The Firebird

The phrase ‘City of Love’ hardly does justice to the complexity of Paris as a cultural metropolis. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the city, with its wealth of great artists, was a good starting point for anyone trying to be in the right place at the right time. Unfortunately, Emmanuel Chabrier never managed this; quite the opposite, in fact: his opera ‘Le roi malgré lui’ was largely dogged by misfortune – the Opéra-Comique in Paris burned down a week after its premiere, and Chabrier’s opera never really came into its own even afterwards. Only the ‘Fête polonaise’, performed here, soon found its way into the repertoire in its orchestral version. The counter-example to this is Igor Stravinsky’s ‘The Firebird’, for even the first performance caused a sensation throughout Paris, something not even the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who commissioned the work, had foreseen. After all, the unknown Stravinsky was neither his first nor his second choice. A stroke of luck for Diaghilev, then, and just the ticket for the Parisian audience. Others, however, including Sergei Prokofiev, had to take a roundabout route before they met with favourable reactions. In Chicago, Prokofiev’s powerful touch and the unusual harmonies of his Third Piano Concerto left the concert hall largely cold. It was quite different in Paris: his performance was a great success, and artists such as Maurice Ravel marvelled at his compositional and pianistic artistry. Prokofiev had found his home in Paris, even if this meant emigrating from the homeland he missed.

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