Paris in the Belle Époque of Richard Wagner, he went on to experiment with impressionism in music, atonal music and chromaticism. His most famous works include "Clair de Lune" for piano (written ca. 1890, published 1905), "La Mer" for orchestra (1905) and the opera "Pelléas et Mélisande" (1903-1905). The most revolutionary composer to work in Paris during the "Belle Époque" was the Russian-born Igor Stravinsky. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: "The Firebird" (1910), "Petrushka" (1911) and "The Rite of Spring" (1913). The last of these transformed the
The Rite of Spring that the work's opening bassoon melody was derived from an anthology of Lithuanian folk songs, but maintained that this was his only borrowing from such sources; if other elements sounded like aboriginal folk music, he said, it was due to "some unconscious 'folk' memory". However, Morton has identified several more melodies in Part I as having their origins in the Lithuanian collection. More recently Richard Taruskin has discovered in the score an adapted tune from one of Rimsky-Korsakov's "One Hundred Russian National Songs". Taruskin notes the paradox whereby "The Rite", generally acknowledged as the most revolutionary of the composer's early