Stravinksy's Rite of Spring

                                                 Vaslay Nijinksy 

Igor Stravinky's The Rite of Spring, ( Le Sacre du Printemps) caused a riot when it was first performed in Paris on the evening of 29 May 1913 in Paris at the brand-new Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, in front of a glittering audience. The piece was commissioned  and produced by the noted impresario of the Ballets Russes, Serge Diahilev who had earlier produced the young composer’s The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911). Stravinsky developed the story of The Rite of Spring, originally to be called The Great Sacrifice, with the aid of artist and mystic Nicholas Roerich, whose name appears with the composer’s on the title page of the earliest publications of the score. The production was choreographed by the brilliant Vaslay Nijinksy (photo above).
Details surrounding the events on this evening remain hazy. Official records are scarce, and most of what is known is based on eyewitness accounts or newspaper reports. To this day, experts debate over what exactly sparked the incident , was it  the music or  the dancing, a  publicity stunt or social warfare? Though most agree on at least one thing: Stravinsky’s grand debut ended in mayhem and chaos. As the crowd arrived on opening night, expectations were high.The Théàtre des Champs Élysées had just opened, and audience members came to see and be seen. Stravinsky was nervous because he knew that avant-garde pieces were risky in Paris.Decades before, Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser had been booed off the stage at the Opera. But Stravinsky had had great success here in the past with his  The Firebird and Petrushka.

                                                     Igor Stravinsky

According to accounts I have read as the curtain went up and not long after the opening notes were heard, a ruckus broke out in the auditorium. The opening bassoon solo was set so high that the audience didn’t know what instrument they were hearing. As the lights came up on the first tableau of dancers, people began yelling, and a wilder shouting match began, and it became increasingly difficult to hear the music, and amidst the noise the dancers could not stay in sync.Stravinsky had taken the orchestra, which was associated with high society and culture, and brought it to a carnal, bestial, earthy level. As he heard the roar of the audience begin to build, Stravinsky panicked and ran backstage to intervene. By the time he reached the wings, things were in complete chaos.
But the performance continued. Diaghilev may have expected there would be some kind of ruckus at the performance. Unbeknownst to Stravinsky and Nijinsky, he had instructed the conductor, Pierre Monteux, to keep going no matter what happened.
As some in the audience booed and shouted during the performance, others as loudly and energetically defended the performance, resulting in fist fights and eventually a riot that required police intervention. In the second half , police were unable to keep the audience under control and rioting resumed.  Stravinsky was so taken aback by the audience's reaction, and he fled the scene before the show was over.
Musically, in addition to its provocative harmonic character what was that most shocking to the audience was Stravinksy's abandonment of classical melodic and harmonic development in favour of the rhythmic and tonal properties of the music. The music itself was unlike anything that came before it, primitive and savage , celebrating the raw, the physical, the elemental.
This combined with imaginative scenes of “pagan” Russia,and the evocative, sometimes violent dancing, sharp and unnatural choreography (dancers danced with bent arms and legs and would land on the floor so hard their internal organs would shake), was considered shocking to some, though exciting, brilliantly creative and innovative to others. It should hardly have come as a surprise given the ballet's thematic content. The ballet's title and subtitle alone hint that something darker lurks behind the velvet theater curtains: The Rite of Spring: Picture of Pagan Russia in Two Parts. It's essentially a story that centers around ancient Russian tribes and their pagan celebration of Spring. That offers a remorseless human sacrifice to their gods, choosing a young girl who is forced to dance to death.

The writer Jean Cocteau described a certain amount of manipulation of the whole thing, writing  in a pamphlet called Cock and Harlequin "All the elements of scandal were present, the small audience in tails and tulle, diamonds and ospreys, was interespersed with the suits and bandeaux of the aesthetic crowd. The latter would apply novelty to show their contempt for the people in the boxes.... uniumerable shades of snobbery, super-snobbery and inverted snobbery were represented... The audience played the role that was written for it."

                                     A drawing by Jean Cocteau of Stravinsky playing his music

I will end with a 1987 Joffrey Ballet performance of the work, and you can seen for yourselves how this work might have looked and sounded in 1913.Many years later, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring which foreshadowed rock, punk and jazz, managed to destroy the old order and  still has an edgy, intense, almost out-of-control feeling that makes it so exhilarating, liberating and engaging, this I believe is the immense power that good music carries.The composer Pierre Boulez said "The Rites of Spring serves as a point of reference to all who seek to establish the birth certificate of what is still called "contemporary" music."  Sometimes new music is born, and new births can be violent.