“The most important piece of music of the 20th century” Although designed as a work for the stage commentators broadly agree that The Rite of Spring has had a greater impact in the concert hall. In his autobiography Stravinsky writes that the derisive laughter that greeted the first bars of the ‘Introduction’ to The Rite of Spring at the premiere disgusted him, and that he left the auditorium to watch the rest of the performance from the stage wings.Ī year later, when the score was performed in Paris as a concert piece for the first time, Stravinsky was carried on the shoulders of his fans in triumph and there were huge ovations. “The work of a madman … sheer cacophony,” wrote the composer Puccini. The unrest receded significantly during Part II and at the end there were several curtain calls. Through all the disturbances the performance continued without interruption. He recalled, “Everything available was tossed in our direction, but we continued to play on.” “The work of a madman …sheer cacophony”īy the time the first part of the ballet was over the police had already arrived and around 40 people had been arrested. Conductor Pierre Monteux believed that the trouble began when these two groups, the pro and con factions, began attacking each other, and the orchestra. At that time a typical Parisian ballet audience consisted of two diverse groups: the wealthy and fashionable set, who would be expecting to see a traditional performance with beautiful music, and a ‘Bohemian’ group who were eager for something new. They were very naïve and stupid people.”Ĭontrary to popular belief it was not just the shock of hearing the music and the choreography that caused the riot at The Rite of Spring’s premiere. Stravinsky said the audience, “came for Scheherazade or Cleopatra, and they saw Le Sacre du Printemps. Their heavy steps were a world away from traditional elegant ballet. Stravinsky described the dancers as a row of “knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down” who jerked rather than danced. Then there was the dance choreographed by Nijinsky which, according to some observers, was what really shocked the audience at The Rite of Spring’s premiere. I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed.” “I had only my ear to help me I heard and I wrote what I heard. “I was guided by no system whatever in Le Sacre du Printemps,” wrote Igor Stravinsky in 1961. As Stravinsky put it, “There are simply no regions for soul-searching in The Rite of Spring.”Ĭlick to load video “I was guided by no system whatever in Le Sacre du Printemps” At a deeper level the music negates the very thing that for most people gives it meaning: the expression of human feelings. The sounds are often deliberately harsh, right from opening Lithuanian folk melody, and the music is rhythmically complex in a completely unprecedented way. combinations of notes which don’t make normal harmonic sense. The score contains many novel features for its time including experiments in tonality, metre, rhythm, stress and dissonance, i.e. Musically his avant-garde score for The Rite of Spring contradicted every rule. Stravinsky’s inspiration was still Russian folk tradition – after various primitive rituals celebrating the advent of spring, a young girl is chosen as a sacrificial victim and dances herself to death. The idea for the work came to Stravinsky in 1910 when he was composing The Firebird, but he put the project aside for a year to write Petrushka, before immersing himself in The Rite of Spring in the summer of 1911. The Rite of Spring was Stravinsky’s third project for the Ballets Russes after The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911). Stravinsky was a young, virtually unknown, composer when Diaghilev recruited him to create works for the Ballets Russes. The riot at Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring premiere
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