The Rite of Spring premieres

On May 29, 1913, the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev premiered Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris. Pierre Monteux conducted, Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed, and Nicholas Roerich designed sets and costumes for a ballet subtitled Pictures of Pagan Russia, in which a chosen maiden dances herself to death in a spring sacrifice. The opening, a bassoon playing at the top of its range, was already unsettling; the pounding, irregular rhythms and stacked dissonant chords that followed were stranger still.¹³

Stravinsky was 30 and had made his name with two Ballets Russes scores, The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911). Ballet music had always served the dance, and by 1900 orchestral music had absorbed the huge sound world of Wagner. Stravinsky took that orchestral power in a new direction: instead of long melodies and smooth harmonic change, he built music from short folk-like fragments repeated and layered, with accents that fall in unpredictable places. Diaghilev's company, a Paris-based troupe of Russian artists, was a natural home for such experiments because it paid for the most daring painters, composers and choreographers of the day.¹²

The audience reaction is famous. Whistles, shouts and counter-shouts drowned out parts of the music, and Nijinsky had to call out counts to the dancers from the wings. Historians note that accounts of the evening differ widely and that some later retellings of a full riot were exaggerated, but the disruption was real. Within a year the score triumphed as a concert piece in Paris, and it became one of the most performed and most imitated works of the century. Nijinsky's choreography was lost until a reconstruction by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer was staged in 1987.¹²