Composing Pulcinella was, said Igor Stravinsky: “My discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible.” Begun in 1919 for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, who first performed it the following year, it proved to be a pivotal work in 20th-century music, and the portal to the new world of neoclassicism through which many other composers would follow, too. But Diaghilev had originally offered the Pulcinella commission to Manuel de Falla, who had been too busy to take on the task, and who later that year began work on a chamber opera, El Retablo de Maese Pedro (Master Peter’s Puppet Show), based upon an episode in Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
