How Stravinsky changed the course of 20th-century arts with ‘Rite of Spring’

Opening night of the ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), music by Igor Stravinsky, choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, set off one of music history’s most epic uproars.

Many in the audience that night — May 29, 1913, in the newly opened, tres chic Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris — objected vociferously to Nijinsky’s earth-bound choreography and Stravinsky’s clamorous score. This was not ballet with satin pointe shoes and soaring jetés. High-decibel arguments and physical fights broke out. The police were called.

Presented by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, The Rite of Spring may have been Stravinsky’s most notorious ballet. But it was not his first ballet, nor would it be his last. More than any other major composer except Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky is most widely known for his ballets. He wrote more than a dozen, starting in 1910 with The Firebird, a work drenched in Russian folklore. His final ballet was the angular, thoroughly modern Agon, composed between 1953 and 1957 for George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. (In a showcase of 20th-century masterpieces, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under Zell Music Director Designate Klaus Mäkelä, will perform The Rite of Spring in concerts March 5-6.)

Born in 1882, Stravinsky grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia, home of the Mariinsky Theatre, where two Tchaikovsky ballets, The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and The Nutcracker (1892), had their premieres. Ballet was highly respected in pre-revolutionary Russia, and thanks to the Tsar’s patronage, its ballet schools turned out superbly trained dancers. Among the country’s early 20th century stars were Anna Pavlova, Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina. Stravinsky’s first two ballets, The Firebird and Petrushka, would make Karsavina and Nijinsky international stars.

By the early 1900s, Russian ballet, however, had lost some of its creative juice. Despite a wealth of fine dancers, productions at the most prestigious theaters like the Mariinsky and the Bolshoi were lackluster, heavily dependent on story ballets and uninspired music. Revolution was in the air. The tsarist regime was seriously threatened in 1905 and finally toppled in 1917. Like Russia’s political rebels, many young Russian painters, poets, stage designers, dancers, choreographers and composers longed to break away and try something, anything, new. They found a leader in Diaghilev, a cultivated, well-connected 30-something who dreamed of introducing the best of Russian art, opera and ballet — old as well as new — to the West.

Diaghilev tested his dream in Paris in 1906 with an exhibit of Russian art and sculpture. Parisians fell hard, thrilled by their first sustained taste of “exotic” Russian culture. The next year, he sponsored a set of Paris concerts with programming input from Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov, Glazunov and operatic bass Feodor Chaliapin. In 1908, he put Chaliapin onstage at the Paris Opéra in a deliriously received production of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov.

The ground was set for Diaghilev’s next venture, the Ballets Russes. (Despite its box-office success, Boris Godunov left the impresario with huge financial losses. Ballet was comparatively cheaper to produce.) During the company’s two-decade existence, Diaghilev commissioned ballets from some of the era’s greatest composers: Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Manuel de Falla, Prokofiev, Richard Strauss, Respighi and Poulenc. But it was Stravinsky, with his scores for The Firebird, Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring, who fueled the Ballets Russes’ early, explosive success. Inspired by Russian folk music and myths, his scores offered the haunting melodies and dark harmonies of old Russia. But it also bristled with modernism’s propulsive, off-kilter rhythms and dissonant outbursts. Composer Pierre Boulez called The Rite of Spring the “birth certificate” of 20th century contemporary music.

Karsavina, then in her mid-20s and a Mariinsky star, originated the role of the magic Firebird in 1910. One year later, she was onstage with Nijinsky in Petrushka, a tale of a love-sick puppet smitten with a cold-hearted ballerina doll. Michael Fokine choreographed both ballets.

In his 2002 book, Stravinsky and Balanchine/A Journey of Invention, Charles M. Joseph includes Karsavina’s memories of working with Stravinsky on The Firebird.

“Often times he came early to the theater before a rehearsal began in order to play for me over and over again some specially difficult passage,” she said. "There was no impatience with my low understanding.” At the piano, his head bobbed so violently on accented phrases, she recalled, that “the rhythm lived in, and at times, took possession of his body.”

Joseph also quotes Pierre Monteux, who conducted the tumultuous Rite of Spring premiere with unflappable calm. Monteux described the sight of composer at the piano, introducing Diaghilev and himself to his newest ballet. “[T]he walls resounded as Stravinsky pounded away, occasionally stamping his feet and jumping up and down to accentuate the force of the music.”

Stravinsky wrote more than 100 works — from solo piano pieces to symphonies, an opera and choral music. But why was he so strongly drawn to ballet? One memorable quote hints at an answer.

“There is music wherever there is rhythm,” Stravinsky declared, “as there is life whenever there beats a pulse.” Dance is nearly impossible without some sort of rhythmic pulse. And sharply etched rhythms erupt in virtually every piece of music Stravinsky wrote.  

"I love ballet and am more interested in it than in anything else. For [it] is the only form of scenic art that sets … as its cornerstone, the tasks of beauty and nothing else.” — Igor Stravinsky

He also believed that ballet aspired to the loftiest possible aesthetic goals.

 “I love ballet and am more interested in it than in anything else,” he said. “For [it] is the only form of scenic art that sets … as its cornerstone, the tasks of beauty and nothing else.”

Ballet also held a more mundane appeal for Stravinsky. It meshed beautifully with how he approached the task of composing. He was undoubtedly among classical music’s greatest geniuses, taking composition in new, ground-breaking directions. But he refused to regard himself as a sensitive artiste receiving inspiration from somewhere in the cosmos. No, he proudly defined himself as a craftsman above all else. He solved concrete problems to create the work of art he had in his mind. He touched on that idea during six Charles Eliot Norton lectures he gave at Harvard University in 1939-40.

“The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free,” he stated. “My freedom … consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself. My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles.”

Ballet certainly provided the obstacles Stravinsky felt he needed. If a ballet tells a story, its music must propel the action and illuminate its characters. Story or no story, dancers have bodily limitations. Even the finest dancers can move only so fast; they need breaks to catch their breath. Ballet is a collaborative art. Composers have to keep stage design, lighting, costumes in mind as they work. Stravinsky thrived on those kinds of limits.

In the Ballets Russes’ final years, Stravinsky met Balanchine, a young Russian choreographer who had just started working with Diaghilev’s company. In 1928, the 24-year-old Balanchine and Stravinsky collaborated on a new staging for Stravinsky’s recently composed Apollo.  It was the start of contemporary ballet’s most fruitful partnership.

Stravinsky composed several ballets for Balanchine. Their Orpheus in 1947 featured Maria Tallchief, a young Native American who would go on to become one of the 20th century’s most stellar ballerinas. In 1949, Balanchine’s reworking of Stravinsky’s The Firebird would bring both Tallchief and Balanchine’s fledgling New York City Ballet international renown. (After retiring from the stage, Tallchief settled in Chicago, and beginning in 1971, served for two decades as Lyric Opera of Chicago’s ballet director.)

I searched in vain for the exact source of a Stravinsky quote I swear I read somewhere years ago. But since it perfectly sums up his approach to composing ballets, I’ll pass it along anyway.

While working on one of their ballets, Balanchine allegedly told Stravinsky he needed “about two minutes” of music at a certain point. “George,” Stravinsky supposedly replied, “I can give you 1 minute, 59 seconds. I can give you 2 minutes, one second. I cannot give you ‘about two minutes.’ ”

Maybe Stravinsky never said that. But he certainly could have.