augmented fourth apart, for instance the C major/F major superimposition, which serves as the Petrushka motif, and which Stravinsky explores (and perhaps discovered) as a white-note/black-note separation of the pianist's hands. Octatony is also important in The Rite of Spring (along with other, less rational chromatic modes); but here there is a consistent opposition between the melody often Dorian-mode folksong fragments and the remainder of the harmonic field, which typically sets up chromatic interferences with it. Stravinsky engineers these interferences by joining together Dorian tunes a diminished or augmented octave (major 7th or minor 9th) apart, as on the very first page. At other times, such intervals serve as constructs in their own right, derived from or defining the harmonic field, as in the Spring Auguries or the Sacrifical Dance. They seem a natural expression of the harsh and terrible events the ballet enacts. Yet, curiously, Stravinsky never lost his taste for such chords. What one might call the mistuned octave remained for him an emblematic sonority regardless of dramatic or narrative context, and usually, in fact, without violent or barbaric connotations. Five days after the premiere, Stravinsky was admitted to hospital with acute enteritis, which soon emerged as full-blown typhoid fever. He stayed in the Villa Borghese nursing home for more than five weeks, missing all six performances of Khovanshchina (only the last two or three of which, however, included his final chorus), the last three of The Rite and its ensuing London premiere (11 July). Instead, he went straight back to Ustilug in mid-July, and there embarked, in collaboration with Stepan Mitusov, on a completion of The Nightingale, to a fat commission from the newly formed Moscow Free Theatre. It was to be their last summer at the family home. Yet Stravinsky may already have begun to sense that Russia was finished as far as he was concerned artistically. His first two ballets, performed in suite form in both St Petersburg and Moscow, had been greeted by a distinctly mixed press and a deafening silence on the part of his own closest friends (notably the Rimsky-Korsakovs and Steinberg); and now Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov, Vladimir's older brother and recently an even closer friend of Stravinsky's, had published a poisonous review of The Rite of Spring in Russkaya Molva. The fact that it was apparently partly motivated by fury at Stravinsky's role in the Khovanshchina reworking, which had superseded their father's version, will hardly have eased the pain it caused. Paris, by contrast, made handsome amends for its hooliganish first reaction to The Rite when Monteux conducted two separate concert performances in the Casino in April 1914, and after the first of these, on 5 April, Stravinsky was mobbed by delirious admirers. So when the Free Theatre collapsed in May 1914, leaving Diaghilev with the world premiere of The Nightingale (spectacularly designed by Benois) in Paris later that month, the composer was not greatly disturbed, though he lost money because of the charge. More worrying was his wife's health. In January, after the birth of their fourth child, she had had a severe