Summary: On June 25, 1910 – 108 years ago today – Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird received its premiere at the Paris Opera House, in a ballet performance produced by Serge Diaghilev, staged by the Ballets Russes, and conducted by Gabriel Pierné. With choreography by Michel Fokine and the Firebird herself danced by the great Tamara Karsavina, The Firebird was a smash, a sensation, a runaway hit from the first. The not-quite 28-year-old Stravinsky was hailed as the successor to the Moguchaya Kuchka, the Russian Five, the group of nineteenth-century composers who put Russian nationalist music on the international musical map: Mily Balakirev, Cesar Cui, Modest Musorgsky, Alexander Borodin, and Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov.<br> Writing in the Nouvelle Revue française, the critic Henri Ghéon called The Firebird:<br> “the most exquisite marvel of equilibrium that we have ever imagined between sounds, movements, and forms: [a] danced symphony.”<br> There’s no need to quote additional reviews, because one after the other, they echo the one just quoted.<br> Thanks to The Firebird’s triumph, the young Stravinsky instantly became the star composer of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, in which capacity he would turn out the magnificent Petrushka in 1911 and the seminal The Rite of Spring in 1913.<br> The Firebird is indeed a beautifully crafted, gorgeously orchestrated piece. And if in truth much (if not most) of it sounds as if it could have been composed by Alexander Borodin or Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov 40 years earlier, there are still enough moments of genuine modernism in it (for example, “The Infernal Dance” and the asymmetrical phrases of the Finale) that the piece sounds suitably up-to-date.<br> At that triumphant premiere 108 years ago today, no one in the audience would have guessed that a scant few years before Stravinsky was still but a compositional amateur. We hear and read all the time about musical child prodigies but rarely about adult prodigies. Stravinsky was among the greatest adult musical prodigies of all time, and his story bears telling, if for no other reason to remind us that we can accomplish great things at any point of our lives provided we’re determined and not hard work-averse.<br> Igor Stravinsky<br> Igor Stravinsky was born on June 17 (Gregorian calendar; June 5th according to the Russian, Julian calendar), 1882, in the town of Oranienbaum (today known as Lomonosov), on the Gulf of Finland about 35 miles west of St. Petersburg.<br> Stravinsky’s family was considered minor nobility: his mother Anna came from the landowning, governing class of 19th century Russia, and his father Fyodor was one of the great operatic bass-baritones of his time, a singer whose career coincided with the golden age of Russian opera.<br> In 1876, Fyodor became a member of the Imperial Theater in St. Petersburg. It was there that Stravinsky grew up, with his three brothers (two older, one younger), his mother and father, and the servants (as many as five or six), in an eight-room, second-story flat in the center of town.<br> The St. Petersburg in which Stravinsky grew up was an amazing mix of Western and Eastern Europe, of rich and poor, of city people and country peasantry. The impressions made on the young Stravinsky were indelible; the exotic confrontation and synthesis of East and West that he witnessed on a daily basis cut through to his very soul. It was a confrontation and synthesis that would come to lie at the heart of his music.<br> Stravinsky’s hated school, made few friends, and was a poor student; in his own words, a student:<br> “Who studied badly and behaved no better.” <br> <a href="https://robertgreenbergmusic.com/course/great-masters-stravinsky-life-music/"></a>Precisely when Stravinsky began taking piano lessons is still unclear; it was probably around the age of ten. At about the same time he began attending the opera and concerts. As far as his music education went, that was about it: by the age of 17,
