# Birth of the Rite



## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

100th anniversary of its premiere. here is the opening paragraph of Presto Classical's article:

<< Very few musical premières can claim to be as notorious as the evening of 29th May, 1913, when Paris's Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, under the baton of Pierre Monteux, presented the first performance of Igor Stravinsky's ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring). Reports abound of laughter and general uproar from the audience, which apparently reached such a volume that the on-stage dancers could no longer hear the voice of choreographer Nijinsky shouting out the step numbers to them from the wings! It is debatable whether the majority of the criticism was aimed at the music or the choreography, but in any case there is no denying the raw power of the work, with its savage rhythms and frenzied conclusion during which the Chosen One dances herself to death. >>


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Congratulations Igor Stravinsky! This work is now OFFICIALLY ANTIQUE.

How _ooolllllddddd_ modern music is 

How _behind their time_ are so many from the general listening audience.


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## Ravndal (Jun 8, 2012)

Wohooo. Congrats! One of the last great composers!


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## Neo Romanza (May 7, 2013)

My favorite _Le sacre du printemps_:










In my opinion, _Le sacre du printemps_ is still one of the most incredible works in the classical repertoire.


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## maestro267 (Jul 25, 2009)

My opinion is that most of the reaction was to the choreography and staging. How can it have been praised so shortly afterward when given as a concert performance? Surely the music would've provoked a hostile reaction if it was that that people were so worked up over. It says something as well that the vast majority of Rite performances these days are concert performances without the dancing.


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## DrKilroy (Sep 29, 2012)

You can watch the original Nijinsky choreography on YouTube. I love the Sacrificial Dance.

Best regards, Dr


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## NightHawk (Nov 3, 2011)

As of today, I own three recordings of The Rite and have heard, either live or on a library loan, many other performances. It is amazing to me that every time I hear a new performance I hear something I've never heard or noticed in quite the same way before. I think it has to do with the multitude of cross-rhythms, which can be emphasized or moderated to the nth degree. I think it is also because it is a deeply _memorable_ work and I just notice slight differences very quickly - I know this for a fact as I constantly 'air cue' the work quite well when listening to it w/o score!


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

It's a work of genius indeed.

Here is what *David Ewen*, an American writer on music, wrote about The Rite of Spring back in 1956 (quote from the book in green italics, source at bottom of this post).

I printed this out more for those who aren't aware of these things, people who've listened to it for years will know a lot of this info, but those who've come to it more recently may not.

_Soon after completing the Fire-Bird, Stravinsky had a "vision," as he himself described it. He saw a girl dancing herself to death in a sacrificial pagan rite. He reported this transport to the painter Nicolas Roerich, who, impressed, agreed that this could be elaborated intoa new ballet. Roerich helped Stravinsky work out a general outline in which images of pagan Russia where evoked.

The writing of this new ballet was delayed while another one, of quite a different character, engaged Stravinsky - Petrushka. Not until Petrushka was out of the way did Stravinsky return to The Rite and complete it.

The Rite of Spring has no detailed specific program. In abstract terms it portrays a ritual of pagan Russia. Symbolic or anecdotal details are not permitted to intrude. An exquisite orchestral introduction of seventy-five bars sets the mood of springtime: the earth is reborn; life is regenerated. There then takes place the Ballet of the Adolescents, who accompany their uneven stamping on the ground with an incantation. A second ceremonial consists of a kind of community contest, during with the Sage of the tribe appears to consecrate the soil. A pagan night, touched with mystery and sadness, descends. The Mysterious Circle of Adolescents begin a frenetic dance. A victim for the sacrifice is now chosen; and she dances herself to death.

The premiere performance, at the Theatre de Champs Elysees in Paris on May 29, 1913, created a scandal which has been frequently described. Nijinsky's exotic choreography and Roerich's bizarre settings and costumes were partially responsible. But it was Stravinsky's revolutionary score which, more than any single factor, stirred that first-night audience to dynamic reactions. The performance had not progressed very far when catcalls, shouts and stamping of feet began to drown out the music. On the one hand, musicians like Maurice Ravel and Debussy arose to exclaim that this was a work of genius; on the other, people like the critic Andre Capu, the Austrian Ambassador, and the Princess de Pourtales pronounced it a fake. Blows were exchanged. One woman spat in the face of a demonstrator. Pandemonium followed. Very little of the music could now be heard.

Such was the birth of a musical work which has justifiably been described as one of the epochal landmarks in the music of our generation. More than any other single composition, it has influenced composers throughout the world, setting forth a new trend in musical composition, helping to evolve a new idiom. The dynamism of Stravinsky's rhythmic writing - the rapidly changing meters, the counterpoint of different rhythms - had a devastating kinesthetic appeal; the tension of the music, built up through dissonance and polytonality, had a terrifying effect; the brazen colors produced by unorthodox instrumentation were dazzling; the primitive appeal to the elementary sense of masses of sound and disjointed melodies had overwhelming impact. All this destroyed the complacency not only of a first-nigh audience but also of an entire musical era.

When The Rite of Spring was introduced in London at the Drury Lane Theatre on July 11, 1913, the audience was better mannered than the one which had witnessed the premiere performance in Paris. But the critics where just as savage. "It has no relation to music at all as most of us understand the word," one of them wrote. Another remarked: "A crowd of savages…might have produced such noises."

Appreciation for this powerful and original music did not come suddenly. When the orchestral suite was introduced in this country by Pierre Monteux and the Boston Symphony in 1924, there was still profound antagonism to this music. One wit contributed the following verse to the pages of the Boston Herald:

Who wrote this fiendish Rite of Spring?
What right had he to write this thing?
Against our helpless ears to fling.
Its crash, clash, clang, bing, bang, bing!

If acceptance came slowly, it came inevitably as well. The score is now heard often - more often in the symphony hall than in the theatre - and much of the original surprise is gone. Instead, we now appreciate the incomparable vitality, the richness of speech, the audaciousness of thinking in this music. Indicative that this work is no longer for esoteric ears alone is the fact that it was incorporated in a Walt Disney motion picture, Fantasia, which was seen by millions._

[Note that the verse he mentions (printed jokingly about the American premiere of the work in the Boston Herald newspaper) was set to music by American composer Henry Cowell, its one of his set of Anti-Modernist Songs.]

& more recent opinions, this time on interpretation of The Rite, by *Esa-Pekka Salonen* (in blue) and *Sir Simon Rattle* (in grey).


_Does [The Rite] being a ballet affect the way I perform it? I think it's important to know the subject matter - it helps; and you shouldn't treat it as a piece of absolute music because it isn't and wasn't meant to be. Also, there's no development, no symphonic shape as such, so it's not like conducting a Mahler or a Brahms symphony, where you're in charge of the narrative. In the Sacre you kind of enable the narrative but you're not in charge of it; you basically give the orchestra the tools to handle it - you can't do any funny stuff with it. Or you can, but its pointless, because if you just make sure that the machine works faultlessly, then this particular machine produces a scary and very moving thing on its own. But you have to know what images it needs to convey in order to enable it._

_The Rite was once hard to play, but now it's in danger of becoming an orchestral showpiece because people know and play it so well. There was a time when, basically, Markevitch and Fruhbeck where the ones who could really conduct it and train orchestras to play it. The biggest challenge is to keep it in proportion, not to make it just a series of bright colours, but to maintain the story and keep it coming out of the earth.

I'm sure that if Stravinsky wrote the bassoon solo now, he'd start it on a top E flat, not a C. He would want it to be even more dangerous_.

The article also talks about the many composers influenced by this work, right until recent times - composers as diverse as Copland, Orff, Xenakis, Messiaen, Reich, Glass, Ligeti, Robert Reynolds, Michael Gordon and Louis Andriessen. It also talks of a kind of "Stravinsky fixation" among composers "every bit as ideologically narrow as the serialism it sought to replace." Interesting, seems that virtually anything that sets out to liberate one thing ends up restricting another, ready for another generation to topple or at least rework.

Incidentally, there are three editions of the piece (the 1913 original, a revision of 1921 and a reorchestration done in 1947). Igor also tinkered with the 1947 version in the 1960's and there's also a version for two pianos. The differences between the various orchestral versions are said to be minimal in terms of listening, and I think its hard sometimes to know which is which, especially if the cd you got doesn't give details. But I'm not too worried about this.

Sources:

Ewen, D. (1956). The Home Book of 20th Century Music. London: Arco Publishers Limited (pp. 405-406).

Clark, Philip. (2013). Rewriting The Rite, in Limelight magazine, May 2013 issue. (pp. 35-39).


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

I believe the 1947 re-orchestration of the Rite was done mainly to get at least one version of the work under copyright (which had long since expired on the original version). Don't know how well this worked because to avoid copyright payments, all you had to do was use the old version.


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## Marisol (May 25, 2013)

At least in the US we can freely enjoy and copy the score to our hearts desire!
http://imslp.org/wiki/The_Rite_of_Spring_(Stravinsky,_Igor)


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

According to Clinton Nieweg, literally 21.300 things in previous Sacre score editions have been wrong:

http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2013/05/the-absolutely-right-rite-of-spring.html

A Kalmus Edition from the year 2000 is said to be the most authentic, but a new one is being planned.


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## DeepR (Apr 13, 2012)

I'm sure there's good reason for public opinion to praise the Rite to the sky. Also on this site it seems to be some kind of holy grail. Personally, I simply enjoy listening to it, but the music doesn't have any deeper meaning to me. There is no journey or destination. You could randomly swap some parts and I'd enjoy it all the same, but nothing more.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

DeepR said:


> I'm sure there's good reason for public opinion to praise the Rite to the sky. Also on this site it seems to be some kind of holy grail. Personally, I simply enjoy listening to it, but the music doesn't have any deeper meaning to me. There is no journey or destination. You could randomly swap some parts and I'd enjoy it all the same, but nothing more.


The Rite is way too easy to be a 'holy grail'. How about if you take note of the scene titles as the music progresses? Doing that is all my imagination needs.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

DeepR said:


> I'm sure there's good reason for public opinion to praise the Rite to the sky. Also on this site it seems to be some kind of holy grail. Personally, I simply enjoy listening to it, but the music doesn't have any deeper meaning to me. There is no journey or destination. You could randomly swap some parts and I'd enjoy it all the same, but nothing more.


You might think so, but I recently rewatched Disney's Fantasia, and I found the rearrangement of the various bits of the Rite (they moved the end of Part 1 until right before the end and cut the Sacrificial Dance, and after that reprised the bassoon solo) far more jarring than their chopping of Beethoven's Pastoral (where they cut all of the development). It struck me that they didn't even end the piece on a tonic chord, which I hadn't noticed as a child.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

joen_cph said:


> According to Clinton Nieweg, literally 21.300 things in previous Sacre score editions have been wrong:
> 
> http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2013/05/the-absolutely-right-rite-of-spring.html
> 
> A Kalmus Edition from the year 2000 is said to be the most authentic, but a new one is being planned.


Yep and that's not new. They played a tape of Igor rehearsing The Rite when he did those historic recording sessions in the 1960s. & Igor said during that to the players to ignore various bits of the score, even though it was a printed score, it had been printed wrong. So what you say, well it doesn't surprise me. Maybe not as much a nightmare as the Bruckner editions confusion, but still some textual issues here, it seems.


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

There´s a later, recorded example of such a very outspoken, negative Parisian public respond to a modern work: Scherchen´s premiere of Varese´s "Deserts" (1954), from the very same concert hall as that of "The Rite of Spring" premiere, Theatre des Champs Elysees, cf.

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2007/Feb07/Scherchen_599600.htm


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