his relation with the Russian Ballet dating from the period of l'Oiseau de Feu, an old-fashioned fairy-tale ballet, endowed with an exotic air, however, by reason of its very modern musical setting. In this music was the germ of a new attitude towards the ballet, a germ which in Pétrouchka began actually to bear fruit. For sheer pantomime as much of it was, Pétrouchka showed, here and there, a most significant reliance on purely choreographic gesture—a reliance which was only made possible by certain definite qualities in the musical accompaniment.
What these qualities were it may be hard to indicate, but anyone who has heard the music will remember its vivid intimacy of feeling, its freedom from formality, its utter abandonment of the conventional means of climax. Stravinsky makes no attempt to strike the hearer into an atti-
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