Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Ice Maiden was taken as a basis for the libretto of Le baiser de la fée – a ballet that was ordered by Ida Rubinstein for her seasons. However, Stravinsky admitted that only some motifs were left from the Danish writer's fairy tale. They are the mother and her child lost in the blizzard, the Fairy who marked the child with her magic kiss and who then took him away to her miraculous world of eternal life. Using some themes from the pieces by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky dedicated to the great Russian composer his score and supposed that the image of the Fairy and her magical kiss is very actual, because each of Tchaikovsky's creations was sealed with the muse's kiss.
