Carnegie Hall

Stravinsky was in his 20s and at the beginning of his career when he wrote The Firebird in 1910, his first big hit and a summation of the Rimsky-Korsakov tradition with which he grew up. Many years later in 1962, Stravinsky penned an essay, “The Firebird’s First Flight,” that included some hard and humorous words about the 1910 ballet score that propelled him to fame as a young man. To the 80-year-old composer, who had long before succumbed to neoclassicism, the work seemed overlong, overwrought, and lacking in “real musical invention.” Commenting on the live horses trotted out by impresario Sergei Diaghilev at the Paris premiere, Stravinsky wrote that “one of them, a better critic than actor, left a malodorous calling card.” Even the positive reaction of the Paris audience seemed suspect to him in retrospect. “The Parisian audience wanted a taste of the avant-garde; and The Firebird was just that,” he wrote. “To this explanation I would add that The Firebird belongs to the styles of its time, and that while it is more vigorous than most of the music of the period, it is also not too original—good conditions for a success.”

To be sure, there were a few aspects that continued to “delight” Stravinsky in his old age: He still liked the innovative natural-harmonic string glissando “which the bass chord touches off like a Catherine wheel,” and he was still fond of the rhythmic irregularities in the finale and the intervallic ones in the introduction and Kastchei sections. “When, one day in the future, some poor doctoral candidate sifts my early works for their ‘serial tendencies,’” he predicted, “this sort of thing will, I suppose, rate as an Ur-example.”

Splendor and Magic

For most of us, Stravinsky’s retrospective grumblings are swept away by the splendor and magic of the music. Of the many transitional works from the period—Mahler’s symphonies, Scriabin’s tone poems, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Gurre-Lieder—The Firebird retains what is perhaps the most endearing freshness and vital sense of possibility. It is in the “twilight of Romanticism” genre, but it also points the way irresistibly forward. The exhilarating violence of the “Infernal Dance,” the ominous bass rumblings in the introduction, the breathless shimmer of strings at the beginning of the finale, and the granitic blocks of sound at the end all have the distinctive Stravinsky sound and personality—a tantalizing forecast of Pétrouchka and The Rite of Spring. Even the more Rimsky-Korsakovian moments, such as the dream-like berceuse and the limpid Khorovod, seem part of a new context.

To remedy what he considered to be the “wastefully large” orchestra of the original ballet score and the first suite from late 1910, Stravinsky composed two pared down suites (“criticisms stronger than words,” as he called them)—one in 1919, the other in 1945. Nevertheless, as singer-journalist William Zakariasen has pointed out, it is only in the opulent uncut version that The Firebird stands as “the one great bridge between Romanticism and modernism in Russian music.”

Completed in 1910, Stravinsky’s The Firebird received its first complete Carnegie Hall performance on February 5, 1974, with The Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Lorin Maazel.

Photography: All photography courtesy of the Carnegie Hall Rose Archives.