Pulcinella Suite

Diaghilev handed Stravinsky a folder of eighteenth-century Italian manuscripts then attributed to Pergolesi and asked him to orchestrate them; what came back in 1920 was Pulcinella, in which the old melodies stand almost unaltered while the harmony, rhythm and instrumentation belong entirely to the twentieth century. Picasso designed the sets. Stravinsky later called it his discovery of the past and the beginning of everything he wrote afterwards. He extracted the orchestral suite in 1922, dropping the three singers and about a third of the music. Much of the source material has since been reattributed to other composers. The ballet was first given on 15 May 1920 at the Paris Opéra under Ernest Ansermet, with a libretto and choreography by Léonide Massine after an eighteenth-century play about the commedia dell’arte figure Pulcinella. It was Ansermet who put the proposal to Stravinsky, in 1919, and Stravinsky disliked the idea until he had read through the scores Diaghilev had turned up in libraries in Naples and London.