This past May 13th marked the 95th anniversary of a momentous evening in music history: the first pubic performance in 1913 of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. A night at the ballet not soon forgotten, and one that has acquired a patina of legend. For what appear to have been a combination of influences, some members of the audience chose to make their displeasure known in stentorian terms, while others defended the work with equal fervor. The whole thing escalated to pretty nasty levels, enough to have been dubbed a "riot" by subsequent commentators.
Well, it wasn't a riot à la shootouts, police battened down like storm troopers, etc. But it was quite a fracas nonetheless. Some of the commentaries might lead you to believe that the protest was aimed almost entirely towards the music — and that the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps marks a watershed moment of music history as the old style gave way to the new. Well....it's a nifty and convenient idea, perhaps, but really things don't work that way, in the arts as in anywhere else.
It's posterity that comes up with the idea of the watersheds. It isn't as though Western newspapers of the morning of May 14, 1913 were carrying headlines reading: "The Romantic Era: It's Officially Over!" with lead articles beginning: "Last night, the young Igor Stravinsky ended one musical era and began another, all by himself. Be sure to update your PDAs, Blackberries, iPhones, etc. "
The Rite of Spring is very much a child of its time, an era of huge orchestras and in-your-face spectacles. Stravinsky's score accompanied a ballet depicting a pagan ritual of human sacrifice; he filled it with fragmented Russian folk tunes, surging orchestration, and pulsating rhythmic patterns. It is a difference in degree from his immensely popular Petrushka, but certainly not a difference in kind.
To this day it remains an astonishing musical spectacle, but at the same time, we can hear it from nearly a century's distance and recognize just how much of a 19th-century work it remains, with its strong nationalistic elements, giganticism à la Wagner, Mahler, etc., and its harmonic language of brilliantly-evolved late Romantic idioms. Biographer Stephen Walsh describes it as "romantic self-absorption gone mad."
The actual reasons for the riot aren't all that clear, but objection to the music itself most likely ranks fairly low on the list. There probably isn't one single solution to the question; the audience at the Parisian Théâtre des Champs-Elysées was hardly a homogenous bunch, including a fair number of tourists; the weather was unpleasantly hot as well. An open dress rehearsal the previous day had gone off without a peep from an audience made up of mostly musicians, dance aficionados, artists of various shapes and sizes, and musically sophisticated society folk.
But on the next night the mood seems to have been belligerent from the get-go, with protests accompanying the very opening of the work — a bassoon solo which is anything but offensive. (The image below is from the BBC's re-enactment of that opening night's choreography, in "Riot at the Rite".)
There may have been a sizeable faction set against choreographer Vaclav Nijinsky, who as a dancer had scandalized Paris with his pantomimed masturbation to Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" and whose recent choreography to Debussy's "Jeux" had elicited critical displeasure. The audience's rowdy behavior was enough to drown out most of the musical score, which also points towards non-musical causes.
Nonetheless, the legend surrounding the performance is strongly musically oriented — even Stravinsky himself seems to have thought it was the music causing the fuss, at least judging from his recorded remembrances of the evening.
Fair warning: I'm completely in speculative mode here. The whole "Riot at the Rite" has a touch of Rocky Horror Picture Show about it all. I recall attending some of those midnight showings of Rocky Horror at the old UC Theater on University Avenue in Berkeley. De rigueur for the evening: bags of rice and rolls of toilet paper, readiness to get up and dance the Time Warp, and enough savvy to know precisely where and how to sass the onscreen actors.
Then, as now, I didn't think that the movie really warranted (warrants) such a response, but getting wild at Rocky Horror was the "thing" there for a while, and you just had to go. That original series of five public performances of Le Sacre, all of them rowdy, emits a distinct aura of faddishness. Like the Rocky Horror Picture Show, hula hoops, and pet rocks, public obnoxiousness at "The Rite of Spring" was quickly a thing of the past. Within less than a year, Stravinsky's score was being given normally respectful hearings as it was performed in concert, the venue in which it is most often heard.
We have a ton of recordings of the Rite available. Certainly nobody would want to miss Igor Stravinsky Himself conducting it; he actually made three recordings but the most easily available and sonically modern is with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra (a pickup orchestra made up out of either New York or Los Angeles musicians), also available as part of Sony/BMG's boxed set of Stravinsky's recordings for Columbia Masterworks. Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony have gifted us with a knockout rendition. You also might want to hear the premiere's conductor, Pierre Monteux with the Boston Symphony in a gramophone classic.
Comments