Robert, Greenberg. Great Courses Audio.

Great courses. Fine arts & music. Music appreciation.

Lecturer: the author

When it comes to creative longevity, brilliance across a range of styles, and near-universal fame, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) is nearly unrivaled among 20th-century artists. Stravinsky's career was a dizzying progression across the miles and the decades, from fin de siècle czarist Russia to Southern California in the 1960s. His career features styles ranging from nationalism and Impressionism to Fauvism, Neoclassicism, and the 12-tone ultra-serialism of Anton Webern and Alban Berg. Professor Robert Greenberg presents this long-lived master of musical creativity as a one-man compendium of people, places, compositional styles, and techniques, his life and music a virtual artistic history of the West from the 1890s to the late 1960s. Even a partial list of Stravinsky's friends and collaborators reads like a "who's who" of 20th-century Western culture: Picasso, Rimsky-Korsakov, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Balanchine, Puccini, Satie, Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Jean Cocteau, Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Nabokov, Paul Klee, Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, Woody Herman, even Zsa ZsaGabor. "Stravinsky, without a doubt, was a supremeoriginal," says Professor Greenberg. "We study him to see what, aside from the unaccountable gift of genius, made this originality possible."

Mode of access: World Wide Web