Igor Stravinsky - Zvezdoliki

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The Russian title of Stravinsky's cantata King of the Stars (1911-1912) is Zvezdoliki, literally "Starface." The work is scored for male chorus and full orchestra (including celesta and two harps). The text, by symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont, is in Russian; Stravinsky, as was often the case, was more interested in the text on a purely sonic level than for its content or semantic sense. "Its words are good," Stravinsky noted, "and words were what I needed, not meanings."


King of the Stars was composed at roughly the same time that Stravinsky worked on the score of his ballet masterpiece The Rite of Spring (1911-1913). The choral writing, predominantly in four parts, is characterized by close spacing and triad-based harmonies with the addition of sevenths, ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths. At times, Stravinsky sets phrases in unison to accentuate certain parts of the text.


As with many of Stravinsky's early "Russian" works, King of the Stars has a fundamentally bitonal harmonic structure, often employing the choral and instrumental bodies as distinct harmonic entities superimposed upon one another; the final sonority, for example, consists of two distinct chords, a C major dominant ninth chord in the orchestra and a G major seventh chord in the chorus. Debussy, to whom the work is dedicated, was among the many who deemed the work essentially unperformable, targeting its bitonality as a likely cause of serious intonation problems in performance. The work was first performed in 1939, more than a quarter century after its composition.