in whole or in part". In fact, the police on this occasion were wrong - the law he'd allegedly broken merely forbade using the national anthem "as dance music, as an exit march, or as a part of a medley of any kind - but the gossip mill blew the incident up into a story in which Stravinsky was arrested, held in custody for several nights, and photographed for police records.
8. He became a naturalised United States citizen in 1945.
9. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and in 1987 he was posthumously awarded the Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 1982 the United States Postal Service included him on their Great Americans series of Postage stamps.
10. For much of his life he was a religious man and once said, "Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament".