the score of Musorgsky's Khovanshchina, which Diaghilev was putting on in June and for which, in particular, Stravinsky was providing the final chorus Musorgsky had never written. The momentous first performance of The Rite, conducted by Monteux and with Maria Piltz as the Chosen One who must sacrifice her life in order to renew the fertility of the soil, at last took place on 29 May in the new Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris. The riot which attended the premiere has been much chronicled. It was a typically Parisian affair, targeted as much at Nizhinsky (whose choreography of Debussy's Jeux two weeks earlier had been disliked) and even at the theatre's manager, Gabriel Astruc, as at the music, which in fact was largely inaudible. The open, cinema-like design of the new theatre tended to encourage a certain social fractiousness, as perhaps did the hot weather and the presence of a less-than-committed touristic element in the audience. The open dress rehearsal the previous day had passed off without incident before an audience that was actually more typical for the Ballets Russes: a mixture of society le tout Paris and seriously interested musicians, balletomanes, artists and literati. Yet the music might well have merited a riot. Certainly it was to remain the most notoriously violent score of a time when huge, noisy orchestras and harsh dissonance were more or less commonplace appurtenances of the new music. The primitive imagery of Russian symbolism, of the kind exploited by Roerich, had always carried a certain revolutionary tone, a note of challenge to ossified social structures. But behind all the racket, behind the wilfully discordant harmonies and convulsive metric irregularities lay a genuinely innovatory kind of musical thinking whose point would not become clear until Stravinsky himself began to deconstruct it in subsequent works. Already Petrushka had begun to isolate and manipulate fragments of folk melodies (including tradesmen's cries and factory songs), and to combine them in variable patterns which tended to dissolve regular harmony and metre. The Rite of Spring merely intensified these procedures by transferring them to a situation where disruption within a fixed, immobile context was actually part of the plot. Both scores make heavy use of ostinato patterns, and both take the idea of a variable-length melodic figure or cell as the determinant of metre. But whereas in Petrushka these changing metres are mostly incidents within a prevailing regularity, in The Rite they take over the entire rhythmic structure, and even invade the regular ostinato patterns in the form of thrown accents, often drastically emphasized. Because The Rite is also more polyphonic than Petrushka, there is at the same time a conflicting accentual relationship of the different lines (which is why Stravinsky sometimes found it hard to know where to put the barlines a problem reflected in the many changes the score underwent in different editions down the years). Harmonically both works use the idea of modal fields. In Petrushka such fields are defined either by the conventional mode of the folksongs, or by the octatonic scale, particularly as articulated by triads an