Vera de Bosset

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Vera de Bosset by Sergei Sudeikin

Vera de Bosset , originally Vera Bosse , (born January 7, 1889 in Saese near Tamsal ; † September 17, 1982 in New York ) was a Russian actress, painter and ballet dancer with German-Baltic roots. She was best known as the long-time lover and later second wife of the composer Igor Stravinsky .

Life

Her father Arthur Harald Bosse (born April 9, 1861, † August 22, 1937 in Santiago / Chile) and her mother Henriette Malmgreen (born December 23, 1866) belonged to the German-Baltic upper class in Estonia, which at the time belonged to Russia . Vera changed her last name to the French-sounding stage name Bosset.

When Vera and Stravinsky in 1920 in Paris met for the first time, she danced the role of the Queen in the ballet Sleeping Beauty by Tchaikovsky . They were both married: the composer with his cousin, the Russian painter Jekaterina Nossenko, with whom he had two daughters and two sons; Vera with the Russian painter and set designer Sergei Sudeikin , whom she had met in St. Petersburg in 1915 and who was part of the circle of friends of the successful impresor Sergei Djagilew in Paris . In connection with her love affair with Igor Stravinsky, Vera de Bosset left her husband. Stravinsky stayed with his family until his wife's tuberculosis death in 1939 and led a double life. Most of the time he spent with his wife and children, the rest of the time with his lover. His wife apparently tolerated the situation with a mixture of generosity, bitterness and suffering.

After the start of the war in 1939, Stravinsky accepted a call from Harvard University in Cambridge ( Massachusetts ) on the east coast of the United States to initially hold a series of lectures, the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures . Vera de Bosset followed him in January 1940. They married on March 9, 1940 in Bedford, Massachusetts. In the first years of their emigration, the couple struggled with livelihood problems. Stravinsky, who could only express himself moderately in English, looked in vain for a job as a music teacher.

The last resting place of the Stravinsky couple in Venice

He was looking for a way out of the situation by composing some smaller, more pleasing pieces of music, such as the tango . The pieces of music had the hoped-for success.

In 1962 the couple traveled to Moscow and Leningrad . Moscow television carried a report about it.

Igor Stravinsky died in New York on April 6, 1971, shortly after buying an apartment there. Vera de Bosset lived there until her death in 1982. She found her final resting place in the grave next to her husband in the San Michele cemetery in Venice .

literature

  • Robert Craft: Stravinsky - Chronicle of a Friendship, 1948–1982. Atlantis Musikverlag, Zurich / Mainz 2000, ISBN 3-254-00229-6 .
  • Robert Craft: Igor and Vera Stravinsky '/ photo album 1921 to 1971. with texts from interviews with Stravinsky 1921–1963 / photos and Facsimiles selected by Vera Stravinsky and Rita McCaffrey. Verlag Schuler, Herrsching 1982, ISBN 3-7796-5199-0 .
  • Robert Craft (ed.): Dearest Bubuschkin: The correspondence of Vera and Igor Stravinsky, 1921–1954, with excerpts from Vera Stravinsky's diaries, 1921–1971. Publisher Thames and Hudson, New York 1985.

Web links

Commons : Vera de Bosset  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Stravinsky biographer. Robert Craft reports that Vera de Bosset suddenly confessed to him after a turbulent day that she was four years older than her passport showed. After that she would have been born in 1885 and would have been 97 years old.
  2. ^ Robert Craft: Stravinsky: Discoveries and Memories. Naxos Books, 2013, ISBN 978-1-84379-753-1 , p. 154. (English)
  3. ↑ The descendants of the cantor, schoolmaster and assistant preacher at the St. Petri Congregation in St. Petersburg Sebastian Bosse (1697–1775). In: Baltic pedigree and family tables. Special issue 12, Cologne 1976, p. 14.
  4. ↑ Charles M.Joseph: Stravinsky Inside Out. Yale University Press, New Haven 2001, ISBN 0-300-07537-5 .
  5. ↑ Eric Walter Whithe: Stravinsky, Igor. In: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Macmillan Publisher, London 1985, Volume 18, p. 254.
personal data
SURNAME Bosset, Vera de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bosses, Vera; Stravinski, Vera; Stravinsky, Vera; Sudeikina, Vera
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian dancer and wife of Igor Stravinsky's
DATE OF BIRTH January 7, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Saese, Tamsal
DATE OF DEATH 17th September 1982
Place of death new York