L'Histoire du soldat (The Soldier's Tale) is a theatrical work by Igor Fyodorovitch Stravinsky, first performed in 1918. The score employs pared-down chamber forces and a spoken narrator, drawing on Russian folk material, ragtime-influenced rhythms and modernist harmonic and rhythmic techniques to create abrupt contrasts in texture and metre, and it marks a shift in Stravinsky's output toward smaller-scale, theatre-oriented and neoclassical explorations following his earlier ballet period.
