The Greeting Prelude is an orchestral work composed in 1955 by Igor Stravinsky. Its origins can be traced back to an incident that occurred during a rehearsal at the inaugural Aspen Festival in 1950, when Stravinsky was displeased by a surprise rendition of "Happy Birthday to You", a song with which he was unfamiliar. The next year, at the request of Samuel Barber, he harmonized it and composed a two-part canon as a birthday present for Mary Louise Curtis. In February 1955, Charles Munch, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, contacted Stravinsky with a request for a brief orchestral tribute for Pierre Monteux's 80th birthday. After initially expressing uncertainty that he could accept the commission, he composed Greeting Prelude between February 18 and 23.

Its world premiere performance took place at Symphony Hall, Boston, on April 4, 1955, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Munch, as part of a program shared with Monteux. Immediate reactions to the brief work, which treats the "Happy Birthday" theme serially within a diatonic harmonic context, were positive. Leonard Bernstein and Colin Davis conducted the Greeting Prelude in 1962 in tribute to Stravinsky's 80th birthday that year; the former on the CBS television series Young People's Concerts, in an episode devoted to the composer.

Cyrus Durgin of the Boston Globe described the Greeting Prelude as "a kind of perpetual motion which has no conclusion". Musicologist Eric Walter White called it a "jovial, aphoristic work, but rather too short to make much effect". Stravinsky himself said that it was a "very learned prelude" and "a kind of singing telegram".

One of the few events that interrupted Igor Stravinsky's work on The Rake's Progress in 1950 were engagements to conduct two concerts at the inaugural Aspen Festival in July. During a rehearsal, he was taken aback when his downbeat did not produce the result he expected:

I started a rehearsal of Tchaikovsky's Second Symphony, but instead of the doleful Russian horn melody, I heard this happy little tune ("Happy Birthday to You"). I had no idea what happened and did not understand the point (which was that one of the orchestra players had just become a father); until a certain time had been spent in diplomacy, in fact, I was actually piqued.

Stravinsky had been unfamiliar with "Happy Birthday to You", but remembered it after this occasion. The following year, in June 1951, he encountered the song again when Samuel Barber asked him to harmonize it as a 75th birthday present for Mary Louise Curtis. He complied and composed a two-part canon based on the melody.

In 1954, Stravinsky received a commission from the Venice Biennale to compose a choral work based on sacred texts, with a premiere at St. Mark's Basilica tentatively scheduled for an undetermined date between September 1954 and 1955. By February 1955, however, they had still not finalized his contract, which left the composer in a state that musicologist Stephen Walsh described as "creative limbo".

As Stravinsky awaited confirmation from the festival bureaucracy, he received a letter early that month from Charles Munch, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The conductor requested a brief orchestral work to commemorate the 80th birthday in April of former Boston Symphony music director Pierre Monteux. The composer and elder conductor, who conducted the premieres of Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, had a longstanding professional relationship, despite periods of acrimony. Although Stravinsky wrote to Munch on February 9 that he was uncertain he could fulfill the task, he began to compose the Greeting Prelude on February 18. He completed it on February 23 and mailed the score to the New York City office of Boosey & Hawkes that same day. The score was published in 1956.