Yes, it’s another ballet, and we’re listening to the suite. Deal with it.
The Firebird (1910) was Stravinsky’s first commission for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes — and his breakthrough. He was twenty-seven. The ballet draws on Russian folklore: the Firebird, a magical creature of light, helps Prince Ivan defeat the immortal demon Kashchei by revealing the secret of his deathless soul. Stravinsky’s teacher was Rimsky-Korsakov, and it shows in the brilliant orchestration and Russian folk material woven in with care. But it already goes further than anything Rimsky-Korsakov wrote. The Infernal Dance is violent in a way that points directly toward what came next: Petrushka in 1911, then The Rite of Spring in 1913 — until he finally blew up the concert hall.
The 1919 Suite is the version most often performed — shorter, leaner, cut down from the full ballet. The Berceuse and the Finale are the heart of it: one hushed and hovering, the other a slow crescendo into something enormous and inevitable. The finale sounds like dawn.