Stravinsky & The Rite of Spring
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)
On 29 May 1913, the premiere of The Rite of Spring at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris provoked a riot. The audience booed, jeered, and fought in the aisles. The conductor could barely be heard over the uproar. That evening changed the history of music.
The Riot of 1913
The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps) was a ballet depicting an ancient pagan Slavic ritual in which a young woman dances herself to death as a sacrifice to the god of spring. The choreography by Vaclav Nijinsky was as shocking as the music: angular, primitive movements that rejected everything the audience associated with classical ballet.
The music began with what was immediately recognised as a provocation: a bassoon solo in an impossibly high register, playing a Lithuanian folk tune that the instrument could barely manage. Then the orchestra entered with a ferocity — dense dissonant chords, savage rhythms with accents falling unpredictably — that left the audience confused and outraged.
Whistles and catcalls began almost immediately. Nijinsky stood in the wings shouting counts to the dancers who could hear nothing over the uproar. The composer fled the theatre. The conductor Pierre Monteux later described the evening as the most terrifying of his career. The police were called.
"I was unprepared for the explosion of rage that greeted the performance. I left the theatre in a rage... I am still angry."
— Igor Stravinsky, on the 1913 premiere
A Life in Three Periods
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was born on 17 June 1882 in Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg, the son of a bass baritone at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre. He studied law at university while taking private composition lessons from Rimsky-Korsakov, who recognised his talent and guided his early development. He died in New York on 6 April 1971, aged 88, having composed in three successive styles that seemingly had nothing in common — yet all were unmistakably Stravinsky.
Period I: Russian (1908–1920)
The Ballets Russes trilogy — The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring — established Stravinsky as the dominant force in modern music. Rich orchestration, Russian folk material, and increasingly radical rhythm and harmony.
Period II: Neoclassical (1920–1951)
A reaction against Romanticism and Expressionism. Stravinsky turned to the clarity of Baroque and Classical models: Bach, Handel, Pergolesi. Clean textures, irony, and formal balance replaced primitivism.
Period III: Serial (1954–1966)
At age 70, Stravinsky adopted Schoenberg's 12-tone technique (ironic since he had opposed it for decades). His late serial works are spare, concentrated, and deeply personal — among the strangest music of the century.
The Ballets Russes & Diaghilev
Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (1909–1929) was the most artistically ambitious and consequential arts organisation of the early 20th century. Diaghilev brought together the greatest talents of the age: composers Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Milhaud, Satie; painters Picasso, Matisse, Braque; choreographers Fokine, Nijinsky, Massine, Balanchine. Each production was a collaboration between the arts.
Diaghilev discovered Stravinsky through his Fireworks (1908) and immediately commissioned The Firebird. It was a brilliant match: Diaghilev demanded novelty, daring, and scandal; Stravinsky delivered all three. The three Russian ballets made both men famous across Europe.
The Ballets Russes folded on Diaghilev's death in 1929, but its influence on 20th-century theatre, dance, and visual art is immeasurable. It is the model for all subsequent attempts to create a genuinely collaborative multi-arts enterprise.
The Rite of Spring: Musical Analysis
Polyrhythm & Additive Metre
The most famous feature of the Rite is its rhythmic violence. In the "Augurs of Spring" section, Stravinsky writes a chord (the famous "Augurs chord") that is struck repeatedly with accents on unpredictable beats. The time signature changes almost every bar: 3/4, 2/4, 5/4, 3/8, all in rapid succession. This is additive metre — building irregular rhythmic units by addition rather than regular division.
Polytonality
The famous Augurs chord is a superimposition of two chords: E-flat major in one hand and F-flat dominant seventh in the other. Two keys simultaneously — polytonality. It produces an aggressive dissonance that is not "wrong" in any traditional sense but rather belongs to two right systems at once. This technique influenced Bartok, Milhaud, and countless film composers.
Primitivism
The Rite depicts pre-Christian Russia — primitive, violent, sacrificial. Stravinsky used actual Lithuanian folk tunes as the basis for some sections. The music rejects beauty in the conventional sense, pursuing instead raw energy and ritual force. This "primitivism" — the artistic use of pre-civilised forms — connects the Rite to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Expressionist art.
Orchestration
The Rite uses a massive orchestra including extensive brass, a large percussion section, and the entire woodwind family in extreme registers. The opening solo bassoon is written at the top of the instrument's range, where its tone is harsh and strained. This is deliberate: Stravinsky wanted the discomfort, the wrongness, the sense of something forced beyond its natural limits.
Rhythmic Structure: The Augurs of Spring
The Russian Trilogy
The Firebird (1910)
Stravinsky's first major success, The Firebird follows Russian folk tales of the magical bird and its role in defeating the sorcerer Kashchei. The score shows Rimsky-Korsakov's influence in its brilliant orchestration but already displays Stravinsky's signature: the contrast between diatonic folk-like material (the human characters) and chromatic, unsettling harmonies (Kashchei's supernatural world). The Berceuse and Finale remain among the most performed pieces in the orchestral repertoire.
Petrushka (1911)
A puppet show at a Russian fair: Petrushka (a kind of Pierrot figure), the Ballerina, and the Moor. The defining innovation is the "Petrushka chord" — C major and F-sharp major sounding simultaneously — which represents the puppet's divided, suffering nature. The score is full of Russian folk tunes, street music, and hurdy-gurdy textures, while the harmonic language is already moving beyond anything Debussy had attempted.
Stravinsky in America
Stravinsky left Russia in 1914 and never returned. He lived in Switzerland, then France, before fleeing to the United States in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II. He settled in Hollywood, where he composed, taught, conducted, and became a colourful presence in American cultural life alongside other European emigre composers (Schoenberg, Bartok, Milhaud, Korngold).
The Rake's Progress (1951), his neoclassical opera to a libretto by W.H. Auden, was composed at the height of his Hollywood years. Shortly after its completion, he was introduced to Schoenberg's music by the conductor Robert Craft — Schoenberg had died in 1951 — and underwent the astonishing conversion to serialism in his early 70s.
He continued composing until 1966 and died in New York in 1971. His body was flown to Venice, per his request, and he was buried on the island of San Michele, near the grave of Diaghilev.