Run Time: Approx. 22 minutes

Every young artist needs a big break—someone to take a chance on them, open the door, and put them on the map. For a young Igor Stravinsky, that person was Sergei Diaghilev.

In 1909, entrepreneur and arts patron Sergei Diagalev opened the Ballet Russes in Paris with the goal of introducing Russian art to the cultural centers of the broader world. Diagalev didn’t just want to put on Russian ballet, he wanted to create a convergence of modern art—to commission music from the best composers, sets from the greatest artists, and costumes from the most prominent designers—all to position Russian art at the highest echelon. At the height of its reign, the Ballet Russes boasted a roster of stars like Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova dancing choreography by George Balanchine (later the founder of the New York City Ballet), wearing costumes by Coco Chanel adorned by sets from Pablo Picasso.

The Ballet’s first seasons featured existing music, mostly presenting well-established Russian composers like Mikhail Glinka, Alexander Borodin, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. But Diagalev’s ambition was to be at the cutting edge of contemporary art, and he itched to begin commissioning.

Diagalev and his advisors planned their first new piece for the 1911 season. It was to be Russian through and through, so they turned to folklore for their narrative, settling on tales of a bird whose magical feathers glow with a luminous red-orange light. The story, assembled by Diagalev and his creative team from multiple sources, centers on Prince Ivan who in his quest to defeat the evil sorcerer Kashchei and free the thirteen princesses he holds captive, comes upon a Firebird. He captures her, but then lets her go, receiving a magical feather in return. With the Firebird’s help, Ivan defeats Kashchei, falls in love with one of the princesses, and frees the prisoners by breaking the evil sorcerer’s spell.

For this new project, Diagalev first approached more established composers, including Alexander Glazunov and Anatoly Lyadov, both of whom ultimately withdrew. Eventually, with a recommendation from Glazunov and a bit of a leap of faith, Diagalev turned to the young, relatively unknown Igor Stravinsky. The gamble could not have turned out better. The Firebird became a huge success, launching Stravinsky’s international career and beginning a long and definitive collaboration with the Ballets Russes.

In his approach to the music, Stravinsky employs a striking juxtaposition of avant-garde, exotic sonorities mixed with more traditional harmony. These opposing aesthetics create a distinct contrast between the story’s principal characters: the supernatural creatures like the Firebird and Kashchei are represented by the unsettling, dissonant harmonies, while the human characters are colored by more typical, grounded ones. Stravinsky refers to this technique as leit-harmony, a cousin of the leitmotif used by Humperdinck in Hänsel und Gretel.

Listen to the stark shift, for example, that occurs when the scene changes from the eerie opening world of Kashchei’s garden, where Ivan first encounters the Firebird, to when he spots the princess. Introduced by the oboe following the fleetwinged episode of the Firebird’s capture, the music turns instantly from forward-looking 20th-century harmony to something altogether more Romantic, only to be mightily disrupted by the entrance of Kashchei and his men in the Infernal Dance.

The fevered bacchanal kicks off when the Firebird casts a spell forcing the evildoers to dance themselves into exhaustion. Even to adventurous Parisian ears, the abrasiveness of the Infernal Dance must have been startling. Of course, we now know this was but a hint of what was to come in The Rite of Spring. Nevertheless, the sting is soothed by a haunting lullaby as the solo bassoon rocks the Sorcerer to sleep, enabling Ivan to find and destroy the egg that holds his power.

From the embers of the Berceuse, a horn signals the rising sun, offering hope and renewal to the freed occupants of Kashchei’s prison. The grounded, folk-like melody of the finale is backed by a continually ascending harmony, suggesting liberation, renewal, and the triumph of light over darkness. At the finale’s climax, Stravinsky uses asymmetrical time signatures to interrupt the melody in unexpected places—a favorite technique of his and one that separates him from the masses. In the hands of a lesser composer, a melody such as this might be trite. But Stravinsky knew that even when offering an inevitable conclusion, there can still be moments of wonder.