H.C. Andersen centret

H. Colin Slim: About "The Nightingale" (1914) and "The Fairy's Kiss (1928)

Stravinsky was a longtime enthusiast of the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, whose story The Nightingale was the inspiration for the composer's opera Le rossignol (1908-1914). In 1928, when actress-impresario Ida Rubinstein commissioned a ballet from Stravinsky, he combined his appreciation for Andersen's work with a long-harbored notion of using melodies from the music of his compatriot Tchaikovsky as the basis for a new composition. The result was Le baiser de la fée (1928) or, in its full translated title, "The Fairy's Kiss, Allegorical Ballet in Four Tableaux, Inspired by the Muse of Tchaikovsky." The ballet is based on Andersen's tale "The Ice Maiden." Stravinsky provides a compact synopsis of the story in his autobiography: "A fairy imprints her magic kiss on a child at birth and parts it from its mother. Twenty years later, when the youth has attained the very zenith of his good fortune, she repeats the fatal kiss and carries him off to live in supreme happiness with her ever afterward." The sonic language of this ballet might be described as a combination of Tchaikovsky's opulent melodies spiked with a bit of 1920s dissonance, a characteristically colorful orchestral palette, and a hint of the emotional coolness typical of Stravinsky's neo-Classical style. Stravinsky does employ some Tchaikovskian sounds and instrumental combinations, but the textures are consistently leaner than those in Tchaikovsky's own ballets. In 1934, Stravinsky condensed the nearly hour-long ballet into a Divertimento of some 25 minutes. Around the same time, he transcribed the Divertimento for violin and piano for his own use during concert tours with violinist Samuel Dushkin.

Notes, Second Series, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Mar., 2003) pp. 542-55.

(Bibliografisk kilde: HCAH)