away on tour for much of that spring, and Balanchine was left free to evolve his ideas of an abstract, non-anecdotal choreography, no doubt on the basis of the composer's suggestions, but in large measure free of his interference. Apollo must have startled a Paris audience that still, in spite of everything, thought of Stravinsky as the composer of The Rite of Spring (which he had himself conducted for the first time in France at a Salle Pleyel concert only four months before). Here all violence, abrasiveness and even dramatic insistence are stilled, and instead the work coolly and mellifluously depicts the birth and apotheosis of the god of formal perfection in music that is like some 18th-century ballet de cour filtered through Adam and Delibes. Yet several critics saw it rightly as a defining moment in Stravinsky's recent work. Boris de Schloezer detected in it a spirit of purity and renunciation, and predicted that the composer's next work would be a Mass, while for Henry Prunieres (ReM, ix/711, 1928, pp.2878), Apollo was a flawless masterpiece that revealed Stravinsky's classicism to be no longer, as of late, an attitude, [but rather] a response to an intimate need of the mind and heart. Stravinsky's own mouthpiece of these years, the composer Arthur Lourie, referred to the music's struggle against the charm and temptation of aesthetic fetishism, and suggested that Stravinsky's long-cultivated anti-individualism had now brought him towards the spiritual, aiming thereby at the long-lost unity of the moral and the aesthetic (A propos de l'Apollon d'Igor Strawinsky, Musique, i, 1928, p.118). Lourie, admittedly, was engaged in a far-reaching polemic setting up Stravinsky as the antithesis to Schoenberg, who had conducted the world premiere of his Suite op.29, in Paris in December 1927, alongside Pierrot lunaire and other works (Stravinsky himself had not attended these concerts). Stravinsky's art, Lourie argued somewhat fancifully in his article Neogothic and Neoclassic (H19278), is a reaction against Schoenberg's aesthetics. Implicitly attacking serialism for seeking to control the element of emotion and evoke a purified and obedient material, he added that Stravinsky had himself escaped from the apparently comparable prison of neo-classicism, and was now writing music that was polymethodic. This description certainly seems borne out by Stravinsky's next ballet, Le baiser de la fee, a remarkably inventive montage of pieces by or in the style of Tchaikovsky, set to a scenario (after Hans Christian Andersen) strongly redolent of romantic story ballets like Giselle or Swan Lake. The work was commissioned by Ida Rubinstein for performance by her new ballet company in Paris in the autumn of 1928, though the idea and the actual choice of some of the Tchaikovsky piano pieces and songs came from Benois, who was also to be responsible for designing the production. But even Benois, one of Stravinsky's oldest collaborators, must have been astonished at the fertility of the treatments, so much more abstracted and varied than those of Pulcinella and so alert to the freshness, inventiveness, ingenuity, and vigour which Stravinsky had himself proclaimed as Tchaikovskian characteristics in his open letter to Diaghilev