and spicy harmony based on an eight-note scale of alternating tones and semitones (Octatonic). There were more opportunities to test his ear for such things. In January 1908 his Symphony in E and The Faun and the Shepherdess were performed together in a public concert under Wahrlich, and Stravinsky picked up his first ever press notices, which were largely, if not ecstatically, favourable. By the time the Maeterlinck piece, Fantasticheskoye skertso or Scherzo fantastique, was finished at the end of March, he was a coming man in St Petersburg musical circles. In his Stolichnaya pochta review of the symphony, Karatigin remarked on the lively cheerfulness of musical thinking that is characteristic of Stravinsky and distinguishes him to his advantage from many of the newest composers. Rimsky-Korsakov probably oversaw the Scherzo fantastique and he certainly heard excerpts from it, played on the piano by his other star pupil, Maximilian Steinberg, at a domestic gathering on 12/25 April. But the master was already mortally ill with angina, and less than two months later, on 8/21 June, he died at his country retreat at Lyubensk. Stravinsky was shattered by his teacher's death. He travelled from Ustilug to St Petersburg (a two-and-a-half day rail journey) for the funeral. Before leaving, he had completed and dispatched to Lyubensk a new, more compact and refined orchestral scherzo called Feyerverk (Fireworks) a wedding present for Steinberg and Rimsky-Korsakov's daughter Nadezhda, who had married a few days before her father's death. Now, on his return to Ustilug, he rapidly composed a funeral tribute which he hoped would be performed in one of the memorial concerts that autumn and winter. His letters of the time to the Rimsky-Korsakov family express positive despair at the thought that, amid all the diplomacy and politics surrounding such occasions, his work would be overlooked; the sense of impending rejection is almost tangible. Meanwhile he, Katya and their baby son moved into a new house he had designed on the Nosenko estate at Ustilug, and there he completed a set of four piano studies (begun in May), indebted not to any music of the St Petersburg circle, but to the Moscow composer Skryabin. At this point, Stravinsky had no fewer than three orchestral works awaiting performance. Ziloti had already seen the Scherzo fantastique, had successfully lobbied the house of Jurgenson to publish it, and eventually conducted its premiere in January 1909. The previous week the Pogrebal'naya pesn' (Funeral Song) had at last been presented in a Russian Symphony Concert in Rimsky-Korsakov's memory, conducted by Felix Blumenfeld. Since all the performance materials subsequently vanished, we can judge its character only from reviews. Several critics praised its orchestration, while some regretted that, though often beautiful, it was less tragic in tone than they would have expected: the author makes successful play with orchestral colours, one wrote, but in itself the piece preserves an impression of artificiality, and is in no way an outcry of the heart (N. Bernstein, Peterburgskaya gazeta). If we add to these accounts the common view of the Scherzo fantastique as dazzling but insubstantial, we