About selling souls

The world on the eve of the First World War had to radically renounce abundance, waste. Igor Stravinsky, who had lived on Lake Geneva since 1914, was able to stay there because he was unfit for war. After 1917, he did not want to return to Russia because of the revolution. Theaters were closed all over Europe, musicians, singers and actors were recruited for the armies, suffering and death dominated people's minds. Stravinsky recalled the war years of 1917/18 as "the most difficult I have gone through." With two friends, he conceived the plan of founding a traveling theater that would travel through the country and perform according to medieval custom with a minimum of participants, reading, playing, dancing, making music, juggling. The subject was quickly found. It was about the soldier who loses his soul to the devil. Stravinsky composed musical numbers for it, which he considered appropriate for a simple folk theater piece. This does not change the fact that "the quite novel rhythmic difficulties of the score and the high degree of virtuosity it demanded ... required serious commitment on the part of the performers." (Ernest Ansermet)