Chant du Rossignol (English: Song of the Nightingale), as it was published in 1921,[1] is a poème symphonique by Igor Stravinsky adapted in 1917 from his 1914 opera The Nightingale.
Stravinsky's first opera, The Nightingale was based on Hans Christian Andersen's 1843 fairy tale of the same name and was set to a Russian-language libretto in three acts told from the point of view of a fisherman. The poème symphonique derives its material mostly from the latter two acts, which were completed in 1914 after Stravinsky had established himself as a ballet composer and five years after he had completed the first act. He was in fact unsure about returning to The Nightingale at all, and this doubt may have led him to create the purely instrumental poème symphonique; in his autobiography he writes:
The work had its first performance on December 6, 1919, in Geneva, conducted by Ernest Ansermet at the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.[2] It was met with criticism, much like that of The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky's nontraditional use of dissonance and instruments was unwelcome in later performances of the piece as well. It is possibly due to this public reaction that he then let Diaghilev turn it into a ballet.
The Chant is divided into four movements of varying length, which follow a non-linear, episodic structure. The music is taken from acts II and III. The movement list is as follows:[3]