“Pulcinella,“ Suite (1949 revised version)

Program notes

About the Work

Pulcinella is the work that launched Stravinsky’s neoclassical phase, and it began with a suggestion from Diaghilev. In 1919, the impresario presented Stravinsky with a stack of musical manuscripts he had unearthed in libraries in Naples and London: pieces attributed (largely incorrectly, as it turned out) to the Italian Baroque composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. Diaghilev wanted Stravinsky to arrange them into a ballet score on the commedia dell’arte character of Pulcinella.

Stravinsky was sceptical at first, but once he started studying the manuscripts, he was hooked. The result was something far more interesting than a simple arrangement: Stravinsky kept the original melodies and basslines almost intact, but reharmonised them, re-orchestrated them with strikingly modern instrumental colour, and laced them through with rhythmic dislocations and “wrong-note” cadences entirely his own. The ballet premiered at the Paris Opéra on 15 May 1920, with sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso and choreography by Léonide Massine. Stravinsky later extracted a purely instrumental concert suite, premiered by Pierre Monteux and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in December 1922; the version performed tonight is his final 1949 revision.

Listen for the Vivo, a moment of pure musical comedy. Listen too for the Serenata, where a Baroque melody is suddenly punctured by Stravinsky’s cool, archly modern harmonies. The whole work is a sustained act of loving mischief: Stravinsky later called it “my discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible.”