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Even before the production of The Firebird in igio Diaghilev saw in him "a man on the eve of celebrity." Stravinsky joined Diaghilev's group, whom he captivated by his enthusiasm for all the arts and his "absence of the slightest dogmatism." The dazzling Paris galaxy of his acquaintances in- cluded Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Giacomo Puccini, Marcel Proust and Paul Claudel, and Pablo Picasso. His next work with Diaghilev, Petrouchka, was also based on a Russian folk theme. This time it was the story of a puppet at a Russian country fair, how it is brought to life, then dies, but finally reappears as a ghost. The first performance on Christian Louboutin Boots June 13, igii, with Nijinsky as Petrouchka, was again ac- claimed, doubly reassuring Stravinsky, who had Cheap Louboutins a newly active role in planning the ballet. "It gave me the absolute conviction of my ear just as I was about to begin The Rite of Spring." Stravinsky's triumph with his music for Diaghilev's The Rite of Spring, first performed at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris on May zg, 1913, as we have seen, created a scandale in the musical community, but con- firmed his role as the leading modernist composer. At the end of the tumultuous evening Diaghilev had commented, "Exactly what I wanted!" Stravinsky reported himself and Nijinsky to be "excited, angry, disgusted and happy." The shocking originality of his music for The Rite was Stra- vinsky's unmistakable victory over his parents' Cheap Louboutins efforts to stifle his talents in an uncreative conventional life. And it was no accident that he chose the rite of spring, the season that Stravinsky himself remembered from his childhood on the Russian countryside as a time of sudden rebirth "that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole world cracking." At the age ofthirty-one, Stravinsky had achieved a reputation as the musical prodigy of the twentieth century and created works that would continue to please large audiences. His next sixty years produced an encyclopedia of sometimes contradictory Christian Louboutin Boots musical experiments. During his long and restless life he would divide himself among three nationalities. When World War I broke out he was a European celebrity in the world of music, and for the past four years had been 1iving in a Swiss mountain chalet, returning to Russia only for the summers.