off in a completely new direction that was to have quite unforeseen consequences for them both. Diaghilev probably saw his suggestion (in early September 1919) that Stravinsky arrange some Pergolesi pieces he and Leonid Massine had unearthed in the Naples Conservatory as simply a device for bringing Stravinsky back into the Ballets Russes fold until The Wedding was ready. He expected another work along the lines of Tommasini's Good-Humoured Ladies, based on sonatas by Scarlatti, or Respighi's arrangements of Rossini in La boutique fantasque. But Stravinsky, after initial doubts, was taken with the material not all of it actually by Pergolesi and was tinkering with it creatively. Meanwhile Diaghilev at last staged The Song of the Nightingale, with choreography by Massine and designs by Matisse, at the Opera in February 1920 (Ansermet had conducted its concert premiere to a hostile audience in Geneva two months before). This was Stravinsky's first Ballets Russes premiere, apart from the non-danced Fireworks, since the opera itself in 1914. But his true return to the Paris stage was certainly with the Pergolesi ballet, Pulcinella, which the company mounted at the Opera (with Ansermet conducting) on 15 May. Like Petrushka, this was one of those rare theatre works which cohere in all their ingredients: Picasso's sparkling neo-commedia designs, Massine's choreography and scenario (based on 18th-century examples he had discovered in Naples), and the wonderful dancing with Massine himself in the title role and Karsavina as Pimpinella everything proclaimed the restoration of the Russian ballet to full form, and in a completely new type of work, with no hint of nostalgia for the old days of leaping Polovtsians or sinuous Sheherazades (even if those old works were still in the company's repertory). Though some questioned the ethics of Stravinsky's recompositions, with their added harmonies, metric displacements and spicy orchestrations, few denied the infectious wit and charm of the result. Reynaldo Hahn, himself a doubter, had to admit (in Excelsior) that M. Stravinsky has never given proof of greater talent than in Pulcinella, nor of a surer taste in audacity. One wonders what Hahn would have said if he had known the work which Stravinsky was at that very moment starting to compile from scattered sketches of the past two years, a piece for large wind ensemble which preserved in an almost classical way the most radical principles of his wartime vocal works. The Symphonies d'instruments a vent, begun probably in May 1920, is a score which brings to a pitch of intensity the metrical and chord-voicing treatments so typical of those works. Indeed its distillation of a ritualistic Slavonic solemnity is so powerful that Richard Taruskin has plausibly argued (Notes, xlix, 19923, pp.161721) that it is actually an instrumental stylization of a panikhida or Orthodox funeral service. Study of the sketches and variant scores shows also the extent to which empirical testing the process which Stravinsky later called grubbing about lies behind these slow progressions and winding cantilenas. Even allowing for the fact that most of the sketch material of the Symphonies was not new, and that the Pulcinella