The Rite of Spring Riot, 1913 by Igor Stravinsky By Aaron Green Updated April 17, 2016. In May 1913, Igor Stravinsky debuted his ballet The Rite of Spring. Though it is one of Stravinsky's most famous works, his creation was first met with harsh criticism, negative reviews, and... a riot. Watch this YouTube performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring Ballet . The Creation of The Rite of Spring A few years prior to 1910, Stravinsky began flirting with the idea and music of The Rite of Spring ballet to premiere with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company. Whether or not the music came before the story/setting or visa versa (there are conflicting statements by Stravinsky himself), we do know that by 1910, Stravinsky met with Russian expert Nicholas Roerich to discuss ancient pagan rituals.

Together, they came up with the working title "The Great Sacrifice." After taking a year hiatus to finish his ballet Petrushka, Stravinsky resumed work on The Rite of Spring with Roerich, and by July 1911, the pair had completed a working draft of the ballet's structure within a few days, changing its title to Vesna sviashchennaia (Russian) or Holy Spring. continue reading below our video Top 5 Longest Running TV Shows However, the work's French translation Le Sacre du printemps (English: The Rite of Spring) is what stuck. According to Stravinsky's journals, he returned to his home in Ukraine and wrote two movements before deciding to move to Clarens, Switzerland a month later, where he completed the ballet's first part and drafted the second. Stravinsky stopped work on the ballet by Spring of 1912, and enjoyed a nice break, even taking a trip to Bayreuth, Germany with Sergei Diaghilev to attend a performance of Richard Wagner 's opera, Parsifal.

Stravinsky returned to Clarens, Switzerland during the Fall season to finish The Rite of Spring - as signed on his orchestral score, he completed it on March 8, 19 The Cause and Events of the The Rite of Spring Riot Stravinsky debuted the The Rite of Spring Ballet at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on May 29, 1913, to an audience accustomed to the grace, elegance, and the traditional music of "conventional" ballets, i.e. Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake . Opposition to Stravinsky's work literally happened within the first few minutes of the piece as members of the audience booed loudly in response to the inharmonic notes accompanying the unrecognizable bassoon's opening solo. What's more, the work's unconventional music, sharp and unnatural choreography (dancers danced with bent arms and legs and would land on the floor so hard their internal organs would shake), and Russian pagan setting, failed to win over the majority of the audience. It should hardly come as a surprise given the ballet's thematic content.

The ballet's title and subtitle alone, hints that something darker lurks behind the velvet theatre curtains: The Rite of Spring: Picture of Pagan Russia in Two Parts. The story centers around ancient Russian tribes and their celebration of Spring. They then offer a sacrifice to their gods, choosing a young girl whom is forced to dance to death. As the ballet progressed, so did the audience's discomfort. Those in favor of Stravinksy's work argued with those in opposition. The arguments eventually turned to brawls and police had to be notified. They arrived at intermission and successfully calmed the angry crowd (yes, the show wasn't even half way over before people were throwing punches). As the second half commenced, police were unable to keep the audience under control and rioting resumed. Stravinsky was so taken aback by the audience's reaction, he fled the scene before the show was over. The Rite of Spring in the 21st Century Just like Beethoven's 9th Symphony changed the future of symphony composition, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring changed the future of ballet. Up to that point, ballet was beautiful, elegant, and charming.

As I mentioned before, audiences were accustomed to seeing and hearing works like Swan Lake , The Nutcracker , and Sleeping Beauty . Stravinsky's Rite of Spring introduced new concepts in music, dance, and story. Today, it is considered to be a milestone in the history of ballet. It has become a regular work in many ballet companies ' repertoires. The music has been used extensively in film, television, and radio, for example Disney's Fantasia. It has also inspired composers like John Williams (Star Wars) and Jerry Goldsmith (Outland). The Rite of Spring 1913: Why did it provoke a riot? - Telegraph Classical Music The Rite of Spring 1913: Why did it provoke a riot? The Rite of Spring caused an outrage on its premiere in Paris a century ago. But was it the music or the dance? Ivan Hewett investigates.

Mischief-makers: Igor Stravinsky with Diaghilev Photo: Hulton Archive By Ivan Hewett , Classical Music Critic 12:47PM BST 16 May 2013 It was 100 years ago that the most famous scandal in the history of the arts took place, at a swanky new theatre in Paris. Anyone who was anyone was there. The cosmopolitan German aristocrat Count Harry Kessler said that “it was the most dazzling house I’ve ever seen in Paris”. Jean Cocteau wrote that “the smart audience in tails and tulle, diamonds and ospreys, was interspersed with the suits and bandeaux of the aesthetic crowd. The latter would applaud novelty simply to show their contempt for the people in the boxes… Innumerable shades of snobbery, super-snobbery and inverted snobbery were represented.” What drew them on the night of May 29 1913 was the whiff of something potentially outrageous: a brand-new ballet from the Ballets Russes, which had entranced and shocked Paris ever since their first appearance there in 1909.

What gave the event an extra frisson was that this Rite of Spring was the product of the most savage of all these so-called “Northern savages”. Igor Stravinsky, the composer, had scored a massive hit the previous year with Petrushka, which added an exciting element of modernist collage to colourful Russian folklore. Vaslav Nijinsky, the choreographer, had caused a minor scandal a few months previously, with his blatantly erotic portrayal of the lovesick faun in Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune. Stravinsky was hoping the new ballet would be an even bigger hit than Petrushka. “From all indications I can see that this piece is bound to 'emerge’ in a way that rarely happens,” he wrote gleefully to Nicholas Roerich, who was the guiding spirit behind the ballet’s vision of pagan Russia. It’s a fair bet that Diaghilev, the great entrepreneur behind the Ballets Russes, was hoping for something more than an emergence. He wanted a scandal.

Related Articles 13 Apr 2013 The Ballets Russes in Paris in 1913 And he got one, though what actually happened that night is something of a mystery. The dancer Dame Marie Rambert remembered that “a shout went up in the gallery: 'Un docteur!’. Somebody else shouted louder, 'Un dentiste!’” Kessler said that people started to whisper and joke almost immediately. The conductor of the premiere, Pierre Monteux, was told by one of his double-bass players that “many a gentleman’s shiny top hat or soft fedora was ignominiously pulled down by an opponent over his eyes and ears, and canes were brandished like menacing implements of combat all over the theatre.” These are just a few of dozens of eyewitness reports. As the musicologist Richard Taruskin points out, the Rite is the most over-documented premiere in history, and yet so many things are obscure. Was it the choreography that annoyed people, or the music ? Were the police really called? Was it true that missiles were thrown, and challenges to a duel offered? Were the creators booed at the end, or cheered?

There were certainly plenty of good reasons for outrage, starting with the high, almost strangled bassoon melody that begins the work, soon draped with fluttering, twittering woodwind sounds. It’s often said that the pulsating rhythms of the Rite of Spring are what caused the outrage, but pulsating rhythms at least have an appeal at a visceral level (an appeal certainly felt at the Rite’s premiere, where according to one eye witness one excited onlooker beat out the rhythms on the bald pate of the man in front). It’s more likely that the audience was appalled and disbelieving at the level of dissonance, which seemed to many like sheer perversity. “The music always goes to the note next to the one you expect,” wrote one exasperated critic. At a deeper level, the music negates the very thing that for most people gives it meaning: the expression of human feelings. As Stravinsky put it, “there are simply no regions for soul-searching in The Rite of Spring”. This is what separates it so decisively from Stravinsky’s hit of 1911, Petrushka.

There we’re immersed in a human world, which exudes the very specific cultural ambience of Russia. It’s true that the main characters are puppets, rather than rounded human beings. But they have characters, even if they’re somewhat rudimentary, and at the end there’s even a suggestion that Petrushka might have a soul. There’s no sign that any of the creatures in the Rite of Spring has a soul, and there’s certainly no sense of a recognisable human culture. The dancers are like automata, whose only role is to enact the ritual laid down by immemorial custom. An iron necessity rules everything: there has to be a game of Rival Tribes, there has to be Dance of the Young Girls, and an elder has to bless the earth. And finally, a young girl has to be chosen and then abandoned to her fate, which is to dance herself to death. Which brings us to the other great innovator of that long-ago premiere, Vaslav Nijinsky. This strange young man, with his oddly shaped body and strange naive air (“One became aware of strange absences in his personality,” said Stravinsky) created something as epoch-making in dance as Stravinsky’s score was in music.

Whereas classical dance aspired upwards, in defiance of gravity, Nijinsky’s dancers seemed pulled down to the earth. Their strange, jerky movements and awkward poses defied every canon of gracefulness. Given all this, it’s no surprise there was a scandal. And yet, among the shouting and hissing, there were one or two sensitive observers who realised they were witnessing something deeply original, rather than merely shocking. The French writer Jacques Rivière observed that “there is something profoundly blind about this dance . There is an enormous question being carried about by all these creatures moving before our eyes. It is in no way distinct from themselves. They carry it about with them without understanding it, like an animal that turns in its cage and never tires of butting its head against the bars.” To be reminded of that brute animal unconsciousness at the zoo is one thing; to have it enacted by a troupe of highly trained dancers and musicians, in a theatre full of Parisian sophisticates, is quite another. Perhaps the riot was a sign of disquiet, a feeling that the world had lost its moorings, and that barbarism was about to be let loose in the streets.

Given that the First World War would soon break out, that feeling wasn’t so wide of the mark. Ivan Hewett presents '20 minutes: I Predict a Riot' on BBC Radio 3 tonight Culture Shock: Flashpoints: Music and Dance: Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring text version The Rite of Spring's percussive rhythms and violent score enraged its first listeners in 1913. Listen to an excerpt? Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring 1913 On May 29, 1913, in Paris, Les Ballets Russes stages the first ballet performance of The Rite of Spring (Le Sacré du Printemps,) with music by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky. The intensely rhythmic score and primitive scenario -- a setting of scenes from pagan Russia -- shock audiences more accustomed to the demure conventions of classical ballet. The complex music and violent dance steps depicting fertility rites first draw catcalls and whistles from the crowd, and are soon followed by shouts and fistfights in the aisles. The unrest in the audience escalates into a riot.

The Paris police arrive by intermission, but they restore only limited order. Chaos reigns for the remainder of the performance. Nijinsky and Stravinsky are despondent. However, Sergei Diaghilev, the director of Les Ballets Russes, comments that the scandal was "just what I wanted." The ballet completes its run of six performances amid controversy, but no further disruption. Both Stravinsky and Nijinsky continue to work, but neither creates pieces in this percussive and intense style again. In later years, The Rite of Spring is regarded as a path-breaking 20th century masterpiece. The work is often heard in concert and the ballet is set by many prominent choreographers. After extensive research, Nijinsky's original setting is reconstructed and presented by the Joffrey Ballet in 1988. This performance, 75 years after the premiere, causes no riots. In fact, it is televised nationally on PBS.

Milestones of the Millennium: The Rite of Spring Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" with Thomas Kelly Almost no musical work has had such a powerful influence or evoked as much controversy as Igor Stravinsky's ballet score �The Rite of Spring�. The work's premiere on May 29, 1913, at the Th�atre des Champs-Elys�es in Paris, was scandalous. In addition to the outrageous costumes, unusual choreography and bizarre story of pagan sacrifice, Stravinsky's musical innovations tested the patience of the audience to the fullest. In this edition of Milestones of the Millennium, we explore the history surrounding �The Rite of Spring,� its infamous premiere and its tremendous impact on music ever since. One of Stravinsky's most significant collaborators was Serge Diaghilev, director of the Ballets Russes. The two were close working partners for some twenty years, until Diaghilev's death in 1929. Much of Stravinsky's most exceptional music, including the score for �The Rite of Spring,� was composed for the productions of Diaghilev.

The first collaboration between the two Russians involved the ballet �Les Sylphides,� in which Diaghilev called upon various Russian composers to orchestrate several of Fr�d�ric Chopin's compositions for piano. �Les Sylphides� is musically innocuous and foretells but little of the coming storm. Harvard University professor Thomas Kelly suggests that one of the reasons that the Paris premiere of "The Rite of Spring" created such a furor was that it shattered everyone's expectations. The evening's program began innocently with a performance of �Les Sylphides.� However, as the follow-up piece, �The Rite of Spring� turned out to be anything but spring-like. One of the dancers recalled that Vaslav Nijinsky's shocking choreography was physically unnatural to perform. "With every leap we landed heavily enough to jar every organ in us." The music itself was angular, dissonant and totally unpredictable. In the introduction, Stravinksy called for a bassoon to play higher in its range than anyone else had ever done. In fact, the instrument was virtually unrecognizable as a bassoon.

When the curtain rose and the dancing began, there appeared a musical theme without a melody, only a loud, pulsating, dissonant chord with jarring, irregular accents. The audience responded to the ballet with such a din of hisses and catcalls that the performers could barely hear each other. Backstage at the premiere, Nijinsky shouted at the dancers while Diaghilev tried to suppress a possible riot by flashing the house lights. Stravinsky himself fumed at the audience's response to his music. If nothing else, the ballet's premiere managed to instill in the audience the true spirit of the music. As Thomas Kelly states, "The pagans on-stage made pagans of the audience." Despite its inauspicious debut, Stravinsky's score for �The Rite of Spring� today stands as a magnificent musical masterpiece of the twentieth century. Hear PT host Lisa Simeone and commentator Thomas Kelly discuss the scandalous premiere of Stravinsky�s great score and how it changed music forever. An online feature from Milestones of the Millenium . (This audio segment requires the free RealPlayer 5.0 or higher. Portions of the music have been edited from this online version.

You can also listen with a 14.4 connection) Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky | The Australian Ballet Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky 09 April 2010 | By Annie Carroll “If you are born without wings, don’t do anything to stop them growing” Coco Chanel ‘What is art?’ Jan Kounen asks me, ‘What is not art?’ he continues. The French film director, all glistening eyes and mysterious smile, clearly enjoys rhetoric. I recently had the opportunity to briefly chat with Kounen during his whistle-stop tour of Australia. In his most recent film Coco & Igor , soon to be released in cinemas around the country, Kounen explores the borders of art and commerce and asks the audience to question their own thoughts of the nature of art. Set between 1913 and the early 1920s, the film depicts the alleged love affair between two of the great visionary artists of the 20th century – Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel. Both renegades of their time, Chanel and Stravinsky caused disunity among many with their revolutionary ideas about fashion and music.

For Kounen, directing the film was the prospect of a journey he couldn’t miss. In a heady portrayal of intense human connection, the audience is transported from the premiere of the Rite Of Spring in the magnificent Theatre des Champs Elysees in 1913, to the inky rooms of Coco’s country house in 1920. For Kounen, a big attraction to the director’s chair was the opportunity to recreate the tumultuous evening of the Rite of Spring premiere. The harmony of cinema, music, dance and costume created a web of art forms for Kounen to juggle, along with the challenge of re-building a Nijinsky ballet which was never formally recorded. Recreations have relied on testimony and drawings and Kounen’s own reconstruction was “like a whole monument of which you have only paintings, you can only rebuild as you imagine” he explains. The complex, rousing scene is the tour de force of the film, instilling a steady hum of tension that persists with every scene. “The proposal (for the film) was to have a heavy sky but no storm. It asks the audience for a little effort, but I think it’s interesting to move in another territory.

Instead of the volcano exploding, you see the lava bubbling underneath”, says Kounen.Kounen has created a visually sumptuous film, with scenes looking as though they’ve been plucked from a World of Interiors’ magazine photo shoot. Karl Lagerfeld and Maison Chanel collaborated with Kounen to create the elegant dresses for Anna Mouglalis, who plays Coco Chanel. A wisp of a woman, Mouglalis blazes through the screen, cigarette between scarlet lips, in a cloud of impenetrable smoke, displaying Chanel’s fierce independence and penchant for pearls. Stravinsky, played by Mads Mikkelsen, seems equally difficult to decipher, but it is in his music that he finds emotional release. When rehearsals for Rite of Spring began, Stravinsky hired a German pianist to play his score only to fire him in order to play it twice as fast, spinning the dancers to their frenzied limits. So stirring was Stravinsky’s music that Kounen believes the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring score was one of the most important evenings in the history of music.

“Between Stravinsky and The Sex Pistols there was nothing very important” Kounen quips, explaining that the ardent reaction of the audience at the premiere of Rite Of Spring was much like the riotous response The Sex Pistols generated with their punk-rock act. Rite Of Spring was performed only six times in 1913 at the Theatre des Champs Elysees, but it marked the transition from the traditionalist to the contemporary. To this day, the ballet remains a playground for artistic liberty, with re-workings by Martha Graham, Angelin Preljocaj, Maurice Bejart, Stephen Page and Pina Bausch. In many ways, the brief and fiery connection between Coco and Igor seemed destined to happen. Elbowing against the constraints of the era, neither could settle with convention in their art. From the film’s first shot of Chanel taking a pair of scissors to her corset, to scenes of Stravinsky penning music that shocked Old World composition into the past, their motivation is as black and white as the keys of a piano or the tone of one of Coco’s famous tweed jackets. Both wanted to challenge the expected in a bid to shift towards modernity.

“To move in one direction is to go backwards”, said Stravinsky famously. Kounen believes the same of film – “We have a duty in cinema; to do something different to what was done before but without forgetting what was done before us. For inspiration, we have the duty to welcome it and accept the fact that we are not its master.” When I ask Kounen why Stravinsky so callously remarks to Chanel that ‘You’re not an artist Coco, you’re a shopkeeper’, he puts it down to a bad case of matrimonial guilt; it’s Stravinsky’s excuse for discontinuing the affair. So was Chanel an artist? “I think she doesn’t care,” Kounen replies “Why react to him? Stravinsky is just using it as an excuse for the relationship. She’s not pissed off because she sees the truth. She is an artist, of course. Art is a social vision she had. The manifestation of that is to do clothes, perfume. She’s even more of an artist, exploring, and discovering possibilities in her own life.” In the depiction of these two creative giants, it becomes clear that human nature reacts to change in foreseeable ways; we shy away from what we don’t understand or expect.

Kounen says of his film, “Maybe what you’re seeing now you say boo to and destroy the career of the people, but in 100 years your children say it’s a masterpiece. Maybe it’s to say look, we don’t know what we see now. The things we love may be forgotten, the things we hate may be famous.” Lucky for Kounen, Coco & Igor won’t be quickly forgotten. Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky is in cinemas April 15 Want to win a fantastic Coco & Igor prize pack, courtesy of Madman Entertainment? Click here! 1000+ images about Rite of Spring: 1913 to now on Pinterest | The rite of spring, Ballet and Spring Pinterest • The world’s catalog of ideas Rite of Spring: 1913 to now American Repertory Ballet Artistic Director Douglas Martin is creating a brand new "Rite of Spring" for ARB, set to Stravinsky's driving score. After its controversial 1913 premiere by the Ballets Russes, The Joffrey Ballet was the first ballet company to revive the original version, choreographed by Nijinsky. Martin was part of this cast.

Now, his "Rite" is a totally unique adaptation, set in a 20th-century office! 31 Pins133 Followers The Rite of Spring & The Firebird 1913-2013 - DANCE The Rite of Spring & The Firebird 1913-2013 100TH ANNIVERSARY COLLECTORS EDITION Choreography by Vaslav Nijinski (1913) Scene plan: Igor Stravinsky and Nicholas Roerich Reconstructed and staged by M. Hodson The Firebird Choreography and Libretto: M. Fokine (1910) Reconstruction: I. Fokine, A.

Liepa Mariinsky Orchestra and Ballet BAC241 / Ballet recorded at the Mariinsky Theatre (June 2008) Choose your online retailer Buy this item at In celebration of the creation of Le Sacre du printemps (Rite of spring) in Paris in 1913, new edition in a DVD-book of a wonderful Stravinsky night at the Mariinsky (ex-Kirov) with the original Nijinsky version of the Rite of Spring and the Firebird both conducted by Valery Gergiev. The premiere of The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris, on may 1913 caused a veritable scandal. The audience was shocked by the primitive violence of the ballet. I twas so radically rejected that the ballet was taken off after eight performances. Although long forgotten, thanks to the relentless work of Millicent Hodson, Nijinsky’s original choreography was recreated. The Firebird is a russian folk tale in two scenes commissionned at the young Stravinsky by Diaghilev and premiered at the Paris Opera House in 1910. The ballet was an immediate success.

The Ballets Russes enabled The choreographer Fokine could bring his enterprise the right amount of novelty needed to captivate but not clash with the audience. I twas a total succes. The Orchestra and Ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre are conducted by Valery Gergiev. Director: Denis Caïozzi Bonus: Documentary on Russian Ballets (8 min) Interviews with Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer (30 min.) Length: 85 min - Image: NTSC, colour, 16:9 Audio: PCM Stereo, 5.1 Dolby Digital Zones: All Zones - 1 disc(s) - Release date: 2013-05-22 Did The Rite of Spring really spark a riot? - BBC News BBC News Did The Rite of Spring really spark a riot?

By Ivan Hewett Classical music critic 29 May 2013 Close share panel Image caption Finnish National Ballet's 2013 revival of the original 1913 production Of all the scandals of the history of art, none is so scandalous as the one that took place on the evening of 29 May 1913 in Paris at the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring. The Rite descended into a riot, the story goes. Magnified in the retelling, it has acquired the unquestionable certainty that only legend can have. Everyone simply "knows" that there was a riot. But is it possible to separate fact from fiction? Was there violence? Dozens of witnesses left accounts of the evening, but they tend to say different things. According to some, blows were exchanged, objects were thrown at the stage, and at least one person was challenged to a duel.

The plot Depicts a pagan spring ritual in a Russian village Includes a dance of abduction, a game between rival tribes and a passionate dance of the earth At the end a girl is chosen for sacrifice, and dances herself to death There is no doubt that there was a lot of noise - contemporary press reports make this clear. Esteban Buch, director of studies at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Science in Paris, says it's difficult to deny that "something really extraordinary" took place - but he points out that if you look at the accounts given over the months, years and decades that followed, "the riot" acquires greater importance as time goes on. The Rite and the riot become entangled in memory making this event, as he puts it, "some kind of gate to modernism, to the 20th Century". Image caption Choreographer and dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, left, in the original Rite of Spring How soon did the trouble start? Lydia Sokolova, one of the dancers on the stage that night, said the audience came prepared. The players Igor Stravinsky made his name with The Firebird in 1910.

The Rite of Spring establish him as a key figure in 20th Century music at the age of 30. Vaslav Nijinsky, the virtuoso male ballet dancer of his era, pictured above right in L'Apres-midi d'un Faune. A revolutionary choreographer and for a while Diaghilev's lover. Sergei Diaghilev founded Ballet Russe in 1909. He hired stars such as Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova, and commissioned music from Debussy, Ravel and Prokofiev, as well as Stravinsky. "They had got themselves all ready. They didn't even let the music be played for the overture. As soon as it was known that the conductor was there, the uproar began," she said in an interview recorded in 1965. There had been some noise two weeks earlier at the premiere of Debussy's ballet, Jeux, and critics had heaped abuse on Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography. Now Nijinsky had choreographed the Rite of Spring - rumoured to be the last word in Russian primitivism or modernist chic, depending who you believed.

So part of the audience may well have been predisposed to be outraged. "There was an existing tremor in the air against Nijinsky before any curtain went up," says Stephen Walsh, professor of music at Cardiff University. Others say the trouble began with the start of the overture and its strangled bassoon melody, and other strange sounds never before conjured from an orchestra. Igor Stravinsky, for his part, said the storm only really broke after the overture, "when the curtain opened on the group of knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down". Image caption Kenneth MacMillan's The Rite of Spring from Beyond Ballet Russes, 2012 Were the police called? It's hard to say at this point what role the police played, if any. One account has it that about 40 people were arrested, which would suggest police arriving in large numbers. Media captionAn extract of a recent recording of the Rite of Spring Another witness points out that it was standard practice for some police to be present at Parisian theatres at the time. Esteban Buch visited the Paris prefecture archives to check police records, only to find that the relevant file was missing.

His hunch is that there were a couple of policemen in the theatre as a matter of routine "and they just witnessed the scene without doing much". Was it class warfare? The brand new Theatre of the Champs Elysees was "awash with diamonds and furs" according to one contemporary report. It seems that the beau monde really did turn out for this premiere - and some will have been keener than others on the avant-garde performance. Jean Cocteau wrote that "the aesthetic crowd... would applaud novelty simply to show their contempt for the people in the boxes". Find out more Ivan Hewett explored the myths that surround the infamous first performance of the Rite of Spring in I Predict a Riot on Radio 3 Listen again here But were they divided by class? Buch says there are unlikely to have been any poor or even middle class people in the auditorium. "My reading of the evidence is that actually the divisions went inside social groups - you have people who are very much alike and they have different opinions on the piece." One barrier to understanding the quarrel, Buch adds, is that none of those who protested ever left a record explaining the reason for their anger.

Image caption A modern staging to mark the centenary at Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre Was it the music or the dance that shocked? Will the music last a very long time this way? Diaghilev to Stravinsky The young Stravinsky had taken Paris by storm in previous seasons. His Petrushka, the year before, had been a massive hit. "There is no question at all, he was a star," says Walsh. But compared with the Rite of Spring, "Petrushka was not such a forbidding score, by any means." Stravinsky himself said that when he first played the beginning of the Rite, with its dissonant chords and pulsating rhythm, to Serge Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, Diaghilev asked him a "very offending" question: "Will it last a very long time this way?" (Stravinsky replied: "To the end, my dear.") So the music was as startling as the strange jerky movements of the choreography. Esteban Buch argues that you cannot separate the impact of one from the other. What upset people, he thinks, was "the very notion of primitive society being shown on stage".

Image caption And another centenary take by Bejart Ballet Did Diaghilev want a scandal? "He knew there was going to be trouble," said Lydia Sokolova, and there are some signs that he was hoping for a scandal. Announcing the Rite of Spring in the Parisian press, Diaghilev had suggested it would cause "impassioned debate". In so doing, Esteban Buch suggests, he was setting the scene "for maybe not a riot, but at least a controversy". He certainly got one. Walsh points out the curious fact that the dress rehearsal passed off "without a murmur", whereas with Debussy's opera Pelleas and Melisande a decade earlier, there had been trouble at the dress rehearsal but not at the premiere. So perhaps chance also played a part. Was the premiere a success? What happened next?

Five more performances in Paris and four in London at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane Nijinsky then ran off with one of Diaghilev's dancers - their rift never healed There were concert performances (no ballet) in Russia and in Paris in 1914 Diaghilev revived the ballet in 1920 with a new choreography by Leonide Massine The performance continued to the end, despite the rowdiness of the audience, and one thing most accounts seem to agree on is that there was an ovation. Walsh cites one press report, however, which suggests that when Stravinsky and Nijinsky took their bow, the ovation fought against the noise of protesters. As he puts it, this does "slightly modify the impression that they stood in front of the curtain and were greeted with uniform admiration". So even on this point, we cannot be quite sure. Ivan Hewett explored the myths that surround the infamous first performance of the Rite of Spring in I Predict a Riot on BBC Radio 3. Catch up with iPlayer.

Then The Curtain Opened: The Bracing Impact Of Stravinsky's 'Rite' : Deceptive Cadence : NPR Dancers in folkloric costumes, moving unpredictably to pounding chords, characterized the 1913 Rite of Spring premiere at Paris' Champs Elysées Theater. Keystone-France/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Keystone-France/Getty Images Dancers in folkloric costumes, moving unpredictably to pounding chords, characterized the 1913 Rite of Spring premiere at Paris' Champs Elysées Theater. Keystone-France/Getty Images One hundred years ago this week, a ballet premiered that changed the art world. Igor Stravinsky 's Le Sacre du Printemps — The Rite of Spring — was first seen by the public on May 29, 1913, in Paris. As the orchestra played The Rite's swirling introduction, the audience at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées began to murmur. Then the curtain opened. Dancers dressed in folkloric costumes began to move unpredictably to the pounding chords.

In the theater, the rumbles grew to pandemonium — hoots and jeers, arguments and even fistfights between traditionalists and modernists in the audience. It became difficult to hear the music. The composer, who was sitting in the theater, described the scene in a 1965 interview, included in the documentary Stravinsky. "When the curtain opened on a group of knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down ... the storm broke," Stravinsky said. "They came for Scheherazade, or for Cleopatra. And they saw Le Sacre du Printemps. They were very shocked. They were very naïve and stupid people." New Yorker music critic Alex Ross says Stravinsky shocked the audience with a revolution in harmony. Article continues after sponsorship "You have these two chords slammed together: E Major — actually F-Flat Major, as it's spelled in the score — and an E-Flat Dominant 7th chord," Ross explains. "These are two adjacent chords. They're dissonant. They're being jammed together. And that's a harsh sound, and he keeps insisting on it.

That chord repeats and repeats and repeats, pounding away." And then, Ross says, there was Stravinsky's revolution in rhythm. "It seems as though at first he's just going to have this regular pulse. But then these accents start landing in unexpected places, and you can't quite get the pattern of it," Ross says. "It's as if you're in a boxing ring, and this sort of brilliant fighter is coming at you from all directions with these jabs." As unsettling as the music was, the audience at the premiere of The Rite of Spring was even more shocked by Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography. "This was not ballet," says Lynn Garafola, a professor of dance at Barnard College and author of a history called Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. "It was a style of expressive performance that was extremely violent, and that seemed to depart completely from conventional ballet vocabulary. An image from the 2013 production of Le Sacre du Printemps by the Joffrey Ballet, Chicago, reflects the hard jumps and stamps of Vaslav Nijinsky's original choreography.

Herbert Migdoll/Joffrey Ballet hide caption toggle caption Herbert Migdoll/Joffrey Ballet An image from the 2013 production of Le Sacre du Printemps by the Joffrey Ballet, Chicago, reflects the hard jumps and stamps of Vaslav Nijinsky's original choreography. Herbert Migdoll/Joffrey Ballet "It included a lot of stamping. It included jumps. It didn't aspire to be ethereal — in other words, to look like jumps that could hang in the air. ... They seemed to go up simply to crash down into the earth. And then there were parts where they were simply trembling, when their hands were in fists, doing something that seemed, for all the world, to be primitive." The story itself is primitive: An ancient Russian tribe makes a sacrifice to the gods of fertility; a virgin is chosen; and she dances herself to death. But Ballets Russes founder Sergei Diaghilev, who staged the ballet, was also intent on presenting modern works. Stravinsky had already written two scores for the company, The Firebird and Petrushka. He said the idea for The Rite of Spring came to him in a dream.

He also claimed a sort of mystical creative process. "Very little immediate tradition lies behind Le Sacre du Printemps, and no theory," Stravinsky said. "I had only my ear to help me. I heard, and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which the Sacre passed." However it came to Stravinsky, Alex Ross says the music still has an impact. "The Rite felt completely different. And that has remained a very powerful influence," Ross says. "Even the youngest composers coming to the fore today listen to The Rite and think, 'my God.' It still sounds new to them." The Rite of Spring influenced 20th century composers from Bartok and Stockhausen to Steve Reich and the American minimalists. Within a year of the premiere, the score was hailed by critics and audiences as a masterpiece. As for the ballet, Nijinksy's original choreography was abandoned after the initial run, and wouldn't be seen again until the 1980s. But historian Lynn Garafola says the choreography had an equally dramatic impact on the world of dance. "I think it was the beginning of what eventually becomes modern dance.

It meant that it was possible to create a large-scale work — not a work for a soloist — that departed from the traditional vocabularies of ballet," she says. "This was a new kind of ballet, a new kind of choreography, and a new kind of music." In the century since its premiere, The Rite of Spring has become a symbol of what's modern. And Igor Stravinsky knew better than to try a sequel.

Question: What ballet by Igor Stravinsky shocked audiences when it premiered in 1913?
Answer: The Rite of Spring