Essays & Further Reading

Take an in-depth look at The Nightingale & Other Short Fables with the following articles and essays.

Fun Facts About the COC's Nightingale & Other Short Fables

What is going into Robert Lepage's world premiere of Stravinsky's The Nightingale & Other Short Fables? Seventy-five puppets designed by Michael Curry, including eight Bunraku puppets (the Japanese characters), 37 Taiwanese and Chinese puppets used by the chorus, four shadow puppets, and many more!

Stravinsky in Toronto

By Ezra Schabas

Igor Stravinsky, the cosmopolitan Russian composer who dominated modern music throughout much of the 20th century, was associated with many places during his lifetime. Educated in St. Petersburg, he went on to live in such cities as Paris, Geneva, Los Angeles and New York. While he never actually lived in Toronto, he visited this city six times during the 1960s, and, thanks to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, was the central figure in various television and radio programs, a film documentary, concerts and recordings.

Orientalism in Art

By Linda Hutcheon & Misha Teramura

What we call the "Orient" has long fascinated Western culture—in large part, thanks to a history of conquest and colonization. What Edward Said famously dubbed "Orientalism" was the result of this history: the West's version of the Orient as its exotic, seductive, yet despotic, dangerous Other became dominant.

About the Compositions

The first act of The Nightingale is written in a Russian impressionistic style reminiscent of Stravinsky’s teacher, the great composer Rimsky-Korsakov. Stravinsky might have finished the work in this vein had he not been sidetracked by his three great ballet score commissions for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: the aforementioned Firebird (1910) along with Petrushka (1911) and Le Sacre du Printemps (1913).

The Works of Igor Stravinsky

by Caitlin Coull

It is far too often the inevitable fate of creative figures who have attained a certain measure of success or notoriety early on in their careers to find that their subsequent artistic explorations are seldom examined on their own merit.