The Rite of Spring is a ballet and orchestral concert work by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company. The original choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky, with stage designs and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. The premiere of Stravinsky’s modernist ballet, inspired by Russian culture, sparked a violent protest in Paris on May 29, 1913. The piece, which celebrated the advent of spring and featured Nijinsky’s dance, caused a riot when it was first performed at the Ballets Russes.
The Rite of Spring was a collaboration between Stravinsky, visual artist Nicholas Roerich, and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. The work celebrates the advent of spring, though its subtitle, “Pictures of Pagan Russia”, explains the ballet’s darker plot of ritual sacrifice. Stravinsky’s relationship with his other main collaborator, Vaslav Nijinsky, was more complicated than initially thought.
The Rite of Spring was produced by the Ballets Russes and conceived by Stravinsky and choreographed by Nijinsky. Both Stravinsky and Nijinsky continue to work, but neither creates pieces in this percussive and intense style again. In later years, The Rite of Spring is considered one of the most controversial works of art.
The dance choreographed by Nijinsky was what shocked the audience at the premiere of The Rite of Spring. The reaction was so polarized that there were fistfights and outbursts of protests.
📹 The ballet that incited a riot – Iseult Gillespie
Dive into the history and controversy of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, “The Rite of Spring,” which shattered the conventions of classical …
Who did the choreography for The Rite of Spring?
On May 29, 1913, Les Ballets Russes in Paris performed The Rite of Spring, a ballet with music by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky. The performance was characterized by a rhythmic score and primitive scenario, setting scenes from pagan Russia. The complex music and violent dance steps, depicting fertility rites, initially sparked unrest, leading to a riot. The Paris police intervened but only restored limited order, causing chaos for the rest of the performance.
Despite this, Sergei Diaghilev, the director of Les Ballets Russes, praised the scandal as “just what I wanted”. The ballet completed its run of six performances without further disruption. The piece is considered a 20th-century masterpiece and is often heard in concert. In 1988, the Joffrey Ballet reconstructed Nijinsky’s original setting, televised nationally on PBS, 75 years after its premiere.
What was the controversy with Stravinsky at The Rite of Spring?
Stravinsky believed that the crowd, who had seen the Sacre du Printemps, were upset by the dissonance in the score, dancers’ movements, and the woodwind section’s rapid sounds. The storm broke when the curtain opened, and the composer reacted by saying “go to hell” to the naive and stupid people. Contrary to popular belief, the riot was likely not due to the shock of the music, exotic choreography, or Roerich’s bizarre settings, but rather by anti-Russian, anti-Diaghilev, and anti-Nijinsky factions in Paris who were determined to disrupt proceedings before music was heard.
What did audiences find shocking about The Rite of Spring?
The opening notes of a ballet sparked a ruckus in the auditorium due to the high-pitched bassoon solo. The audience’s wild shouting made it difficult to hear the music. Stravinsky panicked and ran backstage, but chaos ensued. Diaghilev had expected a ruckus, but he instructed the conductor, Pierre Monteux, to keep going despite the chaos. The performance continued, and Stravinsky and Nijinsky were unaware of the chaos. The performance was a testament to the power of music and the power of imagination.
Which Nijinsky choreography inspired one of the most notorious riots in theatrical history?
The Rite of Spring is a ballet and orchestral concert work by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company. The avant-garde nature of the music and choreography caused a sensation when first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913. The music achieved equal or greater recognition as a concert piece and is widely considered one of the most influential musical works of the 20th century.
Stravinsky was a young, virtually unknown composer when Diaghilev recruited him to create works for the Ballets Russes. The concept behind The Rite of Spring, developed by Nicholas Roerich from Stravinsky’s outline idea, is suggested by its subtitle, “Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts”. The scenario depicts various primitive rituals celebrating the advent of spring, after which a young girl is chosen as a sacrificial victim and dances herself to death.
The ballet was not performed again until the 1920s, when a version choreographed by Léonide Massine replaced Nijinsky’s original, which saw only eight performances. Massine’s work was the forerunner of many innovative productions directed by the world’s leading choreographers, gaining work worldwide acceptance. In the 1980s, Nijinsky’s original choreography was reconstructed by the Joffrey Ballet in Los Angeles.
Stravinsky’s score contains many novel features for its time, including experiments in tonality, metre, rhythm, stress, and dissonance. The music is considered one of the first modernist works and is one of the most recorded works in the classical repertoire.
Who did Stravinsky collaborate with?
Stravinsky, a composer, developed a strong relationship with Picasso, whom he met in 1917. They exchanged small-scale works of art, including Picasso’s famous portrait of Stravinsky and Stravinsky’s clarinet music sketch. This exchange established their collaborative space in Ragtime and Pulcinella. Stravinsky’s interest in literature began with Russian folklore, which he collected from numerous collections, including Alexander Afanasyev’s collection Russian Folk Tales. Folk music collections influenced Stravinsky’s music, with numerous melodies from The Rite of Spring found in an anthology of Lithuanian folk songs.
An interest in the Latin liturgy began after Stravinsky rejoined the church in 1926, starting with his first religious work, Pater Noster, written in Old Church Slavonic. He later used three psalms from the Latin Vulgate in his Symphony of Psalms for orchestra and mixed choir. Many works in Stravinsky’s neoclassical and serial periods used or were based on liturgical texts. This exchange of interests and literary sources influenced his work and the way he approached his work.
Why did Nijinsky stop dancing?
Vaslav Nijinsky, born in Kiev, Russia in 1889 or 1890, was a renowned ballet dancer who faced numerous challenges in his career. He was interned in Budapest, Hungary, during World War I and was allowed to tour with the Ballets Russes in New York. However, he became mentally unstable due to the stress of managing tours and deprived of opportunities to dance. After a tour of South America in 1917, the family settled in St. Moritz, Switzerland.
His mental condition deteriorated, and he was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1919 and committed to a mental asylum. For the next 30 years, he was in and out of institutions, never dancing in public again.
Eleanora Bereda, born in 1856, was orphaned and started working as an extra in Warsaw’s Grand Theatre Ballet. She later joined the company at age 13 and became a solo dancer at age 13. Tomasz Niżyński, who also attended the Wielki Theatre school, accepted a soloist contract with the Odessa Theatre at age 18. They met and married in 1884 and settled into a career with the traveling Setov opera company. Eleanora had three children, Stanislav, Vaslav, and Bronislava. Both boys received training from their father and appeared in an amateur Hopak production in Odessa in 1894.
Did Stravinsky marry his cousin?
Stravinsky’s success in Paris with the Ballets Russes led him to move from St. Petersburg, where he married his cousin Catherine Nossenko and moved with her and their children to France. However, World War I disrupted the Ballets Russes’ activities in western Europe, and Stravinsky found it difficult to rely on them as a regular outlet for his compositions. The Russian Revolution of October 1917 ended any hope of Stravinsky returning to his native land.
By 1914, Stravinsky was exploring a more restrained and rhythmic musical composition. His musical production consisted of short instrumental and vocal pieces based on Russian folk texts, ragtime, and Western popular or dance music. He expanded these experiments into large-scale theatre pieces, such as The Wedding, Renard, and The Soldier’s Tale.
The Russian style in Stravinsky’s music began to fade after World War I, but not before producing another masterpiece, the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Stravinsky’s first maturity compositions, from The Rite of Spring in 1913 to the Symphonies of Wind Instruments in 1920, used a modal idiom based on Russian sources and were characterized by sophisticated feeling for irregular meters and syncopation.
After voluntary exile from Russia, Stravinsky reconsidered his aesthetic stance and adopted a Neoclassical idiom. His Neoclassical works of the next 30 years usually take reference to past European music, such as composers or historical styles, as a starting point for a highly personal and unorthodox treatment.
Why did people not like The Rite of Spring?
The Rite of Spring, a ballet by Igor Stravinsky, premiered in Paris on May 29, 1913, and was expected to be a major cultural event due to the talent involved. The Ballets Russes, or “Russian Ballet”, was a hot ticket due to the Eastern exoticism of previous productions, such as Firebird and Petrushka, both composed by Stravinsky. The audience was shocked by the ugly costumes, heavy choreography, and harsh music, which was expected to shock the audience.
The choreographer, Vaslav Nijinsky, was known for his shocking and often risqué choreography, such as his 1912 performance of Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune. The audience was shocked and with good reason.
Why was Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring referred to as Nijinsky’s lost ballet?
The Joffrey Ballet’s “Rite” is celebrating its 100th anniversary, a choreographically lost work that had few performances and was controversial. The reconstruction was a collaboration between Joffrey Ballet founder Robert Joffrey and choreographer Millicent Hodson, who spent 16 years assembling Nijinsky’s lost choreography from old notes, drawings, Stravinsky’s rehearsal score, photos, and conversations with Ballets Russes members like Rambert.
Hodson’s investigation led to the marriage of art historian Kenneth Archer, who was researching costumes and sets for the original “Rite”. The reconstruction aims to revive the ballet’s iconic dance form, which was a controversial and controversial piece of dance history.
Were Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky friends?
The Rachmaninoffs were initially hesitant to attend dinner at the Stravinskys’ home, as Rachmaninoff was introverted and hardly left his lair. However, they shared commonalities as Russian-born pianist-composers living in exile and worried for their children during World War II. When Rachmaninoff produced a jar of honey, Stravinsky loved it, easing tensions. They avoided discussing their musical tastes and instead found common ground in their dislike for the music business. Interestingly, composers William Grant Still and Rachmaninoff shared a vision of Los Angeles as a welcoming home and place of creative freedom, though they never met.
What was groundbreaking about Nijinsky choreography for The Rite of Spring?
Nijinsky’s choreography for The Rite of Spring represented a significant departure from traditional dance forms, featuring rotating geometric patterns and jerky, irregular movements with individual limbs. Stravinsky resided during the latter years of his life.
📹 When Stravinsky Met Nijinsky: Two Artists, Their Ballet, and One Extraordinary Riot
When Stravinsky Met Nijinsky is a non-fiction children’s book written and illustrated by Lauren Stringer. Using rhythmic prose and …
I think it’s actually incorrect to refer to the ballet as “Stravinsky’s” and I kind of don’t appreciate how much Nijinsky was downplayed. Stravinsky was hired by Diaghilev to compose for the Ballet Russe, of which Nijinsky was the lead choreographer at the time. It was a collaborative effort if anything
I wish this talked more about Nijinski and the dancing itself. Yes, Stravinsky’s score was a big part of the reason people rioted, but I feel like everyone just focuses on that aspect where the actual movements of the body in this ballet was so subversive of traditional ballet of the time. The choreography marks a huge cultural shift in the dance milieu of the time as Modern dance as we know it has its beginnings around this same time. I think that the Rite of Spring choreography is just as important as the music, so I wish this lesson got more into describing the dance and the important choreographic choices Nijinski made that caused such a strong reaction in the audience. I think that is an important part of discussing ballets.
Having grown up a Disney kid, of course I first heard some of this music in Disney’s Fantasia, and loved it! That fight with the T-Rex and Stegosaurus? Oh God, one of the best fight scenes in all of animation, hands down! 😀 I first learned more about this ballet in a music class my first year of college, I was delighted to learn more about it! I can see why the newness of the ballet might upset some people back during its debut, but a full-on riot? Good Lord, I didn’t think it worthy of that much anger! LOL And to think that Stravinsky told the dancers to keep going as the audience erupted into a rage, and they did! Good God! When I first heard that this music was from a ballet, I was shocked myself that it was from the ballet, since typically I think of the traditional ballets, like Sleeping Beauty or The Nutcracker, the more “romantic” elements of the genre, as it was put so well. 🙂 But as I’ve come to accept Rite of Spring for what it is, I like how different it is. The arts are known for ever-evolving, so it’s not so far fetched to me that this was weird to audiences when it first came out. For some Halloween, I want to go as the sacrificial maiden, I like the costume, it looks cool, relatively easy to pull off, and warm enough to be out in the cold if I bundle up just right. There, I said it. LOL
Re.. Stravinsky and Disney: When Disney was making “Fantasia”, he heard Stravinsky was in LA. So he invited the composer to see the sequence that used “Rite of Spring”. Stravinsky had enjoyed other Disney films and eagerly accepted the invitation. As Disney was busy, he got some employee to accompany Stravinsky. However, The composer was an ultra Russian nationalist who was not impressed with dinosaurs galumphing around to his ‘mystical music’ and gave the hapless employee a ferocious tirade in the best ripe Slavonic before storming out! When Disney rang up the man he asked: ‘Well, what did Mr Stravinsky think of what we did with his music?’ ‘Errrrrr…It made quite an impression on him…’
The first time I heard this piece of music was in Disney’s Fantasia. There the animators successfully used the ballet to convey primal feelings. The scene shows the development of the life on the earth and how harsh it was. It’s been more than 20 years since I saw the movie but I recognized the piece instantly and I immediately knew from where. I should say that Disney did a great job mixing the music with the images.
This article should have been written by a Musicology specialist rather than an English Lit scholar. The narrative given here doubles down on a lot of the “shock value” history that music historians have been debunking in recent decades (see for ex. the work of Richard Taruskin, or Tamara Levitz). For instance, new research has focused extensively on revisiting primary sources to reconstruct just how much of a “riot” the premiere of the ballet really was, and whether it was caused so much by the audience’s shock of the “modern” compositional techniques or other factors. Entirely absent from this TedEd history are aspects of exoticism/primitivism that colored the initial reception of the piece – many in the audience were not as struck by the avant-garde novelty of Tchaikovsky’s music, but more so by the amusing depiction of “native” behavior of the primitive peasant characters. We must notice, then, that some of the audience became rowdy because they thought the crude portrayals of ethnic rural people were funny. We cannot plaster over this racially-sensitive history with praise of the composer and choreographer’s geniuses, ignoring the elite urban audience’s sense of cultural and civilizational superiority, if we wish to be responsible cultural historians in the 21st century.
This was always my favorite part of Fantasia, and the harsh tone and aggressive music fits well in several parts to the jagged and unforgiving landscape of early earth while the slower portions as life rose from single-celled to complex multi-cellular lifeforms. Even though a lot of the paleontology was wrong in that short, it was still a fantastic production and I still watch it to this day….even if the Tyrannosaur Rex looks too much like an Allosaurus and a bunch of other issues.
Amazing thank you. I was never into these kinds of performances and indeed had that snobby feeling from the few I had seen on TV at some point, until I stumbled on the rite of spring on YouTube one day. Such raw power… The pagan aspect was intensely beautiful. I was very eager to learn more about it and I’ll try to go see it soon. Thanks a lot for the explanations, awesome animations as always too
The rite of string actually didn’t cause any ACTUAL RIOTS. Although it was first described by Ivan Hewitt as ‘the ballet that caused a riot’ but what actually happened was a mystery and the witness reports contradicted widely to one another (which is normal – if there’s 10 people is a concert and I asked 10 people what happened inside the theatre, they would’ve given me 10 different versions of what happened in their perspectives) but what is ACTUALLY true that we know was the riot of spring did actually had over FOUR curtain calls at the end of the premier despite the initial shock with the audience (which is pretty normal for composers at the 20 the century especially composers like Stravinsky who abides to expressionism) so we can only conclude that yes, some in the audience at the premier might have engaged in violating behaviours – noises, throwing thins at the orchestra etc. but there ARE audiences historic accounts that they did enjoy the composition. The ‘RIOT’ is just a rumour/some misinformation that’s been falsely passed around but for us classical musicians and musicologists, no matter what the actual version of the history would be like, Stravinsky’s masterpiece is always one of the most valuable pieces of classical music work in the history of music. Source: my musicology postgrad lecture
So…. Diaghilev invented the root thing for publicity. Paris was already used to some pretty dramatic stuff, but he felt the reaction wasn’t big enough, so he started rumors about a riot after opening night. Yes, it was an innovative work, but some of the drama has been invented. Also, the word ballet is accented on the first syllable. “bal-LAY” sounds weird. * Pushes ballet nerd glasses up on a too-long nose.*
As humans are visual beings (90% apparently) I would say that Nijinsky was probably to ”blame for the riots”. But since in the hierarchy of art the top is reserved for the conductor/composer, cerebral and 99.99% male, and the very bottom is reserved for the lowly, physical, and often female, art of dance we are were we are; Stravinsky a demigod, but Nijinsky only known by the few ardent ballet lovers.
Really great, except for the glaringly false statement “you can hear Stravinsky’s influence in modern jazz’s rhythms.” Jazz rhythm is rooted in African-American musical practices reaching centuries back before Stravinsky. It first appeared in commercial form in ragtime in the late 1890s, then in jazz and blues shortly thereafter. Those early jazz musicians living in New Orleans knew nothing of Stravinsky; anyway the Rite wasn’t performed in the US until 1920, in Philadelphia.
Ah, Stravinsky. The Jim Morrison of classical music! He also died in 1971–the same year that the lizard king did! LOL! I always felt that Stravinsky and Morrison would have gotten along just fine and I wouldn’t be surprised if Jim, while reading William Blake poetry, would be listening to “The Rite of Spring” in the background.
It doesn’t open with dancers, the opening bassoon solo and the rest of the introduction is played before anything happens on stage, and strictly speaking there is no atonality. Also, how are the dancers not one with the music? It’s well documented that Nijinsky insisted every beat in the score be danced out in some way, in order to reinforce and double the huge rhythmic impact of the music.
I don’t think the audience rioting was a bad thing. Maybe it was the eeriness, the uncanny music and grusome plot showed through a raw threatening dance…… Art creates feelings. This dance was made to create fear and anger throwing the public on edge….I think that’s what caused the riot. It means the show was a huge success. If if managed to provoke the audience with feeling to that extent
Actually before the premier of the ballet Stravinsky premiered the orchestral music by itself to great reviews. It was the dancing that defied traditional ballet that turned the Parisian public off. And Stravinsky wasn’t the first person to defy music of the 19th century. That honor goes to the French impressionists like Debussy, Satie and Faure. They were defying Germanic and traditional romantic compositional styles in the 1890’s.
I’m sorry but no. Telling the story of the rite of spring’s creation as if Nijinsky was just hired by Stravinsky and with zero mention of Diaghilev is just unacceptable. Especially since Nijinsky was the bigger star and he had caused another huge scandal with L’aprè-midi d’un faune (on music by Debussy) the year before.This makes me question the information in every other article on this website. Do better.
Also: not a note of this piece is atonal. Lots of it is bitonal, lots of it is based on the octatonic scale, lots of it is chromatic, but it always has a pitch center, so it’s not atonal, even though it’s also not tonal. It has the property called “centricity” – one note acts as the home note like in tonal music, but the harmonies do not relate to each other as in tonal music.
Sorry, but this is a legend. There is no historical record of a riot. As for hecklers in the crowd, in France at that time there was a tradition that hecklers would be hired to stir up excitement; there were also people hired to cheer. Don’t take my word for it. Go to the faculty of music at the main university in your country and talk to the music professor who specializes in that time period of French music. That’s how I learned.
Imagine giving Nijinsky all the credit for the choreography and making no mention of the great Sergei Diaghilev. Did you know Diaghilev and Stravinsky’s relationship was strained when, upon second performance of the Rite of Spring, the music was praised to high heaven but no mention of the choreography was made? Diaghilev was offended that the ballet’s success seemed not to rely on his choreography. And yet you chose to mention only Nijinsky? What about the fact that Nijinsky and Diaghilev had a romantic relationship? Does even that not merit mentioning the great Diaghilev, without whom the Rite would not have been written?