arts, ideas & societyWikipedia1913 · Paris, France
The Rite of Spring
Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring premiered in Paris on 29 May 1913 and caused a sensation with its dissonant music and angular choreography. The story depicts pagan spring rituals in which a young girl dances herself to death as a sacrifice. The music used shifting metres, strong rhythms and harsh dissonance that audiences had never heard. The word riot was only applied to the premiere later, in reviews of performances from 1924. The original choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky was lost and was reconstructed by the Joffrey Ballet in the 1980s.
The score uses frequent changes of metre, accents placed off the beat and clashing harmonies, which together made it feel unstable to listeners used to smooth late-Romantic melody. Stravinsky also drew on Russian folk material, a link he tended to downplay. The ballet's staging, with dancers in angular, turned-in poses, matched that rhythmic energy.
The work is one of the most influential pieces of 20th-century music, and it helped define modernism. Its score is still one of the most recorded works in the classical repertoire, and it reshaped what audiences expected from both ballet and orchestral music.
Modernist works that initially provoke hostility often later become standard repertoire, as Stravinsky's own Firebird and Petrushka did before. The Rite became a template for later avant-garde premieres that are judged in hindsight.
The Joffrey Ballet in Los Angeles reconstructed Nijinsky's original 1913 choreography in the 1980s after it had been thought lost.
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