Scene One

This fairy tale ballet is set in Tsarist Russia. Prince Ivan, son of the Tsar, is wandering through the forest one night. He comes upon the magical Firebird, who tries to hide, but is soon captured by him. She begs to be set free, but Ivan is reluctant to release the enchanting creature. The Firebird offers him one of her feathers, promising that, with it, he can summon her to his aid if ever he encounters trouble. Ivan agrees and releases the Firebird.



Later on, Ivan arrives at the courtyard of the ancient, enchanted castle of the evil magician Kastchei. There he observes 13 maidens emerging from the building to play in the garden with golden apples. One of these young girls—whom he judges all to be princesses—attracts his attention, and he soon becomes enamored of her. Stepping out from the shadows where he had been hiding, Ivan watches the maidens do a round dance, after which they re-enter the castle to return to their captivity.



Disheartened by their sudden departure, the Prince decides to enter the castle to pursue the Princess he loves and the other maidens. He is quickly captured, however, by Kastchei's hideous entourage of guards, which include two-headed monsters. Kastchei appears and decides to turn his newest captive into stone. But the Prince remembers the magical feather he possesses from the Firebird. He waves it in the air and suddenly the Firebird appears. The magical creature immediately causes Kastchei and his monstrous toadies to do a frenzied dance, which leaves them completely exhausted. They are next lulled by the Firebird's magic into a deep sleep. The Firebird then leads Ivan to the source of Kastchei's power, a huge egg that contains his soul. The Prince smashes it and Kastchei dies.



Scene Two

Kastchei's castle disappears, freeing the maidens and the other victims of the evil magician—the knights who had been turned to stone. Ivan is reunited with the Princess, whom he takes to be his bride.

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1st Tableau

Stravinsky's third concert version of his Firebird ballet was completed in 1945. Stravinsky called this work a "ballet suite," and it is substantially different from its predecessors in a number of ways. Perhaps most significant is the addition of more music in the third suite: whereas suites one and two each consisted of five movements, the 1945 suite boasts ten, including the original five from the 1919 suite, plus three Pantomimes, a Pas de deux, and a Scherzo. Also notable are the revisions the composer made in both of the later suites: notation, barring, and metrics are altered to facilitate reading Stravinsky's complex rhythms. There are also a number of changes in orchestration, due in part to the reduced orchestra of the later suites (the 1945 suite consists of the same instrumentation as the reduced 1919 suite, with the exception of an added snare drum in the former). This "ballet suite" was Stravinsky's final attempt to make his ballet more palatable: while his suites remained popular for decades after the ballet's appearance early in the century, Stravinsky quickly outgrew the Russian musical idioms that give the work its characteristic sound. The concert suites enabled Stravinsky to extract what he felt were the ballet's salvageable moments, and to censor what musicologist Eric Walter White called the work's "effusiveness [which} must have been increasingly embarrassing to Stravinsky as time went on." The composer himself, after years of attempting to update his ballet, always referred to the work dismissively as "that audience lollipop."

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