5 things to know about Stravinsky’s The Firebird

Composed in 1910 to accompany a new ballet of the same name, its impact on the landscape of music, and the career of its previously little-known composer were seismic. 

But why was it so significant? Where did it come from? And why was such a relatively unknown twenty-seven year-old from St Petersburg trusted with its realisation?

To offer you some background to the piece, and help you understand why it remains so well-known to this day – even among people with only a burgeoning knowledge of classical music – we’ve pulled together the answers to those questions and more, with these five things to know about The Firebird.

Stravinksy wasn’t first choice to compose the work

In 1909, Sergei Diaghilev established the Ballets Russes. The ballet company was the latest in a number of Diaghilev’s enterprises and exhibitions to present Russian art to Parisian audiences. Among the works choreographed by Michel Fokine for the ballet’s first season was Les Sylphides, set to music by Chopin, for which Diaghilev hired the relatively unknown Stravinsky to re-orchestrate. That Stravinsky was on Diaghilev’s radar at all was purely chance, the impresario had happened to attend a concert in St Petersburg earlier that year which featured Stravinsky’s pieces Scherzo fantastique and Feu d’artifice. He may not have heard much of Stravinsky, but he’d heard enough.

Though well-received in its debut season Ballets Russes was struggling to establish itself, and struggling even more to make money. To improve its fortunes Diaghilev chose to ride his self-created Parisian wave of interest in Russian art and commissioned a new ballet for 1910, one with a distinctly Russian design, and sound. Working with a committee of artists they conceived a story based on Russian fairytales. The work was The Firebird, but who would compose its score? First choice was Alexander Tcherepnin, who had previously worked with Fokine, but he soon withdrew from the project. Anatoly Lyadov was then approached, but would be unable to meet the tight 1910 deadline. Also considered were Alexander Glazunov and Nikolay Sokolov, before Diaghilev finally settled on Stravinsky. Something of a gamble, but it was a decision that would ultimately propel the young conductor to international stardom.

It proved an instant hit – albeit not with everyone

The Firebird received its premiere at Paris’ Palais Garnier in June 1910. There’d been much excitement and expectation in the lead up to the performance, with Diaghilev describing Stravinsky as ‘a man on the eve of celebrity’. Thankfully its debut didn’t disappoint. Both ballet and score proved a hit with Parisian audiences, and prominent critic Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi hailed the young Stravinsky as ‘the only composer who has achieved more than mere attempts at promoting Russia’s true musical spirit and style’ and a legitimate heir to the prominent Russian composers of the 19th century. The adoration would continue during the work’s run in Paris, as the show’s principal dancer Tamara Karsavina observed to reporters, ‘with every performance, success went crescendo’.

However, despite its success in Paris, when The Firebird received its Russian premiere later that year, responses were a little more lukewarm with the avant-garde magazine Apollon reporting that ‘many deserted the [hall] during the performance of this suite’. The experts likewise remained divided on the score, with the Latvian composer Jāzeps Vītols writing that ‘Stravinsky, it seems, has forgotten the concept of pleasure in sound… [His] dissonances unfortunately quickly become wearying, because there are no ideas hidden behind them’.

Its score borrows heavily from other composers

Though undoubtedly groundbreaking, and recognised now as being unmistakably Stravinsky, that’s not to say the score for The Firebird was completely original in application. As Timmy Fisher, writing for the London Symphony Orchestra explains, ‘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’.

Chief among these influences, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Stravinsky’s teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Of the recurring motifs used by Stravinsky in The Firebird, the split between conventional and chromatic harmony to illustrate the difference between good and evil, or ordinary and fantasy is a notable nod to the elder Russian. But Stravinsky’s influences weren’t limited to his countrymen, his use of leitmotifs to symbolise particular characters is very Richard Wagner. But that’s not to detract from the impact or importance of Stravinsky’s work, the way in which he lifted these techniques from opera and deployed them for ballet was undoubtedly revolutionary, and his score does display many of his own original flashes.

The Firebird made Stravinsky

It is no exaggeration to say that for Stravinsky The Firebird was life-changing. Only recently turned 28 at the time of its premiere, its success in Paris saw him become a household name almost overnight. Hitherto unknown, he was now moving in the same high Parisian circles as fellow composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel and writers such as Marcel Proust.

More notably, the success allowed him a platform from which to compose further groundbreaking works, as he continued his partnership with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, writing first Petrushka and then The Rite of Spring – a work so radical it prompted a riot at its premiere. The fame these works brought Stravinsky also enabled him to meet other leading artists – from dancer Vaslav Nijinsky to Picasso and writers such as WH Auden and Dylan Thomas – many of whom he would go on to work with or be influenced by during his long career.

…yet he grew to resent the work

That’s not to say that Stravinsky disliked or moved to disassociate himself from the work. But after many decades of being asked to conduct his ‘breakout hit’, rather than his newer works, he grew tired of its weight following him around, once writing that after first conducting the piece in 1915, he’d since performed it ‘nearly a thousand times more’. It’s also been reported that Stravinsky was even moved to apologise for, what the American conductor Robert Craft termed, the music’s ‘mimetic specificity’.

Yet despite this he would revisit it several times. He arranged three suites based on his original score – in 1911, 1919 and 1945 – for concert performance, and when, in 1965, he made his final London appearance at our Royal Festival Hall, it was The Firebird which he chose to conduct to bring the concert to a close, albeit after so many curtain calls, that he had to return to our stage in his coat and hat to cease the applause.