These four short songs, written at the request of Maja de Strozzi-Pecic, a Croatian soprano, are settings of Russian folk poems. Composed between the end of 1918 and the fall of 1919, and with disparate texts, they do not really form a song cycle. They are, as musicologist Eric White has noted, a "mixed bag." The first and second songs—Canard (Ronde) and Chanson pour compter—sounding like they might better belong in his song collection Three Tales for Children, or even with the Pribaoutki (nonsense songs). The third and fourth songs—Le Moineau est assis and Chant dissident—are also somewhat out of place here. White would place Le Moineau with Saucers, Stravinsky's collection of peasant songs, and would have Chant dissident as a more effective choral setting. Harmonically, the works are generally diatonic. With the exception of the more chromatic fourth song, Stravinsky uses typical folk idioms for the songs. The piano is often used in a decidedly ensemble-like rather than accompanimental manner, suggesting, along with the sketches for the work, that Stravinsky might have had a chamber ensemble in mind when composing these songs. In fact, the first and fourth songs were later orchestrated for small ensemble, and included in the Four Songs of 1955.



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