Igor Stravinsky
Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring)
Igor Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum, Russia in 1882 and died in New York City in 1971. He composed Le Sacre du printemps between the years 1911 and 1913 on a commission from Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. It was first performed, with choreography by Nijinsky, in Paris in 1913 under the direction of Pierre Monteux. The score calls for 3 flutes, 2 piccolos, alto flute, 4 oboes, 2 English horns, 3 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, 2 bass clarinets, 4 bassoons, 2 contrabassoons, 8 horns (two doubling Wagner tubas), 4 trumpets, bass trumpet, 3 trombones, 2 tubas, timpani, percussion, and strings.
*****
As the first performance of The Rite of Spring began, there were mutterings and catcalls from the audience. When the curtain rose the protests increased, now joined by those calling for order and castigating the demonstrators. People everywhere were shouting at each other. Several witnesses reported that the audience was so raucous that hardly a note of the music could be heard. One observer saw an elegantly dressed lady slap a man who was hissing in the next box. Another said, “It was war over art for the rest of the evening.”

Shortly after the uproar began, a fuming Stravinsky left the auditorium and went backstage. There, as he later recalled, he found Nijinsky “standing on a chair, screaming ‘Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen!’—they had their own method of counting to keep time. Naturally the poor dancers could hear nothing by reason of the row in the auditorium. I had to hold Nijinsky by his clothes, for he was furious, and ready to dash on the stage at any moment and create a scene. Diaghilev kept ordering the electricians to turn the house lights on or off, hoping in that way to put a stop to the noise.”

It’s hard to imagine the scene today. After all, the same piece of music that caused a near-riot in Paris in 1913 was considered safe enough to include in a Disney film (Fantasia) by 1941. But the premiere was a singular event—subsequent performances were scandal-free. A successful revolution had taken place, and now that the work has influenced western music for over ninety years (and had its musical language purloined for use in countless film scores) it seems clear that the war over art was won long ago.

In his autobiography, Stravinsky related how the idea for the piece came to him: “One day, when I was finishing the last pages of The Firebird in St. Petersburg, I had a fleeting vision which came to me as a complete surprise. 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. I must confess that this vision made a deep impression on me.” Together with his friend Nicholas Roerich an anthropologist and expert in Slavic prehistory, Stravinsky worked out the scenario for the ballet:

Part I, The Adoration of the Earth, opens with sounds that reminded Stravinsky of “the violent Russian spring, that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking.” As the music continues, softly, it represents “the awakening of nature, the scratching, gnawing, wiggling of birds and beasts.” The Slavonic tribes gather at the foot of a sacred hill to celebrate the spring rite. An old witch enters, followed by young girls with painted faces. Ritual games begin: games of abduction, spring rounds, and a game of rival cities. The games cease when a procession of wise men enters. They bless the earth, and the oldest and sagest of them kisses the earth. The people are seized with mystical passion, and they dance to celebrate the earth and purify it.

Part II, The Sacrifice, begins in the pagan night. The adolescent girls begin a series of mysterious circle dances. One of the girls is chosen as the victim, and the others dance in her honor. They invoke the ancestors and offer the victim up to the wise old men. The elders sanctify the chosen one and she begins her sacrificial dance. In this Danse Sacrale, one of the most primal, hair-raising pieces of music ever composed before or since, she dances herself to death.

The Rite of Spring is famous for its musical complexities, but in fact there are many aspects of it that are easily apprehended. Most of the melodies and accompanying ostinato figures are quite simple: like primitive folk songs, they rarely contain more than four or five notes. These are not developed in the traditional sense. Instead, Stravinsky repeats them and rearranges them, changing their time values and their placement in the bar. Likewise, the harmonies may be crashingly dissonant, but they are usually made up of simple elements combined in unexpected ways. For example, the heavy stamping string chords in Part I’s Dance of the Adolescents are made up of two quite ordinary triads: E major and E-flat major seventh. Since they are only a semitone apart they sound dissonant together, but they are simple all the same. The harmonies are not “functional” in the way we expect them to be—there are no chord “progressions” as such, nor “resolutions.” The music often goes for long periods with no change in harmony at all.

Stravinsky seems to have deliberately simplified these two aspects of the music so we might focus on the prime motivator of the piece: rhythm. Rhythm in The Rite of Spring may be static, propulsive, or even violent, but it continually draws our attention. The rhythms may occur in a conventional meter but with oddly-placed accents, as in the Dance of the Adolescents, or in a sequence of rapidly-changing irregular meters, as in the Danse Sacrale. In either case, they frequently sound simpler than they look on paper. While he was composing The Rite of Spring Stravinsky often found that he could play the rhythms he was hearing more easily than he could figure out how to write them down.

The Rite of Spring is still occasionally given as a ballet. The choreography of the original production, by Nijinsky, was well-received but it was not at all what Stravinsky had in mind. Stravinsky was thinking in big, sweeping gestures and he found Nijinsky’s choreography to be fussy and overly complicated. It has since been lost, so revivals of the ballet must use newer—and potentially superior—choreography. But it may be that The Rite of Spring was destined to have its greatest impact in the concert hall. Stravinsky, for one, preferred it that way. Without visual distractions, we may be swept away by the astonishing pagan sound-world the composer has created.