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The origins of this piece 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".