Igor Stravinsky: The Firebird (ballet, 1910)

 

Stravinsky’s first big success was The Firebird, a ballet produced in Paris by the Russian company, the Ballet Ruses in 1910. Impresario Sergei Diaghilev had launched the project the year before with the purpose of introducing Russian works to French audiences, including pieces by Stranisky’s late teacher and mentor, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Diaghilev heard one of the 27-year-old Stravinsky’s early orchestral works performed in a concert in St. Petersburg, and was sufficiently impressed to approach the young composer about writing the score for an original ballet based upon a Russian poem and a folk-tale.

 

Diaghilev was highly ambitious to introduce new and modern 20th century works to the Parisian audience. His company was composed of some of Russia’s finest dancers, including Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, and many others. Artist and designer Alexandre Benois and choreographer Michel Fokine collaborated to create a story of a magical glowing bird, who is caught and released by a prince. After considering other young Russian composers, Diaghilev finally decided to offer the opportunity to Stravinsky.

 

The ballet premiered on June 25, 1910 and quickly became a sensation with the French public. The costumes, set designs and choreography were all highly stylized and innovative - it was a brilliant, unprecedented production. Nobody had ever seen anything quite like it. But holding it all together was the majestic, audacious music of this then-unknown Russian composer. This would quickly change Diaghilev brought Stravinsky back to write two sequels, each one more advanced and daring than the other. By the middle of the decade, Stravinsky was arguably the most famous and controversial composer in Europe.

 

The music for The Firebird was highly influenced by Rimsky-Korsakov, who had been one of the most forward-thinking late Romantic composers in Russia. But audiences were quick to notice a powerful individual voice emerging that would quickly blossom into the most radical new musical style since Wagner. Already in The Firebird, we find Stravinsky’s love for rhythm as a forceful and formidable element in music. We also hear for the first time his total mastery of tonal blending of instruments, particularly with various groupings of woodwinds and horns.

 

Stravinsky also had a flair for exotic melodies, which he put to full effect in the strange fairy-tale setting. There are long, eerie stretches of sound as themes slowly and ominously develop, followed by savage eruptions of loud and furious boldness marked by extreme chromaticism and the willingness to change meter to drive the action forward.

And finally, of course, we have the finale, one of the most beautiful and awe-inducing two-plus minutes of glorious music ever written. (For all of you old Yes fans, this is the startling, exciting fanfare that the group would play over the PA before each of their concerts before bursting onto stage.) Everyone who truly loves music needs to have a copy of Stravinsky's first masterpiece, or one of the suites that he later created for orchestral performance.

And for anyone who has never witnessed an actual ballet performance of The Firebird, I am including a particularly exotic, exciting video that is filmed in such a way that it might suggest some of the initial excitement and wonder that Stravinsky and Diaghelev created over a hundred years ago back in Paris - an event that would herald a brand new era in music.

Just as Pablo Picasso, among others, were radically reshaping the world of modern painting and sculpture, Stravinsky's bold ideas of rhythmic and harmonic abstraction would soon change the face of Western music. A bold new century had indeed begun, and the face of the new "modernism" would forever change the course of all the arts and all currents of thought. It's no wonder that Pablo liked to draw Igor's picture so often - though one was a Spaniard and the other a Russian, they truly were "birds of a feather."


 

Stravinsky by Picasso