Divertimento from The Fairy’s Kiss (rev. 1949)

Program notes

About the Work

The Divertimento is a concert suite that Stravinsky drew from his 1928 ballet The Fairy’s Kiss (Le Baiser de la fée), a work that is, in effect, a loving homage to Tchaikovsky. Commissioned by the dancer Ida Rubinstein to mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of Tchaikovsky’s death, the ballet took as its starting point a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, ‘The Ice Maiden,’ in which a fairy marks a baby boy with her kiss and later, on his wedding day, claims him for her own. Stravinsky saw in this an allegory of Tchaikovsky himself, touched in the cradle by the muse and claimed by an early death, and built the whole score out of Tchaikovsky’s own music, taking lesser-known piano pieces and songs and weaving, orchestrating and transforming them into something unmistakably his own.

The result is one of the warmest and most approachable of Stravinsky’s neoclassical scores. Rather than the granitic modernism of The Rite of Spring, here we find elegance, lyricism and affectionate wit: Tchaikovsky’s melodies, refracted through Stravinsky’s cooler, more angular sensibility, with crisp rhythms, transparent textures and sly harmonic sidesteps. In 1934 Stravinsky extracted the Divertimento, a four-movement orchestral suite of the ballet’s most appealing music (Sinfonia; Danses suisses; Scherzo; Pas de deux), and he revised it in 1949. It distils the ballet’s charm into a compact concert work that makes a graceful, sparkling opening to the programme.

What to Listen For

Listen for the unusual double identity of this music: Tchaikovsky’s tunes heard through Stravinsky’s ears. The melodies have a Romantic, lyrical warmth that is pure Tchaikovsky, but they are dressed in Stravinsky’s clean, pointed orchestration, with sudden rhythmic kinks, dry wind sonorities and a slightly detached, ironic poise. The game of the piece is hearing where one composer ends and the other begins.

Follow the four movements: the opening Sinfonia, with its broad lyrical sweep; the lively, folk-flavoured ‘Swiss Dances’ (the ballet has an Alpine setting), full of perky tunes and dancing rhythms; the glittering, fairy-light Scherzo; and the great Pas de deux, the emotional heart of the suite, where a long, tender melody unfolds with real warmth before the music builds to a brilliant, energetic close. Throughout, listen for Stravinsky’s superb craftsmanship: the clarity of his textures, the precision of his rhythms, and the affection beneath the elegant surface.