Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): The Firebird Suite (1919)

When the great impresario Serge Diaghilev needed a new piece for his Russian Ballet, he turned to his former teacher Anatol Liadov, a notorious procrastinator. The subject was to be the Russian folk tale of the Firebird. Liadov estimated the composition would take a year. By mutual consent, the task was given to the twenty-seven-year-old Igor Stravinsky.

Stravinsky finished The Firebird music on May 18, 1910. A French critic described the composer playing through the score at an informal gathering in St. Petersburg: “The composer, young, slim, and uncommunicative, with vague meditative eyes, and lips set firm in an energetic looking face, was at the piano. But the moment he began to play, the modest and dimly lit dwelling glowed with a dazzling radiance. By the end of the first scene, I was conquered: by the last, I was lost in admiration. The manuscript on the music-rest, scored over with fine pencilings, revealed a masterpiece.”   

At one of the rehearsals, Diaghilev observed: “Mark him well.  He is a man on the eve of celebrity.” Stravinsky's celebrity was assured at the first performance at the Paris Opera on June 25, 1910. Gabriel Pierné conducted. “The first Firebird!” Stravinsky recalled. “I stood in the dark of the Opera through eight orchestral rehearsals…. The stage and the whole theatre glittered at the première and that is all I remember.”  

Tamara Karsavina danced the title role. The choreography was by Mikhail Fokine, “easily the most disagreeable man I have ever worked with,” said Stravinsky, who was modest about the work's success. “The performance was warmly applauded by the Paris public,” he said. “I am, of course, far from attributing this success solely to the score.” After the first performance, he went out to dinner with Debussy.   

Stravinsky made three orchestral suites from The Firebird music.  The first, in 1916, was followed by a version for smaller orchestra in 1919. A third suite appeared in 1945.   

The story of the ballet concerns the young Prince Ivan hot in pursuit of the Firebird, finally capturing her in the garden of the ogre Kashchei. She begs him to set her free and gives him a magic feather when he does so. Ivan observes the dances of the captive princesses and is himself captured by the ogre, who tries to turn Ivan into a stone. But Ivan waves the magic feather, summoning the Firebird, who then reveals how to kill the ogre. This done, the princesses are freed and Ivan marries their leader, with the blessing of the Firebird. According to Stravinsky, Ivan succeeds “because he yielded to pity, a wholly Christian notion which dominates the imagination and the ideas of the Russian people.”

Program Notes by Charley Samson, copyright 2022.