There was a riot.
An actual riot with fisticuffs and shouting and police ejecting rabble rousers.
The wealthy men had changed from their lounge suits – sack coats and waistcoats with starched collars high on the neck suitable only for lounging in one’s own home – into their evening suits. Their wives, clad in designer gowns by Paul Poiret or Jacques Doucet, accompanied them to the brand new Théâtre de Champs-Elysées on the evening of 29 May 1913 for a night at the ballet. These were Paris’s elite, men and women who went to the ballet for an evening of beauty and elegance. They were joined in the audience by the hipsters of their day who, according to the writer Jean Cocteau, “would applaud novelty simply to show their contempt for the people in the boxes.”
Together, they were having none of The Rite of Spring in both a literal and figurative sense. The shouting began almost immediately, the wealthy crowd indignant of the spectacle before them, the beatniks indignant of the wealthy crowd. Florent Schmitt, the composer of Tragédie de Salomé, the third of three ballets premiered in the 1913 season of the famed Ballet Russes, sided with the Bohemian group, allegedly shouting “Taisez-vou, garces du seiziéme!” or, in a literal translation referencing high society’s preferred arrondissement, “Shut up, you bitches of the sixteenth!” A member of the orchestra informed conductor Pierre Monteux that “many a gentleman’s shiny top hat or soft fedora was ignominiously pulled down by an opponent over his eyes and ears, and canes were brandished like menacing implements of combat all over the theatre.” The man responsible for the music, Igor Stravinsky, did not even see it: “As for the actual performance, I am not in a position to judge, as I left the auditorium at the first bars of the prelude, which had at once evoked derisive laughter. I was disgusted.” The composer of the greatest work of the 20th century viewed its premiere from the stage wings, helping the dancers keep time.
Whatever the crowd may have expected to see and hear that night was most certainly not what they witnessed. That is not to say that there had been no controversy to that point, however.
With the benefit of more than 100 years of hindsight, we now understand just how special Stravinsky’s masterpiece is. In 1913, though, it sounded absolutely insane. Previous seasons of the Ballet Russes had included, aside from Stravinsky’s two prior successes in The Firebird and Petrushka, works like Prince Igor by Alexander Borodin and Tchaikovsky’s famed Swan Lake. The previous season had included Maurice Ravel’s beautiful Daphnis et Chloé and Debussy’s sumptuous The Afternoon of a Faun. It was the latter, as it turns out, that sparked a backlash from some critics, exactly one year to the day prior to The Rite of Spring.
The choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky, inspired by ancient Greek and Egyptian art encountered at the Louvre, culminated in an act of overt sexual desire which led the editor of Le Figaro, Gaston Calmette, to voice his displeasure. “We are shown a lecherous faun, whose movements are filthy and bestial in their eroticism, and whose gestures are as crude as they are indecent. That is all. And the over-explicit miming of this mis-shapen beast, loathsome when seen full on, but even more loathsome when seen in profile, was greeted with the booing it deserved. Decent people will never accept such animal realism.” One delights in pondering what Calmette would have written about the spiritual successor to Nijinsky’s Faun, Madonna’s infamous and masturbatory “Like a Virgin” performance from the MTV Video Music Awards.
It is little surprise, then, that a ballet featuring the choreography of Nijinsky set to Stravinsky’s music of savage rhythmic intensity would be poorly received. Stravinsky blamed Nijinsky. “The scandal which it produced is a matter of history, but that scandal was in nowise due to the so-called novelty of the performance, but to a gesture, too audacious and too intimate, which Nijinsky made, doubtless thinking that anything was permissible with an erotic subject and perhaps wishing thereby to enhance the effect of the production.” Stravinsky was not even the first composer to blame Nijinsky’s choreography for the failure of a performance that month. Two weeks prior to the riot at the Rite, Claude Debussy’s newest ballet, Jeux, had its premiere. Debussy was so incensed at Nijinsky’s choreography that he left his seat in the middle of the performance to smoke a cigarette. Debussy described a ballet “in which Nijinsky’s perverse genius applied itself to a special branch of mathematics! The man adds up demisemiquavers with his feet, checks the result with his arms and then, suddenly struck with paralysis all down one side, glares at the music as it goes past.”
The initial reception of The Rite of Spring was a far cry from that of Stravinsky’s two previous efforts for the company. The Ballet Russes founder, the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, had plucked Stravinsky from relative obscurity in St. Petersburg. Stravinsky’s family was both solidly upper middle class and very musical; his mother, Anna, a fine pianist, his father, Fyodor, the principal bass singer of the Mariinsky Theater, regarded as perhaps the finest bass in Russia. Nevertheless, Stravinsky’s father initially refused to allow him to pursue music. To hear him tell it, Stravinsky’s relationship with his parents was, uh, not great: “My childhood…was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.” He was raised in Saint Petersburg, Peter the Great’s European fever dream, home to some of the most beautiful architecture, and some of the worst sanitation issues, on Earth:
Arrangements for the disposal of sewage…may be briefly referred to as a system of filthy cesspools in the back yards of all houses, with rough wooden carts to carry away the contents at night and pollute the atmosphere by the operation. At the same time, as though this were not enough, the citizens are supplied with water which nobody valuing his or her life dares to drink unboiled. St. Petersburg is probably the only city in Europe, or perhaps the world, where danger-signals in the form of placards with glaring red letters are posted up on house-fronts, inside tramcars and in most places of public resort, warning all and sundry against drinking raw water.
Stravinsky’s only confidante was his cousin, Katherine (Katya) Gavrylivna Nosenko, who seemed to understand him in a way that no one else in his family did. Stravinsky’s attitude about his family appears to have been borne of the fact that his mother preferred his oldest brother, Roman, who was taller and more handsome than young Igor, who would grow to a Napoleonic five feet and three inches as a grown man, though it should be noted that historians seem to agree that Napoleon was actually 5’6” so perhaps “Kevin Hart-esque” is a better descriptor. Well into his twenties, he had the sort of nebbish physicality that surely led the people of St. Petersburg to conclude that he was sickly (he was) or, at the very least, silently judging them for the positioning of their cravats.
Classical music’s history is littered with child prodigies. Stravinsky was not one of them. What he was was a young man with connections, thanks to his father’s career as well his father’s insistence that he become a lawyer. One of Stravinsky’s classmates was Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov, son of the Professor of Practical Composition and Instrumentation at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Stravinsky had already met the famed composer through his father’s work and approached him with some of his compositions while his family was on summer holiday in Germany in 1902. By 1903, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov began teaching Stravinsky, then 21 years old, for one hour twice each week.
If he wasn’t a child prodigy, he was a regular one. His opus one, a Symphony in E-flat dedicated to his teacher, was completed in 1907 and remains a part of the repertoire to this day, though its composer does not exactly speak of it with glowing adoration: “I am not at all ashamed of it – it is my first opus. It has a few nice sections, but most of it is crude, in the Glazunov-Tchaikovsky style, and the instrumentation is academic. In itself the work is not interesting, but it serves as one more document illustrating how not to compose.” Less than two years later, however, Stravinsky’s fortunes would forever change. On the evening of 6 February 1909, Diaghilev was among those in the audience who braved the winter temperatures to witness a concert featuring Stravinsky’s opuses three and four, Scherzo Fantastique and Fireworks, the latter a wedding present for Nadezhda Rimsky-Korsakov and Maximillian Steinberg, the daughter and favorite pupil respectively of Stravinsky’s teacher. Keep that “favorite pupil” bit in the back of your mind. Diaghilev was sufficiently impressed to offer Stravinsky the opportunity to orchestrate music by Chopin for the premiere of Les Sylphides, which would take place that summer in Paris as part of the Saison Russe organized by Diaghilev. He would give the company its more famous name the next year. Stravinsky would provide the company with its three greatest ballets over the course of the next four.
Having passed Diaghilev’s test, Stravinsky was approached to write a ballet for the 1910 season based on the Russian folktale of the Firebird. Stravinsky accepted, but not without hesitation: “Although alarmed by the fact that this was a commission for a fixed date, and afraid lest I should fail to complete the work in time – I was still unaware of my own capabilities – I accepted the order.” As he had done for the previous eighteen summers, Stravinsky traveled to his family’s estate in Ustyluh, a small town on the border of Ukraine and Poland with a predominantly Jewish population that was decimated during the Holocaust. Unlike the previous eighteen summers, when he left the estate he had no idea that he was halfway to international fame and the estate would eventually become a museum in his honor, “#1 of 1 things to do in Ustyluh” according to the folks at TripAdvisor!
Two years removed from the death of his teacher and one year from his big break with Diaghlev, Stravinsky composed one of the finest ballets in history in six months. Stravinsky’s first ever trip to Paris came in the spring of 1910 for rehearsals of his soon-to-be masterpiece. There was no shortage of hiccups in the long rehearsal schedule, chief among them the fact that the character of the Firebird had been recast without the composer’s knowledge. The conductor of the performance, a brilliant organist and somewhat forgettable composer named Gabriel Pierné, quarreled with the young composer on several occasions, the worst incident being when he scolded Stravinsky in front of the entire orchestra for writing “non crescendo” as a precaution to the musicians. “Young man, if you do not want a crescendo, do not write anything.” Nevertheless, the premiere performance on 25 June 1910 at the Paris Opera was an unqualified success and Stravinsky immediately leapt up several strata in the reputational hierarchy of living composers. Diaghilev put the world on notice: “Take a good look at him—he’s about to be famous.”
Stravinsky biographer Michael Oliver, in a move which would come to afflict a great many Stravinsky biographers, stakes out a position blowing through the atmosphere of high praise on a rocket ship fueled by hyperbole: “The Firebird is the work of a young genius who has not yet formed a mature style of his own but has already surpassed his teacher.” Um, Scheherazade is on line two, Mr. Oliver, and would like a word. Oliver isn’t SO far off, though. After all, the first fleeting glimpses of Stravinsky’s greatest achievement, in a mature style of his own, surpassing his teacher, all teachers, and anyone else who ever composed anything, were envisioned during the final stages of work on The Firebird. “I had a fleeting vision which came to me as a complete surprise, my mind at the moment being full of other things. I saw in my imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.”
The success of The Firebird was surely appreciated by the composer, a man who had just celebrated his 28th birthday and had a wife and two young children, with a third on the way in September of that year, to support. Stravinsky had married Katya on 23 January 1906 and had two children with her almost immediately. No one seemed to take issue with the fact that she was also Stravinsky’s first cousin, with the notable exception of the Orthodox Church, which necessitated the couple finding a priest devoid of curiosity to officiate the wedding. Thankfully, Stravinsky had long since abandoned his belief in the church and was something of an agnostic by the wedding date. He would become quite religious in his middle age, composing sacred music, purchasing and displaying religious iconography, and going to church regularly.
Nosenko gave birth to their third child in Lausanne, Switzerland, twenty-five kilometers up the road from Clarens, where they would stay until the winter. Stravinsky had taken Katya to Switzerland for the supposed health benefits of a climate whose reputation was surely burnished by its contribution to the rapid psychological recovery of Tchaikovsky, who composed his epic Violin Concerto in a span of less than a month while convalescing there after the worst year of his life. In addition to their trips to Ustyluh, the Stravinskys would return to Clarens in each of the intervening years and Stravinsky would complete a great deal of work on The Rite of Spring and its predecessor, Petrushka, while living there, working “in a closet-sized room barely big enough to hold a table, two chairs, and a small upright piano.”
Petrushka was a great leap forward for Stravinsky in two significant respects. Whereas The Firebird had been a story imposed upon him by Diaghilev and the action was dictated primarily by choreographer Michel Fokine, Stravinsky’s vision of the story of Petrushka was the lodestar for the entire production. The story of “the immortal and unhappy hero of every fair in all countries” was also an advance on Stravinsky’s use of the orchestra, which to this point was heavily indebted to his teacher, who was, to be fair, the author of perhaps the greatest textbook on orchestration in history, still available on Amazon to this very day. The sounds of Petrushka are less refined and more vulgar than The Firebird. The composer Roman Vlad, who would publish a biography of Stravinsky in 1960, described the sound as that of “a gigantic accordion or a broken-down fair organ.” The premiere, at the Ballet Russes’ first home in the Théâtre du Châtelet, was again a massive success, with praise heaped upon Stravinsky by many. Equal praise was reserved for Nijinsky’s performance as Petrushka, with Sarah Bernhardt allegedly going full fan girl and saying “I am afraid! I am afraid because I have seen the greatest actor in the world!”
During the two years between the premieres of Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky’s life reads like a work of fiction. In addition to finishing The Rite, he composed a short choral work called The King of the Stars. He met Richard Strauss. He performed The Rite in the version for two pianos at a small gathering in the home of critic Louis Laloy, his partner on piano number two being Debussy. He split duties on completing the score of Mussorgsky’s Khovanschina with Maurice Ravel. He traveled throughout Europe with the Ballet Russes and met his artistic foil, Arnold Schoenberg, in Berlin after each man took in a performance of the other’s greatest masterpiece to that point, Schoenberg attending one of the Ballet Russes performances of Petrushka, Stravinsky in the audience for a performance of Pierrot Lunaire. Stravinsky and Ravel were both fans of the work, an atonal masterpiece utilizing Schoenberg’s characteristic “sprechstimme” or “speech song.” Mary McAuliffe, in her book Twilight of the Belle Epoque describes Debussy’s response to Stravinsky’s description of Schoenberg’s new work as “simply…staring at Stravinsky and saying nothing.”
Everything was coming up roses, with at least one exception. Stravinsky undertook the Wagner pilgrimage and heard Parsifal at Bayreuth, which he claims to have absolutely detested. The full account, found in Stravinsky’s autobiography from 1936, is utterly scathing, but this single sentence gives a general sense of his experience: “I could think of only one thing, and that was the end of the act which would put an end to my martyrdom.” In a February 1913 letter to Maximillian Steinberg, which is to say “in real time,” Stravinsky’s take was quite a bit more generous: “I was in Monte Carlo for Parsifal, but didn’t see a thing as I sat in a side box, which I didn’t mind, since I could appreciate the great art of Wagner from the direct source of that greatness and not through the medium of pygmies swarming around the stage – they get terribly in the way, even when you don’t see them.”
After the notorious first performance of The Rite of Spring, the work received additional performances in Paris and London, which were notably absent the madness of the premiere. A year later, the work received its first concert performance and was likewise a massive success, which caught Stravinsky by surprise: “The audience, with no scenery to distract them, listened with concentrated attention and applauded with an enthusiasm I had been far from expecting and which greatly moved me.” At least one account claims that young members of the crowd carried Stravinsky through the streets of Paris on their shoulders.
Stravinsky’s next move was right out of the Wu-Tang playbook, a straight cash grab. An upstart company, the Moscow Free Theatre, expressed interest in performing Stravinsky’s opera The Nightingale, which he had begun prior to Diaghilev’s commission for The Firebird and of which he had completed only the first act. Stravinsky was apprehensive about accepting the offer because of the musical clash of styles that would ensue if he tried to complete the opera now, given the radical shift in musical style he had undergone. “I informed the director of the Théatre Libre of my misgivings, and suggested that they should be content with the Prologue alone, presenting it as an independent little lyrical scene. But they insisted upon the entire opera in three acts, and ended by persuading me.” That persuasion took the form of ten thousand rubles, enough to give Stravinsky a little financial stability, an important development given the recent birth of his fourth child. It was also enough to bankrupt the Moscow Free Theatre, which didn’t survive to perform the opera.
The Moscow Free Theatre’s misfortune was Diaghilev’s opportunity, and The Nightingale was staged as part of the Ballet Russes 1914 season. Between the massive success of The Golden Cockerel, one of Rimsky-Korsakov’s final works, and the fact that The Nightingale wasn’t The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky’s newest work failed to garner much public acclaim. The composer lost at least some faith in the work as he had constructed it and ultimately reworked the material into a symphonic poem called The Song of the Nightingale. The broader question of where to go artistically after The Rite nevertheless persisted. This fleeting period of disappointment was not without its positives, however. Stravinsky had recently met and begun a friendship with a neighbor in Clarens, who also happened to be the conductor of the orchestra at Montreux, Ernest Ansermet. Ansermet attended the aforementioned concert performance of The Rite of Spring on 5 April 1914 and had spoken enthusiastically of the work in a letter to his friend: “I want only to recommend that you go to the second performance, this Sunday. Make reservations in advance…because there will be a mob.”
By the time the already famed composer met the young conductor, Ansermet had fully ingratiated himself into a group of Swiss artists into which he would usher his new friend. This group of artists and writers would have a profound impact on the next chapter of Stravinsky’s life. One of them would be the literary force behind Stravinsky’s next crowning achievement.
Ah, for the days when classical music could engender enough passion for a brawl to break out, or harsh words at the very least. It is impossible to imagine this happening today, and the more’s the pity.