Apollon musagète, Ballet in Two Scenes (1947 version)

By the time the world warmed up to the primitive force of Igor Stravinsky’s early masterpieces for the Ballets Russes (The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring), the composer had already left Russia behind and moved on to more austere subjects and a neoclassical style. One area of sustained focus was ancient Greece and Rome, first in Oedipus Rex (1927) and continuing in the ballets Apollon musagète (1928), Persephone (1934), Orpheus (1947) and Agon (1957).

The commission for Apollon musagète (later shortened to Apollo) came from the American patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who asked Stravinsky to create a work for the 500-seat theater she had spearheaded at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. There was room for only a small cast of dancers and musicians, which led Stravinsky to create a scenario for Apollo and three muses (out of the original nine) and a sparse accompaniment of strings. The ballet premiered on April 27, 1928, with choreography by a Ballets Russes alumnus, Adolf Bolm.

In Greek mythology, the god Apollo is associated with light and truth, as well as music and poetry, and the term Apollonian has come to describe art that exhibits order, balance, clarity and precision. When Stravinsky first played a piano transcription for Serge Diaghilev, the impresario behind the Ballets Russes immediately recognized the music’s Apollonian brilliance: “It is, of course, an amazing work, extraordinarily calm and with greater clarity than anything [Stravinsky] has done,” Diaghilev wrote to his partner. “Filigree counterpoint around transparent, clear-cut themes, … music not of this world, but from somewhere above.”