Music Director
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Suite from The Firebird
The heavy task of western composers in the early 20th century was to break the bonds of a centuries-old system of functional tonality, which had been pushed to chromatic extremes by such late Romantic composers as Wagner and Strauss. One solution was the development of atonal music by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern in Vienna. Atonality is achieved by intentionally avoiding the establishment of a key. These composers developed the technique of serialism. which is a method of musical composition in which all 12 chromatic tones of the octave appear in strict order with no note repeated before the sequence is completed.
Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) provided another approach, which first appeared in Le Sacre du Printemps. his third ballet score composed for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russe. Stravinsky was influenced by the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), a pianist/visionary who tried to develop a theory of composition based on the use of harmonic structures built on fourths instead of thirds. The result was a dissonant Impressionistic chromaticism.
Stravinsky was the son of a singer at the Imperial Opera in St. Petersburg, but he did not immediately plunge into a music career. He attended law school with the son of Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Rimsky-Korsakov advised Stravinsky to study music, and in 1903, Stravinsky became Rimsky-Korsakov's student Rimsky died in 1908 and Stravinsky never had another teacher.
In the opening decades of the century Paris had again become the center for intellectual and artistic life in the west. Artists and musicians from all over the world took up residency in Paris, as did Stravinsky, and many other Russians.
Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929), the Russian ballet impresario, heard some of Stravinsky's early works, and invited him to compose a ballet score. Stravinsky produced the impressionistic "Firebird" in 1910, surely reflecting Stravinsky's exposure to the work of Claude Debussy, and followed it with another ballet, "Petrouchka" followed in 1911. "Le Sacre du Printemps" was completed in 1912, the same year during which Debussy composed "Jeux", and Schoenberg wrote "Pierrot Lunaire."
Like Debussy's "Prelude a L'apres-midi d'un faune", Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du Printemps" is a seminal, innovative work in modern music history.
The "Firebird" ballet is based on a Russian supernatural fairy tale about a green-taloned ogre who represents evil, whose soul lives protected in a casket. Prince Ivan captures a bird, who eventually helps the prince to destroy the evil ogre's soul. Stravinsky reworked the score of the ballet to produce a concert suite based on it in 1919.
Notes by Beth Fisher