04 July 2008

This ballet score, Stravinsky's longest work apart from his operas, was commissioned by Ida Rubinstein, a Russian dance-actress of formidable beauty and no less formidable wealth who generally got what she wanted. She had come to Paris with Diaghilev's company in 1909, but soon left to go it alone. In 1911 she put on Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, a lavish spectacle with sensuous poetic dialogue by Gabriele d'Annunzio and music by Debussy. She also commissioned Ravel's La Valse (1920) and Boléro (1928), as well as works that allowed her to appear in a musical context as an actress, including Stravinsky's Perséphone (1934) and Honegger's Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher (1938).

Le Baiser de la fée (The Fairy's Kiss) came about as a result of an invitation she extended to Stravinsky in December 1927, proposing a ballet to be based on music by Tchaikovsky. She knew her man. Stravinsky, who remembered that once, as a boy, he had glimpsed the great composer at the Mariinsky Theatre, venerated Tchaikovsky, and had orchestrated missing parts of The Sleeping Beauty for Diagilev's presentation in 1921. Drawing now on songs and piano pieces by his great predecessor ­ as well as on his ability to imitate Tchaikovsky's manner and to work from within a joint personality, Tchaivinsky ­ he created the 45 minute score between July and October 1928.

The first performance took place at the Paris Opera on 27 November, with Rubinstein as the Fairy, in a production to which two other old Diaghilev hands contributed: the choreographer Bronislava Nijinska (sister of the famous dancer), who had been responsible for the first stagings of Stravinsky's Renard and Les Noces, and the designer Alexandre Benois, who had worked on the scenario and designs of Petrushka.

The scenario in this instance was drawn from Hans Christian Andersen, as with the composer's earlier fairytale for the theatre, The Nightingale. It is not clear who chose the tale of the Ice Maiden as the subject, but it was Stravinsky who set on the title, after he had started work and discovered he was 'retaining only the skeleton of the story', as he wrote to Benois. This skeleton he summarized as follows: 'A fairy marks a young boy in his infancy with a mysterious kiss. She claims him from the arms of his mother, and, on the day of his greatest happiness, claims him from life, in order to possess him and thus to preserve an unchanging happiness.' 'I relate the fairy to Tchaikovksy's Muse', he went on, 'who similarly marked him with her fatal kiss, the mysterious imprint of which one senses on all the works of this great artist.' How could it not be there also on Le Baiser de la fée, this posthumous masterpiece?

The opening is based on Tchaikovsky's 'Lullaby in a Storm', the tenth of his Sixteen Songs for Children, Op.54. Becoming more vigorous, the music depicts the storm, in which a mother carrying her baby son is chased by spirits, who capture the child and convey him to the Fairy. The Fairy implants her kiss (the music comes to a passionate Tchaikovskian climax), then abandons her prey to be found by Swiss villagers. There is a brief return to the lullaby before a new rush of energy and anxiety leads into the second scene.

This starts with a medley of Swiss dances, having as refrain a horn-heavy number for which Stravinsky used Tchaikovsky's piano Humoresque. The stolen boy is now a young man, happy and in love, but in the latter part of the scene the Fairy is observed (and heard, with a reminiscence from the first scene) overseeing him. Here, by Stravinsky's own account, the music mimics parts of The Sleeping Beauty.

So it does at the gentle start of the third scene, whose second section is a scherzo with trio. People have come to celebrate the young man's wedding, and there follows a grand pas de deux for him and his bride. This comprises an opening section with warm rising gestures, an adagio with solo cello taking the melody of Tchaikovsky's song 'None but the lonely heart', a lively dance with flutes and pizzicato strings, and a galloping coda.

The bride, however, is found to have disappeared after this last number, and the final scene opens with the young man alone. He remembers the 'None but the lonely heart' adagio, but overpowering this comes the music of the Fairy's kiss, still more passionate than before. She takes him in an eternal embrace, as the music arrives at a 'Lullaby of the Land Beyond Time and Place'.

ENDS