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demons. With Bolm as the Prince and Karsavina as the Firebird, it was performed in June, 1910, the first work of Stravinsky in his own right to be heard outside of Russia. Debussy rushed backstage to embrace him. The audience was delighted to appreciate music that was contemporary without being uncomfortable and Diaghilev was congratulated on every hand. He at once commissioned another ballet for the following season. When Stravinsky played for him a piece for piano and orchestra which he had already written on the adventures of Petrouchka, “the immortal and unhappy puppet, hero of every fair in every country,” Diaghilev was enchanted. Together they worked out the scenes of the ballet, the carnival in the public square, the crowds and booths, the magician with his tricks, the gypsies and trained bear, the puppet show whose dolls come to life, the vain love of Petrouchka for the Dancer and his death at the hands of his rival, the Moor.

Petrouchka was music of power and vitality, close to the Russian people, with folk tunes and echoes of the hurdy-gurdy, humor and satire and poignant grief. Like Strauss, Stravinsky scorned development of themes but in a tradition he had inherited from the Russian “Five” rather than from Germany. Almost contrary to the nature of music, which traditionally depended on development and repetition, Stravinsky was terse and direct, aiming, as he said, “at straightforward expression in its simplest form. I have no use for ‘working-out’ in dramatic music. The one essential thing is to feel and convey one’s feelings.”

In this Petrouchka succeeded and Paris acknowledged what Debussy’s embrace had already recognized: the appearance of an original and major composer. Nijinsky as the puppet broke the audience’s heart. Thrown by his master into a black box, rushing about waving his stiff arms in the air, pathetic in love and frantic in jealousy, his performance was a triumph just in time for the London season.

England greeted the Russian Ballet with a fervor equal to France. In the brilliant Coronation summer of 1911 “it was exciting to be alive.” The heat broke records, festivities were at a peak, airplanes landed on country lawns, everybody was stimulated by the thrill of flight but the Russian Ballet “crowned all.” It restored the dance to its “primal nobility,” wrote Ellen Terry. It was a revelation in the harmony of the arts. Society, intellectuals, everyone with any pretensions to taste, flocked to Covent Garden “night after night, entranced.” Nijinsky enraptured all who came: as the uncouth puppet, as the Negro slave in silver trousers of Schéhérazade, as Pierrot in a candle-lit garden chasing dancers dressed as butterflies to music by Schumann, as the Blue God rising from a lotus in a Chinese pool to music by Proust’s friend Reynaldo Hahn, as the ghost of a rose in a costume of petals, flying out of a window in a famous leap that made people say his element was the air. Speaking no English and hardly any French, he became the darling of the dinner parties, speechless but smiling.

Impelled by triumph, like Strauss, to try for new sensation, Diaghilev in the season of 1912 succeeded in shocking Paris. He produced two new ballets by French composers. Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, written for the occasion, was acknowledged by Stravinsky “one of the finest things by a French composer.” Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune, whose music was already known, was a scandal for non-musical reasons. Nijinsky was the Faun in skin-fitting tights painted in animal spots, with a tiny tail, a wig of tight curls made of gold cord, and two little curling horns. In a ballet lasting twelve minutes he chased nymphs in Greek gowns and, as the last escaped him, leaving behind her veil, fell upon it in a movement of sexual consummation. The choreography in this case was Nijinsky’s own. The curtain fell upon hoots, whistles, and insults mixed with cries of “épatant!” and “Bis, bis!” Obliging, the company danced the ballet over again to “indescribable chaos.” Next morning Gaston Calmette, the editor of Figaro, published