Why do we yearn to add what we once had to what we’ve got?
Why do we turn from what we are to what we were when we cannot?
Why not account our joys twice blessed with each new day begun?
Why, having some, seek to have it all, then find that we have none?

Igor Stravinsky wrote L’Histoire du soldat during World War I when he was in exile in Switzerland. Stravinsky had already made a big splash in the musical world with his earlier trio of large-scale ballet works The Firebird, Petrushka, and the infamous The Rite of Spring, all of which were in collaboration with the famous Ballet Russes in Paris. Because of the composer’s exile and the economic restrictions that accompanied WWI, L’Histoire du soldat is a much more modest composition in terms of personnel, but it is a work on par with his other theatrical works and is known as a masterpiece of the early 20th Century avant-garde.