It all began with music lessons for Stravinsky's son in October of 1929. By that fall, Nadia Boulanger, thirty-two-year-old professor at the École normale de musique in Paris and at the Conservatoire américain at Fontainebleau, had garnered a reputation as an extraordinarily gifted music educator. The daughter of a Parisian composer, the distinguished Ernest Boulanger, and an exiled Russian princess and former Conservatoire vocal student, Raïssa [née Mychestky], Boulanger had made her place in Paris as a composer, performer, and pedagogue. Her musical prowess had been tested and proven already by her prodigious graduation with four first prizes from the Conservatoire de Paris at the age of sixteen. By 1929, despite abandoning her own moderately scandalous career as a composer in favor of performing and teaching, Boulanger had ascended to a compelling position in modernist circles as a charismatic, passionate teacher of musical composition, harmony, history, accompaniment, and performance. Above all, she championed new music.

Contemporaneously, by the late 1920s, Igor Stravinsky held both an imperious and a controversial place within the modernist musical community. Son of a Russian opera singer, Fyodor, and a Ukrainian-born mother, Anna [née Kholodovskaya], Stravinsky returned from Switzerland to Paris following the First World War to find that his new neoclassical aesthetic divided the city that had earlier celebrated him for works such as The Firebird and Petrushka. Though his professional world and social acquaintances appear to have had little connection to Boulanger's at this time, Boulanger had already developed a deep devotion to Stravinsky's music, and was actively promoting it. Sparse evidence and anecdotal references describe Stravinsky's visits to Boulanger's studio in the 1920s, a teaching space that must have reminded him of the jours fixes that he had attended at the home of his own beloved teacher, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908). During visits with Boulanger's students, Stravinsky spoke about his works and provided feedback on the compositions of Boulanger's pupils. These occasional exchanges, as well as Boulanger's extraordinary reputation as a pedagogue, led Stravinsky to approach Boulanger about facilitating the education of his son, Sviatoslav Soulima.