Why did Ustyluh of all places play such an important a role in the composers life? For Igor Stravinsky was born in 1882 a thousand miles away at Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov) near St. Petersburg. The answer was given by the composer himself in his book Dialogues:
“In the 1890s, physician Gavriil Nosenko, the husband of my mother’s sister (and my father-in-law from 1906), bought a brewery and several thousand hectares of land there. His manor stood amid woods, rivers, and wheat fields, the climate was extremely salubrious, and this is the reason why our parents would send my brother Gury and me there from 1896 to 1900. I say send because my brother and I stayed there on our own with cousins Kateryna and Liudmyla Nosenko, while my parents preferred going to Piechysky.” (Piechysky was the manor of Igor’s Aunt Kateryna in Podillia near Proskuriv, now Khmelnytsky).
In Piechysky, Igor met his cousin Kateryna, the daughter of Aunt Mariya and Uncle Gavriil from Ustyluh, where they would later make friends and go out together. As time went by, this friendship turned into love.
It was not so easy to get from St. Petersburg to Ustyluh in those times: it took over two days.
Every summer Ustyluh saw gatherings of the Nosenko and Stravinsky offspring with their friends from St. Petersburg, Samara province, Kyiv, and Podillia. Boys and girls played various games, sang songs, painted, swam, rode in light carriages, and learned dramatic roles by heart. In addition, Igor spent much time playing the piano, as his parents wanted.
One interesting fact from the Ustyluh period of Stravinsky’s life and that is brother Gury and he were often ill. For this reason, the parents kept them away from ponds and rivers. Igor still could not swim at seventeen. And only at Ustyluh did he pick up what he had lost, bathing and boating for hours on end in the Luha. Who knows — perhaps the health-giving properties of the water and the mild climate of Ustyluh helped him promote good health and live to almost ninety.
The young people were encouraged to do manual labor. Still standing down the lane near the former Stravinsky house are lime trees and maples planted by the boys. The children also built a tennis court and a theater stage. When Igor turned nine, his parents invited O. Snietkova, the daughter of a well- known Mariyinsky Theater violinist, to teach him music. The boy learned fast, how to read notes and play the piano.
A considerable influence on Igor’s musical development was made by his father FСdor Stravinsky (1843-1902), a prominent Russian singer. The boy attended rehearsals of the operas in which his father sang. The elder Stravinsky’s life and work were closely linked to Ukraine. After graduation from the Nizhyn Gymnasium, he studied at the universities of Odesa and then of Kyiv. Then he served at the Kyiv Opera. This theater had opened just ten years earlier, and all its productions were in Italian. The young singer and his colleagues broke with this tradition, putting on operas in Russian, several of them having Ukraine-based plots. Stravinsky took part in 149 productions in three opera seasons, plus more than thirty on tours of the Odesa, Katerynoslav, and Kharkiv theaters. Stravinsky Sr. had a good command of the Ukrainian language. He could recite The Kobzar from memory, while his library, one of the richest in St. Petersburg where he had moved at the invitation of the Mariyinsky Opera in 1876, included books by many Ukrainian writers.
After graduation from St. Petersburg University in 1905, Igor Stravinsky hurried to Ustyluh, where Kateryna had returned from Paris. They were engaged in late 1905 and married in January 1906. Stravinsky’s Petersburg friends Andrei and Vladimir, sons of Rimsky-Korsakov, were the groom’s best men. Rimsky- Korsakov personally received the newlyweds at the Stravinsky house threshold when they came back from the church. He blessed them, holding above their heads an icon which he then presented to them as a wedding gift. The other gift was a proposal to continue his services as a teacher.
The Stravinsky newlyweds chose Ustyluh as their permanent place of residence. Yet, let us read an excerpt from the composer’s book, Dialogues, about this.
“After getting married, I had a new house built just on the Luha bank... From 1907, when the house was finished, and until 1914, when the war cut me off from Russia, I would spend there at least a part of every year there. Ustyluh was a heavenly nook for work, so I even had my grand piano moved there from Saint Petersburg... In Ustyluh, I took a special liking to one Bernstein. I cannot remember exactly now whether it is he or some other resident of the town who gave me a violin, but one way or another, it was in Ustyluh where I first learnt to play the violin.”
The house was being built in accordance with Igor Stravinsky’s personal design, he himself took part in its construction, which incurred the reproach of Rimsky- Korsakov. But the pupil, of course, preferred music studies. Going by the dates Stravinsky put on the pages of completed note scores and in letters to Nikolai Rimsky- Korsakov, Claude Debussy, Sergei Diaghilev, Alexandre Benois, and other colleagues, one can confirm that he lived and composed in Ustyluh for about twenty months in 1907-1914. In general, the composer spent every summer in Ukraine from 1893 to 1914. Each time the composer returned to Ustyluh he always wrote new works. For instance, it is in the little house on the Luha bank that he created the cantata King of the Stars for a male choir and orchestra, four piano studies, small pieces for voice and the piano, and other works. The composer began to write the music for the ballet Rite of Spring and opera Nightingale in Ustyluh, finishing it in Clarent (Switzerland). He also began in Ustyluh Scherzo Fantastique for the orchestra and wordless song Pastorale for voice and piano, only to finish them in St. Petersburg.
Leaving Ustyluh for Switzerland in late July 1914, Stravinsky was destined never to return. He could not even afford to think about it for six years. This Western Ukrainian territory was occupied by the Austrian and German troops for four years. After the Kaiser’s Germany collapsed in November 1918, these lands were taken by Poland. August 1920 saw the establishment of Soviet power which held out until the coming September. Only then did the composer travel to Warsaw, asking for Polish citizenship and the return of his manor. The application was turned down and the land and the house had to be sold for a song. As a wanderer who had lived for years in hotels and rented lodgings in many countries of Western Europe, the composer was left without a home of his own. He had to start over from nothing.
Nor was Stravinsky lucky to visit his homeland in 1962, when he was invited to perform a few recitals in the USSR. When preparing for this trip, he asked to put Ustyluh on the list of the places he would visit. Unfortunately, local authorities denied the request.
What is the history of the Stravinsky house? Igor Stravinsky thought it had been destroyed during two world wars, but the house remained intact, although Ustyluh itself and the surrounding villages were utterly ruined. Unfortunately, the composer’s favorite dwelling was rebuilt beyond recognition in the late 1950s: the fancy roof was torn down and an additional story was added. In this shape, the house was handed over, as a hostel, to the local land-reclamation station.
Luckily, the ground floor remained the way it was when the Great Maestro was still alive. It now houses the I. F. Stravinsky Museum. It is symbolic that during the past twenty years the house has heard never-ending music performed by pupils of the children’s musical school located on its first floor.
