In the spring of 1919, the impresario Sergei Diaghilev began work on a new idea: a ballet based on the Renaissance characters of commedia dell’arte, with set designs by Pablo Picasso and music by Ottorino Respighi. (The Italian theatrical tradition had been enjoying a brief revival: Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire date from this period, too.) When Respighi withdrew from the project, Diaghilev approached Igor Stravinsky, his collaborator on wildly successful productions of The Rite of Spring, Petrushka, and The Firebird. Diaghilev did not want an original score, however. Hoping to evoke the sense of a bygone era, he wanted his friend to orchestrate pieces believed at the time to be by the 18th-century composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (since then, scholars have shown that many were misattributed). Stravinsky had some initial reservations but agreed to look at the music—and as the composer later recalled, “I looked and fell in love.” Pulcinella was a huge success, and it achieved even greater renown as a concert suite (containing 11 of the original 18 movements) and transcriptions (the Suite italienne ) for violin or cello and piano.

Perhaps even more crucial is Pulcinella’s significance among Stravinsky’s works. Stravinsky said several decades later, “Pulcinella was my discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible.” Stravinsky retained the spirit of the source material and infused it with something uniquely his own, striking a delicate balance between past and present that ultimately came to be known as the “Neoclassical” style. This had a profound impact on Stravinsky’s output. Although only one of his subsequent compositions is based on another composer’s music (the 1928 ballet The Fairy’s Kiss, in which he reworked music by Tchaikovsky), many of the pieces that he wrote between 1920 and 1950—such the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, Oedipus Rex, and The Rake’s Progress—are indebted to older models.

The source material comprises much of Pulcinella’s score; Stravinsky hardly alters the original melodic and bass lines. In contrast to the massive instrumental forces of his earlier ballets, the instrumentation is relatively simple and sparse. Straightforward meters replace the complex rhythms used so dramatically in works like The Rite of Spring. Yet modern touches are clearly audible throughout the work, appearing as sly, witty anachronisms of harmony, rhythm, and timbre. Inner voices are also altered, producing flashes of 20th-century dissonance. While Stravinsky’s approach to the earlier sources is nuanced and subtle, the result is one of the most original—and arguably one of the most significant—works of the 20th century.