Apollon musagète

Apollon musagète (Apollo, Leader of the Muses) is a remarkable example of how unexpectedly Stravinsky’s musical style could change. He completed this one-act ballet score in 1928, at a time when his idiom’s modernist side often resisted the natural expressiveness of string instruments; some of his recent works had been written for wind instruments only. Then in Apollon musagète Stravinsky did the exact opposite, composing music of calm and poised loveliness for an orchestra of strings alone; he derived the idea from the dance forms of the French Baroque-era composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. In the ballet’s scenario, based on Greek mythology, the god Apollo encounters three of the nine Muses—Calliope, Polyhymnia and Terpsichore, representing the Classical arts of poetry, mime and dance. Apollon musagète was first performed in April 1928 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.. Two months later Stravinsky himself conducted the Paris premiere by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company; this featured choreography by George Balanchine that remains standard today.