Stravinsky’s earliest work followed from that of his teacher, Russian nationalist composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. But in three famous ballet scores written for the Ballets Russes (Russian Ballet) in Paris, Stravinsky rapidly developed his own powerful, hard-edged avant-garde style, a style that can be compared to the contemporary fauve style in French painting (see page 308). These ballets reveal a fascinating progression toward a more and more abstract use of folk tunes. Compare the development of abstraction in art by Kandinsky and Picasso (pages 307 and 309).

The first ballet, The Firebird (1910), spins a romantic fairy tale about the magical Firebird, the ogre Kastchei, and Prince Ivan Tsarevitch, son of the tsar. Its rich, half-Asian setting is matched by beautifully colored folk music and orchestral sound worthy of Debussy. But in the next ballet, Stravinsky moved from the steppes to the urban marketplace, to Mardi Gras in St. Petersburg. Petrushka (1911), the story of a carnival barker and his puppet, encouraged him to put a hard, satirical edge on his folk material. Then in The Rite of Spring (1913), Stravinsky boldly and brutally imagined the fertility cults of prehistoric Slavic tribes. Here Russian folk music, broken down into repeated, fragmentary motives, is treated as the source of primitive rhythmic and sexual energy, rather than picture-postcard charm.

The musical style that Stravinsky brought to a head in The Rite has many features that struck listeners of the time as barbaric, apart from its use of deliberately crude folk-tune fragments. The music is abstract in the sense that it sounds utterly unemotional, by Romantic standards. It is grindingly dissonant. It emphasizes meter in a very heavy, exciting way, and the rhythms themselves are dazzling and unpredictable. Finally, the score is enormously loud: It demands a colossal orchestra, as though the composer wanted to show how he could control — and transform — the chief powerhouse of musical Romanticism.