At the beginning of the 20th century, in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, the Ballets Russes were responsible for many a scandal with their new forms of expression in both music and dance, combined with their liking for archaic and exotic subjects. Igor Stravinsky's famous – indeed notorious – Rite of Spring was not the only work he composed for them. But speaking of the first performance of his short opera The Song of the Nightingale (1914), based on Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale of the same name, he remarked: "The only sense in which the premiere wasn't a success is that it didn't cause a scandal."  

Gabriel Fauré's opera Pénélope was in the programme of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées at almost the same time. Fauré set the last four books of Homer's Odyssey in a musical language somewhere in the space between Wagner, Debussy and Ravel. Ulysses and Penelope finally come together after twenty years apart.  

The fairytale about the nightingale also has a happy ending. Though the Emperor of China fails to recognize the strength and loveliness of its natural voice, the nightingale saves him from death at the last minute with its songs. Fauré, incidentally, was thought of by his contemporaries as the French Robert Schumann. This judgement related not only to his compositions, but first and foremost to his interpretations of Schumann's piano music. For topical reasons a second previously unknown work is about to have its first performance in Basel. Funeral dirge, which Stravinsky wrote in memory of his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, was rediscovered in St. Petersburg in 2016.