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Stravinsky was devastated by the death of his teacher, the great composer Rimsky Korsakov. "I will remember him in his coffin as long as memory is. Seeing me crying his widow asked 'Why so unhappy? We still have Glazunov'. I have never hated again as I did in that moment."#"The Rite of Spring" was so radical that when it received its first performance in 1913, the roar of protest eventually all but drowned out the orchestra#Furious at the hostile reception to his "Rite of Spring", Stravinsky left the auditorium and going backstage found Nijinsky, the choreographer, in the wings shouting to keep the dancers in time. The composer clung onto his clothes to prevent him from rushing on stage#At the first performance of "The Rite of Spring" Diaghilev, the company manager, put the house lights up so that the police could pick out and eject those creating most commotion#In "The Rite of Spring", Stravinsky attempted to capture the violent and sudden breaking of the Russian winter into spring, like the cracking of the ice on the River Neva, like the whole world cracking. And he believed he was only the vessel through which such catastrophic music passed#"I saw in my imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring."#Stravinsky often objected to other people's interpretations of his work. He described the mood of Herbert von Karajan's version of "The Rite" as 'tempo di hoochy-koochy'#When Stravinsky's mother was invited to hear "The Rite of Spring" for the first time she said: "I don't think it'll be my sort of music". "I hope you won't whistle," said a friend. "No," she replied, "I don't know how"#Stravinsky's cantata "The Wedding", a celebration of Russian wedding customs, may have been inspired by hearing the chiming of the bells of St Paul's Cathedral during a visit to London in 1914#On hearing of the 1917 revolution in Russia, Stravinsky decided he belonged back in the "Russia that was waking from her winter sleep". He started making travel plans, but thought better of it and did not return for forty years#Stravinsky worked with the great painter Picasso on his ballet "Pulcinella". The two men were inspired by a drunken theatrical troupe they saw while on holiday together in Naples. The composer's only other memory of their trip was that they were arrested for urinating on the wall of the Galleria#His every change of musical direction irritated Stravinsky's contemporaries. When he adopted a neo-classical idiom in the Twenties, the composer Schoenberg commented that he was becoming "Herr Modernsky, who puts on a wig to look like Papa Bach"#The personal relationship between Stravinsky and Schoenberg veered from mutual admiration to sarcastic criticism. They were, for some years, near-neighbours in Hollywood, but never met socially#Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg met on one occasion at the Schoenberg's in 1912, 'the First and Last Supper of the hypostatic trinity of twentieth-century music', but Stravinsky did not recall the evening#The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra took an immediate dislike to Stravinsky's "Petrushka" in 1913: they considered it 'schmutzige Musik' ('dirty music'), and sabotaged the first Viennese performances#"He is a spoilt child who cocks a snook at music. He's also a young barbarian who wears flashy ties and treads on women's toes as he kisses them." (Claude Debussy on Stravinsky, 1916)#"Maestro, what do you think of modern music?" "I detest it!" "But you, Maestro ..." "I don't write modern music, I only write good music." (Stravinsky to American reporters, 1925)#"The Times says that "The Rite" is to the twentieth century what Beethoven's Ninth was to the nineteenth. At last!" (Sergei Diaghilev, 1929)#"He composes invariably at the piano, because he needs direct contact with the element of sound and wishes to subject every chord, every interval, every phrase to a fresh test. He rarely composes more than two or three pages a day, sometimes even less." (Theodore Stravinsky, 1948)#"I received a request from the Disney office for permission to use "The Rite of Spring" in a cartoon film [Fantasia], accompanied by a warning that if permission were not granted the music would be used anyway. When I saw the film, I remember someone saying 'But it's all changed'. It certainly had..."#Stravinsky recalled how he was offered $100,000 "to pad a film with music". He refused. and was offered the same fee should he allow his name to be put to someone else's score#In 1942, Stravinsky was approached by the Ringling Brothers to write a polka to be danced by a troupe of elephants in tutus. This became a very popular act, and the "Circus Polka" received over four hundred performances
