Pulcinella

When first performed in 1920, the Italianate grace and Rococo manners of Stravinsky’s one-act ballet-with-song Pulcinella came as a pleasant jolt to his devotees, coming as it did after the Russian composer’s years of dabbling with ancient Russian folk traditions on the one hand and the nascent jazz style on the other. Pulcinella was one of several neo-classical ballets commissioned by the Ballets Russes’ impresario, Serge Diaghilev, who had become enamoured of Italy’s classical style, reminiscent of his beloved St Petersburg, from which he was exiled during the First World War. Diaghilev started to compile Italian music from that era, including works by Domenico Scarlatti and Pergolesi, but also including the lesser-known, deliberately frivolous piano works of Rossini. The latter pieces, which Diaghilev himself transcribed and amended to form a sequence suitable for a ballet, he persuaded the Italian Respighi to orchestrate—the result being La boutique fantasque (1919). Stravinsky, unlike Respighi, was given greater licence to do as he wished with the “Pergolesi” pieces Diaghilev gave him (half of which, as was later discovered, were in fact by other composers, a confusion caused by unscrupulous publishers misattributing these works to the well-regarded Pergolesi immediately after his death). In fact, Stravinsky did remarkably little to the originals, only very occasionally displacing or sustaining a harmony, or adding anachronistic instrumental detail such as the red-nosed trombone in the “Vivo” (a genuine Pergolesi piece). But it opened the long chapter which became known as his neoclassical period.