| The Rite of Spring (Le sacre du printemps) |
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Set painting Kiss to the Earth 2nd Variant |
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| Choreographed by | Vaslav Nijinsky |
| Composed by | Igor Stravinsky |
| Date of premiere | 29 May 1913 |
| Place of premiere | Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris |
| Original ballet company | Ballets Russes |
| Designs by | Nicholas Roerich |
| Setting | Russia |
| Genre | Russian Modernism |
The Rite of Spring, original French title Le sacre du printemps (Russian: Весна священная, Vesna svyashchennaya), is a ballet with music by Igor Stravinsky; choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky; and concept, set design and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. It was produced by Sergei Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes ballet company and had its première in Paris on 29 May 1913.
The music's innovative complex rhythmic structures, timbres, and use of dissonance have made it a seminal 20th century composition. In 1973, composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein said of one passage, "That page is sixty years old, but it's never been topped for sophisticated handling of primitive rhythms...", and of the work as a whole, "...it's also got the best dissonances anyone ever thought up, and the best asymmetries and polytonalities and polyrhythms and whatever else you care to name."[1]
A performance of the work lasts about 33 minutes.
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While the Russian title literally means "Sacred Spring", the English title is based on the French title under which the work was premièred, although sacre is more precisely translated as "consecration". It has the subtitle Pictures from Pagan Russia (French: Tableaux de la Russie païenne).
Versions differ on the origin of the concept for The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky later in life said that it came to him in a dream. But contemporary sources support that the idea originated with the Russian philosopher and painter Nicholas Roerich. Roerich shared his idea with Stravinsky in 1910, a fleeting vision of a pagan ritual in which a young girl dances herself to death. Together, Roerich and Stravinsky worked out a scenario of pagan dances in pre-Christian Russia. Roerich drew from scenes of historical rites for inspiration and used research of early Russian culture to create settings and costumes to complete the image of an early pagan Russia.
Stravinsky's earliest concept for the music of The Rite of Spring came in the spring of 1910. Stravinsky writes, "... there arose a picture of a sacred pagan ritual: the wise elders are seated in a circle and are observing the dance before death of the girl whom they are offering as a sacrifice to the god of Spring in order to gain his benevolence. This became the subject of The Rite of Spring."[2]
While composing The Firebird,[3] Stravinsky began forming sketches and ideas for the piece, enlisting the help of Roerich. Though he was sidetracked for a year while he worked on Petrushka (which he intended to be a light burlesque as a relief from the orchestrally intense work already in progress), The Rite of Spring was composed between 1912 and 1913 for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.
Diaghilev assigned the choreography of the ballet to Vaslav Nijinsky, the company's leading male dancer. Nijinsky conceived of a completely original dance style for the ballet that emphasized earthy staccato movements with feet turned inward. It was a radical departure from ballet as it was known at the time. Nijinsky experienced considerable trouble conveying his ideas to his collaborators and teaching the steps to the dancers. Stravinsky would later write in his autobiography of the process of working with Nijinsky on the choreography, stating that "the poor boy knew nothing of music" and that Nijinsky "had been saddled with a task beyond his capacity."[4] While Stravinsky praised Nijinsky's amazing dance talent, he was frustrated working with him on choreography.
This frustration was reciprocated by Nijinsky with regard to Stravinsky's patronizing attitude: "...so much time is wasted as Stravinsky thinks he is the only one who knows anything about music. In working with me he explains the value of the black notes, the white notes, of quavers and semiquavers, as though I had never studied music at all... I wish he would talk more about his music for Sacre, and not give a lecture on the beginning theory of music."[5]
After undergoing revisions almost up until the very day of its first performance, the ballet was premièred by the Ballets Russes on Thursday, 29 May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, conducted by Pierre Monteux.
The première involved one of the most famous classical music riots in history. The intensely rhythmic score and primitive scenario and choreography shocked the audience that was accustomed to the elegant conventions of classical ballet.
The evening's program began with another Stravinsky piece entitled “Les Sylphides.” This was followed by, “The Rite of Spring”. The complex music and violent dance steps depicting fertility rites first drew catcalls and whistles from the crowd. At the start, some members of the audience began to boo loudly. There were loud arguments in the audience between supporters and opponents of the work. These were soon followed by shouts and fistfights in the aisles. The unrest in the audience eventually degenerated into a riot. The Paris police arrived by intermission, but they restored only limited order. Chaos reigned for the remainder of the performance.[6] Stravinsky had called for a bassoon to play higher in its range than anyone else had ever done. Fellow composer Camille Saint-Saëns famously stormed out of the première allegedly infuriated over the misuse of the bassoon in the ballet's opening bars (though Stravinsky later said "I do not know who invented the story that he was present at, but soon walked out of, the première." [7]). Stravinsky ran backstage, where Diaghilev was turning the lights on and off in an attempt to try to calm the audience.
After the première, Diaghilev is reported to have commented to Nijinsky and Stravinsky at dinner that the scandal was "exactly what I wanted."[8]
Some scholars have questioned the traditional account, particularly concerning the extent to which the riot was caused by the music, rather than by the choreography and/or the social and political circumstances. The Stravinsky scholar Richard Taruskin has written an article about the première, entitled "A Myth of the Twentieth Century," in which he attempts to demonstrate that the traditional story of the music provoking unrest was largely concocted by Stravinsky himself in the 1920s after he had published the score. At that later date, Stravinsky was constructing an image of himself as an innovative composer to promote his music, and he revised his accounts of the composition and performances of The Rite of Spring to place a greater emphasis on a break with musical traditions and to encourage a focus on the music itself in concert performances. Once the music became popular, later writers appropriated Stravinsky's version of events. Taruskin summarizes how unimportant the music apparently was to most of the audience at the première:
In 1913 [the music] was not the primary object of attention. The most cursory perusal of the Paris reviews of the original production, conveniently collected in Truman C. Bullard's dissertation, reveals that it was the now-forgotten Nijinsky choreography, far more than Stravinsky's music, that fomented the famous "riot" at the première. Many if not most reviews fail to deal with Stravinsky's contribution at all beyond naming him as composer. And, as most memoirs of the première . . . agree, a lot of the music went unheard, which did not dissuade the protesters in the least.[9]
The ballet completed its run of six performances amid controversy,[10] but experienced no further disruption. The same performers gave the London premiere on 11 July the same year, to a quieter reception.[11] Nijinsky's ballet was not performed again and his choreography disappeared until reconstructed in the 1980s (see below).
The first concert (i.e., non-staged) performance of the work was given in Moscow on 5/18 February 1914, conducted by Serge Koussevitsky;[12] after the Paris concert première at the Casino de Paris on 5 April 1914, conducted by Monteux,[13] (whose direction was praised by Pierre Lalo and Florent Schmitt),[14] Stravinsky was carried out into the Place de la Trinité on the shoulders of a cheering crowd.[12] The United States concert première was in 1922 in Philadelphia.[13]
A representation of the 1913 première incident appears in the 2005 BBC-TV drama "Riot At The Rite" [15][16] as well as in the opening scenes of the 2009 film, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky.
Vaslav Nijinsky was the premiere choreographer for the ballet. Because of the irregular, constantly changing pulse of Stravinsky’s music, the dancers (who customarily count out their dance steps by the numbers) soon referred to the musical score as “an arithmetic lesson.” One of the dancers recalled that the modern choreography was physically unnatural and that "with every leap we landed heavily enough to jar every organ in us." [1] During the performance, when the Sacrificial Virgin shook onstage during her solo dance, her hands held up by her cheeks, someone in the balcony cried out: “Call a doctor . . . a dentist . . . two doctors!!!” [2]
During the performance, Nijinsky stood on a chair, leaned out (far enough that Stravinsky had to grab his coat-tail), and shouted counts to the dancers, who were unable to hear the orchestra (this was challenging because Russian numbers above ten are polysyllabic, such as eighteen: vosemnadsat vs. seventeen: semnadsat).[17] As Thomas Kelly states, "The pagans on-stage made pagans of the audience."
Archaeologist and painter Nicholas Roerich contributed the set design and the costumes, which were described in a 2002 Ballet Magazine article as "heavy smocks, handpainted with [primitive] symbols of circles and squares." [3]
The Rite is divided into two parts with the following scenes (there are many different English translations of the original titles; the ones given are Stravinsky's preferred wording[18] followed by the original French in parenthesis):
First Part: Adoration of the Earth (Première Partie: L'adoration de la Terre)
Second Part: The Exalted Sacrifice (Seconde Partie: Le Sacrifice)
Though the melodies draw upon folk-like themes designed to evoke the feeling of songs passed down from ancient time, the only tune Stravinsky acknowledged to be directly drawn from previously existing folk melody is the opening, first heard played by the solo bassoon.
Stravinsky's music is harmonically adventurous, with prominent use of dissonance for the purposes of color and musical energy. Rhythmically, it is similarly adventurous, a number of sections having constantly changing time signatures and off-beat accents. Stravinsky used asymmetrical rhythms, percussive dissonance, polyrhythms, polytonality, layering of ostinati (persistently repeated ideas) and melodic fragments to create complex webs of interactive lines. An example of primitivism can be seen below (from the opening of the final section, the "Sacrificial Dance"):
According to George Perle (1977 quoted in 1990), the "intersecting of inherently non-symmetrical diatonic elements with inherently non-diatonic symmetrical elements seems... the defining principle of the musical language of Le Sacre and the source of the unparalleled tension and conflicted energy of the work".
Like the symmetrical partitioning of the twelve-tone scale in Le Sacre, the work's diatonicism may be explained in terms of interval cycles more simply and coherently than in terms of traditional modes or major and minor scales. With the single exception of interval[-class] 5, every interval[-class] from 1 through 6 partitions an octave into equal segments. A seven-note segment of the interval-5 cycle [C5], telescoped into the compass of an octave, divides the octave into unequal intervals: 'whole-steps' and 'half-steps'".
The boundary of what Perle considers the principal theme from the Introduction, following the solo bassoon head motif in measures 1-3, is a symmetrical tritone divided by minor thirds, making an interval-3 cycle (C 3) (p. 19). Like Edgard Varèse's Density 21.5, "it partitioned the interval of a tritone into two minor thirds and differentiated these by twice filling in the span of the upper third--first chromatically and then with a single passing note--and leaving the lower third open". The theme repeats "truncated" in 7-9, the head motif only in 13, and then fully, transposed down a half step, fifty three measures later, 66, at the end of the movement with "(c-flat)-(b-flat)-(a-flat) instead of the head motif's c-b-a" (p. 81-82).
Like Density 21.5, it "implies the complete representation of each partition of the C3 interval cycle." C30 begins in the head motif's c-b-a and is completed by the main theme which immediately follows (see example above). However, "the otherwise atonal C 3 cycle is initiated by a minor third that is plainly diatonic and tonal" (p. 83). Thus The Rite of Spring has something in common with No. 33 of Béla Bartók's 44 Violin Duets, "Song of the Harvest", which, "juxtaposes tonal and atonal interpretations of the same perfect-4th tetrachord" (p. 86).
The enduring celebrity of The Rite of Spring is partly due to its constant discussion and analysis by musicologists and music theorists. Allen Forte,[33] Van den Toorn has given analyses of the work's structure in terms of abstract relations of rhythm and pitch, arguing for a modernist understanding of its musical language.
The Rite of Spring is scored for an unusually large orchestra consisting of the following:
Stravinsky scored the instruments of the orchestra in unusual sounding registers in The Rite of Spring, often emulating the strained sounds of untrained village voices.[34] An instance of this is heard in the very opening bassoon solo which reaches near to the highest notes of the instrument's range. The composer also called for instruments that, before The Rite of Spring, had rarely been scored for in orchestral music, including the alto flute, piccolo trumpet, bass trumpet, Wagner tuba, and güiro. The use of these instruments, combined with the aforementioned manipulation of instrumental registers, gave the piece a distinctive sound.
In his 1951–52 Charles Eliot Norton lectures, Aaron Copland characterized The Rite of Spring as the foremost orchestral achievement of the 20th century.[35]
Stravinsky composed a piano four-hands version before finishing the orchestral score. The composer was continually revising the work for both musical and practical reasons, even after the première and well into ensuing years. The transcription for piano four-hands was performed with Claude Debussy; since Stravinsky composed the Rite, as with his other works, at the piano, it is natural that he worked on the piano version of the work concurrently with the full orchestral score. It was in this form that the piece was first published (in 1913, the full score not being published until 1921 by Editions Russe de Musique). Owing to the disruption caused by World War I, there were few performances of the work in the years following its composition, which made this arrangement the predominant version by which the piece gained public exposure. This version is still performed quite frequently, as it does not require the massive forces of the full orchestral version.
Stravinsky also made two arrangements of The Rite of Spring for player piano. In late 1915, the Aeolian Company in London asked for permission to issue both the Rite and Petrushka on piano roll, and by early 1918 the composer had made several sketches to be used in the more complex passages. Again owing to the war, the work of transcribing the rolls dragged on, and only the Rite was ever issued by Aeolian on standard pianola rolls, and this not until late 1921, by which time Stravinsky had completed a far more comprehensive re-composition of the work for the Pleyela, the brand of player piano manufactured by Pleyel in Paris.
The Pleyela/pianola master rolls were not recorded using a "recording piano" played by a performer in real time, but were instead true "pianola" rolls, cut mechanically/graphically, free from any constraints imposed by the ability of the player. The Zander recording includes both the pianola version, and the orchestral Rite with the faster tempo restored to the final section. A low-fidelity recording is available here.[36]
The music has since become a frequent basis for ballets produced by dance troupes around the world. Since Nijinsky's original version, some 180 choreographies[37] have been created to the score of The Rite of Spring. The second version was created in 1920 by Leonide Massine, again for the Ballets Russes. It was based on the original scenario by Roehrich and used the sets and costumes of the 1913 premier production.
Among the many others, some of the most noted productions include a version choreographed by Sir Kenneth MacMillan for the Royal Ballet of London in 1962 that remains in its repertoire today.[38] Glen Tetley created a powerful abstract version for the Bavarian Opera Ballet of Munich in 1974 combining modern and classical dance styles. This version has since been produced by American Ballet Theater and other major companies.[39][40] Modern dance choreographer Pina Bausch created a highly acclaimed Rite of Spring (German title: Frühlingsopfer) in 1975 for her Wuppertal Dance Theatre. In her dramatic and violent interpretation, the sacrificial victim is lynched by a mob of onlookers. Bausch's production has since been performed throughout the world.[37][41]
After nine performances by the Ballets Russes, Nijinsky's ballet was not produced again. His choreography was documented only in contemporary written eye-witness accounts, in photographs, and in detailed notes preserved by the English ballet director Marie Rambert.
In 1987, the Joffrey Ballet received a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant in Dance of $243,400 "to support three self-produced seasons in New York City and Los Angeles, and the reconstruction of Vaslav Nijinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps." The reconstruction was done by Millicent Hodson, a choreographer and dance historian, and her husband Kenneth Archer, an art historian. Hodson and Archer reconstructed the ballet together by researching "prompt books, contemporary sketches, paintings, photographs, reviews, the original costume designs, annotated scores, and interviews with eye witnesses, such as Dame Marie Rambert, Nijinsky's assistant." [4]
The piece premièred in Los Angeles, and in 1990, Joffrey's reconstruction was televised as part of the Dance in America/Great Performances series on PBS.[42] Hodson's reconstructed version of Nijinsky's "Sacre" has since been added to the repertory of the Mariinsky Theatre Ballet Company (formerly the Kirov) of St. Petersburg, Russia and has been filmed by that company and released on video.[43]
Nijinsky's choreography introduced new concepts of dance that were extremely influential in the 20th Century. Different from the long and graceful lines of traditional ballet, his Rite of Spring featured arms and legs that were sharply bent in. The dancers danced more from their pelvis than their feet, a style that later influenced Martha Graham. The "anti-ballet" aspects of the Nijinsky choreography (body components curled inward not opened outward, body pulled down not lifted up, steps heavy not light, focus on grotesqueness not elegance) as well as the controversial, violent, pagan, or primitivist thematic material, greatly influenced Tatsumi Hijikata and Tamano method Butoh.
The Rite of Spring was further popularized through Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940), an animated feature film in which original animated images and stories were combined with works of classical music. The Rite of Spring is the fourth piece in the film's program, illustrated by "a pageant, as the story of the growth of life on Earth" according to the narration read by Deems Taylor. The sequence depicts the evolution of life on earth, from the beginning of simple life forms up to the dinosaurs and their eventual destruction. The original score of Stravinsky's work was edited for its use in Fantasia. Part I was considerably shortened and the opening bassoon solo was repeated at the end. Moreover, the finale of Act II (La Danse Sacrle) was completely omitted, since after L'Action Rituelle des Ancêtres the music goes back to Act I - which has been split into two parts - and plays the two last movements (L'Adoration de la Terre and La Danse de la Terre).
Stravinsky's own 1961 recording of the work for Columbia Records included liner notes by him, transcribed from an interview for which the audio still exists. Therein, he stated that he received $1,200 (his share of a total $5,000) for the use of his music in the film, explaining that since his music was not copyrighted for use in the USA it could be used regardless of whether he granted permission or not, but that Disney wished to show the film in other countries. In order for the music to follow the animated story concerned, much of Part I either was omitted entirely or was moved to, or repeated at, the end. Stravinsky, the only living composer featured in the film at the time of its release, spoke critically of the significant re-ordering and cuts made to his composition. One source states that he also conceded that the animators understood the meaning of the piece,[44] but Stravinsky said in his autobiography that the musical performance of the work was "execrable", and about the animation, "I do not wish to criticize an unresisting imbecility."[45]
As one of Western music's genre-defining compositions, themes from the work have been interpolated into dozens of other compositions. Among them:
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