"Pagan" Spring Awakening turned music upside down 100 years ago

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Paris - Roaring, whistling, stomping, and the occasional slap - such was the premiere of the ballet The Rite of Spring by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris 100 years ago, on May 29, 1913. The composition, subtitled Pictures of Pagan Russia, was considered by many listeners to be "the most false ever written." The music of the thirty-one-year-old Stravinsky was replete with dissonances, sharp sounds, and unusual rhythms, marking a fundamental turning point in the history of music. This magnum opus of 20th-century music influenced many composers and is often compared to the groundbreaking painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso from 1907, which signified the birth of cubism. The premiere of The Rite of Spring, which took place just 14 months before the outbreak of World War I, effectively opened the door to further significant musical transformations of the 20th century.
The idea for the ballet - a girl is sacrificed to the god of spring before the eyes of pagan elders - reportedly flashed through Stravinsky's mind in 1910 while he was working on the ballet The Firebird. Stravinsky signed the contract to compose the piece with the head of the Russian Ballet, Sergei Diaghilev, in the summer of 1911 in Karlovy Vary, and he wrote the work primarily in the Swiss town of Clarens between 1911-1912, completing it in March 1913.
The premiere of this groundbreaking work took place in a completely new theatre, which had only opened at the beginning of April 1913. Alongside The Rite of Spring, the program included the ballet Les Sylphides by Frédéric Chopin, The Spirit of the Rose to music by Carl Maria von Weber, and the impressionist ballet Afternoon of a Faun by Claude Debussy.
The choreography for the premiere of The Rite of Spring was handled by Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, and the designer was Russian painter, philosopher, and mystic Nicholas Roerich. The ballet's narrative is a fantastical reconstruction of a Slavic pagan ritual, divided into two parts, The Adoration of the Earth and The Sacrifice.
The overly progressive music, with a strong emphasis on its rhythmic aspect, hinted that the reception by the audience would not be unanimous. This was even more so as Nijinsky presented anti-ballet positions of the body - with arms at sharp angles and turned-in feet. The audience's reaction was swift - grumbling escalated into a brawl, the audience whistled, shouted at the dancers, musicians, and conductor, banged umbrellas against each other, and slapped one another. Nijinsky's dancer and collaborator, Marie Rambert, heard someone in the gallery shout: "Doctor! Dentist! Two doctors!"
Stravinsky described the premiere as follows: "From the beginning of the performance, there were mild protests against the music. And as soon as the curtain rose and the stage was filled with bobbing pigtails and feet in 'iks', a riot ensued immediately. I heard shouts behind me of 'Shut your mouth!', someone screamed 'Stop it, whores from the sixteenth district!', but those 'whores' were the most elegant ladies in Paris. The uproar continued, and after a few minutes, I angrily left the audience and remember slamming the door behind me. The music was so dear to me, I loved it so much. When I came backstage completely furious, Diaghilev was frantically turning on the lights in the audience - he was probably hoping to calm the audience. Then, until the end of the performance, I stood in the side wings holding Nijinsky's frock coat from behind because he was standing on a chair counting the ballet corps in time - as if he were shouting commands to sailors on a ship."
About the composition, for example, composer Claude Debussy said that "the drumming of blacks had not yet been universally recognized as music," while poet Jean Cocteau claimed that The Rite of Spring was filled with "wild sorrow and the childbirth pains of Earth," and composer Arthur Honegger likened it to an atomic bomb that overturned an entire epoch. Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who considered Stravinsky the only truly great composer of the 20th century, remarked about The Rite that it was "rather crude work, too outwardly flashy, with little inner substance."
After the premiere, there were another five performances, already without the passions; one of them was attended by famous French composer Maurice Ravel and his Italian colleague Giacomo Puccini, who judged the music as "cacophonous." The Rite of Spring was performed four times in Nijinsky's choreography in London as well.
A new choreography was created only in 1920 by choreographer Leonid Massine, and ten years later, Massine presented The Rite of Spring with dancer Martha Graham in the leading role at the Metropolitan Opera. The work was first performed in Moscow only in 1965. Since then, almost all significant choreographers have attempted to interpret Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (reportedly performed worldwide over 150 times), including Maurice Béjart and Pina Bausch.
In 1987, there was even a reconstruction of the original Nijinsky choreography performed in Los Angeles. In recent years, there has even been a punk rock version of The Rite of Spring, and in 2008, the original inhabitants of Australia, the Aborigines, danced the leading roles.
The Rite of Spring has gradually become one of the most performed and recorded works of modern classical music, especially in orchestral form, whose premiere with Sergei Kusevitsky at the podium took place in February 1914 in St. Petersburg. The work influenced a whole array of artists, such as French composer Edgar Varèse, who was present at the premiere in 1913, and his American colleague Aaron Copland.
According to recent research, a significant portion of the first part of The Rite of Spring was a transposition of a Russian folk song that appeared in 1877 in the collection One Hundred Russian National Songs by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.