Igor Stravinsky wrote three ballets that changed twentieth-century music — and he had done it before he was thirty. The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring: each more radical than the last.
He was born in Oranienbaum in 1882; his father sang bass at the Mariinsky Theatre. He studied with Rimsky-Korsakov, and in 1909 Diaghilev heard his orchestral pieces and commissioned a ballet.
The Rite of Spring (1913): primitive rhythms, polytonality, a clean break with academic harmony. A scandal at the premiere; a classic ever after.
He lived in Switzerland, in France, and finally in the United States, moving from neoclassicism to serial technique — always recognizable, always different. He was still conducting into his eighties.
He died in New York in 1971 and is buried on the island of San Michele in Venice, beside Diaghilev.