Ballet (music) of Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" after the composer's death. In many cases ballets were still short scenes within operas, to enable scenery or costume changes. Perhaps the best-known example of ballet music that is part of an opera is the "Dance of the Hours" from Amilcare Ponchielli's opera "La Gioconda" (1876). There was a violent change in mood when Igor Stravinsky's ballet "The Rite of Spring" (1913) was performed. The music was modernist and dissonant, and the movements were highly stylized. In 1924 George Antheil wrote "Ballet Mécanique," which was actually for a film of moving objects, not for dancers, but
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"