Stravinsky died of pulmonary edema on 6 April 1971 in New York City, having left six memoirs written with his friend and assistant Robert Craft, as well as an earlier autobiography and a series of lectures.

[27][28] His first major task from his new teacher was the four-movement Piano Sonata in F-sharp minor in the style of Glazunov and Tchaikovsky – he paused temporarily to write a cantata for Rimsky-Korsakov's 60th birthday celebration, which the elder composer described as "not bad".

[33]The two had grown close during family trips, encouraging each other's interest in painting and drawing, swimming together often, going on wild raspberry picks, helping build a tennis court, playing piano duet music, and later organizing group readings with their other cousins of books and political tracts from Fyodor Stravinsky's personal library.

[36] The two married on 24 January 1906, at the Church of the Annunciation five miles (eight kilometers) north of Saint Petersburg – because marriage between first cousins was banned, they procured a priest who did not ask their identities, and the only guests present were Rimsky-Korsakov's sons.

[40][41] In 1898, the impresario Sergei Diaghilev founded the Russian art magazine Mir iskusstva,[42] but after it ended publication in 1904, he turned towards Paris for artistic opportunities rather than his native Russia.

[49][50] Diaghilev asked multiple composers to write the ballet's score, including Lyadov and Nikolai Tcherepnin, but after none committed to the project,[51] the impresario turned to the 27-year-old Stravinsky, who gladly accepted the task.

[61][62] The resulting work, Petrushka (under the French spelling Petrouchka),[63] premiered in Paris on 13 June 1911 to equal popularity as The Firebird, and Stravinsky became established as one of the most advanced young theater composers of his time.

[64][65] While composing The Firebird, Stravinsky conceived an idea for a work about what he called "a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death".

[67] The result was The Rite of Spring (Le sacre du printemps), which depicted pagan rituals in Slavonic tribes and used many avant-garde techniques, including uneven rhythms and meters, superimposed harmonies, atonality, and extensive instrumentation.

[67][70][h] Soon after, Stravinsky was admitted to a hospital for typhoid fever and stayed in recovery for five weeks; numerous colleagues visited him, including Debussy, Manuel de Falla, Maurice Ravel,[i] and Florent Schmitt.

[74] The May 1914 premiere was moderately successful; critics' high expectations after the tumultuous Rite of Spring were not met, though fellow composers were impressed by the music's emotion and free treatment of counterpoint and themes.

[75] In early July 1914, while his family resided in Switzerland near his sick wife, the composer traveled to Russia to retrieve texts for his next work, a ballet-cantata depicting Russian wedding traditions titled Les noces.

[80] Stravinsky met numerous Swiss-French artists during his time in Morges, including the author Charles F. Ramuz, with whom he collaborated on the small-scale theater work L'Histoire du soldat.

[88][89] After his relationship with Chanel developed into an affair, Stravinsky relocated his family to the white émigré-hub Biarritz in May 1921, partly due to the presence of his other lover Vera de Bosset.

[94] The interest in Pushkin shared by Stravinsky and Diaghilev led to Mavra, a comic opera begun in 1921 that exhibited the composer's rejection of Rimsky-Korsakov's style and his turn towards classic Russian operatists like Tchaikovsky, Glinka, and Dargomyzhsky.

[107] The composer later wrote that he was contacted by God at a service at the Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua, leading him to write his first religious composition, the Pater Noster for a cappella choir.

[109] The May 1927 premiere of his opera-oratorio Oedipus rex was staged as a concert performance since there was too little time and money to present it as a full opera, and Stravinsky attributed the work's critical failure to its programming between two glittery ballets.

Basing the music on romantic ballets like Swan Lake and borrowing many themes from Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky wrote The Fairy's Kiss with Hans Christian Andersen's tale The Ice-Maiden as the subject.

His family subsequently moved to an apartment on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris, where he began writing a two-volume autobiography with the help of Walter Nouvel, published in 1935 and 1936 as Chroniques de ma vie.

[142][143][144] The lectures, written with assistance from Pyotr Suvchinsky and Alexis Roland-Manuel, were published in French under the title Poétique musicale (Poetics of Music) in 1941, with an English translation following in 1947.

[150] The couple's poor English led to the formation of a predominantly European social circle and home life: the estate staff consisted of mostly Russians, and frequent guests included musicians Joseph Szigeti, Arthur Rubinstein, and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

[151][148] However, Stravinsky eventually joined popular Hollywood circles, attending parties with celebrities and becoming closely acquainted with European authors Aldous Huxley, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Dylan Thomas.

[s][167] Continued international tours brought Stravinsky to Washington, D.C. in January 1962, where he attended a dinner at the White House with then-President John F. Kennedy in honor of the composer's 80th birthday.

[185] After a service at Santi Giovanni e Paolo with a performance of the Requiem Canticles conducted by Craft, Stravinsky was buried on the cemetery island of San Michele in Venice, several yards from the tomb of Sergei Diaghilev.

[201] Rimsky-Korsakov thought the Symphony in E-flat (1907) was swayed too much by Glazunov's style, and disliked the modernist influence on Faun and Shepherdess (1907);[202] however, critics found the works to not stand out from his teacher's music.

[203] Russian composers often used large orchestration to feature many different timbres, and Stravinsky harnessed this idea in his first three ballets, often surprising the musicians and performers due to the orchestra's great force at certain moments.

[211][212] The Rite of Spring is one of the most famous and influential works of the 20th century; the musicologist Donald Jay Grout described it as having "the effect of an explosion that so scattered the elements of musical language that they could never again be put together as before.

[230] Richard Taruskin wrote that Oedipus rex was "the product of Stravinsky's neo-classical manner at its most extreme," and that musical techniques "thought outdated" were juxtaposed against contemporary ideas.

Stravinsky was inspired by the operas of Mozart in composing the music, particularly Così fan tutte,[w] but other scholars also point out influence from Handel, Gluck, Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, Rossini, Donizetti, and Verdi.

[307] With Alexis Roland-Manuel and Pierre Souvtchinsky, he wrote his 1939–40 Harvard University Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, which were delivered in French and first collected under the title Poétique musicale in 1942 and then translated in 1947 as Poetics of Music.