At the end of the first two decades of the twentieth century, the international reputations of Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky were already well secured and unquestionably more established than that of Béla Bartók. Stravinsky had caught the attention of the Parisian public through his famed ballets since the early 1910s – the premiere of The Rite of Spring on 29 May 1913 has been retrospectively celebrated as ‘a key moment in cultural history’ – and Schoenberg had disrupted the music circles of Vienna and Berlin with his Pierrot Lunaire (1912) and then the Skandalkonzert (31 March 1913). Bartók, on the other hand, did not manage to make such a name for himself before the end of the First World War, either in Berlin (despite the support of Busoni) or in Paris (except for the circles of the Société musicale indépendante). It could be argued that this initial delay in Bartók’s early reception allowed him to win, at best, a well-deserved ‘third place’ in the canon of early twentieth-century Western music. Even in his home country, Bartók’s affirmation was problematic. Although he was invited to replace his piano teacher István Thomán at the Budapest Academy as early as 1907 (at the age of twenty-six), he did not succeed in performing his most ambitious works in Hungary until the late 1910s: his efforts in the New Hungarian Musical Society proved to be fruitless and his one-act opera – Bluebeard’s Castle op. 11 BB 62 (1911) – was found ‘lacking from a theatrical standpoint’ by the juries of two different competitions (the ‘Ferenc Erkel prize’ and a competition sponsored by the leading Hungarian music publisher Rózsavölgyi). As Gillies has remarked: