Benois called the ballet a 'fairy tale for grown-ups'. Patched together from various folk tales, its aim was to create what Benois called a 'mysterium of Russia' for 'export to the West'.134 The real export was the myth of peasant innocence and youthful energy. Each ingredient of the ballet was a stylized abstraction of folklore. Stravinsky's score
was littered with borrowings from folk music, especially the peasant wedding songs (devichniki and khorovody) in the Ronde des princesses and the finale. The scenario was a patchwork compilation of two entirely separate peasant tales (for there was no single tale of the Firebird) as retold by Afanasiev and various lubok prints from the nineteenth century: the tale of Ivan Tsarevich and the Firebird, and the tale of Kashchei the Immortal. These two stories were rewritten to shift their emphasis from a tale of pagan magic (by the grey wolf of the peasant stories) into one of divine rescue (by the Firebird) consistent with Russia's Christian mission in the world.135
In the ballet the Tsarevich is lured into the garden of the monster Kashchey by the beauty of the maiden princess. Ivan is saved from the monster and his retinue by the Firebird, whose airborne powers compel Kashchey and his followers to dance wildly until they fall asleep. Ivan then discovers the enormous egg which contains Kashchey's soul, the monster is destroyed, and Ivan is united with the princess. Reinvented for the stage, the Firebird herself was made to carry far more than she had done in the Russian fairy tales. She was transformed into the symbol of a phoenix-like resurgent peasant Russia, the embodiment of an elemental freedom and beauty, in the pseudo-Slavic mythology of the Symbolists which came to dominate the ballet's conception (as immortalized by Blok's 'mythic bird', which adorned the cover of the Mir iskusstva journal in the form of a woodcut by Leon Bakst). The production for the Paris season was a self-conscious package of exotic Russian props - from Golovine's colourful peasant costumes to those weird mythic beasts, the 'kikimora', 'boliboshki' and 'two-headed monsters', invented by Remizov for the Suite de Kashchei - all of them designed to cater to the fin-de-siecle Western fascination with 'primitive' Russia.
But the real innovation of The Firebird was Stravinsky's use of folk music. Previous composers of the Russian national school had thought of folklore as purely thematic material. They would frequently cite folk songs but would always subject them to the conventional (and essentially Western) musical language canonized by Rimsky-Korsakov. To their trained ears, the heterophonic harmonies of Russian folk music were ugly and barbaric, and not really 'music' in the proper sense at all, so that it would be highly inappropriate to adopt them as a part of their
17. Gusli player. The gusli was an ancient type of Russian zither, usually five-stringed, and widely used in folk music
art form. Stravinsky was the first composer to assimilate folk music as an element of style - using not just its melodies but its harmonies and rhythms as the basis of his own distinctive 'modern' style.*
The Firebird was the great breakthrough. But it was only made possible by the pioneering work of two ethnographers, whose musical discoveries were yet another product of the 'going to the people' in the 1870s. The first was by Yury Melgunov, a pianist and philologist who carried out a series of field trips to Kaluga province in the 1870s. On these trips he discovered the polyphonic harmonies of Russian peasant song, and worked out a scientific method of transcribing them. The other was by Evgenia Linyova, who confirmed Melgunov's findings by recording peasant singing with a phonograph on field trips to the provinces. These recordings were the basis of her Peasant Songs of Great Russia as They Are in the Folk's Harmonization, published in St Petersburg in 1904-9,136 which directly influenced the music of Stravinsky in The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. The most important aspect of Linyova's work was her discovery that the voice of the peasant chorus singer was not inflected with individual characteristics, as previously believed by the kuchkist composers, but rather strived for a kind of impersonality. In the preface to her Peasant Songs she described this last quality:
