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 Firebird was looking for fresh compositional talent. The ballet was the first of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes productions to have an all-original score composed for it. Alexandre Benois wrote in 1910 that he had two years earlier suggested to Diaghilev the production of a Russian nationalist ballet, an idea all the more attractive given both the newly awakened French passion for Russian dance and also the ruinously expensive costs of staging opera. The inspiration of mixing the mythical Firebird with the unrelated Russian tale of Koschei the Deathless possibly came from a popular child's verse by Yakov Polonsky, "A Winter's Journey"