Stravinsky worked on the opening 'Nocturne' and the closing 'Valse Brillante' his reward was a much bigger commission, to write the music for a new ballet, The Firebird (L'oiseau de feu) for the 1910 season. Having heard Feu d'artifice he approached Stravinsky, initially with a request for help in orchestrating music by Chopin to create the ballet Les Sylphides. Diaghilev's intention, however, was to produce new works in a distinctively 20th-century style, and he was looking for fresh compositional talent.

To present these works Diaghilev recruited the choreographer Michel Fokine, the designer Léon Bakst and the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

In 1909, still in Paris, he launched the Ballets Russes, initially with Borodin's Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. In 1907 he began his theatrical career by presenting five concerts in Paris in the following year he introduced Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov. Like Stravinsky, Diaghilev had initially studied law, but had gravitated via journalism into the theatrical world. Among those in the audience was the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who at that time was planning to introduce Russian music and art to western audiences. In 1909 Feu d'artifice was performed at a concert in Saint Petersburg. In the 1980s, Nijinsky's original choreography, long believed lost, was reconstructed by the Joffrey Ballet in Los Angeles. Massine's was the forerunner of many innovative productions directed by the world's leading ballet-masters, gaining the work worldwide acceptance.

After a mixed critical reception for its original run and a short London tour, the ballet was not performed again until the 1920s, when a version choreographed by Léonide Massine replaced Nijinsky's original, which saw only eight performances. The concept behind The Rite of Spring, developed by Roerich from Stravinsky's outline idea, is suggested by its subtitle, 'Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts' the scenario depicts various primitive rituals celebrating the advent of spring, after which a young girl is chosen as a sacrificial victim and dances herself to death. The Rite was the third such project, after the acclaimed Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911). Stravinsky was a young, virtually unknown composer when Diaghilev recruited him to create works for the Ballets Russes.

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