The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps)

Program notes

About the Work

No single work did more to define the sound of the twentieth century than Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Its premiere, given by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on 29 May 1913, has become the most famous scandal in the history of music: from almost the first bars the audience erupted, partisans of the new work shouting down its detractors, laughter and jeering rising to such a pitch that the dancers reportedly could not hear the orchestra, and the choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky stood in the wings bellowing the counts to keep them together. Whether there was an actual riot or merely an uproar has been debated ever since, but the symbolic force of the evening is undeniable: it marked the moment when modernism announced itself in the concert hall with shocking violence.

The work was conceived as a ballet, subtitled ‘Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts,’ and grew out of a vision Stravinsky said came to him while completing The Firebird: an imagined ancient rite in which a young girl is chosen and made to dance herself to death as a sacrifice to the god of spring. Working with the painter and folklorist Nicholas Roerich, who designed the production and helped shape its scenario, Stravinsky drew on folk melodies (the opening bassoon tune comes from an anthology of Lithuanian folk songs) and on an idea of primeval ritual, fashioning from them a score of unprecedented rhythmic ferocity. Nijinsky’s choreography, with its turned-in feet, stamping, and convulsive movements, deliberately repudiated the grace of classical ballet, matching the music’s primitivism.

What so shocked the first listeners was above all the rhythm. Stravinsky unleashed irregular, hammering accents that fell where the ear least expected them, metres that changed almost bar by bar, and dissonances stacked into pounding blocks of sound. He treated the large orchestra, swollen with extra woodwind and brass and a battery of percussion, as a vast rhythmic engine, capable of both delicate, archaic colourings and overwhelming brutality. Beneath the chaos lay rigorous construction: the score is built from short, obsessively repeated cells that accumulate and collide, a technique that would influence composers for generations. Within a decade the riot was forgotten and the music had triumphed; today The Rite of Spring is among the most performed and recorded of all orchestral scores, as thrilling in the concert hall as it once was scandalous in the theatre.

What to Listen For

The Rite falls into two parts. Part One, ‘The Adoration of the Earth,’ opens with one of the strangest sounds in the repertoire: a solo bassoon, pushed to the very top of its register, spinning out an archaic, plaintive folk-like melody that seems to come from before history. Around it other woodwinds gather, the texture thickening into a dawn chorus of birdcalls and twittering, until the orchestra abruptly cuts off.

Then comes the moment everyone remembers: the ‘Augurs of Spring,’ where the strings, reinforced by horns, pound out a single dissonant chord again and again, with savage, irregular accents stamping down where you do not expect them. This relentless rhythmic violence is the heart of the work; let the displaced accents knock you off balance, as they are meant to. Listen, too, for the way Stravinsky builds from short repeated fragments (a tune, a rhythm, a gesture), layering and colliding them rather than developing them in the old symphonic way.

Part Two, ‘The Sacrifice,’ begins in mystery, a cold and shadowy nocturnal landscape, before mounting through the ‘Glorification of the Chosen One’ toward its terrifying climax. The work ends with the ‘Sacrificial Dance,’ in which the chosen maiden dances herself to death: a movement of jagged, convulsive rhythms in constantly shifting metres, almost impossible to count, driving to a final, shattering orchestral lurch, a single brutal chord that drops like an axe. After it, silence.