The ballet Pulcinella premiered at the Paris Opera in 1920, featuring sets designed by Pablo Picasso and choreography by Léonide Massine. The music, composed by Igor Stravinsky, became popular through the orchestral suite that Stravinsky himself published two years later, excluding the sung parts. It is only rarely that the full suite—the original version of the score—is performed.
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The plot of the ballet Pulcinella is based on a manuscript from 1700 containing various stories about that character, the Neapolitan adaptation of the famous male figure from the Commedia dell’Arte, Harlequin. He is a stock character of burlesque nature: hunchbacked, with a large belly and a hooked nose. The story revolves around the caricatured amorous adventures of this common man, simultaneously lazy and cunning. Two young women from a village openly show their attraction to him. This leaves their respective fiancés—as well as Pimpinella, Pulcinella’s girlfriend—beside themselves with jealousy. The betrothed end up stabbing Pulcinella and flee. The villagers find his body. However, at some point, the unimaginable happens: the dead man rises. In truth, Pulcinella had only pretended to be dead. He swapped roles with his friend Fourbo to surprise everyone when he reappears disguised as a magician. To complete the farce, the fiancés Florindo and Coviello also disguised themselves as Pulcinella to impress Prudenza and Rosetta. Thus, at one point, there are four Pulcinellas on stage. In the end, everything is cleared up and concludes happily, with each marrying “their own.”
The Ballets Russes had previously experimented with combining Italian Baroque music and Commedia dell’Arte in a play by Carlo Goldoni with music by Domenico Scarlatti. Following its success, Sergei Diaghilev invited Stravinsky to compose Pulcinella and, to convince him, gave him a collection of scores that could be orchestrated. These were chamber music, keyboard works, and opera arias that, at the time, were believed to have been written by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–1736). More recent musicological studies have revealed the true authors. Indeed, nine of the selected excerpts are vocal parts from Pergolesi’s comic operas, but there is also music by composers Domenico Gallo (1730–ca.1768), Carlo Monza (1735–1801), Alessandro Parisotti (1853–1913), and the Count of Wassenaer (1692–1766).
One of the most fascinating aspects of this creation is how Stravinsky superimposed 18th-century music with his own stylistic identity. He based the ballet’s sequence of pieces—heard uninterrupted during the roughly half-hour-long one-act performance—largely preserving the melodies and bass lines. However, he added his own stamp through dissonances that “disturb” the harmony, subtle rhythmic alterations, obsessive repetition of fragments, and, above all, unmistakable orchestration techniques. In this latter aspect, he combined a small orchestra with soprano, tenor, and bass vocal parts—vocals that do not intervene directly in the plot nor are associated with any of the characters.
Pulcinella marks a turning point in the career of the Russian composer, notably revealing his fascination with “ancient” music. From then on, much of his work was framed within a neoclassical aesthetic.
Rui Campos Leitão