The Rite of Spring the four-part piano score published in 1913. There have been numerous variants of the English translations; those shown are from the 1967 edition of the score. Lawrence Morton, in a study of the origins of "The Rite", records that in 1907–08 Stravinsky set to music two poems from Sergey Gorodetsky's collection "Yar". Another poem in the anthology, which Stravinsky did not set but is likely to have read, is "Yarila" which, Morton observes, contains many of the basic elements from which "The Rite of Spring" developed, including pagan rites, sage elders, and the propitiatory sacrifice of a young maiden: "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"