2023-07-08 07:13:06
From 1910 to 1913, Igor Stravinsky produced three works, at the request of the performance entrepreneur Serge de Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes, those who have been delighting Paris for a year. The composer is still steeped in his national “atavism”, forged in particular with his master Rimsky-Korsakov and his many evenings spent at the Mariinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg, listening to works by Tchaikovsky or Glinka.
Second choice however (Diaghilev had first approached Anatoli Liadov), the young artist then aged 27 obtained a triumph at the Paris Opera on June 25, 1910, with Fire Bird. The plot borrows from a fairy tale the story of a prince who captures a magical bird, then releases it in exchange for some of its feathers capable of defeating evil. And the score, still marked by post-romantic features, notably in the splendor of its orchestration, already sounds “exotic” by a motricity in the rhythms and orientalizing melodic turns.
A triumph and a bomb
The following season, to a libretto by Alexandre Benois (also from Saint Petersburg), Stravinsky offered the Ballets Russes a new opus, Petrouchkasubtitle burlesque scenes. It follows the misfortunes of a puppet who, coming to life, falls in love before being torn to pieces by its builder. The show premiered at the Châtelet on June 13, 1911. The orchestra is still imposing but treated in a mosaic of instrumental configurations, while the chord attached to the main character punctuates the entire score with the savagery of popular songs. New triumph.
But it was May 29, 1913, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées just inaugurated, with the stormy creation of Rite of Spring, that the bomb placed by Igor Stravinsky in the history of the music of his century really burst. These Paintings of pagan Russia echo the ceremony which welcomed the renewal of nature through the sacrifice of a young adolescent girl. This ancestral barbarism emerges from the extreme registers “inflicted” on the instruments and, above all, from a rhythm “deconstructed” by the irregular superposition of measures.
A dreamy poster
When they were created, these three works had benefited from the talents of exceptional collaborators: the choreographers and dancers Michel Fokine, Tamara Karsavina or Vaslav Nijinski; the scenographers Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois or Nicholas Roerich; the conductors Gabriel Pierné or Pierre Monteux.
Stravinsky, constantly revising his works, condensed these ballets into orchestral suites, themselves often retouched. Fire Bird has three versions, dating respectively from 1910, 1919 and 1945; that of Petrouchka performed in 1911 was revised in 1947, the year in which the score of the Sacre was also revised.
Once a Russian, always a Russian
Even if Igor Stravinsky, during a long career of more than seventy years, shared between Russia, Switzerland, France and the United States, tried all aesthetics (neoclassical, serial… ), it is still to his Russian inspiration that his fame remains attached.
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