Five Reasons to Love Stravinsky's The Firebird

Stravinsky began writing The Firebird in 1909 on a commission from a fellow Russian, Serge Diaghilev. Diaghilev’s dance company, the Ballet Russes, had just made a splash with its first Paris season, performing works based on traditional Russian themes created by Russian-born artists, and the impresario hoped to ride this wave of interest in the Russian ‘exotic’.

As such, Stravinsky’s ‘fairy-tale ballet in two scenes’ borrows heavily from a variety of Russian folk sources. Set in the enchanted garden of Kashchey the Immortal – a wizard with a penchant for turning people to stone – the action centres around the heroic Prince Ivan and his attempts to free a beautiful princess from Kashchey’s evil clutches.

The Firebird is just one of several mythical creatures and objects Ivan encounters along the way. At one point, at the height of Ivan’s peril, she lays a spell on Kashchey’s monstrous retinue, compelling them to dance to exhaustion. She also provides Ivan with the key to vanquishing his enemy.

Stravinsky’s music is truly dazzling. It shimmers and pulsates with the expert touch of an orchestrator twice his age. For the Parisians it was groundbreaking – to the point of bafflement: during rehearsals Stravinsky was required to explain many of the instrumental details, while unexpected sonorities led to missed entries from the dancers.

But this ‘new’ sound was, in fact, a piece of deft mimicry. Stravinsky, yet to find his own musical voice, had stuffed his score with tricks picked up from his musical elders back in St Petersburg, in particular the so-called Moguchaya kuchka, or ‘Mighty Handful’ group of composers, which included his teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

The Firebird’s rich, decorative style and animated rhythmic language is pure kuchkism, as are the folkish tunes that pervade the score. In fact, tunes featured in both the princesses’ round dance (‘Khorovod’) and the finale are pilfered from Rimsky-Korsakov’s own published collection of Russian folksongs!

If Stravinsky’s sound-world was largely derivative, he undoubtably broke new ground in the way he borrowed techniques from opera and transferred them to ballet.

Working closely with choreographer Mikhail Fokine, who had led the team that cobbled together the scenario, he ensured that every element of the production was bound together by the music. Recurring motifs are placed throughout the score to symbolise characters and situations – à la Wagner – while good and evil, normal and magical, are delineated in his split use of diatonic (conventional) and chromatic (crunching) harmony – à la Rismky-Korsakov.

Human characters such as the Princess, for example, are largely associated with diatonic harmonies; the magical world of Kashchey and the Firebird is associated with ‘exotic’ harmonies such as the eight-note diminished scale known to Stravinsky as the ‘Rimsky-Korsakov’ scale.

‘The most exquisite marvel of equilibrium that we have ever imagined between sounds, movements and forms’
Henri Ghéon, playwright

When The Firebird opened, on 25 June 1920 at the Paris Opéra, it caused a sensation. Stravinsky became a household name overnight, and was soon moving in lofty artistic circles alongside Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Erik Satie, and writers such as Marcel Proust and Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Like the performers, the public was dazzled by Stravinsky’s sumptuous orchestral style. Critics were struck in particular by the way the music had been integrated with dance and the set and costume designs – by Léon Bakst and Alexander Golovin.

‘The most exquisite marvel of equilibrium that we have ever imagined between sounds, movements and forms,’ gushed playwright Henri Ghéon. For musicologist Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, Stravinsky was ‘the only composer who has achieved more than mere attempts at promoting Russia’s true musical spirit and style.’

This success would provide Stravinsky with the platform that enabled him to compose some of the most groundbreaking works of the 20th century – most famously The Rite of Spring which, when it was premiered three years later, caused a riot.

Still, as Stravinsky’s style developed, he would come to resent The Firebird. Like so many artists and bands who have huge breakout hits, he was often asked to conduct the work, or one of the two concert suites he created from it, instead of his newer material.

The Firebird, its success, and (arguably) the trajectory of its composer’s extraordinary career, were all the result of a lucky break. Stravinsky was not Diaghilev’s first-choice composer for the ballet. He wasn’t even his second. The impresario had tried established figures Anatoly Lyadov and Nikolai Tcherepnin, and considered Alexander Glazunov, before resorting to this relative newcomer.

Aged just 27, Stravinsky was unknown outside of Russia. The only music of his to be performed outside his homeland was a pair of Chopin orchestrations, featured as part of the Ballet Russes’s 1909 season. These had been commissioned on the strength of a short orchestral work – the Scherzo fantastique – premiered at a concert Diaghilev just happened to attend in St Petersburg.

Had Diaghilev not been at that concert, we would surely not have The Firebird, nor the remarkable string of works that Diaghilev and Stravinsky went on to produce together: Petrushka (1911), The Rite of Spring (1913), The Nightingale (1914), Pulcinella (1920), Mavra (1922), Reynard (1922), The Wedding (1923), Oedipus rex (1927) and Apollo (1928).

Written by Timmy Fisher, sub-editor within the BBC Proms Publications team, co-host of The Classical Music Pod, writer and journalist.