PROGRAM
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIFTH SEASON
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director
Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Global Sponsor of the CSO
Thursday, May 19, 2016, at 8:00
Friday, May 20, 2016, at 1:30
Charles Dutoit Conductor
Music by Igor Stravinsky
Fireworks, Op. 4
Symphony in C Moderato alla breve
Larghetto concertante—
Allegretto
Largo—Tempo giusto
INTERMISSION
The Firebird
Friday’s performance is generously endowed by Elaine Frank in loving memory of Zollie S. Frank.
This work is part of the CSO Premiere Retrospective, which is generously sponsored by the
Sargent Family Foundation.
This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency,
and the National Endowment for the Arts.
COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher
Igor Stravinsky
Born June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum, Russia.
Died April 6, 1971, New York City.
Fireworks, Op. 4
This is the first music by
Stravinsky the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra ever
played. Frederick Stock
included it on the second
half of his program on
January 22, 1915, sandwiched between music by
Eric DeLamarter and the
Queen Mab Scherzo from
Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet. The program book
mentions (in passing and without comment) a
recent ballet by Stravinsky called The Rite of
Spring; the importance of that score, one of the
few truly revolutionary works of the twentieth
century, wasn’t yet appreciated, even though it had
caused a riot at its premiere in Paris little more
than a year before.
F ireworks is a small piece of great historical importance. Stravinsky began it
in the spring of 1908, at a time when
he often went to see his beloved teacher,
mentor, and recently appointed father-figure,
Rimsky-Korsakov. “He seemed to like my visits,”
Stravinsky later wrote. “He had my deep affection, and I was genuinely attached to him. It
COMPOSED
1908
FIRST PERFORMANCE
February 6, 1909; Saint Petersburg,
Russia
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
January 22 & 23, 1915, Orchestra Hall.
Frederick Stock conducting
June 26, 1951, Ravinia Festival. William
Steinberg conducting
seems that these sentiments were reciprocated, but
it was only later that I learned so from his family.
His characteristic reserve had never allowed him
to make any sort of display of his feelings.”
One day, Stravinsky mentioned to
Rimsky-Korsakov that he was writing a new
orchestral fantasy:
He seemed interested and told me to send
it to him as soon as it was ready. I finished
it in six weeks and sent it off to the country
place where he was spending the summer. A
few days later a telegram informed me of his
death and shortly afterwards my registered
package was returned to me: “Not delivered
on account of death of addressee.”
Stravinsky dedicated Fireworks to Rimsky’s
daughter Nadia, in honor of her marriage
to Maximilian Steinberg. Apparently the
Steinbergs didn’t appreciate the gesture, then
or later. In fact, Stravinsky’s relations with
Rimsky-Korsakov’s family deteriorated almost
literally from the day of the funeral, when he and
Rimsky’s widow had exchanged heated words.
In 1962, when Stravinsky returned to Russia for
the first time in nearly a half century and invited
CSO PERFORMANCES,
THE COMPOSER CONDUCTING
November 7 & 12, 1940, Orchestra Hall
July 21, 1962, Ravinia Festival
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
July 7, 1968, Ravinia Festival. Seiji
Ozawa conducting
September 11, 12 & 14, 2004, Orchestra
Hall. Sir Andrew Davis conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
three flutes and piccolo, two oboes
and english horn, three clarinets and
bass clarinet, two bassoons, six horns,
2
three trumpets, three trombones
and tuba, bass drum, cymbals,
glockenspiel, triangle, celesta, two
harps, timpani, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
4 minutes
CSO RECORDINGS
1946. Désiré Defauw conducting. RCA
1968. Seiji Ozawa conducting. RCA
1992. Pierre Boulez conducting.
Deutsche Grammophon
Nadia Steinberg to a concert of music which
included Fireworks, she declined.
But Fireworks found a most receptive audience
at the first performance in Saint Petersburg
in 1909, for that night the crowd included
the impresario Sergei Diaghilev. He was so
impressed with Stravinsky’s music (the Scherzo
fantastique also was performed) that he invited
him to orchestrate music by Chopin and Grieg
for the upcoming ballet season in Paris and commissioned him to compose the score for a new
ballet he was planning on the Russian legend of
the Firebird. The rest, of course, is history, but
the fresh force of a singular new voice in music is
felt throughout these four explosive, astonishing
minutes of orchestral fireworks. Igor Stravinsky
Symphony in C
Performed as part of the CSO Premiere Retrospective
Stravinsky wrote a
symphony at the very
beginning of his career—
it’s his op. 1—but he
quickly became famous as
the composer of three
ballet scores (Petrushka,
The Firebird, and The Rite
of Spring), and he spent
the next few years
composing for the theater and the opera house.
When, in 1920, he finally returned to writing
music for an orchestra on the concert stage, he
composed the Symphonies of Wind Instruments,
which omits strings entirely and is no symphony
in the conventional sense of the word.
Throughout the 1920s, Stravinsky began to put
his personal stamp on the traditional forms of
orchestral music—these scores are the earliest of
his so-called neoclassical works. He wrote a
series of concertos—two for piano, one for
violin, and his own little Brandenburg Concerto
COMPOSED
1938–August 19, 1940
DEDICATION
“This symphony, composed to the
Glory of God, is dedicated to the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra on the
occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of
its existence.”
in the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, composed in
1938 to celebrate the thirtieth wedding anniversary of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss, whose
home in Washington, D.C., gave the work
its name.
That same year, Mrs. Bliss, along with Mrs.
John Alden Carpenter and several of her friends
in Chicago, asked Stravinsky to write something
to honor the CSO’s fiftieth anniversary in the
1940–41 season. (Stravinsky later reported that
he was paid $2,500 for the commission and that
he accepted partly because he was nearly broke.)
To celebrate a milestone in the life of a great
American orchestra, Stravinsky decided to tackle
the “standard” by writing a symphony in C in
the four orthodox movements—sonata-allegro,
slow movement, scherzo, finale—scored for a
Beethoven-size orchestra (throwing in the tuba
for added measure). He did not foresee that this
work would become, in effect, his American
passport—the score that would accompany his
move to this country. Nor did he know that its
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
November 7, 8 & 12, 1940, Orchestra
Hall. The composer conducting
(world premiere)
August 14 & 17, 1968, Ravinia Festival.
New York City Ballet as soloists, Robert
Irving conducting
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
March 20, 21 & 22, 2008, Orchestra
Hall. Charles Dutoit conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
three flutes and piccolo, two oboes,
two clarinets, two bassoons, four
horns, two trumpets, three trombones
and tuba, timpani, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
28 minutes
CSO RECORDING
1997. Sir Georg Solti conducting.
London
3
composition would see him through the most
difficult time of his personal life.
Stravinsky began the first movement in his flat
on the rue Saint Honoré in Paris in the autumn
of 1938. On November 30, his daughter Ludmilla
died of tuberculosis—the “family disease” as
the composer would soon call it, with ample
evidence—in the sanatorium at Sancellmoz,
where his wife Catherine and younger daughter
were also being treated. “It is no exaggeration
to say that in the following weeks I was able to
continue my own life only by my work on the
Symphony in C,” Stravinsky later recalled. Three
months later, Catherine died. Stravinsky himself
then moved to Sancellmoz, as he too had been
diagnosed with the disease. That June, his mother
died. “For the third time in six months I heard
the long requiem service, walked in the field
beyond Paris to the cemetery of Sainte Geneviève,
dropped a handful of dirt in an open grave,”
he later wrote. “And for the third time I saved
myself—or at any rate recovered—by composing.”
Stravinsky finished the second movement of the
Symphony in C in the sanatorium in Sancellmoz.
The death of three dear family members,
compounded by the impending threat of war,
persuaded Stravinsky to break with his past and
leave Europe. He accepted Harvard University’s
invitation to give the prestigious Charles Eliot
Norton lectures and its offer of a residence in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. He landed in New
York at the end of September 1939, never to
return to Europe—or to his native Russia—
except as a visitor. In Cambridge, Stravinsky
gave the Norton lectures (in French, as his
English was not yet reliable) and composed the
third movement of his symphony. That winter
he was reunited with Vera de Bosset, his lover
since the 1920s, and they married in Boston in
March 1940. The Stravinskys decided to settle in
California, and by the beginning of the summer
they had bought a house in Los Angeles, where,
on August 19, the composer finished the fourth
movement of his symphony for Chicago.
Stravinsky always spoke of the two stylistically
distinct halves of his symphony—the European
half and the American half—although, having
lived through the most drastic upheaval of his
life, he probably could not help but see, in the
page turn between the second and third movements, the clean break that listeners wouldn’t
4
even notice. (Twenty-five years later, when he
recorded the symphony, he commented that it
was still unpleasant for him to talk about the
work, since it recalled his most tragic year.)
Stravinsky always insisted that his personal
crises at the time were not apparent in this music.
(He did confess, however, that “the upheaval
caused by the war, though neither tragic nor
terrible in my case, was nevertheless a difficult
environment for composition.”) The Symphony in
C is decidedly abstract, its face turned away from
the world in which it was created. “I did not seek
to overcome my grief by portraying or giving
expression to it in music,” he later wrote, “and
you will listen in vain, I think, for traces of this
sort of personal emotion.” Stravinsky is not,
of course, the first composer whose art reveals
nothing of his private life—only consider
Beethoven’s light and witty Second Symphony,
written the autumn he contemplated suicide. But
Stravinsky’s musical stoicism has often drawn
skepticism, and he has sometimes provoked outright anger with his most famous statement on
the subject: “I consider that music is, by its very
nature, essentially powerless to express anything
at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a
psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature.”
Stravinsky admitted that he had scores of
Haydn’s and Beethoven’s symphonies at his
side when he began his own. The tightly coiled
rhythmic figure with which he begins does
recall Beethoven’s Fifth—as do the subsequent
highly charged passages of rapid, repeated eighth
notes—and he borrows Beethoven’s favorite
device of repeating the first theme a step up,
in D. But Stravinsky’s understanding of symphonic style is very much his own. As he told a
Boston interviewer:
My new symphony is going to be classical
in spirit, more concise in its form than
Beethoven. . . . Instead of all the chords
gravitating toward one final tonic chord, all
notes gravitate toward a single note. Thus
this symphony will be neither a symphony
in C major nor a symphony in C minor but
simply a symphony in C.
S travinsky’s first movement is in traditional
sonata form (with a “false recapitulation,”
an old trick of Haydn’s), although the
Composers in Chicago
Over the course of forty years, Igor Stravinsky was a regular guest conductor
with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Orchestra Hall, the Pabst Theater in
Milwaukee, and at the Ravinia Festival.
Chicago American, February 21, 1925
For his debut appearances on February 20 and 21, 1925, Stravinsky chose to conduct his Song of the Volga Bargemen, Scherzo fantastique, Song of the Nightingale,
and a suite from The Firebird. According to the Chicago American, “The
audience was pleasantly agog yesterday and gave Mr. Stravinsky a stirring
welcome . . . . And
what a conductor!”
The reviewer,
Herman Devries,
continued, “I have
rarely seen ‘effect’ so
completely expressed
and obtained as it
was mirrored upon
Orchestra Hall’s
platform yesterday. . . . [His conducting is] a
study in expression, a marvelously magnetic
picture of musical mood.”
Stravinsky leads a recording session for his ballet Orpheus in
Orchestra Hall on July 20, 1964
Stravinsky guest conducted again in January
1935 and February 1940 before appearing
to lead the world premiere of his Symphony
in C—commissioned for the Orchestra’s fiftieth season—on November 7, 1940. Edward
Barry in the Chicago Tribune wrote, “In the
course of the performance we caught ourselves muttering, ‘Ha! A major work!’ ” Robert
Pollak in the Chicago Daily Times proclaimed
that “Musical history is made at night and
perhaps it was made last night at Orchestra
Hall.” And Claudia Cassidy in the Journal
of Commerce described the work as “both
contemporary and timeless, autobiographical
and impersonal. It has the lovely sense of
form as much a part of all Stravinsky scores
as indescribable richness of instrumentation
is the signature of the finest. It is lyrical to the
point of intoxication, and at the same time
delicately, immaculately restrained.”
The composer continued to return regularly to lead the Orchestra, both downtown and at the Ravinia Festival. Stravinsky’s July 1964 visit included recording
sessions of his ballet Orpheus for Columbia Records, and his last appearance was
on April 17, 1965, conducting his Pulcinella in Orchestra Hall.
Frank Villella is the director of the Rosenthal Archives. For more information
regarding the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s anniversary season, please visit
cso.org/125moments.
5
conventions of tonality are treated with characteristic irreverence. Stravinsky chooses not
G major, but G minor, as a counterbalance to C,
and at one point modulates to the very unclassical destination of E-flat minor. The movement
is very much in the spirit of Beethoven—
particularly in its rhythmic energy, tight thematic
unity, and steady allegro pulse (remarkably for
Stravinsky, the master of shifting meters, there
is not one change of time signature in the entire
movement). But it is Beethoven seen through
twentieth-century spectacles, and in the end
it sounds like pure Stravinsky. (The conductor
Ernest Ansermet said that “the allegro of the
Symphony in C is no more than the portrait of a
symphonic allegro.”)
The lightly scored second movement—
Stravinsky omits most of the brass and the
timpani—is a kind of “Italianate song-andaccompaniment.” The fabric is so playfully woven
that it’s not always clear what is melody and what
is accompaniment. The third movement, which
begins without pause, is a headlong scherzo
propelled by its constantly changing meter—
extreme even by Stravinsky’s standards, and
something of a shock after the rhythmic stability
of the previous movements. Stravinsky felt that
this music somehow captured the spirit of his
new surroundings in the United States, and he
claimed that a jocular bassoon solo, in particular,
would never have occurred to him had he not
seen “the neon glitter of the California boulevards from a speeding automobile.”
The last movement combines the European
and American halves of the piece, integrating
material from the first movement into the bustle
of a good classical finale. The coda is another
of Stravinsky’s signature apotheoses—a slow
procession of stately wind chords, the very last
mimicked by the muted strings. Igor Stravinsky
The Firebird
The Firebird opened on
June 25, 1910; on June 26,
Stravinsky was a famous
man. The great impresario
Sergei Diaghilev had
predicted as much—at
one of the final dress
rehearsals he pointed to
Stravinsky and
said, “Mark him well; he
is a man on the eve of celebrity.” Diaghilev was a
good judge of such things, for in 1910 his circle
included many of the most famous creative artists
of the time. He was also, perhaps, excessively
proud, for he had discovered Igor Stravinsky—or,
to be more accurate, he was the one who put
Stravinsky in the right place at the right time.
The rest was all Stravinsky’s doing.
The right place was Paris in 1910. By chance,
Diaghilev had heard Stravinsky’s music for the
first time just two years before, at a concert in
Saint Petersburg. He immediately invited the
twenty-six-year-old composer to assist in orchestrating music for the 1909 ballet season in Paris.
6
But Stravinsky owes his first international success
to Nikolai Tcherepnin and Anatole Liadov, both
prominent, though modestly talented Russian
composers who declined Diaghilev’s offer to
write music for The Firebird. (Richard Taruskin
has debunked the beloved old story that Liadov, a
famous procrastinator, initially accepted but lost
the job when Diaghilev learned that he was just
stocking up on manuscript paper at the time the
first installment of the score was due.)
The Firebird was a spectacular success. (See
Stravinsky’s account, which follows.) According
to Ravel, the Parisian audience wanted a taste of
the avant-garde, and this dazzling music by the
daring young Russian fit the bill. The Firebird was
Stravinsky’s first large-scale commission, and,
being an overnight hit, it was quickly followed
by two more. The first, Petrushka, enhanced his
reputation; the second, The Rite of Spring, made
him the most notorious composer alive.
Both of those works were more revolutionary
than The Firebird—less indebted to folk melody
and the gestures of other masters—and spoke in
a voice of greater individuality. But The Firebird
is one of the most impressive calling cards in the
history of music—a work of such brilliance that,
if he had written nothing else, Stravinsky’s name
would still be known to us today.
picture,” he later wrote, “I was once addressed by
a man in an American railway dining car, and
quite seriously, as ‘Mr. Fireberg.’ ”
lthough Stravinsky later called the
Firebird orchestra “wastefully large,”
he used it with formidable clarity and
imagination. “For me,” Stravinsky wrote, “the
most striking effect in The Firebird was the
natural-harmonic string glissando near the
beginning, which the bass chord touches off
like a catherine wheel. I was delighted to have
discovered this, and I remember my excitement in
demonstrating it to Rimsky’s violinist and cellist
sons. I remember, too, Richard Strauss’s astonishment when he heard it two years later in Berlin.”
The score is filled with delicious details, though
none so novel as the one Stravinsky rightfully
claimed as his own, and, in the closing pages, a
magnificent sweep unmatched by much music
written in the previous century and little since.
With The Firebird, Stravinsky found instant
and enduring fame. “And, oh yes, to complete the
I A COMPOSED
November 1909–May 1910
FIRST PERFORMANCE
June 25, 1910, with Sergei Diaghilev’s
Ballets Russes at the Paris Opera
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
(SUITES)
February 11 & 12, 1921, Orchestra Hall.
Frederick Stock conducting
July 3, 1936, Ravinia Festival. Ernest
Ansermet conducting
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
(COMPLETE)
February 8, 9 & 10, 1973, Orchestra
Hall. Seiji Ozawa conducting
July 1, 1982, Ravinia Festival. Charles
Dutoit conducting
CSO PERFORMANCES, THE
COMPOSER CONDUCTING
(SUITES)
February 20 & 21, 1925, Orchestra Hall
January 14, 1935; Pabst Theater,
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Igor Stravinsky on The Firebird
had already begun to think about The Firebird
when I returned to Saint Petersburg from
Ustilug, in the autumn of 1909, though I was
not yet certain of the commission (which, in fact,
did not come until December, more than a month
after I had begun to compose; I remember the day
Diaghilev telephoned me to say go ahead, and my
telling him I already had). Early in November, I
moved from Saint Petersburg to a dacha belonging to the Rimsky-Korsakov family about seventy
miles southeast of the city. I went there for a
vacation, a rest in birch forests and snow-fresh air,
but instead began to work on The Firebird. Andrei
Rimsky-Korsakov (son of the composer) was
with me at the time, and he often was during the
following months; because of this, The Firebird is
dedicated to him. The introduction up to the bassoon and clarinet figure at bar six was composed
February 27, 1940, Orchestra Hall
November 7, 8 & 12, 1940,
Orchestra Hall
January 12, 14 & 15, 1954,
Orchestra Hall
July 21, 1962, Ravinia Festival
MOST RECENT CSO
PERFORMANCES (COMPLETE)
August 9, 1984, Ravinia Festival.
Michael Tilson Thomas conducting
January 21, 22 & 23, 2010, Orchestra
Hall. Pierre Boulez conducting
January 31, 2010, Carnegie Hall. Pierre
Boulez conducting
MOST RECENT CSO
PERFORMANCES (SUITES)
October 2, 3 & 4, 2014, Orchestra Hall.
Riccardo Muti conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
three flutes and two piccolos, three
oboes and english horn, three
clarinets, clarinet in E-flat and bass
clarinet, three bassoons and two
contrabassoons, four horns, three
trumpets, three trombones and
tuba, timpani, triangle, tambourine,
cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, bells,
xylophone, celesta, piano, two harps,
and strings, with three trumpets, four
tenor tubas, and bells playing offstage
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
47 minutes
CSO RECORDINGS
1969. Carlo Maria Giulini conducting.
Angel (suite)
1992. Pierre Boulez conducting.
Deutsche Grammophon (complete)
June 26, 2015, Morton Arboretum.
James Feddeck conducting
1996. James Levine conducting.
Disney (suite)
July 12, 2015, Ravinia Festival. Ted
Sperling conducting
2000. Pierre Boulez conducting.
EuroArts (video, complete)
January 17, 18 & 22, 1935,
Orchestra Hall
7
in the country, as well as notations for later parts.
I returned to Saint Petersburg in December and
remained there until, in March, I had finished
the composition. The orchestra score was ready
a month later, and the complete music mailed to
Paris by mid-April. (The score is dated May 18,
but by that time I was merely retouching details.)
The Firebird did not attract me as a subject.
Like all story ballets, it demanded descriptive
music of a kind I did not want to write. I had
not yet proved myself as a composer, and I
had not earned the right to criticize the aesthetics of my collaborators, but I did criticize
them, and arrogantly, though perhaps my age
(twenty-seven) was more arrogant than I was.
Above all, I could not abide the assumption that
my music would be imitation Rimsky-Korsakov,
especially as by that time I was in such revolt
against poor Rimsky. However, if I say I was less
than eager to fulfill the commission, I know that,
in truth, my reservations about the subject were
also an advance defense for my not being sure
I could. But Diaghilev, the diplomat, arranged
everything. He came to call on me one day, with
Fokine, Nijinsky, Bakst, and Benois. When the
five of them had proclaimed their belief in my
talent, I began to believe, too, and accepted.
Fokine is credited as the librettist of The
Firebird, but I remember that all of us, and
especially Bakst, who was Diaghilev’s principal
adviser, contributed ideas to the plan of the scenario; I should also add that Bakst was as much
responsible for the costumes as Golovine. My
own “collaboration” with Fokine means nothing
more than that we studied the libretto together,
episode by episode, until I knew the exact
measurements required of the music. In spite of
Fokine’s wearying homiletics, delivered at each
meeting, on the role of music as an accompaniment to dance, he taught me much, and I have
worked with choreographers somewhat in the
same way ever since. I like exact requirements.
I was flattered, of course, at the promise of
a performance of my music in Paris, and my
excitement on arriving in that city, from Ustilug,
towards the end of May, could hardly have been
greater. These ardors were somewhat cooled,
however, at the first rehearsal. The words “for
Russian export” seemed to be stamped everywhere, both on the stage and in the music. The
mimic scenes were especially obvious in this
sense, but I could say nothing about them as they
were what Fokine liked best. I was also deflated
to discover that not all of my musical remarks
were held to be oracular, and Pierné, the conductor, disagreed with me once in front of the
whole orchestra. I had written “non crescendo,”
a precaution common enough in the music of
THE FIREBIRD: A SYNOPSIS OF THE COMPLETE BALLET
Fokine’s adaptation of the fairy tale
pits the Firebird, a good fairy, against
the ogre Kashchei, whose soul is preserved as an egg in a casket. A young
prince, Ivan Tsarevich, wanders into
Kashchei’s magic garden in pursuit of
the Firebird. When he captures her,
she pleads for her release and gives
him one of her feathers, whose magic
will protect him from harm. He then
meets thirteen princesses, all under
Kashchei’s spell, and falls in love with
one of them. When he tries to follow
them into the magic garden, a great
carillon sounds an alarm and he is
captured. Kashchei is about to turn
Ivan to stone when the prince waves
the feather; the Firebird appears.
Her lullaby puts Kashchei to sleep,
and she then reveals the secret of his
immortality. Ivan opens the casket
and smashes the egg, killing Kashchei.
8
The captive princesses are freed,
and Ivan and his beloved princess
are betrothed.
A scene-by-scene breakdown of
Stravinsky’s score follows.
Introduction
Scene 1:
Kashchei’s magic garden—
Appearance of the Firebird pursued
by Ivan Tsarevich—
Dance of the Firebird—
Ivan Tsarevich captures the Firebird—
The Firebird’s entreaties—
Appearance of the thirteen
enchanted princesses—
The princesses’ game with the golden
apples (Scherzo)—
Sudden appearance of
Ivan Tsarevich—
The princesses’ khorovod
(Round dance)—
Daybreak—
Magic Carillon, appearance of
Kashchei’s guardian monsters and
the capture of Ivan Tsarevich—
Arrival of Kashchei the Immortal,
Kashchei’s dialogue with Ivan
Tsarevich, intercession of
the princesses—
Appearance of the Firebird—
Dance of Kashchei’s retinue, under the
Firebird’s spell—
Infernal dance of all
Kashchei’s subjects—
Lullaby (the Firebird), Kashchei
wakes up—
Kashchei’s Death, deep shadows—
Scene 2:
Disappearance of the palace and
dissolution of Kashchei’s enchantments; animation of the petrified
knights; general rejoicing
Costume designs by Léon Bakst for the Ballets Russes’ production of The Firebird, Paris Opera, 1910: the Firebird
(left), Tamara Karsavina as the Firebird (center), the Tsarevna (right)
the last fifty years, but Pierné said, “Young man,
if you do not want a crescendo, then do not
write anything.”
The first-night audience glittered indeed, but
the fact that it was heavily perfumed is more
vivid in my memory; the gaily elegant London
audience, when I came to know it later, seemed
almost deodorized by comparison. I sat in
Diaghilev’s box, where, at intermission, artists,
dowagers, aged Egerias of the Ballet, “intellectuals,” balletomanes, appeared. I met for the
first time Proust, Giraudoux, Paul Morand,
Saint-John Perse, Claudel (with whom, years
later, I nearly collaborated on a musical treatment
of the Book of Tobit) at The Firebird, though I
cannot remember whether at the premiere or at
subsequent performances. At one of the latter
I also met Sarah Bernhardt. She was thickly
veiled, sitting in a wheelchair in her private box,
and seemed terribly apprehensive lest anyone
should recognize her. After a month of such
society, I was happy to retire to a sleepy village
in Brittany.
A moment of unexpected comedy occurred
near the beginning of the performance.
Diaghilev had had the idea that a procession
of real horses should march on stage—in step
with, to be exact, the last six eighth notes of
bar eight. The poor animals did enter on cue all
right, but they began to neigh and whinny, and
one of them, a better critic than an actor, left a
© 2016 Chicago Symphony Orchestra
malodorous calling card. The audience laughed,
and Diaghilev decided not to risk a repetition in
future performances. That he could have tried it
even once seems incredible to me now—but the
incident was forgotten in the general acclaim for
the new ballet afterwards.
I was called to the stage to bow at the conclusion, and was recalled several times. I was
still on stage when the final curtain had come
down, and I saw Diaghilev coming towards me,
and a dark man with a double forehead, whom
he introduced as Claude Debussy. The great
composer spoke kindly about the music, ending
his words with an invitation to dine with him.
Some years later, when we were sitting together
in his box at a performance of Pelléas, I asked
him what he really thought of The Firebird. He
said, “Que voulez-vous, il fallait bien commencer
par quelque chose” [Well, you had to start with
something]. Honest, but not extremely flattering. Yet shortly after The Firebird premiere he
gave me his well-known photo (in profile) with
a dedication “à Igor Stravinski en toute sympathie artistique.” I was not so honest about the
work we were then hearing. I thought Pelléas
a great bore as a whole, and in spite of many
wonderful pages. Phillip Huscher has been the program annotator for the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1987.
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