On the evening of 29 May 1913, at the weeks-old Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, a solo bassoon began playing at the very top of its register — so high that some in the audience laughed, unsure what instrument they were hearing. The evening had opened innocuously with the moonlit romanticism of Les Sylphides, which only sharpened the shock of what followed: within minutes of the curtain rising on Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, the laughter had curdled into shouting, whistling and, by many accounts, scuffles between the ballet's defenders and its enemies. The dancers could no longer hear the orchestra; the choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky stood on a chair in the wings bellowing the counts; the impresario Serge Diaghilev flicked the house lights on and off; and the conductor Pierre Monteux kept beating time through the din — "apparently impervious and as nerveless as a crocodile", Stravinsky later wrote — until he reached the final bar. Music history's most famous riot was under way. Probably.
The work being premiered deserved the commotion. The Rite of Spring — subtitled "Pictures of Pagan Russia" — was conceived by Stravinsky with the painter-archaeologist Nicholas Roerich, who designed its sets and costumes: a pagan tribe welcomes spring, and a chosen maiden dances herself to death before the elders. Its composer was no unknown provocateur: at 30, Stravinsky was Diaghilev's proven hit-maker, whose Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911) had made the Ballets Russes the most fashionable spectacle in Europe — which made the betrayal, for loyal subscribers, all the sharper. The new score ran on pounding asymmetric rhythms and grinding dissonances that still startle; Nijinsky's choreography threw out ballet's turned-out elegance for stamping, knock-kneed, pigeon-toed masses — a calculated assault on everything the word "ballet" promised. For the smart subscribers in the boxes it may have been the dancing, as much as the music, that felt like an insult purchased at full price.
What actually happened?
Here the historian must lower the temperature, for the Rite's riot is a textbook case of legend outgrowing evidence. There were certainly noise, insults flying between factions, and some ejections — one later account puts around forty people out the door — and Stravinsky fled his seat in fury. But no arrests are documented, no injuries recorded, and the police presence at the interval belongs to some retellings and not others. Many colourful details wilt under inspection: the elderly composer Camille Saint-Saëns supposedly storming out over the bassoon almost certainly wasn't there that night, and the American writer Carl Van Vechten, who claimed a young man drummed fists on his head in ecstasy, seems to have fused two different evenings. The press coined the pun "Le Massacre du printemps", and everyone who was anyone in Paris later remembered having been present — in numbers the theatre could not have held. Diaghilev, a genius of publicity who had seeded the house with both society boxes and standing young aesthetes, is said to have remarked afterwards that the scandal was exactly what he wanted.
Tellingly, the uproar did not recur. Giacomo Puccini, who inspected the piece at a later performance, reportedly pronounced it the work of a madman — but he said it to a calm house. The remaining performances of the short run passed with diminishing protest, and when the Rite was given in concert in Paris in April 1914, the audience carried Stravinsky out in triumph. Whatever happened on 29 May, Paris needed less than a year to decide it had witnessed a masterpiece.
The long spring
The score went on to reorganise twentieth-century music — its stamping rhythms echo through everything from Shostakovich to Hollywood horror soundtracks, generations of composers have measured themselves against it, and Disney set dinosaurs lumbering to it in Fantasia in 1940, to the composer's lucrative irritation. Nijinsky's choreography, danced only a handful of times before war and the dancer's mental collapse swept it away, vanished almost entirely; it was painstakingly reconstructed in 1987 by the Joffrey Ballet from drawings, scores and survivors' memories. The premiere itself has become art history's favourite creation myth: the night the twentieth century booed its own arrival. The myth insists that Paris rioted against the arrival of the future; the record says, rather more interestingly, that Paris made a very loud noise, went home to bed, and came back the following week for more.
Quiz nuggets
- The Rite of Spring premiered on 29 May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, conducted by Pierre Monteux.
- Choreography was by Nijinsky, designs by Nicholas Roerich; the subtitle is "Pictures of Pagan Russia".
- The piece opens with a bassoon solo at the extreme top of its register.
- The Saint-Saëns walkout story is almost certainly apocryphal — he appears not to have attended the premiere; no arrests were documented.
- Nijinsky's original choreography was lost and reconstructed by the Joffrey Ballet in 1987; a 1914 concert performance ended with Stravinsky carried in triumph.