Жар-птица: Балет Игоря Стравинского

1910 ballet by Igor Stravinsky

The Firebird (; Жар птица) is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1910 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Michel Fokine, who collaborated with Alexandre Benois and others on a scenario based on the Russian fairy tales of the Firebird and the blessing and curse it possesses for its owner. It was first performed at the Opéra de Paris on 25 June 1910 and was an immediate success, catapulting Stravinsky to international fame and leading to future Diaghilev–Stravinsky collaborations including Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). The Firebird mortal and supernatural elements are distinguished with a system of leitmotifs placed in the harmony dubbed "leit harmony". Stravinsky intentionally used many specialist techniques in the orchestra, including ponticello, col legno, flautando, glissando, and flutter tonguing. Set in the evil immortal Koschei's castle, the ballet follows Prince Ivan, who battles Koschei with the help of the magical Firebird. Stravinsky later created three concert suites based on the work: in 1911, ending with the "Infernal Dance"; in 1919, which remains the most popular today; and in 1945, featuring significant reorchestration and structural changes. Other choreographers have staged the work with Fokine's original choreography or created entirely new productions using the music, some with new settings or themes. Many recordings of the suites have been made; the first was released in 1928, using the 1911 suite. A film version of the popular Sadler's Wells Ballet production, which revived Fokine's original choreography, was produced in 1959.

Igor Stravinsky began studying composition with Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov in 1902. He completed several works during his time as a student, including his first performed work, Pastorale (1907), and his first published work, the Symphony in E flat (1907), which the composer categorized Opus 1. In February 1909, a performance of his Scherzo fantastique and Feu d'artifice in Saint Petersburg was attended by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who was intrigued by the vividness of Stravinsky's works. Diaghilev founded the art magazine Mir iskusstva in 1898, but after it ended publication in 1904, he turned towards Paris for artistic opportunities rather than his native Russia. In 1907, Diaghilev presented a five concert series of Russian music at the Paris Opera; the next year, he staged the Paris premiere of Rimsky Korsakov's version of Boris Godunov. By 1909, Diaghilev had connected with Michel Fokine, Léon Bakst, and Alexandre Benois, and gained enough money to start his independent ballet company, the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev commissioned Stravinsky to orchestrate music by Chopin for the ballet Les Sylphides, and the composer was finished by March 1909. Fokine was a renowned dancer, receiving first prize in his class upon graduation from the Imperial Theatre School in 1898; he subsequently entered the Mariinsky Ballet as a soloist and was promoted to lead dancer of the company in 1904. Fokine was dissatisfied with the ballet tradition of glamorous appeals to the audience and interruptions from viewers; he felt that dramatic dance should be strictly displayed with no interruption of illusion, and that the music should be closely connected to the theme. His 1907 ballets The Dying Swan and Les Sylphides were very successful and established Fokine as a competitor to other prominent choreographers. In 1908, Benois, a member of Diaghilev's Mir iskusstva circle and friend of Fokine's, arranged for the dancer to prepare a repertoire for the Ballets Russes' 1909 season as the company's first lead choreographer; the season was very successful, and Diaghilev began organizing plans for the 1910 season soon after.

Despite later lamenting the "descriptive music of a kind I did not want to write", Stravinsky finished The Firebird in about six months, and had it fully orchestrated by mid May 1910. Stravinsky arrived in Paris around the beginning of June to attend the premiere of his first stage work; it was his first visit to Paris. Rehearsals began in Ekaterininsky Hall, and Stravinsky attended every rehearsal to help with the music, often explaining the complicated rhythms to the dancers. Tamara Karsavina, who originated the titular Firebird role, later recalled, "Often he came early to the theatre before a rehearsal began in order to play for me over and over again some particularly difficult passage." Stravinsky also worked closely with Gabriel Pierné, who conducted the premiere with the Colonne Orchestra, to "explain the music [but the musicians] found it no less bewildering than did the dancers". Two dress rehearsals were held to accommodate the dancers, many of whom missed their entrances due to the unexpected changes in the music, "which sounded quite different when played by the orchestra from what it had sounded like when played on a piano". When the company arrived in Paris, the ballet was not finished, causing Fokine to extend rehearsals; he petitioned Diaghilev to postpone the premiere, but the impresario declined, fearing public disappointment. The Ballets Russes season began on 4 June 1910 with stagings of Schumann's Carnaval, Rimsky Korsakov's Scheherazade, and short productions from the previous season. Fokine's style of dance made great use of interpretive movement; he used ideas of expressiveness, naturalism, vitality, and stylistic consistency. The choreographer employed many forms of dance in The Firebird. The titular Firebird danced classically, Koschei and his subjects in a more violent and grotesque manner, and the Princesses in a looser, gentler way. The role of the Firebird differed from that of traditional ballerinas; female dancers often danced princesses, swans, and lovers, but the Firebird was a mysterious and abstract idea, represented as a magical force rather than a person. Her choreography featured exaggerated classical steps, with deep bending at the waist;

Excitement for the premiere was great, particularly in Diaghilev's circle of Mir iskusstva collaborators. The sculptor , who helped develop the scenario, wrote to Golovin on 16 June, "I'm staying till Sunday; I must see The Firebird. I have seen your dazzling drawings and costumes. I like Stravinsky's music in the orchestra and the dances tremendously. I think the whole thing together with your sets will look spectacular. Serov has also put off his departure because of this ballet". Diaghilev remarked of Stravinsky during rehearsals, "Mark him well, he is a man on the eve of celebrity". The Firebird premiered at the Palais Garnier on 25 June 1910, and was very well received. The cast starred Karsavina as the Firebird, Fokine as Prince Ivan, as the youngest princess, and Alexis Bulgakov as Koschei. Karsavina later told an interviewer, "With every performance, success went crescendo". Critics praised the ballet for the unity of the decor, choreography, and music. "The old gold vermiculation of the fantastic back cloth seems to have been invented to a formula identical with that of the shimmering web of the orchestra", wrote Henri Ghéon in Nouvelle revue française; he called the ballet "the most exquisite marvel of equilibrium" and added that Stravinsky was a "delicious musician". Fokine's choreography was seen as a triumph of his creative genius; the natural miming and many styles of dance displayed were popular with audiences. Many critics praised Stravinsky's alignment with Russian nationalist music, one saying, "[Stravinsky is] the only one who has achieved more than mere attempts to promote Russia's true musical spirit and style". Michel Dimitri Calvocoressi hailed the young composer as the legitimate heir to The Mighty Handful. Russian audiences viewed the work less favorably, and the Russian premiere was not well received; according to a reviewer in Apollon, "Many deserted the Hall of Nobles during the performance of this suite." A fellow Rimsky Korsakov pupil, Jāzeps Vītols, wrote that "Stravinsky, it seems, has forgotten the concept of pleasure in sound [His] dissonances unfortunately quickly become wearying, because there are no ideas hidden behind them". Nikolai Myaskovsky reviewed the piano reduction of the full ballet in October 1911 and wrote, "What a wealth of invention, how much intelligence, temperament, talent, what a remarkable, what a rare piece of work this is". Stravinsky recalled that after the premiere and subsequent performances, he met many figures in the Paris art scene, including Marcel Proust, Sarah Bernhardt, Jean Cocteau, Maurice Ravel, André Gide, and Princesse Edmond de Polignac. Claude Debussy was brought on stage after the premiere, and he invited Stravinsky to dinner, beginning a lifelong friendship between the two composers. According to Sergei Bertensson, Sergei Rachmaninoff said of the music: "Great God! What a work of genius this is! This is true Russia!" Debussy later said of Stravinsky's score, "What do you expect? One has to start somewhere." Richard Strauss told the composer in private that he had made a "mistake" in beginning the piece pianissimo instead of astonishing the public with a "sudden crash". Shortly after he summed up to the press his experience of hearing The Firebird for the first time by saying, "it's always interesting to hear one's imitators". Sergei Prokofiev, who first heard the piano reduction at a gathering, told Stravinsky, "there was no music in [the ballet's introduction] and if there was any, it was from Sadko". In his 1962 autobiography, Stravinsky credited much of the production's success to Golovin's set and Diaghilev's collaborators; he wrote that Fokine's choreography "always seemed to me to be complicated and overburdened with plastic detail, so that the artists felt, and still feel now, great difficulty in co ordinating their steps and gestures with the music". The ballet's success secured Stravinsky's position as Diaghilev's star composer, and there were immediate talks of a sequel, leading to the composition of Petrushka and The Rite of Spring.

After the success of the premiere, Diaghilev announced an expansion of performances until 7 July 1910, the last of which Stravinsky took his family to from their home in Ustilug. Andrey Rimsky Korsakov quickly traveled to Paris to see the expanded run, and he later praised the production in a letter to his mother. Following the initial run, Alexander Siloti conducted the Russian premiere on 23 October, performing an early draft of the 1911 suite. The debut London season of the Ballets Russes took place in 1912 at the Royal Opera House. The third ballet on the program was The Firebird, which was well received. Osbert Sitwell wrote: "Never until that evening had I heard Stravinsky's name; but as the ballet developed, it was impossible to mistake the genius of the composer, or of the artist who had designed the setting." The Ballets Russes revived the production in 1926 with new settings and costumes by Natalia Goncharova, using Fokine's original choreography. The revival was presented at the Lyceum Theatre in London. In 1916, the first productions of The Firebird and Petrushka on the Iberian peninsula took place; the Ballets Russes returned in 1921 for short season in Madrid. Several companies presented their own choreographies and designs of The Firebird from 1927 to 1933, including the Berlin State Opera, the Royal Swedish Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, and the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb. Many later revivals modeled their choreography after Fokine's, including Adolph Bolm's 1945 production at the Ballet Theatre and Serge Lifar's 1954 Paris Opera Ballet production. Serge Grigoriev and Lubov Tchernicheva's 1954 Sadler's Wells Ballet staging with Fokine's choreography is considered one of the most important and authentic revivals; Grigoriev and Tchernicheva worked for Diaghilev during the initial run, and the lead dancer, Margot Fonteyn, was coached by Karsavina. The Sadler's Wells staging also used Goncharova's 1926 designs. A film version of the revival was made in 1959. New York City Ballet's first big hit as a company after their founding in 1948 was its staging of The Firebird the following year, with Maria Tallchief as the Firebird, choreography by George Balanchine, and scenery and costumes by Marc Chagall. After the Firebird, dressed in a red leotard, dies in battle, he "rises from the ashes and lives again", as Béjart said in an interview for The New Yorker. In 1970, John Neumeier devised a science fiction production of the ballet set in a futuristic world but retaining the original plot. In the initial Oper Frankfurt production, Koschei is a large glass robot with CCTV eyes; the Firebird, wearing a white space suit, defeats him by destroying a specific valve in his system. Neumeier was praised by the critic Oleg Kerensky for giving the ballet "new life" and creating a fascinating effect for the audience "which the original Fokine Golovine [sic] production must have had in Paris sixty years ago". Many other choreographers have staged the work with Fokine's original choreography or created entirely new productions using the music. Stagings with new choreography include John Cranko's 1964 production with the Stuttgart Ballet, Glen Tetley's 1981 staging with the Royal Danish Ballet, John Taras's 1982 Caribbean set rendition with the Dance Theatre of Harlem, Christopher Wheeldon's 1999 production with the Boston Ballet, Krzysztof Pastor's 1999 version with the West Australian Ballet, and Alexei Ratmansky's 2012 production with the American Ballet Theatre.

Critics praised the music of The Firebird emotional character. Cyril W. Beaumont wrote: "[The Firebird] is a supreme example of how music, although having no meaning in itself, can, particularly with a programme hint of its intention, evoke a mood appropriate to the ballet concerned." referring to the "mimetic specificity" with which the music follows the story, a trait Stravinsky later disliked and apologized for. The composer wrote that The Firebird became a centerpiece in his career; his conducting debut was a ballet performance of The Firebird in 1915, and he said that he performed it "nearly a thousand times" more. Fokine's revolutionary Firebird character was part of an effort to combine new ideas with classical ballet, showing his wide ranging abilities as a choreographer. He later described his style as a diversion from the "conventional system of gesticulation" and a move towards natural expression through movement. The wide resources and experienced artists that Fokine accessed allowed him to create massive productions like The Firebird. Each character or group had their own unique choreography, creating complex scenes like the "Infernal Dance", where the Firebird enchants Koschei's subjects but they all dance differently. Dance critic Alastair Macaulay called this the "most complex choreography that had ever been attempted in ballet" at the time.

Throughout the score, Stravinsky used leitmotifs (short, recurring musical phrases associated with a particular person, place, or thing) placed in the harmony, a system he later dubbed "leit harmony". The idea of leit harmony was likely introduced to the composer through Rimsky Korsakov's operas The Golden Cockerel (1907) and Kashchey the Deathless (1902). In these works, mortal elements were associated with the diatonic scales while supernatural elements were associated with the chromatic scale. For example, Stravinsky describes Koschei's leit harmony as consisting of "Magic Thirds"; the harmony begins with a major or minor third, and the lower voice ascends a tritone while the higher voice descends a half step. The title character's leit harmony uses a chromatic descent of the first four notes of the introduction, then reversing those notes, giving the music an "iridescent sheen", as Eric Walter White described it. Stravinsky wrote that The Firebird may be the first appearance of "metrical irregularity" in his music. The passage is marked , with barlines dividing measures into sets of one and two. White wrote that the composer's earlier works made use of consistent musical pulses, "which was to be disturbed as little as possible by tempo rubato". Stravinsky remarked that he composed The Firebird in "revolt against Rimsky", and that he "tried to surpass him with ponticello, col legno, flautando, glissando, and fluttertongue effects". A performance of the full ballet lasts about 45 minutes.