Monsieur Diaghilev,
surely you’re not asking me to conduct music like this?!
I can’t endure much more.
Erm...tell me, Maestro Stravinsky:
does it last a very long time this way?
To the end, my dears!
He’s raving mad, I tell you.
Raving mad!
Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is so raving mad
that its premiere a year later leads to the most notorious riot in the history of modern music.
Stravinsky’s born in 1882 near St Petersburg.
He becomes a law student.
But fancies learning music in his spare time.
Having daddy Stravinsky as a famous singer has its perks.
He grants young Stravinsky access to the best teacher imaginable:
none other than Rimsky-Korsakov, Russia’s most famous composer.
Rimsky thinks highly of Stravinsky but he's less impressed with another of his students:
Sergei Diaghilev.
Though in 1909, it is Stravinsky who needs Diaghilev -
not the other way round.
Because Stravinsky’s a virtually-unknown composer.
And Diaghilev?
Well he's a highly-established music impresario.
That year, Diaghilev is on the hunt for some fresh talent
to write a ballet for his newly-established Ballets Russes.
He hears Stravinsky’s compositions at a St Petersburg concert.
He takes a punt on him
and Stravinsky comes up with The Firebird,
which Diaghilev’s legendary ballet company stages in 1910.
It’s an overnight sensation and the experience teaches Diaghilev two things.
One: that he’s onto something with the young composer.
Two: that his high-society Parisian audiences have a certain view of Russians –
as primitive, untamed representatives of an exotic culture.
How about another ballet by Igor Stravinsky that exploits this prejudice like never before?
Diaghilev teams Stravinsky up with the ideal man for this job:
his set and costume designer, Nicholas Roerich.
Roerich is a kooky mystic and expert in Russian folklore.
Together they devise The Rite of Spring in 1911.
It will depict a group of Slavic tribespeople
celebrating the advent of spring with pagan dances and ritual games.
It is to climax with a sacrificial maiden dancing herself to death
to appease the gods of spring.
Stravinsky spends the next year and a half composing the piece
in a tiny rented room in some small Swiss village.
He writes it for a gargantuan orchestra of 100 musicians.
They’re barely able to fit in the orchestra pit of the Theatre des Champs-Elysees,
the brand-new theatre in Paris at which the ballet is to premiere.
Tensions run high during rehearsals because the music is so complicated
The musicians keep complaining of mistakes in the score.
But when Stravinsky assures them that there are none
and that the orchestra is to play what’s written
they laugh at him, thinking he’s gone crazy.
29th May 1913.
Opening night and the theatre’s packed with Parisians eager to
experience a slice of savage, prehistoric Russia.
A haunting melody opens the piece.
It’s based on a Lithuanian folk song.
But just WHAT is that instrument playing the solo?
Camille Saint-Saens is in the audience and asks his neighbour who informs him it’s a bassoon.
“Well if that’s a bassoon”
replies the veteran composer
“I’m a baboon!”
It’s just so rare to hear the bassoon given a solo and even
more unusual for it to play such high notes.
This was Stravinsky’s attempt at mimicking the strained,
harsh tones of primitive village instruments.
For this story takes place in rural Russia where spring is coming and a thaw is setting in.
The thick Russian ice begins to crack,
revealing the green shoots of elemental life that stir in the soil beneath.
Woodwinds slither and coil like plants bursting into bloom.
Pizzicato strings flutter like wings.
An oboe chirps like a bird tweeting on a single note.
Up high, flutes and clarinets imitate birdsong across this wild rainforest of sound.
Down below, the bass clarinet impersonates the “ribbit” of a frog.
There's no discernible rhythm.
It is as free and wild as nature itself.
Strings enter and we get the first hint of a pulse,
the pumping of lifeblood through this ancient landscape.
Cellos whisper a ghostly chord before the curtain
rises to reveal a crowd of pagan tribesmen gathered in the hills.
They stamp their feet to a rigid machine-like rhythm.
The horns stab like daggers on unexpected beats,
making the music feel irregular.
The harmonies sound brutal and clashing because they’re bitonal;
essentially meaning we’re in two different keys at once.
Bassoons chant as an old woman enters.
She’s a fortune-teller who can predict the mysteries of nature.
Piccolos let out a primal scream.
A folk tune from the horn sounds as the young maidens arrive from the river.
They walk in single file, knock-kneed with turned-in feet and sharply raised elbows.
Diaghilev’s choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky knew he had to ignore all the rules of classical ballet
to capture the primeval world of pagan dancing.
But it’s too much for the audience.
When the women lean their heads awkwardly against their hands, there’s a shout from the auditorium:
“Call a dentist!”
The auditorium erupts with laughter.
The socialite snobs, bedecked in jewels and fur, boo and hiss from their boxes.
These smart aristocrats expected to see some fluffy classical ballet.
Down below, the arty-farty bohemians shout them down.
They’ll praise anything radical to show their hatred for the monied fashionistas.
Amongst them are composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel who shouts out “Genius, genius!”
Stravinsky’s rises from his stalls seat, disgusted at the catcalling.
“Go to Hell!” he cries out
before running backstage.
He steadies Nijinsky who is standing on a chair in the wings, shouting out cues to the dancers.
They’re unable to hear the music because the orchestra’s been drowned out by the uproar
so Nijinsky’s resorted to stamping out the beat.
Eventually the dancers surrender to the rhythms of an ecstatic groove.
The beating of drums signals the start of the ceremonial games.
The tribesmen hunt the young maidens in a ritual of mock abduction.
Horns snarl a hunting call as the tribesmen drag the women off by their hair.
Flutes and piccolos play the part of the prey.
The music’s breathless.
The unpredictable pulse wrong-foots us at every turn.
By now, Diaghilev’s switching the house lights on and off
to try and quell the growing disturbances.
It’s a reaction he expected
perhaps even hoped for
for he instructs the conductor to keep the orchestra playing till the very end.
Trilling flutes usher in a khorovod:
a solemn dance in honour of spring.
A funky bass line weighs the music down
as much as Nijinsky’s choreography which pulls the dancers down to the ground.
It’s the opposite of classical ballet in which
ballerinas aspire upwards and fly gracefully across the stage.
Nijinsky’s barely lift off the ground, stressing the sacredness of the earth on which they stand:
humanity’s dependence on the soil beneath.
Now the pagan men split into rival tribes.
They oppose each other in a furious fight.
Shrieking trumpets and hammering timpani also fight for attention in the orchestra.
Tubas announce a ceremonial procession of wise elders.
Their theme plays in cross-rhythms with other instruments,
including the Latin American guiro that rattles to a different background beat.
The head sage brings a pause to the games.
He reaches down to the earth to bless it with a kiss.
A strange, hushed chord, bleached of colour.
Bass drum and tam-tam crash with earth-shattering intensity.
It’s as though the sage’s kiss has split the ground
vomiting out some gooey lava.
The tribe perform a frenzied dance in celebration of their becoming one with the earth.
It’s no real melodies.
Just a bunch of rhythmic urges that jostle between different sections of the orchestra.
The audience is still yelling and the police have started making arrests.
Two furiously-arguing spectators in neighbouring
boxes have even agreed to a duel the following morning.
Saint-Saens – previously baffled by that bassoon – storms out in anger,
He's decided the whole piece is baffling!
The ballet now enters the stillness of night as the earth falls into deep slumber.
The music’s eerie and hypnotic.
You might recognise it from John Williams’s "Tatooine" music in Star Wars.
Stravinsky’s Rite had an incalculable influence on film composers.
We see the shadowy figures of the young maidens playing a mysterious game under the stars.
They walk in circles to a whispering folk tune,
working out which of them will be the Chosen One –
the one who is to placate the gods of spring by doing the sacrificial dance.
The maidens wear long braided wigs and crude peasant clothes.
Not an inch of skin showing,
Nicholas Roerich’s costumes were far from the graceful tutus and tights of classical ballet.
When one of the maidens falls outside of the circle
eleven thuds announce that she is to be the sacrificial lamb.
The others have been let off the dance of death today.
Majestic brass and drum rolls announce the return of the village elders.
They invoke the ancient spirits of their ancestors.
The sages make ritual preparations for the sacrifice of the Chosen One.
And so begins her dance to the death.
The Chosen One convulses in an unstoppable vortex of ritual motion.
The council of elders dressed in bearskins watch on,
united in bloodlust.
Whereas most composers had up to this point in time
used melody and harmony to drive forward the action,
Stravinsky makes rhythm the driving force here.
His use of the orchestra as one big percussion instrument was very original.
He places silences in all the unexpected places.
He changes the time signature every bar to create an electrifying off-kilter beat.
It reflects the Chosen One staggering and stumbling as she becomes increasingly exhausted.
Eventually we hear her heart pumping out of her chest.
It's mimicked by the timpani beating out of synch with the rest of the orchestra.
A moment of quivering silence as she falls to the ground and snaps her neck
before we hear the final chord
whose notes spookily spell out the word:
DEAD.
Though the Rite of Spring shocked and enthralled its audience in equal measure,
Stravinsky's true genius was recognised a few months later
when he presented it as a stand-alone work.
On that occasion, he was hailed the prince of the avant-garde.
He was carried triumphantly out of the concert hall
through the streets of Paris on the shoulders of his admirers.
They acknowledged that Stravinsky’s wild harmonies,
violent dynamics and unprecedented treatment of rhythm
pushed the frontiers of musical possibility further than ever before.
The Rite of Spring brought music back to its primal origins
using folk tunes and rhythmic rituals to transport the audience to a time
and place when people danced to celebrate their relationship to the earth.
It revealed to Parisians a primitive society from Russia’s distant past.
But the irony on that evening of 29th May 1913 is this.
That it was the MODERNITY and SOPHISTICATION of the piece that shocked the audience.
And it was they –
the beau-monde of Paris who considered themselves so thoroughly civilised
so tolerantly modern –
who in fact became the savage barbarians.