1 Sinfonia
2 Danses suisses
3 Scherzo
4 Pas de deux
a) Adagio
b) Variation
c) Coda
Stravinsky was one of the 20th century’s great tastemakers. His new works generally came as a surprise – and few more so than The Fairy’s Kiss, a ballet based on music by Tchaikovsky. The Romantic master was, at the time, firmly old hat. He seemed to embody all that Modernist Stravinsky eschewed: decadence, lyricism, sentimentality. And yet, when the work was unveiled at the Paris Opéra – performed by former Ballet Russes dancer Ida Rubinstein’s new company – it eluded these criticisms. Stravinsky, it seems, had taken the old hat and made it vintage.
The idea in fact came from stage designer Alexandre Benois, with whom Stravinsky had collaborated for Petrushka (1911) and The Nightingale (1908–14). But clearly it struck a chord with the composer, by now well into his ‘neo-Classical’ period. Indeed, he had already found in Tchaikovsky an early model for this new direction, as demonstrated in the 1921 operetta Mavra. Like that work, The Fairy’s Kiss is a heartfelt tribute to a composer who had played a vital role in Stravinsky’s St Petersburg childhood, and whose works Stravinsky often conducted alongside his own.
The ballet comprises some 17 songs and piano pieces woven together with Stravinsky’s own elaborations and linking passages. Tonight’s suite, devised several years later and titled Divertimento, fuses long sections from each of the ballet’s four scenes. Unlike another neo-Classical re-composition, Pulcinella (1920), which keeps its sources largely intact, here Stravinsky pulls them apart, re-jigging melodies and harmonies and making virtues out of supposed Tchaikovskyan ‘defects’ such as sequence and unvaried repetition. And while the orchestrations are generally in the harder-edged, Modernist mould, he doesn’t shy away from a sweeping tune – as in the climax of the third tableau, which is based on Tchaikovsky’s famous song ‘None but the lonely heart’. As a result, it is hard to tell what is borrowed and what is new.
The ballet’s scenario is based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen: a young boy is kissed by an Ice Maiden who, years later, on the eve of his wedding, returns to claim him as her own. This was Stravinsky’s idea. He saw in the story an allegory for the composer’s own life: a young man branded with a fatal kiss – ie the taint of vulgarity and excess – ‘whose mysterious imprint made itself felt in all the work of this great artist’, as he wrote in the score’s dedication. In this context, The Fairy’s Kiss might be seen as an attempt by Stravinsky to clear Tchaikovsky’s name, to highlight his craft and originally, and in so doing repay a childhood debt.