Music and Vinyl: Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) has to be considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th Century. Russian born, but later with French then American citizenship, Stravinsky's compositional style changed noticeably over the years - from Russian nationalist and folk influences, through neo-classical, to modern and serial styles.

Igor Stravinsky

Of all Stravinsky's compositions it is perhaps The Rite Of Spring that has become his most well known - and initially notorious - pieces. Elizabeth Schwartz provided this programme note for the Oregon Symphony:

"Imagine yourself in Paris, sitting in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on May 29, 1913. You have come to see the Ballets Russes in Les sylphides and Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances, plus a new work by an up-and-coming young Russian composer named Igor Stravinsky. All goes well until Stravinsky’s ballet begins. Before long, you hear hisses and murmurs of disapproval from the audience, which grow in volume and intensity until, without warning, a full-scale riot breaks out in the theater. As you make your way out of the hall, you ask yourself, “How on earth did this happen?” Good question.

"Stravinsky’s initial concept for The Rite of Spring came to him in 1910, while he was working on The Firebird. In his 1935 autobiography, Stravinsky described a ‘fleeting vision’: “I saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.” He floated this idea past Nikolai Roerich, a noted archaeologist and Russia’s foremost authority on folk art and ancient ritual. Roerich was intrigued by this concept, and the two men mapped out a plot for a ballet depicting scenes of pagan Russia, culminating in the sacrifice of The Chosen One.

"Over the years, Stravinsky claimed several different origins of the ideas for The Rite of Spring, each contradicting the others. After his first explanation of the vision that interrupted his work on The Firebird, he began revising or purifying the history of The Rite. In 1920, he told a reporter The Rite of Spring had been conceived without any thought to storyline or ballet staging, and finally repudiated the folk and Russian underpinnings of the work altogether. Why Stravinsky revised the origin story for The Rite of Spring is complex, and has to do with the initial failure of the work in its original form as a ballet, as well as with Stravinsky’s desire, after he left Russia permanently and denounced his homeland following the 1917 revolution, to remake himself as a “Western” composer. As musicologist Richard Taruskin notes, “He rejected the parochial lore of his birthright and embraced an aggressively cosmopolitan ideology of absolute music – music without a passport, without a past, without ‘extramusical’ content of any kind.”

"The Rite of Spring is written in two large sections, “The Adoration of the Earth” and “The Sacrifice,” each containing many smaller sections with their own titles. The musical structure is formed around many repeating rhythmic patterns, called ostinatos. Stravinsky also quotes fragments of melodies from a number of different Russian and Lithuanian folk songs. Harmonically, Stravinsky combines the modal scales of the folk songs with an octatonic scale (a scale made of alternating whole and half steps), to create rich and unusual sonorities. What gives The Rite of Spring its unique energy is Stravinsky’s innovative decision to abandon a steady beat in favor of constantly shifting ostinatos and melodic fragments. One fragment follows after another with no modulation or linkage, in an abrupt, dislocated manner. This results in music of such complexity that Stravinsky often had trouble determining where the measure lines should fall in the score.

"Much has been written about the riot that broke out at the first performance of The Rite of Spring. The uproar was actually a response to Vaslav Nijinsky’s provocative choreography rather than to the music itself, which became impossible to hear as the audience’s reaction grew louder. The open dress rehearsal a few days earlier occasioned no such violent reaction, probably because those attending were music and dance cognoscenti. In contrast, the audience attending the premiere was made up of the general public, along with supporters and detractors of Serge Diaghilev, the director of the Ballets Russes. This audience expected an evening of standard ballet fare; it is no wonder they protested Nijinsky’s shocking and extremely un-balletic (i.e., not classical) steps. As one Paris critic noted, “at the end of the Prelude the crowd simply stopped listening to the music so that they might better amuse themselves with the choreography.” Most reviews of the opening performance paid scant attention to the music, aside from mentioning Stravinsky as the composer.

"The performance continued over the riot, which included fistfights and flying debris.

"Nijinsky had to call out the steps to the dancers from offstage, as they could not hear the music over the increasing pandemonium in the house. The promotional value of such an opening was not lost on either Stravinsky or Diaghilev. Stravinsky recalled, “We were excited, angry, disgusted, and . . . happy . . . Diaghilev’s only comment was ‘Exactly what I wanted.’”

Despite the firestorm of publicity that followed the premiere, The Rite of Spring ballet was performed only a half-dozen times. Ironically, given its negative impact, Nijinsky’s original choreography has since been lost. The Rite of Spring was not positively received until the spring of 1914, when Pierre Monteux conducted it as a concert piece. Its status as the epitome of 20th-century music did not coalesce until the end of the 1920s, after the score was published and The Rite was performed by orchestras from Leipzig to Buenos Aires."