The Rite of Spring future career in music: "I hope [Stravinsky] appreciated that hundreds—perhaps thousands—of musicians were turned onto "The Rite of Spring" ... through "Fantasia", musicians who might otherwise never have heard the work, or at least not until many years later". In later life Stravinsky claimed distaste for the adaptation, though as Ross remarks, he said nothing critical at the time; according to Ross, the composer Paul Hindemith observed that "Igor appears to love it". Before the first gramophone disc recordings of "The Rite" were issued in 1929, Stravinsky had helped to produce a pianola version of the work for the London
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"