The 1920 Stravinsky ballet based on music then attributed to Pergolesi that marked his neoclassical turn is Pulcinella.
Sergei Diaghilev commissioned the work for the Ballets Russes, using an early-18th-century commedia dell’arte scenario centered on the mischievous character Pulcinella. It premiered at the Paris Opera on 15 May 1920, with choreography and libretto by Léonide Massine and sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso.
Stravinsky did not simply reproduce the older music. He reshaped melodies and textures with modern rhythms, harmonies, and instrumental colors. The score was then believed to be by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, but later scholarship showed that much of it came from other composers, including Domenico Gallo and Alessandro Parisotti.
Pulcinella is therefore both a backward glance and a reinterpretation. Its deliberate engagement with earlier musical styles began Stravinsky’s neoclassical period. The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring belong chiefly to his earlier Russian or primitivist phase, although all three helped establish his pre-1920 reputation.