Between 1910 and 1913 Igor Stravinsky made his mark with three great ballet scores, The Firebird (L'Oiseau de Feu), Petrushka and The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps), all written for the pioneering company put together and guided for 20 years by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev.
The fairy-tale plot of L'Oiseau de Feu tells
of how Prince Ivan follows the Firebird into the enchanted garden of
the immortal ogre Kashchei, and with the Firebird's help destroys him
and frees those who have been placed under his spell. While Stravinsky
may have intended to dissociate himself from the sound-world of
Rimsky-Korsakov, the subject found him, perhaps inevitably, evoking the
style of his teacher, as well as that of Tchaikovsky in the "Princesses'
Game with the Golden Apples". In terms of orchestral extravagance,
Stravinsky even outdid Rimsky-Korsakov, celebrated as the wizard of
musical colour, in such magical effects as the gossamer flutters and
bird-like movements in the "Firebird's Dance", or the pealing "Magic
Carrillon". But there are pointers to the future too, such as the
rhythmic vitality of the "Infernal Dance" and the unstable metre of the
ringing Finale.
When he was finishing the score of The Firebird,
Stravinsky had a vision of a pagan rite in which a young girl danced
herself to death. This fleeting image became the inspiration for the
composer's third original score for the Ballets Russes, The Rite of Spring,
which burst on to the stage in Paris in 1913 and causedone of the great
scandals in the history of music history (to Diaghilev's satisfaction,
as Stravinsky later recorded). Stravinsky's individual style had come
into focus in the intervening score for Petrushka; now in The Rite of Spring he pushed his grasp of the physical potential of music to the limit. (Kenneth Chalmers)
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