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The Rite of Spring

The Rite of Spring[n 1] (French: Le Sacre du printemps) is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky with stage designs and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. When first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913, the avant-garde nature of the music and choreography caused a sensation. Many have called the first-night reaction a "riot" or "near-riot", though this wording did not come about until reviews of later performances in 1924, over a decade later.[1] Although designed as a work for the stage, with specific passages accompanying characters and action, the music achieved equal if not greater recognition as a concert piece and is widely considered to be one of the most influential musical works of the 20th century.

For other uses, see Rite of Spring (disambiguation).

Le Sacre du printemps
The Rite of Spring

Russian: Весна священная, romanized: Vesna svyashchennaya, lit.'Sacred Spring'

Pagan myths

29 May 1913 (1913-05-29)
Théâtre des Champs-Élysées
Paris

Stravinsky was a young, virtually unknown composer when Diaghilev recruited him to create works for the Ballets Russes. Le Sacre du printemps was the third such major project, after the acclaimed Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911).[n 2] The concept behind The Rite of Spring, developed by Roerich from Stravinsky's outline idea, is suggested by its subtitle, "Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts"; the scenario depicts various primitive rituals celebrating the advent of spring, after which a young girl is chosen as a sacrificial victim and dances herself to death. After a mixed critical reception for its original run and a short London tour, the ballet was not performed again until the 1920s, when a version choreographed by Léonide Massine replaced Nijinsky's original, which saw only eight performances.[2] Massine's was the forerunner of many innovative productions directed by the world's leading choreographers, gaining the work worldwide acceptance. In the 1980s, Nijinsky's original choreography, long believed lost, was reconstructed by the Joffrey Ballet in Los Angeles.


Stravinsky's score contains many novel features for its time, including experiments in tonality, metre, rhythm, stress and dissonance. Analysts have noted in the score a significant grounding in Russian folk music, a relationship Stravinsky tended to deny. Regarded as among the first modernist works, the music influenced many of the 20th-century's leading composers and is one of the most recorded works in the classical repertoire.

Music[edit]

General character[edit]

Commentators have often described The Rite's music in vivid terms; Paul Rosenfeld, in 1920, wrote of it "pound[ing] with the rhythm of engines, whirls and spirals like screws and fly-wheels, grinds and shrieks like laboring metal".[120] In a more recent analysis, The New York Times critic Donal Henahan refers to "great crunching, snarling chords from the brass and thundering thumps from the timpani".[121] The composer Julius Harrison acknowledged the uniqueness of the work negatively: it demonstrated Stravinsky's "abhorrence of everything for which music has stood these many centuries ... all human endeavour and progress are being swept aside to make room for hideous sounds".[122]


In The Firebird, Stravinsky had begun to experiment with bitonality (the use of two different keys simultaneously). He took this technique further in Petrushka, but reserved its full effect for The Rite where, as the analyst E.W. White explains, he "pushed [it] to its logical conclusion".[123] White also observes the music's complex metrical character, with combinations of duple and triple time in which a strong irregular beat is emphasised by powerful percussion.[124] The music critic Alex Ross has described the irregular process whereby Stravinsky adapted and absorbed traditional Russian folk material into the score. He "proceeded to pulverize them into motivic bits, pile them up in layers, and reassemble them in cubistic collages and montages".[125]


The duration of the work is about 35 minutes.

Instrumentation[edit]

The score calls for a large orchestra consisting of the following instruments:[126]

Influence and adaptations[edit]

The music historian Donald Jay Grout has written: "The Sacre is undoubtedly the most famous composition of the early 20th century ... it had the effect of an explosion that so scattered the elements of musical language that they could never again be put together as before".[21] The academic and critic Jan Smaczny, echoing Bernstein, calls it one of the 20th century's most influential compositions, providing "endless stimulation for performers and listeners".[116][139] Taruskin writes that "one of the marks of The Rite's unique status is the number of books that have been devoted to it—certainly a greater number than have been devoted to any other ballet, possibly to any other individual musical composition ..."[140] According to Kelly the 1913 premiere might be considered "the most important single moment in the history of 20th-century music", and its repercussions continue to reverberate in the 21st century.[141] Ross has described The Rite as a prophetic work, presaging the "second avant-garde" era in classical composition—music of the body rather than of the mind, in which "[m]elodies would follow the patterns of speech; rhythms would match the energy of dance ... sonorities would have the hardness of life as it is really lived".[142] The work is regarded as among the first examples of modernism in music.[143]


Among 20th-century composers most influenced by The Rite is Stravinsky's near contemporary, Edgard Varèse, who had attended the 1913 premiere. Varèse, according to Ross, was particularly drawn to the "cruel harmonies and stimulating rhythms" of The Rite, which he employed to full effect in his concert work Amériques (1921), scored for a massive orchestra with added sound effects including a lion's roar and a wailing siren.[144][145] Aaron Copland, to whom Stravinsky was a particular inspiration in the former's student days, considered The Rite a masterpiece that had created "the decade of the displaced accent and the polytonal chord".[146] Copland adopted Stravinsky's technique of composing in small sections which he then shuffled and rearranged, rather than working through from beginning to end.[147] Ross cites the music of Copland's ballet Billy the Kid as coming directly from the "Spring Rounds" section of The Rite.[148] For Olivier Messiaen The Rite was of special significance; he constantly analysed and expounded on the work, which gave him an enduring model for rhythmic drive and assembly of material.[149] Stravinsky was sceptical about over-intellectual analysis of the work. "The man has found reasons for every note and that the clarinet line in page 3 is the inverted counterpoint of the horn in page 19. I never thought about that", he allegedly replied to Michel Legrand when asked about Pierre Boulez's take on the matter.[150]


After the premiere the writer Léon Vallas opined that Stravinsky had written music 30 years ahead of its time, suitable to be heard in 1940. Coincidentally, it was in that year that Walt Disney released Fantasia, an animated feature film using music from The Rite and other classical compositions, conducted by Stokowski.[141] The Rite segment of the film depicted the Earth's prehistory, with the creation of life, leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs as the finale. Among those impressed by the film was Gunther Schuller, later a composer, conductor and jazz scholar. The Rite of Spring sequence, he says, overwhelmed him and determined his future career in music: "I hope [Stravinsky] appreciated that hundreds—perhaps thousands—of musicians were turned onto The Rite of Spring ... through Fantasia, musicians who might otherwise never have heard the work, or at least not until many years later".[151] In later life Stravinsky claimed distaste for the adaptation, though as Ross remarks, he said nothing critical at the time; according to Ross, the composer Paul Hindemith observed that "Igor appears to love it".[152]

Hodson, Millicent (1996). Nijinsky's Crime Against Grace: Reconstruction of the Original Choreography for Le Sacre du printemps. Pendragon Press.

Stravinsky's autograph manuscript

Le Sacre du Printemps

by Jonathan Biss and Jeremy Denk from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in MP3 format

Performance of Stravinsky's four-hand piano arrangement of The Rite of Spring

: Scores at the International Music Score Library Project

The Rite of Spring

by Tom Service, The Guardian, 13 February 2013

The Rite of Spring: 'The work of a madman'

BBC Proms 2011 Stravinsky's Rite of Spring