Suite from The Firebird (1919 version)

Quick Facts

• Composer’s life: Born June 17, 1882, in Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov), Russia; died April 6, 1971, in New York City
• Year completed: 1919
• First performance (1910 ballet): June 25, 1910, by the Ballets Russes at the Paris Opéra
• First BSO performances (1919 suite): Igor Stravinsky conducting, March 14, 1935, at Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, MA, and March 15-16, 1935, at Symphony Hall
• Approximate duration: 22 minutes

The score of the Firebird Suite in the 1919 version calls for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes and English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, bass drum, xylophone, tambourine, cymbals, harp, piano, celesta, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses). The 1919 suite is about 22 minutes long.

The Russian legend of the Firebird had been discussed as a possible subject for a ballet by Ballets Russes impresario Serge Diaghilev and his staff early in 1909. Michel Fokine, who was to create the choreography, worked out the scenario by combining several Russian fairy tales. The choice of composer was problematic; Diaghilev wanted his former teacher Anatoly Liadov (1855-1914), but the latter was notoriously slow about finishing scores. So, in the fall of 1909, the impresario approached the twenty-seven-year-old Igor Stravinsky, whose brief orchestral work Fireworks he had heard earlier in the year. Stravinsky had just completed the first act of his opera The Nightingale, but he immediately recognized the extraordinary opportunity that a Ballets Russes commission represented. He was also excited about writing big, formal dance numbers. He did have reservations about the necessity of writing gestural music to fit the dramatic passages of mime that related the story. Much later, in Expositions and Developments, one of his series of published “conversations” with Robert Craft, he claimed, “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.”

Nonetheless, Stravinsky was so enthusiastic about the project that he began composing the score in November, six weeks before Diaghilev was able to offer a formal commission. He wrote the opening pages at a dacha belonging to the family of his late teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, about seventy miles south of St. Petersburg. Returning to the city in December, he finished the piece by March and the full orchestration by the following month. The final date on the manuscript, May 18, 1910, reflects a last period of refinement.

The premiere of the lavishly colorful ballet marked a signal triumph for the Ballets Russes and put Stravinsky on the map. Diaghilev could hardly wait to get another work from him, and in the ensuing years he quickly turned out Petrushka and the epoch-making Rite of Spring—all this before having time to return to his unfinished opera! When he finally did get back to The Nightingale, Stravinsky was already among the most famous and influential composers of the century, though a vastly different composer from the one who had written the first act of that oddly divergent work.

The scenario of The Firebird involves the interaction of human characters with two supernatural figures: the magic Firebird and the evil sorcerer Kashchei, a green-taloned ogre who cannot be killed except by destroying his soul, which is preserved in a casket in the form of an egg. Stravinsky needed to find a way to distinguish musically between the human and the supernatural elements of the story. He used some of the same means employed by Rimsky-Korsakov in his last (and best-known) opera, The Golden Cockerel (which had not yet been performed when Stravinsky started work, though he certainly knew its score): the humans are represented by diatonic, often folklike, melodies, the supernatural figures by chromatic ideas, slithery for Kashchei and his realm or shimmering arabesques for the Firebird (whose music is largely derived from a single motive).

The complete ballet is like a danced opera, with “recitative” (the gestural music) and “arias” (the set pieces). Despite Stravinsky’s later claim that he had not wanted to write gestural music, he shaped his music to follow Fokine’s scenario in elaborate and effective detail. The Firebird is most often heard in one or another of Stravinsky’s suites, which omit some of the repetition and development of the full ballet score. The 1919 Suite opens with the ballet’s Introduction, with its mood of magical awe. The double basses present a melodic figure (two semitones and a major third) that lies behind all the music of the Firebird. Following a shower of brilliant harmonics on the violins (played with a new technique invented by Stravinsky for this passage), a muted horn signals the curtain’s rise on a nocturnal scene in the Enchanted Garden of Kashchei, returning to the mysterious music of the opening (with a chromatic bassoon phrase foreshadowing the sorcerer). Suddenly the Firebird appears (shimmering strings and woodwinds), pursued by a young prince, Ivan Tsarevich. The Firebird performs a lively dance, shot through with brilliant high interjections from the upper woodwinds. But Ivan Tsarevich captures the magic bird (horn chords sforzando) as it flutters around a tree of golden apples. The Firebird appeals to be freed in an extended solo dance, but Ivan takes one of its magic feathers before allowing it to depart.

Thirteen enchanted princesses, the captives of Kashchei, appear—tentatively at first —shake the apple tree, then use the fallen fruit for a game of catch. Ivan Tsarevich interrupts their game, for he has fallen in love with one of them. They dance a khorovod (a stately slow round dance) to one of the favorite passages of the score, a melody first introduced by the solo oboe (this is an actual folk song).

In pursuit of the princesses, Ivan Tsarevich enters the palace, where he is captured by the monsters that serve as Kashchei’s guards. In the suite the music then jumps to the point at which Kashchei begins to turn Ivan into stone, making a series of magic gestures: one—two—... But before he can make the third and final gesture, Ivan Tsarevich remembers the Firebird’s feather; he waves it, summoning the Firebird to his aid. Kashchei’s followers are enchanted by the magic bird, who sets them dancing to an “infernal dance” of wild syncopation and striking energy.

The Firebird also indicates to the Prince where he can find—and destroy—the soul of Kashchei, whereupon all the knights that had been turned to stone before come back to life (in a sweetly descending phrase of folklike character) and all take part in a dance of general happiness (a more energetic version of the same phrase). The Firebird has disappeared, but its music, now rendered more “human” in triadic harmony, sounds in the orchestra as the curtain falls.

Though much of The Firebird is of a piece with Rimsky-Korsakov’s fairy tale opera composed only a short time previously, there are things in the manner of Stravinsky’s score that already foreshadow the revolutionary composer to come: the inventive ear for new and striking sounds, the love of rhythmic irregularities (though there is much less of it here than in the later ballets), and the predilection for using ostinatos—repeated fragments of a melodic and rhythmic idea—to build up passages of great excitement, a procedure that will reach the utmost in visceral force with The Rite of Spring. As seen from the vantage point of today, The Firebird is almost a romantic work of the last century, but the dancers at the first performance found the music demanding, challenging them to the utmost. If, in listening to this familiar score, we can cast our minds back into the framework of 1910, we may be able to sense afresh the excitement of being on the verge of a revolution.

Steven Ledbetter

Steven Ledbetter, a freelance writer and lecturer on music, was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998.