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 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).

BBC - Culture - Stravinsky’s ballet: 100 years on Classical music Stravinsky’s ballet: 100 years on Stravinsky’s ballet sparked a riot at its Paris premiere in 1913. One hundred years on, Clemency Burton-Hill asks: why exactly were audiences so scandalised? By Clemency Burton-Hill 21 October 2014 “It’s terrifying!” whispered Claude Debussy, apparently with a “sad, anxious” expression on his face. “I don’t understand it!” Debussy was not alone in his utter lack of comprehension that unseasonably balmy Paris night of 29 May, 1913. Over in another box, in the ravishing art-nouveau auditorium at the city’s glitzy new Théâtre-des-Champs-Élysées, the composer Camille Saint-Saëns heard merely a few bars of the strange opening woodwind solo before hissing to his neighbour: “If that’s a bassoon – I’m a baboon!” Others would not be so polite: the frenzied riots that kicked off at the premiere of The Rite of Spring have become legend.

The capacity audience that evening ran the gamut from bejewelled, high-society Parisian ladies and their white-tie-wearing gentlemen to a gaggle of more bohemian critics and poets, whom Sergei Diaghilev had allowed in for free. Jean Cocteau described the crowd as exhibiting “the thousand varieties of snobbism, super-snobbism, anti-snobbism.” Perhaps they came spoiling for a fight. The succès de scandale was, after all, a well-established element of cultural life at the turn of the last century, especially in Paris. Pieces by Wagner, Schoenberg and others customarily provoked riots, as did Wilde’s play Salomé and its 1906 operatic treatment by Richard Strauss. The Impressionist painters so relished their rejection by the establishment they triumphantly created the Salons des Refusés. And just think of the scandalised reaction to Picasso’s radical 1906-7 work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which smashed pretty much every received idea about the representation of three dimensions onto a flat canvas, paving the way not only for Cubism but to the possibility of total abstraction in art.

This was an era in which to be a truly avant garde artist was to push audiences to the very limits of what they could understand or accept – and far beyond. An era in which certain works of art, music and literature shattered everything that had gone before; after which it was genuinely possible to say ‘nothing would ever be the same again’. Assault on the senses Nevertheless, the riots at the premiere of The Rite of Spring were of a different order. For the past four years Paris had been captivated by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and had perhaps come to expect dance of astonishing, radical sensuality. But not this assault! The new ballet, intended to depict the pre-historic spring rites of ancient Russia and the great sacrifice of a Slavonic tribe, had been created by a trio of visionaries.

They were Igor Stravinsky, whose previous ballets The Firebird and Petrushka had already seen him acclaimed as the greatest young composer of the twentieth-century; Nicholas Roerich, an eminent student of pre-historical pagan Russia, whom Stravinsky praised in an interview as “the creator of the decorative atmosphere for this work of faith”; and – of course – Vaslav Nijinsky, the breathtaking 24-year-old dancer and choreographer. According to the historian Lucy Moore, whose superb biography of Nijinsky has just been published, even Nijinsky was nervous before the curtain rose, knowing that his dancers were baffled and frustrated by the “shuffling steps, flat-footed jumps, clenched hands, hunched shoulders, unsynchronized and deliberately primitive choreography” he had dreamed up for them. Additionally, thanks to Roerich’s designs, they had to dance in unwieldy costumes, false beards and pointed, fur-trimmed caps for the men and headbands and long, fake plaits for the women.

Moore describes how Nijinsky, sweating in the wings before that alarmingly exposed bassoon solo began, knew that his long-robed dancers were probably wondering: “what is ballet for, if beauty and grace are removed?” Meanwhile, “so interconnected were the choreography and the composition,” Moore reminds us, “that Stravinsky noted the rhythm of their steps on his piano score.” And what is music like this, crunchy with dissonance and twisted, sadistic harmonies for? The chosen one One early listener described it as: “As irritating to the nervous system as the continuous thudding of a savage’s tom-tom!” Stravinsky later claimed that, rather like the ‘chosen one’ who dances herself to death in the ballet’s climactic Sacrificial Dance, he’d had to enter into a sort of creative trance to write The Rite of Spring. "Very little immediate tradition lies behind [it] – and no theory,” he remarked. “I had only my ear to help me; I heard and I wrote what I heard.

I am the vessel through which The Rite passed." A vessel he may well have been; but others heard, and, in their own way, wrote what they heard: like Picasso’s painting, the Rite of Spring irrevocably altered the course of 20th century music. From Carter to Boulez, Adams to Adès, nothing was ever the same again; listening today, the score is as revolutionary and thrilling as ever. One hundred years after the notorious premiere of The Rite of Spring, the suspicion remains that the hysterical reaction from the crowd may have been one big publicity stunt orchestrated by the ever-canny Diaghilev. Why, after all, did Gabriel Astruc, the theatrical impresario behind the Théâtre-des-Champs-Élysées, have to lean out of his box, fists clenched, and scream at the rowdy audience: “First listen! Then hiss!”? We’ll never know the truth. But perhaps it is immaterial.

Contemporary observers, Moore argues, felt the music and choreography of The Rite of Spring could be “interpreted as a sign that the end of civilisation was at hand.” A few weeks ago, I found myself in the auditorium at Théâtre-des-Champs-Élysées – which is still, as Astruc intended a century ago, a temple vibrating to the vitality of art and imagination, curiosity and creativity. And it struck me that even now, in Paris, May 2013, no other work over the past 100 years has yet come close to the impact or influence of The Rite of Spring. A whole new generation of composers, designers, dancers and choreographers are still seeking bold and beautiful creative answers to the aesthetic and musical questions it raised. If that’s the end of civilization, then I’m a baboon. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter . 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. ‘Rite of Spring’ and ‘Jeux’ as Radical Music - The New York Times The New York Times Music |Shocking or Subtle, Still Radical Search Continue reading the main story On May 15, 1913, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, just two weeks before the premiere of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” provoked a riot among outraged audience members, the Ballets Russes presented the premiere of another daring ballet, also choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, also conducted by Pierre Monteux.

It was Debussy’s “Jeux,” the composer’s last work for orchestra, commissioned by the company director, Sergei Diaghilev. Though not well received, the ballet was much discussed in Parisian cultural circles, until, that is, it was eclipsed by the scandal of the “Rite of Spring” (“Le Sacre du Printemps”). You can understand why “Jeux” (“Games”), at only 16 minutes, might have been overshadowed. Compared with “The Rite,” a ballet depicting primitive pagan dance rituals, the scenario for “Jeux” was fairly tame. A stray tennis ball falls into a garden at dusk. A young man, dressed for tennis, comes searching for it, joined by two young women. The mood turns flirtatious. The man dances with one woman and steals a kiss, rousing the jealously of the other, until he switches partners, almost provoking the first woman to leave. The sporting romantic entanglements continue until another stray tennis ball drops into the garden, and the three young people furtively slip away. O.K. This is not too shocking.

Still, dangerous eroticism lurks below the surface of “Jeux,” and in its subtler way Debussy ’s music is just as radical as Stravinsky’s, if not more so. The 100th anniversary of “The Rite” is generating many performances of the piece this season, including several by the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall, where Alan Gilbert opens the season on Wednesday night with a program featuring this landmark Stravinsky score. Stravinsky and Debussy (who was 20 years older) were respectful colleagues. The year before the premiere of “The Rite” they played Part 1 of the piece in Stravinsky’s two-piano arrangement for a group of friends. At the time Debussy was composing “Jeux.” Stravinsky followed Debussy’s work and learned from it. As Edward Lockspeiser wrote in his important book on Debussy, first published in 1936, some critics “see in the audacious harmony of ‘Jeux’ the origin of the polytonal passages of ‘Le Sacre’ ”: moments where a theme is heard simultaneously in clashing keys.

Lockspeiser went further, arguing that passages of “Jeux” also point “to the 12-note system of Schoenberg.” Continue reading the main story Why was “The Rite of Spring” shocking? Is it still shocking? Can any music today shock us? These questions, recently raised by two essays in The New York Times , are being vigorously debated on the Web site of The Times ( nytimes.com ). But as “Jeux” suggests, a work of art can be radical without being shocking. This is true in all the arts. Seurat’s technique of dots was radical, but his paintings are joyous and dazzling. In its language and ambiguity, Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” represents radical theater, but a good performance of this profound play should have the audience laughing, and comic actors have been its best interpreters. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “Jeux” was not created to shock. The “Rite” was, and did the trick. But the shock value of the “Rite” comes more from the savagery, pummeling power and grating dissonance of the score than from any pathbreaking experiments with radical composition on Stravinsky’s part.

That a piece is shocking or radical does not in itself make it good. Composers can easily be gratuitously shocking or self-consciously radical. Moreover, a backward-seeming artistic departure can actually be a radical development. In the 1960s, when contemporary music seemed to be dominated by intensely complex serialist composers, the arrival of the exuberant Minimalists struck many as a radical shift. Stravinsky’s “Rite” is not just shocking but also ingenious, audacious and original. Yet other important composers of that era were writing music that was more radical. Photo Schoenberg's Three Piano Pieces (Op. 11), written in 1909, took music into an almost freely atonal realm. They were not intended to shock, but their harmonic language is utterly radical. Credit Arnold Schoenberg Center, Vienna Radicalism in music has most often been attributed to works that push the boundaries of harmonic language. Of course, music can be radical in other ways: rhythm, structure, texture, the use of instruments. But harmonic innovations, being the most audible, have received the most attention and provoked the most backlash.

In the “Rite” the visceral impact of Stravinsky’s harmonic language often comes when he attaches piles of dissonance to elemental themes. When, for example, the dronelike theme of “Spring Rounds” is first heard, it sounds like some grim, ancient Russian folk song. Before long the orchestra bursts wide open and screeches the theme in gnashing chords and wailing brass glissandos to terrifying effect. Yet for radical experiments in harmony, this passage does not rival what Schoenberg was up to even earlier. His Three Piano Pieces (Op. 11), written in 1909, goes way beyond Wagnerian concepts of chromaticism and takes music into an almost freely atonal realm. The harmonic language is utterly radical. But Schoenberg was not out to shock. In the opening of the slow first piece , a sighing theme is cushioned by chords, though the harmonies sound almost unhinged from tonality (major and minor keys). Schoenberg saw these pieces as forward-looking emanations of late Romanticism, the kind of music Brahms would have been writing had he lived until 1909. Some of Brahms’s late piano intermezzos absolutely point the way.

The rhythmic writing, form and counterpoint in the Schoenberg pieces are actually not that radical. The music stunned listeners in its day (and still stuns some today) for its harmonic daring. Advertisement Continue reading the main story The most radical musical elements of “The Rite” involve rhythm. If you forget the scenario, you can hear the piece as depicting combat between music in regular meter (4/4, 3/4 and such) and breakaway stretches where symmetrical pulse is annihilated, as in the climactic “Sacrificial Dance,” which pummels listeners with slashing chords but gives them no steady beat to hang on to. Still, other composers at the time were up to similar experiments in rhythm. Bartok would outdo Stravinsky in his use of asymmetrical meter. There is innovative rhythmic writing in “Jeux” as well. But the work’s most radical element is its unconventional structure. After a slow, mysterious opening passage the score becomes a mercurial scherzando. The tempo shifts constantly; the music is essentially constructed from short motifs that whisk by and are not heard again.

Pierre Boulez, who recorded the work brilliantly with the Cleveland Orchestra in the early 1990s, wrote that this influential score signaled “the arrival of a kind of musical form which, renewing itself from moment to moment, implies a similarly instantaneous mode of perception.” That phrase reads like a description of what Mr. Boulez has striven to do in many of his own compositions. It says something about the relative radicalism of Debussy’s “Jeux” and Stravinsky’s “Rite” that musicians long ago mastered the challenges of the “Rite,” which conservatory orchestras can play fairly comfortably today (the Manhattan School of Music Symphony performs it on Sept. 28), whereas “Jeux,” a conductor’s nightmare, is not played that often. I am completely with listeners who still find the primitivism and blaring power of the “Rite” shocking. Still, some of the passages that haunt me most are the subtler ones, like the opening of Part 2 (“The Pagan Night”), in which — after the wildness of “Dance to the Earth,” which ends Part 1 — we are given a few minutes of nocturnal music to help us collect and regroup.

Here the orchestra shimmers with thick, trembling, pungent harmonies. By the way, according to Nijinsky’s diaries, which are not considered entirely reliable, Diaghilev originally wanted “Jeux” to be about a homosexual encounter among three men in the garden. Now that would have caused a riot among shocked Parisians. A version of this article appears in print on September 19, 2012, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Shocking Or Subtle, Still Radical. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe Stravinsky: Rite of Spring (Live 4.24.13) - YouTube Stravinsky: Rite of Spring (Live 4.24.13) Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later.

Published on May 29, 2013 First performed in Paris on May 29, 1913, the music Igor Stravinsky created for Vaslav Nijinksy's Rite of Spring ballet, and the choreography itself, provoked a riot among the opening night audience. On April 24, 2013 The New England Conservatory Philharmonia lead by Stanford and Norma Jean Calderwood Director of Orchestras Hugh Wolff performed the Rite in Jordan Hall, Boston. Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' Celebrates 100 Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' Celebrates 100 June 05, 2012 2:25 PM Adam Phillips "The Rite of Spring” performed by the Béjart Ballet Lausanne.

(Photo by Francette Levieux) Share Email to a Friend Print Preparations are under way to mark the 100th anniversary of Igor Stravinsky’s momentous ballet score, "The Rite of Spring." The revolutionary work, which provoked a riot during its Paris premiere, is often credited with ushering in the era of modern Western music and continues to exert influence today. The opening notes of "The Rite of Spring" are iconic and beloved today. But for many audience members who came to the Ballet Russes in 1913, they were unwelcome. Copy and paste the embed code below. The code has been copied to your clipboard. MP3 Pop-out player A bassoon had likely never been performed in such a high register. Stravinsky intended to evoke peasant voices in pagan Russia. But as the bassoon segued into the Spring Divinations sequence, the audience began to riot. ​ “It was a high society audience that showed up expecting more of what they might have experienced in the past with Tchaikovsky and with Chopin ballet and even with earlier Stravinsky," says L. Michael Griffel , chair of the music history department at the Juilliard School.

"And instead they had dance and music that was unlike anything they had experienced, and to their ears it very likely seemed ugly. You did not have too much of a tune anywhere you would put words to or could hum. And this audience, dressed in fancy evening gowns and tails and tuxedos and whatnot, they were just devastated.” Ballet Russes dancers from the famed first production. One critic complained the costumes “looked like tents,” obscuring the delicate classical line of the dancers’ bodies. According to Griffel, the musical elements in "The Rite of Spring" conform to a storyline, itself shocking, about pagan tribes and their rituals of earth worship. ​ “You have “The Games of the Rival Clans,” which is wonderful music rhythmically," he says. “You have also the mystical moments that move slowly, something like 'The Mystical Circles of the Young Girls.' You have 'The Adoration of the Earth,' where the, elder, the leader of the group, kisses the earth.” This pungent and challenging world was magnified by the set and colorful costumes, which one critic said resembled tents because they obscured the dancers’ bodies.

Emil Kang, artistic director of Carolina Performing Arts and its year-long celebration of " The Rite of Spring ," says the original choreography, by Vatslav Njinsky, was “anti-ballet.” “Here was a choreographer who made a ballet of ‘pigeon toes’ as they called it and bent arms," Kang says. "Again, the antithesis of what was known to be esthetically pleasing at the time. All those things were contributors to the displeasure of the audience that night.” Griffel says the themes were dark, even frightening. In the climax, a young girl dances herself to death to appease the fertility gods. Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), was hailed as a genius and many critics consider “The Rite of Spring” to be his greatest achievement. ​ “This is the sacrifice by the group of the individual. That is the "Rite of Spring," he says. "That is one of the rites of spring. Life itself, and art imitating life, is not all pretty all the time and not controlled all the time.

It isn’t all balanced; it isn’t all symmetrical; it isn’t all euphonious." "The Rite of Spring" helped introduce an approach to art where every person finds his own meaning in a work, according to Kang. In that spirit, Carolina Arts commissioned 11 new pieces based on "The Rite of Spring." “The commissions are varied across different genres from artists around the world," Kang says, "to all of whom we just said ‘Look at this piece in your own way. Take the chance to reinvent it.’” Puppeteer Basil Twist will create a ballet without dancers, making curtains and other inanimate objects move to a fully-orchestrated version of "The Rite of Spring." Other works in progress are two musical scores written for the avant-garde string quartet Brooklyn Rider as well as a three-part cycle called "The Seasons," played by Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble . It's inspired by folk tunes Stravinsky used in "The Rite of Spring." Theater director Anne Bogart and choreographer Bill T. Jones are collaborating on a piece. And there are surprises yet to be unveiled.

All are inspired by one of the most famous - some would say infamous - works in the history of music. 100 years ago today, 'The Rite of Spring' incited a riot in a Paris theater - The Verge 100 years ago today, 'The Rite of Spring' incited a riot in a Paris theater Igor Stravinsky, composer of The Rite of Spring It began with a bassoon and ended in a brawl. One hundred years ago today, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky debuted The Rite of Spring before a packed theater in Paris, with a ballet performance that would go down as one of the most important — and violent — in modern history. Today, The Rite is widely regarded as a seminal work of modernism — a frenetic, jagged orchestral ballet that boldly rejected the ordered harmonies and comfort of traditional composition. The piece would go on to leave an indelible mark on jazz, minimalism, and other contemporary movements, but to many who saw it on that balmy evening a century ago, it was nothing short of scandalous. Mayhem and chaos Details surrounding the events of May 29th, 1913 remain hazy.

Official records are scarce, and most of what is known is based on eyewitness accounts or newspaper reports. To this day, experts debate over what exactly sparked the incident — was it music or dance? publicity stunt or social warfare? — though most agree on at least one thing: Stravinsky’s grand debut ended in mayhem and chaos. The tumult began not long after the ballet's opening notes — a meandering and eerily high-pitched bassoon solo that elicited laughter and derision from many in the audience. The jeers became louder as the orchestra progressed into more cacophonous territory, with its pounding percussion and jarring rhythms escalating in tandem with the tensions inside the recently opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, site of The Rite of Spring's infamous debut Things reached a near-fever pitch by the time the dancers took the stage, under the direction of famed choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky of the Ballets Russes. Dressed in whimsical costumes, the dancers performed bizarre and violent moves, eschewing grace and fluidity for convulsive jerks that mirrored the work’s strange narrative of pagan sacrifice.

Onstage in Paris, the crowd's catcalls became so loud that the ballerinas could no longer hear the orchestra, forcing Nijinsky to shout out commands from backstage. A scuffle eventually broke out between two factions in the audience, and the orchestra soon found itself under siege, as angry Parisians hurled vegetables and other objects toward the stage. It's not clear whether the police were ever dispatched to the theater, though 40 people were reportedly ejected. Remarkably, the performance continued to completion, though the fallout was swift and brutal. Henri Quittard, a music critic at French daily Le Figaro, described the debut as an exercise in "puerile barbarity," suggesting that Stravinsky had been corrupted by Nijinsky and Sergei Diaghilev — the impresario who founded the Ballets Russes and who had already stirred controversy for his company's erotic interpretation of Claude Debussy's L’Après-midi d’un faune.

"those who liked things tame and pretty, and those eager for something new." It remains unclear whether theatergoers that night were more disturbed by Stravinsky or Nijinsky, whose primitivist choreography may have been as viscerally shocking as the composer's unusual dissonance. Others have speculated that the event may have been orchestrated either as an elaborate publicity stunt on the part of Diaghilev, or as an operation planned by disgruntled traditionalists. "The stories of the 'near riot' may have become exaggerated over time," Daniel Weymouth, associate professor of composition and theory at Stony Brook University, said in an email to The Verge. "There is evidence that the ruckus started between two factions at the Paris Opera — those who liked things tame and 'pretty' and those who were eager for something new — who were already primed for a confrontation." By the early 1900s, Paris had become something of a fulcrum between tradition and modernity. The shift accelerated with the unveiling of the Eiffel Tower in 1889 — a hulking metallic bullseye that drew scathing critiques, controversy, and millions of tourists.

Around the same time, telephones, elevators, and other innovations were just making their ways into buildings, bringing with them a looming sense of change and technological upheaval. These shifts crystallized in the arts, as well. Pablo Picasso began exploring new modes of Cubist representation, while Gertrude Stein and other Paris-based writers were testing the limits of language, searching for meaning that transcended lyricism and traditional narrative. "Even the youngest composers today listen to 'The Rite' and think 'My God.'" In some ways, this tension between old and new aesthetics reached a boiling point with The Rite's debut, marking an explosive cultural shift unlike any in recent memory. Nowadays, it’s difficult to imagine any single piece of art sparking the kind of turmoil that Stravinsky’s did a century ago. Even by contemporary standards, Stravinsky’s harsh dissonance, complex rhythms, and repetitive melodies still seem avant-garde. There's a palpable sense of disconnect, as well — an unsettling step into a world governed not by human emotions or reason, but something else altogether.

(Stravinsky himself once said that "there are simply no regions for soul-searching in The Rite of Spring.") "Even the youngest composers coming to the fore today listen to The Rite and think, 'My God,'" Alex Ross, music critic at The New Yorker, told NPR this month. "It still sounds new to them." "Brutal, tender, and altogether wonderful." The incident catapulted Stravinsky to international stardom as well, despite the negative early reviews that came out of Paris. "One result of the so-called 'riot' was that Stravinsky effectively became the world's leading contemporary composer," says Eric Charnofsky, a composer and lecturer at Case Western Reserve University, describing him as "the one whose subsequent musical ventures defined 'modernism' in the minds of audiences and critics." This evening, the Mariinsky Ballet will celebrate The Rite's 100th anniversary with a performance at the same theater where it debuted to boos and violence. The ballet will be broadcast live on French national television and live-streamed on a giant outdoor display in front of the Hôtel de Ville in central Paris.

When audiences gather tonight, they won't be doing so in protest and they likely won't come armed with vegetables. Instead, they'll convene to celebrate what Weymouth describes as "one of the great aesthetic monuments of Western art — completely assured, startlingly original, brutal, tender, and altogether wonderful." Additional reporting by Michael Shane. The riot at the Rite: the premiere of The Rite of Spring - The British Library The riot at the Rite: the premiere of The Rite of Spring Themes: Art, music and popular culture , Capturing and creating the modern Ivan Hewitt describes the ballet that caused a riot on its premiere in Paris in May 1913. The premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is perhaps the most famous scandal in the history of the performing arts. It took place on the evening of 29 May 1913, at the brand-new Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, in front of a glittering audience. The writer 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’. [1] What drew both the swanky crowd and art-loving crowd was the whiff of something potentially outrageous: a brand-new ballet from the Ballets Russes, a company of Russian dancers put together by the most famous impresario in history, Serge Diaghilev. The Ballets Russes had entranced and shocked Paris ever since their first appearance there in 1909. What the Parisians especially liked was the way these ‘Northern Savages’ (as one critic called the company) played to the fashion for everything primitive and untamed. All the rumours about The Rite of Spring suggested this new ballet would be more than usually primitive. Igor Stravinsky, the composer, had scored a massive hit the previous year with Petrushka, a ballet in which three puppets enact a story of love and jealousy. This added an exciting element of modernist collage to colourful Russian folklore.

Vaslav Nijinsky, the famous dancer who was also the choreographer of The Rite, 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. What actually happened on that scandalous night will always be a mystery to some degree, because the reports contradict each other. 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? The dancer Dame Marie Rambert remembered that right at the beginning ‘a shout went up in the gallery: “Un docteur!" (Call a doctor!). Somebody else shouted louder, “Un dentiste!" (a dentist!)’ [2] The aristocrat Harry Kessler said that people started to whisper and joke almost immediately. [3] Stravinsky himself was so angry that he stormed out and went backstage to help the dancers keep time. What is certain is that the audience was shocked – and with good reason. Stravinsky’s score for The Rite of Spring contradicted every rule about what music should be.

The sounds are often deliberately harsh, right from opening Lithuanian folk melody, which is played by the bassoon in its highest, most uncomfortable range. The music was cacophonously loud, assaulting the ears with thunderous percussion and shrieking brass. Rhythmically it was complex in a completely unprecedented way. In the ‘Ritual of the Rival Tribes’ the music unfolds in two speeds at once, in a ratio of 3:2. And it makes lavish use of dissonance, i.e. combinations of notes which don’t make normal harmonic sense. ‘The music always goes to the note next to the one you expect,’ wrote one exasperated critic. Then there was the dance, choreographed by Nijinsky. According to some observers this was what really caused the scandal at the first night. When the curtain rose the audience saw a row of ‘knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down’ [4] as Stravinsky called them, who seemed to jerk rather than dance. Classical dance aspired upwards, in defiance of gravity, whereas Nijinsky’s dancers seemed pulled down to the earth.

Their strange, stamping movements and awkward poses defied every canon of gracefulness. Both the music and the dance of The Rite of Spring seemed to deny the possibility of human feelings, which for most people is what gives art its meaning. 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. Photograph of a scene from Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring, 1913 Now recognised as one the most significant musical masterpieces of the 20th century, Stravinsky’s ballet, Rite of Spring, caused a storm when it premiered at the newly opened Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris in 1913.

Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring: Keeping Score | PBS Shop Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring You never know when or where revolutions will start. They can be social or political or artistic. Often, these artistic revolutions—revolutions in taste—seem to predict other changes in society. That's exactly the case with The Rite of Spring. Igor Stravinsky wrote The Rite of Spring in 1913. It redefined 20th-century music, much as Beethoven's Eroica had transformed music a century before. With it, Stravinsky took himself far into the realm of the unconscious. The music seemed designed with no apparent order but driven by pure gut feeling. Russian Influences In turn-of-the-century St. Petersburg, everything fashionable seemed to be from anyplace but Russia. The architecture, the music, even the language that the "best" people spoke was French. But artists of all kinds in Russia revolted against this dependence on European ideas. They wanted to establish a nationalist, Russian identity. A powerful mover among them was Stravinsky's teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov.

Rimsky had been a member of the so-called “Mighty Handful,” a group of adventurous, original young composers who began writing music that sounded truly Russian. They were inspired by the old myths and epics and fairy tales. And they all used folksongs and chants to give their music a very particular Russian flavor. Composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov provided lushly orchestrated music that served as the soundtrack for lavish operas and ballets at the imperial theater. But the imperial theater could bog down in bureaucracy and favoritism, stifling the most creative and ambitious artists of the day. Diaghilev and Paris Among those artists was Serge Diaghilev, a producer and aesthete with great energy and vision. He believed in the artistic future of all things authentically Russian. In the face of controversy with the imperial theater, Diaghilev went abroad. Diaghilev knew that Parisian audiences were fascinated by Russian culture, which made Paris the perfect place for Diaghilev's revolutionary Ballets Russes. Diaghilev created a new ballet company built on the Parisian fantasies of old Russia.

Featuring the exotic, the erotic, and the occult, the Ballets Russes astonished the world in its first season. For the company's second season, Diaghilev had promised a daring new ballet, but a crisis loomed when two Russian composers failed to deliver an acceptable score. Desperate, Diaghilev turned to the young, untried Igor Stravinsky to write the music we now know as The Firebird, which premiered in Paris in 1910. Based on the Slavic myth of a phoenix-like creature who helps a prince triumph over evil, The Firebird was a huge success. Russian Village Music Stravinsky wanted to bring music back to the origins of dance. He frequently summered in Ustilug, where he was exposed to the old Russian culture that thrived in villages surrounding his family's country home. In the villages, people celebrated the times of planting and harvesting, and the mysteries of gods and fate. Naturally, the villagers celebrated with music, made with whatever they had—their natural, untrained voices, their hands and feet, and instruments which they had often built themselves. The result was a wild, enthusiastic mixture of song and noise.

This kind of music-making made an enormous impression on the young Stravinsky. He wanted to use the sophisticated symphony orchestra to evoke the wild power of village music—the way it sounded and the way it must have felt to the people making it. The Rite of Spring By 1913, Paris adored the Ballets Russes, with its lavish productions that star dancer Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed. The opulent sets were designed by Nicholas Roerich, and the brilliant scores were written by the now resident composer, Igor Stravinsky. And then came the most famous opening-night scandal in history: the premiere of The Rite of Spring. As the crowd arrived on opening night, expectations were high. The Théàtre des Champs Élysées had just opened, and audience members came to see and be seen. Stravinsky was nervous because he knew that avant-garde pieces were risky in Paris. Decades before, Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser had been booed off the stage at the Opera. But danger was the exciting part. Stravinsky had had great success here in the past with The Firebird and Petrushka.

As the curtain went up and the opening notes were heard, a ruckus broke out in the auditorium. The opening bassoon solo was set so high that the audience didn’t know what instrument they were hearing. As the lights came up on the first tableau of dancers, people began yelling, and a wilder and wilder shouting match began. It became difficult to hear the music. As he heard the roar of the audience begin to build, Stravinsky panicked and ran backstage to intervene. By the time he reached the wings, things were in complete chaos. But the performance continued. Diaghilev may have expected there would be some kind of ruckus at the performance. Unbeknownst to Stravinsky and Nijinsky, he had instructed the conductor, Pierre Monteux, to keep going no matter what happened. Stravinsky had taken the orchestra, which was associated with high society and culture, and brought it to this carnal, bestial, earthy level. The audience was making so much noise that the dancers could not hear the music and stay in sync.

So Nijinsky climbed on a chair and leaned out so far into the set that Stravinsky had to grab him by his coattails to keep him from falling over. Amidst the huge racket of the orchestra and the crowd and the pounding of the dancers’ feet, Nijinsky was there yelling out the numbers: 19, 20, 21, 22! Back to Russian Folk Roots What did Stravinsky write that was so powerful? He wanted to recreate ancient times, a time of a huge, untouched landscape within which a few tribal people gathered once a year to celebrate their relationship to the earth. For the raw material, Stravinsky turned to a book that contained all kinds of folksongs with roots in those pagan rituals. Stravinsky knew this music well from his summers in Ustilug. But he had to figure out what instruments could play these folk sounds. The orchestra is made up of modern instruments of great sophistication. These instruments have no relationship to the instruments that people make with their own hands. Stravinsky’s solution was to write for the instruments of the modern orchestra in bizarre ways. He pushed them to the extreme heights and depths of their ranges.

He put them in uncomfortable positions which resulted in that strained, weird quality he was looking for. He mimicked the authentic village sound by adding grace notes to the lines, which suggested the vocal breaks of untutored singers. Village dances were made up of teams moving in different patterns. In much the same way, teams of instruments play in the Rite. The alternation of these teams, splitting up to form and reform, maintain the excitement of the piece. Sometimes the teams alternate, but sometimes they keep playing until they create a huge pile-up of sound, in which no one is willing to stop or give in to anyone else. The point of this is sensory overload, until the conflict takes us to complete burnout. What makes this piece stand apart from anything written before is the rawness and vitality of the rhythmic elements. The Rite of Spring may not be as shocking today as it was at that scandalous premiere in 1913, but more than 90 years later, it still has that edgy, intense, almost out-of-control feeling that makes it as exhilarating—and liberating—as music can be. More Episodes

Question: The premiere of which ballet by Stravinsky, in Paris in 1913, provoked a riot among the audience?
Answer: THE RITE OF SPRING