That was Nijinsky's choreography for the Dance of the Adolescents section, the music's first and still-shocking moment of crunching dissonance and skewed rhythm.
Stravinsky said that at this point, "Cries of ' Ta gueule ' [shut up] came from behind me. I left the hall in a rage. I have never again been that angry. What really happened on that night of nights? Was this a genuine riot, as it is so often described — a shocked response to Stravinsky's simultaneously primitivist and modernist depiction of an ancient Russian ritual devoted to the seasons?
And was The Rite really such a revolution in music, a gigantic leap of faith into a terra incognita that would inspire every subsequent composer? There is still no more influential piece of music in the 20th century. The Rite is the work that invariably tops polls of the biggest and baddest of the last years. Talking many years after its composition, Stravinsky claimed he had to put himself in a kind of creative trance to compose it, an echo of the fate that befalls the poor girl who dances herself to death in the ballet's climactic Sacrificial Dance : "Very little immediate tradition lies behind The Rite of Spring — and no theory.
I had only my ear to help me; I heard and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which The Rite passed. Let's deal with the riot first. Not the subtle interplay of periodic symmetries typical of the classical era, nor the curvaceous, subjective flexibility in the flow of time that romanticism relished. Stravinsky's rhythms pound and batter; though highly irregular they are still pulsed — and pulsed in such a novel way that the score required innovations in musical notation to make Stravinsky's invention playable.
And in no way are these rhythms presented discreetly — on the contrary, they are frequently hammered out in unison by the gigantic orchestra that the work employs. Indeed, one of the most thrilling aspects of a good performance, even without choreography, is how it looks: few things on a concert platform can rival the display of so many musicians executing such jagged and unpredictable rhythmical shapes in perfect unison.
In order to concentrate the listener's perception on the rhythm, melodic material — most of it pinched from a book of Lithuanian folk tunes — is extremely simple, sometimes reduced to tiny repetitive patterns of a mere two or three pitches.
In tandem with this linear simplicity, the work's gigantic crunching harmonies move at the pace of glaciers, this slow harmonic movement paradoxically magnifying the overall sense of energy and drive. These edifices of sound — though disturbingly dissonant for an audience in — are chosen with impeccable refinement, and they underpin the score's complete arc with a structural surety on an almost Beethovenian level.
And, as with Beethoven at his most emphatic, percussive accents pervade the orchestration. The huge wind and brass sections steal the foreground from the habitually warmer sonority of the strings, and the percussion section dominates over everything. In particular, the spectacular writing for a pair of timpanists and the bass drum typify not only the sound of the Rite but its physical impact as well — indeed, one can feel pulled by them into a rhythmical maelstrom of an almost tribal intensity.
Some of the score's most electrifying moments come when opposed rhythmical strands are piled on top of one another. Such superimpositions amount to a musical collage, creating a form of highly organised chaos. Stravinsky was carried from the hall shoulder-high in triumph.
Nothing he wrote subsequently had the same shattering impact on the musical world. See more Stravinsky News. See more Stravinsky Music. See more Stravinsky Pictures. See more Stravinsky Album Reviews. Stravinsky wrote:. I had only my ear to help me; I heard and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which The Rite passed. This threw up more than a few problems at the time. Stravinsky found it difficult to notate music of such rhythmic complexity and express on paper what he meant, and the original orchestral musicians had to be asked to stop interrupting in rehearsals when they thought they had found mistakes!
The piece opens with a bassoon melody played in a high register making the instrument hard to identify at first , which sounds otherworldly and disturbing. This is followed by the first dance, which is characterised by a repeated, stamping chord, where the accented beat constantly shifts. Our conductor Garry Walker says:. Jeanguy has approached the work through his own cultural roots, and the eight company dancers have been exploring Haitian vodou , with its spirits and rituals:.
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