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 Rite that caused riots: celebrating 100 years of The Rite of Spring | Music | The Guardian Classical music Rite that caused riots: celebrating 100 years of The Rite of Spring Stravinsky's work caused a scandal in 1913 but has since been recognised as one of the 20th century's most important pieces Rite of Spring dancers dressed as pagans scandalised Parisian theatregoers with their stomping steps and the brutal plot based on primitive sacrificial rituals. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis Monday 27 May 2013 10.01 EDT First published on Monday 27 May 2013 10.01 EDT Close This article is 3 years old The audience, packed into the newly-opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to the point of standing room only, had neither seen nor heard anything like it.

As the first few bars of the orchestral work The Rite of Spring – Le Sacre du Printemps – by the young, little-known Russian composer Igor Stravinsky sounded, there was a disturbance in the audience. It was, according to some of those present – who included Marcel Proust, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy – the sound of derisive laughter. By the time the curtain rose to reveal ballet dancers stomping the stage, the protests had reached a crescendo. The orchestra and dancers, choreographed by the legendary Vaslav Nijinsky , continued but it was impossible to hear the music above what Stravinsky described as a "terrific uproar". As a riot ensured, two factions in the audience attacked each other, then the orchestra, which kept playing under a hail of vegetables and other objects. Forty people were forcibly ejected. The reviews were merciless. "The work of a madman … sheer cacophony," wrote the composer Puccini. "A laborious and puerile barbarity," added Le Figaro's critic, Henri Quittard. It was 29 May 1913. Classical music would never be the same again.

On Wednesday evening at the same theatre in Paris, a 21st-century audience – hopefully without vegetables — will fill the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées for a reconstruction of the original performance to mark the 100th anniversary of the notorious premiere. It will be followed by a new version of The Rite by the Berlin-based choreographer Sasha Waltz, among a series of commemorative performances. Today, the piece has gone from rioting to rave reviews and is widely considered one of the most influential musical works of the 20th century. "It conceals some ancient force, it is as if it's filled with the power of the Earth," Waltz said of Stravinsky's music. Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, currently principal conductor and artistic adviser for the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, who will conduct the Rite of Spring at the Royal Festival Hall on Thursday and at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées shortly afterwards , said The Rite still made his spine tingle. "I have to admit that when we come to the moment just before the last dance … my blood pressure is up.

I have this kind of adrenaline surge," he told Reuters. "It's an old caveman reaction." Salonen added: "The miracle of the piece is the eternal youth of it. It's so fresh, it still kicks ass." There is still confusion and disagreement about events that night in 1913, which the theatre describes as "provoking one of the greatest scandals in the history of music" and turning The Rite into the "founding work of all modern music". Stravinsky, was virtually unknown before Sergei Diaghilev hired him to compose for his Ballets Russes's 1913 Paris season. His first two works, The Firebird, performed in 1910, and Petrushka, in 1911, were generally acclaimed. The Rite, subtitled "Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts", begins with primitive rituals celebrating spring, and ends with a young sacrificial victim dancing herself to death. Not only was the theatre hall packed that evening in 1913, but the stairways and corridors were full to bursting with excited and jostling spectators.

The Rite opened with an introductory melody adapted from a Lithuanian folk song, featuring a bassoon playing, unusually, at the top of its register, and prompting composer Camille Saint-Saëns to exclaim: "If that's a bassoon, then I'm a baboon!" The heavy, stomping steps were a world away from the elegance of traditional ballet, as the dancers enacted the brutal plot. As the audience erupted, Diaghilev called for calm and flashed the house lights on and off, while Nijinsky was forced to call out steps to the dancers as the beat of the music was drowned out by the riotous cacophony. Even now there is debate over whether the audience reaction was spontaneous or the work of outraged traditionalists armed with vegetables who had come looking for trouble. The turbulent premiere was followed by five more relatively peaceful performances before one show in London, which received mixed reviews, but the complete ballet and orchestral work were only performed seven times before the outbreak of the first world war. After the fighting ended, Diaghilev attempted to revive The Rite of Spring, but found nobody remembered the choreography. By then Nijinsky, the greatest dancer of his generation, was in mental decline.

Since then The Rite has been adapted for and included in an estimated 150 productions around the world including gangster films, a punk rock interpretation, a nightmarish vision of Aboriginal Australia by Kenneth MacMillan, and Walt Disney's 1940s film Fantasia. A commemorative performance was staged at the Royal Albert Hall in London to mark the 50th anniversary of the premiere. To mark this year's centenary of The Rite of Spring, described by Leonard Bernstein as the most important piece of music of the 20th century, both Sony and Universal have released box sets reprising the best versions in their back catalogues. 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. 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. 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) 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.

Controversial ballet Le Sacre du printemps performed in Paris - May 29, 1913 - HISTORY.com Controversial ballet Le Sacre du printemps performed in Paris Share this: Controversial ballet Le Sacre du printemps performed in Paris Author Controversial ballet Le Sacre du printemps performed in Paris URL Publisher A+E Networks On the night of Thursday, May 29, 1913, the pioneering Russian ballet corps Ballet Russes performs Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), choreographed by the famous dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, at the Theatre de Champs-Elysees in Paris. In founding the Ballet Russes in 1909, the flamboyant impresario Serge Diaghilev was searching for his own version of the Gesamtkunstwerk (or total art form), a concept introduced by the enormously influential German composer Richard Wagner in his book Oper und Drama (1850-51).

Early in the second decade of a new century, Diaghilev saw ballet, and indeed all art, as a means of deliverance from the confines of morality and convention that had ruled Western society in the 19th century. This kind of avant-garde sensibility was widespread in Europe by 1913—particularly in Germany, the birthplace of the era’s most prominent philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings articulated both the sense of chaos and destruction and the call for a violent rebirth of modern society that Stravinsky, Diaghilev and Nijinsky strove to portray in Le Sacre. When the curtain went up in the newly constructed—and architecturally controversial—Theatre de Champs-Elysees on May 29, 1913, it seemed all of Paris society was there. There was great anticipation surrounding Diaghilev’s newest production; advance publicity for the ballet had called it real and true art, art that disregarded the traditional boundaries of space and time. Almost as soon as the curtain rose, the audience began to react strongly to the performance, starting with whistles and proceeding to hisses and howls as the dancers appeared.

Originally titled The Victim, Stravinsky’s ballet portrayed a pagan celebration in which a virgin sacrifices herself to the god of spring. The music was dissonant and strange, while the choreography by Nijinsky marked a radical departure from classical ballet, with the dancers’ toes turned in and their limbs thrust at sharp angles instead of smooth, rounded curves. As Carl Van Vechten, drama critic for the New York Sun later wrote, the unruly audience became as much a part of the performance as the dancers and musicians: Some forty of the protestants were forced out of the theater but that did not quell the disturbance. The lights in the auditorium were fully turned on but the noise continued and I remember Mlle. Piltz [the dancer portraying the sacrificial maiden] executing her strange dance of religious hysteria on a stage dimmed by the blazing light in the auditorium, seemingly to the accompaniment of the disjointed ravings of a mob of angry men and women. The subsequent coverage in the press of the ballet—which is now considered one of the great musical achievements of the 20th century—was resoundingly negative; the music was dismissed as mere noise and the dance as an ugly parody of traditional ballet.

In light of the horrifically destructive conflict that exploded in Europe barely one year later, the violent reaction to Le Sacre de Printemps came to seem like a logical and inescapable response to such an expression of nihilism and chaos. Against a background of growing nationalist fervor across the continent, French audiences were understandably anxious—about their own country’s declining influence in the face of Germany’s growing strength, about the seeming failure of traditional notions of morality and order and about what was to come. A year later, during the July Crisis, the French critic Maurice Dupont praised the sanity of the French reaction, calling Le Sacre a Dionysian orgy dreamed of by Nietzsche and called forth by his prophetic wish to be the beacon of a world hurtling towards death—a wish that would soon be fulfilled on the battlefields of World War I. More on This Topic

Question: Which ballet caused a riot when first staged in Paris in 1913?
Answer: THE RITE OF SPRING