Posted on 05/25/2013 6:05:49 AM PDT by Borges
One hundred years ago this week, a ballet premiered that changed the art world. Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps — The Rite of Spring — was first seen by the public on May 29, 1913, in Paris. As the orchestra played The Rite's swirling introduction, the audience at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées began to murmur. Then the curtain opened.
Dancers dressed in folkloric costumes began to move unpredictably to the pounding chords. In the theater, the rumbles grew to pandemonium — hoots and jeers, arguments and even fistfights between traditionalists and modernists in the audience. It became difficult to hear the music.
The composer, who was sitting in the theater, described the scene in a 1965 interview, included in the documentary Stravinsky.
"When the curtain opened on a group of knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down ... the storm broke," Stravinsky said. "They came for Scheherazade, or for Cleopatra. And they saw Le Sacre du Printemps. They were very shocked. They were very naïve and stupid people."
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross says Stravinsky shocked the audience with a revolution in harmony.
"You have these two chords slammed together: E Major — actually F-Flat Major, as it's spelled in the score — and an E-Flat Dominant 7th chord," Ross explains. "These are two adjacent chords. They're dissonant. They're being jammed together. And that's a harsh sound, and he keeps insisting on it. That chord repeats and repeats and repeats, pounding away."
And then, Ross says, there was Stravinsky's revolution in rhythm.
"It seems as though at first he's just going to have this regular pulse. But then these accents start landing in unexpected places, and you can't quite get the pattern of it," Ross says. "It's as if you're in a boxing ring, and this sort of brilliant fighter is coming at you from all directions with these jabs."
As unsettling as the music was, the audience at the premiere of The Rite of Spring was even more shocked by Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography.
"This was not ballet," says Lynn Garafola, a professor of dance at Barnard College and author of a history called Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. "It was a style of expressive performance that was extremely violent, and that seemed to depart completely from conventional ballet vocabulary.
"It included a lot of stamping. It included jumps. It didn't aspire to be ethereal — in other words, to look like jumps that could hang in the air. ... They seemed to go up simply to crash down into the earth. And then there were parts where they were simply trembling, when their hands were in fists, doing something that seemed, for all the world, to be primitive."
The story itself is primitive: An ancient Russian tribe makes a sacrifice to the gods of fertility; a virgin is chosen; and she dances herself to death.
But Ballets Russes founder Sergei Diaghilev, who staged the ballet, was also intent on presenting modern works. Stravinsky had already written two scores for the company, The Firebird and Petrushka. He said the idea for The Rite of Spring came to him in a dream. He also claimed a sort of mystical creative process.
"Very little immediate tradition lies behind Le Sacre du Printemps, and no theory," Stravinsky said. "I had only my ear to help me. I heard, and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which the Sacre passed."
However it came to Stravinsky, Alex Ross says the music still has an impact.
"The Rite felt completely different. And that has remained a very powerful influence," Ross says. "Even the youngest composers coming to the fore today listen to The Rite and think, 'my God.' It still sounds new to them."
The Rite of Spring influenced 20th century composers from Bartok and Stockhausen to Steve Reich and the American minimalists. Within a year of the premiere, the score was hailed by critics and audiences as a masterpiece.
As for the ballet, Nijinksy's original choreography was abandoned after the initial run, and wouldn't be seen again until the 1980s.
But historian Lynn Garafola says the choreography had an equally dramatic impact on the world of dance.
"I think it was the beginning of what eventually becomes modern dance. It meant that it was possible to create a large-scale work — not a work for a soloist — that departed from the traditional vocabularies of ballet," she says. "This was a new kind of ballet, a new kind of choreography, and a new kind of music."
In the century since its premiere, The Rite of Spring has become a symbol of what's modern. And Igor Stravinsky knew better than to try a sequel.
Classical Ping
Im in the naive and stupid contingent
This music was used in Fantasia to expound upon the theory of evolution.
Remember, this was in 1941.
Ping
In terms of the dance or the music? They don’t do it as a ballet anymore.
If you are familiar with Disny’s 1940 film Fantasia, the rite of spring was a prominent piece in the animated film.
Here’s a bit of the music that’s being discussed.
While Disney did a fantastic job of making animation, even if the subject is evolution, there was actually a hilarious (Italian humor) parody of the Disney segment in another animated movie, called Allegro Non Troppo, which used Ravel’s Boléro.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6aM7st6Xsw
This is the sort of thing that pointy-headed intellectuals and people who live off of the hard work of others worry about.
Those of us who work 18-hours a day to keep our small businesses going have many more pressing concerns.
IOW: Who Cares!?!
A Punk Pastoral?
You don’t listen to music?
Oh and btw, people musicians and dancers work just as hard as you do.
No wonder you are so cranky. ☺
What a silly thing to say.
People who work 18 hour days shouldn’t be on line showcasing their ignorance as a virtue.
Mrs Romulus who studied and danced at the professional level pronounces Sacre du Printemps challenging and satisfying from a technical pov. My own view as audience is that it’s a quaint period piece, desperately self conscious about its modernism.
I’m not a huge fan of dance but I find this music beautiful.
The choreography or the music?
No no no no no no.
The concept of modern dance came from Isadora Duncan, who was inspired by the painting and sculpture of ancient Greece. Duncan was already world famous - and living in Paris - when this ballet was staged. She had performed in Russia frequently, beginning in 1905, and her ideas had a huge impact on Stanislavsky, who became her close friend, and on the choreographer Fokine, and on the intelligentsia of Russia. Nijinsky had already seen her dance, and had also seen the work of Duncan’s brother, Raymond, who lived in Greece and was married to a Greek woman. Raymond Duncan had staged his versions of classical Greek plays in Paris that employed a chorus going across the stage in sideways motion, imitating the figures on Greek frieze paintings and ceramics. Nijinsky had seen that performance in Paris in 1908 or 1909, and that was the source of his inspiration for the choreography for The Rite of Spring.
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