Symphony No. 5 (Sibelius) 1909 Schoenberg continued pushing for more dissonant and chromatic harmonies in his Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16. From 1910–1913 Igor Stravinsky premiered his innovative and revolutionary ballets "The Firebird", "Petrushka" and "The Rite of Spring" ("Le Sacre du Printemps"). Ravel and Debussy were at work developing and performing their Impressionistic music. Though he had been in the public spotlight for nearly 30 years, Sibelius found his works receiving poor reviews for the first time with the 1911 premiere of his Fourth Symphony and, James Hepokoski writes, “was beginning to sense his own eclipse as a contending modernist.” These events
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"