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Although Igor Stravinsky plainly proclaimed himself a genius in The Firebird (1909-10), it was in Petrouchka (1910-11) that he began the experiment which established a new principle in music. In these "scenes burlesques" he discovered the advantages of a new use of the modern orchestra, completely upsetting the old academic ideas about "balance of tone," and proving to his own satisfaction the value of "pure tone," in the same sense that the painter speaks of pure color. And in this work he breaks away from the standards not only of Richard Strauss, the Wagner follower, but also of such innovators as Modeste Moussorgsky and Claude Debussy.

Strauss, following Wagner's theory of the leit-motiv, rounded out the form of the tone poem, carried the principle of representation in music a few steps farther than his master, gave new colors to old instruments, and broadened the scope of the modern orchestra so that it might include new ones; in one of his symphonies Gustav Mahler was content with 150 men! Moussorgsky (although his work preceded that of Strauss, the general knowledge of it is modern), working along entirely different lines, strove for truthful utterance and achieved a mode of expression which usually seems inevitable. Debussy endowed music with novel tints derived from the extensive, and almost exclusive, use of what is called the whole-tone scale, and instead of forcing his orchestra to make more noise he constantly repressed it. (in all of Pelleas et Melisande there is but one climax of sound and in l'Apres-midi d'un Faune and his other orchestral works he is equally continent in the use of dynamics).

Igor Stravinsky has not been deaf to the blandishments of these composers. He has used the leit-motiv (sparingly) in both The Firebird and Petrouchka. He abandoned it in The Sacrifice to the Spring (1913) and in The Nightingale (1914). His powers of representation are as great as those of Strauss; it is only necessary to recall the music of the bird in The Firebird, his orchestral piece, Fireworks, which received warm praise from a manufacturer of pyrotechnics, and the street organ music in Petrouchka. Later he conceived the mission of music to be