Complexity #3 - L'Histoire du Soldat

For my Bar-Mitzvah, which was in 1957, I asked for a tape recorder, and several of my relatives got together and bought me a four track Revere machine. I used it a lot all during high school, playing duets with myself on the clarinet by laying down two tracks, and that kind of thing.  I also recorded programs from the radio.  The tape recorder came with a set of alligator clips connected to a plug, and to record from the radio all you had to do was attach the clips to the two wires that led to the speaker.
One of the pieces that I recorded was a performance of Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat in English.  I'd never heard the piece or even heard of it before I recorded it, but I immediately fell in love with it, and I played for myself repeatedly.  "Down the hot and dusty road, tramps a soldier with his load."
Last night while I was ironing my summer shirts, in preparation for putting them away for the short winter, I took out the LP that I  bought when I was in college of a performance of L'Histoire du soldat in French, narrated by Jean Cocteau, with the devil played by Peter Ustinov.  It had been years since I'd listened to that music, and I was immediately swept away by its brilliance, energy, and rhythms.  Stravinsky attained richness of timbre by using high and low instruments with nothing in between: clarinet, bassoon, violin and bass, etc. So that a small ensemble could have, at times, almost an orchestral effect.
Could it be that such an innovative piece was composed more than 90 years ago?
And why is this a demonstration of complexity, aside from the complexity of the piece itself?
Because so much time has gone by since I first heard that music, and my experience of life and of music is so much richer now.  On the other hand, I'll never have the sense of enthusiastic surprise that I felt when I was fifteen or so upon the discovery of Stravinsky and his music.
And think of the careers of Stravinsky himself, of Cocteau, of Ustinov, of the musicians who performed, of the conductor, the performance history of the piece, what it meant when first performed in 1918, right after World War I, in the throes of the Russian Revolution, and what it meant in the early 1950s, when the recording I have was made, and what it means today, after so much more music has been made and so much more history has happened.
The music, even while you listen to it, only goes so far in unifying your life.  Your mind wanders, you may imagine the ballet, you may think, if only I played clarinet well enough to perform that piece.  Two people listen to it, together in the same room, and they have entirely different resonances in their hearts.