This spring marks the centenary of the infamous Paris premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet“The Rite of Spring,” the scene of a music riot that saw young concertgoers primed for modernity coming to blows with booing members of the old guard. Stravinsky long claimed that his score, derived from Russian and Lithuanian folk music, drove the crowd into a frenzy. But, as music critic Richard Turaskin has pointed out, the unamplified orchestra would have been quickly drowned out by the audience’s catcalls and it therefore must have been the intentionally grotesque choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky, not the music, that provoked the riot.

The man responsible for the costumes at the 1913 premiere was Nicholas Roerich, the artist, ethnographer, art preservation activist, and reputed guru to US vice president Henry A. Wallace. Roerich, who died in India in 1947 and devised a school of ethical and mystical practice called Agni Yoga, collaborated with Stravinsky on the ballet, originally titled “Great Sacrifice,” from the beginning, after Stravinsky had a dream or vision of a violent pagan ritual in which a virgin danced herself to death. Roerich brought his expertise in folklore and religion, along with his interest in the Perennial Philosophy, to the table, and his attempts to renew the flagging world spirit through an infusion of Buddhism, Theosophy, and Central Asian shamanism were as much a part of the creation of “The Rite of Spring”as Stravinsky’s desire to break with musical tradition.

Like that other masterpiece of modernism, “The Waste Land,” “The Rite of Spring”attempts to do something completely new by reaching deep into the past and reconnecting with some kind of primordial sacred. And in the years since its premiere, the ballet has become synonymous with both innovation and atavism. Julia Kristeva observes this when she discusses Strabo’s story of Apollo flaying his rival Marsyas on the tree from which his pipes were made: “What I like about the myths on the origin of music is their cruelty... These legendary acts of barbarism anchor music in an imaginary sacred, a bit like in The Rite of Spring, in fact, when the virgin is sacrificed.”

Marxist curmudgeon Theodor Adorno famously disapproved of the “pleasure” he observed in the audience at the virgin’s frenzied dance to death. He saw the audience’s response as both reactionary and regressive, writing that, “if the liquidation of the young girl is not simplistically enjoyed by the individual in the audience, he feels his way into the collective, thinking (as the potential victim of the collective) to participate thereby in collective power in a state of magical regression.” Even Stravinsky’s friend Jean Cocteau had reservations about the ballet having “a religious complicity among its followers, the same hypnotism as at [Wagner's opera house] Bayreuth.”

Now, one hundred years later, the experience of the violent sacred expressed in “The Rite of Spring” seems to have lost its power to fascinate us in quite the same way, much less cause rioting. Having seen bucolic Brontosauri chewing plants to Stravinsky’s once-startling score in Fantasia, not to mention watching John Cage, Elvis Presley, and The Sex Pistols break more rules than Stravinsky could have named, we cannot imagine the 1913 Paris ballet riot except as a scene out of a Mack Sennet short. It is worth our while then to reflect (as faculty and students at UNC Chapel Hill have been doing over the last year in a centenary program of courses, lectures, and performances) on what “The Rite” means to us today.

Stravinsky’s vision combines the two seemingly opposing desires to connect with the paradigmatic past and to exploit new technology (his score was so fast it was nearly impossible for pianists of his day to play, which is why he wrote it for the automatic pianola). And it is in fact the way in which those two impulses have become so ingrained in the contemporary worldview that robs “The Rite” of its punch. Simply, we have grown into Stravisnky’s revolutionary work. Dancers and orchestras can now easily master the score and choreography that once confounded both players and audience (as did Beethoven’s Ninth, to which Stravinsky compared his ballet in a fit of modesty) and today, seeing a precisely executed dissonant ballet about human sacrifice is now about as shocking as, say, a Jesuit pope from Argentina.

References

Theodor Adorno. The Philosophy of Modern Music. London: Continuum, 2007.

Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva. The Feminine and the Sacred. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2001.

James Ostereich. “Stravinsky and ‘Rite,’ Rigorously Rethought.” The New York Times. October 30, 2012.

Jann Pasler. “New Music as Confrontation: The Musical Sources of Cocteau’s Identity.” In Writing through Music: Essays on Music, Culture and Politics. Oxford and New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2008.

Richard Taruskin. “Shocker Cools Into a ‘Rite’ of Passage.” The New York Times. September 14, 2012.

Pieter C. Van den Toorn. Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring: The Beginnings of a Musical Language. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987.

https://www.theriteofspringat100.org/

Brian Collins is a graduate of the Divinity School and the newly appointed Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy at Ohio University. He has written about Charles Manson and Christian psychedelic rock for Sightings and recently reviewed the work of the electronic band Vatican Shadow and the 2012 horror film Cabin in the Woods for Religious Studies Review. His monograph Yajñānta, the End of Sacrifice: Mimetic Theory and Hindu Myth is due out from Michigan State University Press later this year.