We mark the death on April 6, 1971 – 49 years ago today – of the composer Igor Stravinsky at the age of 88.
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| Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (1882-1971) in 1929, age 47 |
We mark the death on April 6, 1971 – 49 years ago today – of the composer Igor Stravinsky at the age of 88.
To hear him tell it, Stravinsky fully intended to live to be 100 years old. Given the environment in which he grew up, his body, his genetics, and his lifestyle, it was a small miracle that he almost made it to 89. Stravinsky’s long life and remarkably long creative career are together a case of “defying the odds.”
On the plus side, from his young adulthood to very near the end of his life, Stravinsky got up at 8 am and began his day with a regular regimen of calisthenics. He was fit and trim his entire adult life, about which he was quite proud. Sadly, though, when it came to Stravinsky’s health that’s the end of the “plus side” because unfortunately, he did not have genetics on his side. And though he did indeed manage to live into old age, he lived with and through a series of chronic diseases and life-threatening conditions that would have delivered most of the rest of us to an early grave.
Stravinsky was a life-long hypochondriac, a condition he came by honestly. He was a tiny and frail child. Always self-conscious about his height, he grew up to be a diminutive and physically frail adult, topping out at just 5’3” tall. Growing up in St. Petersburg, Stravinsky received his hypochondria directly from his mother Anna, who was inordinately fearful for the health of her children, particularly the teensy Igor. Stravinsky’s sister Tamara recalled that when she and Igor went out during the winter, her mother would issue a series of injunctions:
“not to go on the ice, not to play with stray dogs, not to talk when out, and to breathe through the nose.”
Stravinsky himself later recalled that:
“I was allowed out-of-doors only after my parents had put me through a medical examination, and I was considered too frail to participate in any sports or games when I was out.”
The fears of Stravinsky’s parents – his mother Anna in particular – were well founded. St. Petersburg was in the late-nineteenth century a veritable petri dish of pathogens, including tuberculosis, smallpox, and cholera, epidemics of which struck the city regularly. Both Stravinsky and his older brother Yuri contracted tuberculosis as teenagers, though in neither case did the disease kill them.
Stravinsky’s constitution remained weak throughout his life, and aside from his chronic coughing, colds, influenza, abscesses, bouts of debilitating colitis, bleeding ulcers, and so forth, he suffered any number of other significant illnesses that might – perhaps even should have – put him under.
Stravinsky did his tubercular lungs no favors over the years when he began smoking at about the age of 15. Soon enough he became a heavy smoker, sometimes irresponsibly so, and as such he periodically suffered from acute nicotine poisoning. The first such episode struck in December of 1911, when Stravinsky was 29 years old and living in Paris:
“I awoke in great pain to discover that I was unable to stand or even sit in an erect position. The illness was diagnosed as intercostal neuralgia caused by nicotine poisoning. It was many months in recovering my strength.”
Stravinsky’s serious illnesses stacked up one after the next. Indulge me this following litany, if only to remind us how lucky – relative to Stravinsky’s health – the rest of us are.
In early June 1913, the 31-year-old Stravinsky’s temperature spiked to 106 degrees. Diagnosed with typhoid fever, his recovery is described as having been “painfully and frustratingly slow.”
Along with another debilitating attack of nicotine poisoning, Stravinsky suffered a nasty bout of pleurisy in the spring of 1918 (“pleurisy” being an inflammation of the thin layers of tissue that separate our lungs from our chest wall).
Neither Stravinsky nor his family managed to avoid the Spanish flu pandemic, though gratefully it was not fatal to anyone in the household. Living in Switzerland at the time, the entire clan became sick in October 1918. Stravinsky’s son Theodore recalled:
“Everyone had to take to their beds, and I can still see Father buried under piles of blankets, his teeth chattering, a big beret pulled down over his eyes and in a very bad temper, while my mother staggered around in her dressing gown handing out medicines, infusions and linctuses [cough syrup] to the whole family.”
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