Igor Stravinsky
“Pulcinella”, Suite (revised version from 1949) Igor Stravinsky “Pulcinella”, Suite (revised version from 1949)

In the spring of 1917, Igor Stravinsky met the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso in Rome for the first time. The two artists immediately took to one another: “We travelled together to Naples and spent several weeks there in constant company. We were both deeply impressed by the commedia dell’arte that we saw in a tiny, overcrowded room reeking of garlic. The Pulcinella was a great drunken lout, and every one of his gestures – and probably every word, had I understood it – was obscene.” In this episode, as Stravinsky recalled it, lies the origin of Pulcinella, the ballet that the two of them – Stravinsky as composer and Picasso as set and costume designer – would create a few years later for the Ballets Russes in Paris; there, presented not in a raw, alcohol-infused tavern setting, but with stylised distance. For Sergei Diaghilev, the founder and director of the “Russian Ballets,” Stravinsky had already written several scores that established his international fame, above all The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring. By this time, Diaghilev had developed a taste for appealing to audiences through the familiar: he commissioned new works based on rearrangements of earlier composers, drawing for instance on Domenico Scarlatti (The Good-Humoured Ladies, arranged by Vincenzo Tommasini) or Gioachino Rossini (La Boutique fantasque, arranged by Ottorino Respighi).

In 1919, Diaghilev asked Stravinsky “to produce a new piece based on the music of another famous Italian whom I, as he knew, esteemed and admired: Pergolesi.” This description was a later embellishment, for the composer had at first found the idea of working with the music of a half‑forgotten Italian baroque composer rather absurd – but he quickly discovered unexpected potential in it. In the end, rather than providing “a painfully well‑behaved orchestration of something very pretty,” as Diaghilev had expected, Stravinsky delivered something altogether different. Though he left the melodies largely untouched, the orchestration is bold, even cheeky, cutting asymmetries into the geometric regularity of the baroque, removing bars or beats to trip the music up and make it stumble. He sharpened the cosy cadences by layering different keys on top of one another, and accelerated the tempo to the breakneck point. Whereas the score was understood at the time as a mere orchestration devoid of creative input, Pulcinella is today recognised as a harbinger of the neoclassical period in music: Stravinsky composed “music about music.”

The scenario, devised by choreographer (and dancer of the title role) Léonide Massine and based on a historical source, plays just as freely with elements of the traditional commedia dell’arte: two young women turn away from their fiancés and cast flirtatious glances at the charming Pulcinella; he must fend off attacks on his life and overcome the jealousy of his lover Pimpinella in order to reunite all three couples in the end.