La Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) by Igor Stravinsky: Opening night performance on May 29, 1913 at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees.
DIAGHILEV AND THE BALLETS RUSSES
"The search for the Gesamtkunstwerk - for the holy grail that is the 'total art form' - was actually a universal one by the end of the nineteenth century." [pg. 25]
"By the end of the first decade of the new century, with the help of the impressionists, the manner of composition was changing radically. From Mozart until the late nineteenth century, music was put together with relatively large building blocks: scales, arpeggios, long cadences. However, by the end of the century these units were being discarded. Music had been reduced to individual notes or, at most, short motifs. As in architecture, the arts and crafts movement, and painting, there was a new emphasis on basic materials, primary colors, and elemental substance." [pg. 29]
"Like Nietzsche, Diaghilev believed that autonomy of the artist and morality were mutually exclusive. A man obsessed with morality, with socially acceptable behavior, could never be free, and like Gide, Riviere, and Proust, he believed that the artist, to achieve freedom of vision, must have no regard for morality." [pg. 30-31]
"Diaghilev was of course merely a part (...) of a much broader cultural and intellectual trend, a revolt against rationalism and a corresponding affirmation of life and experience that gained strength from the 1890s on. The romantic rebellion, which, with its distrust of mechanistic systems, extended back over a century, coincided at the fin de siecle with the rapidly advancing scientific demolition of Newtonian universe. Through the discoveries of Planck, Einstein, and Freud, rational man undermined his own world." [pg. 31]
"In this context, where rationalist notions of cause and effect were rejected and the importance of the intuitive moment stressed, shock and provocation became important instruments of art." [pg. 31-32]
"It was in the Russian countryside, primitive and unaffected by mechanization, that Diaghilev and his circle found much of their inspiration, (...). It was, according to Diaghilev, from this Russian soul that salvation would come for western Europe." [pg. 32]
REBELLION
"Perhaps the most sensitive nerve it [Diaghilev's ballet enterprise] touched -and this was done deliberately- was that of sexual morality, which was so central a symbol of the established order, especially in the heart of political, economic, and imperial power, western Europe." [pg. 33]
CONFRONTATION AND LIBERATION
"'The idea of The Rite of Spring came to me,' Stravinsky said later, 'while I was still composing The Firebird. I had dreamed a scene of pagan ritual in which a chosen sacrificial virgin dances herself to death.' Asked on another occasion what he loved most about Russia, he answered: 'The violent Russian spring that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking. That was the most wonderful event of every year of my childhood.' And so the theme of Le Sacre was birth and death, Eros and Thanatos, primitive and violent, the fundemental experiences of all existence, beyond cultural context." [pg. 39]
The initial title assigned to the score: The Victim.
AUDIENCE
"Besides Venice, the city most awash with metaphorical meaning for the western world is Paris." [pg. 44]
Dreyfus affair as "the most sensational symbol of the debility and turmoil." [pg. 47]
"In an era of imperialism France lost ground in the quest for colonies. Her foreign trade declined. (...) And while the birthrate of her neighbors, particularly Germany, grew significantly, that of France declined." [pg. 47]
"By the second decade of this century Paris seemed to be far more entranced by foreign culture that by its own: (...) Moreover, the foreigners, the Russians in particular, were often inclined to regard their contributions with an air of superiority and even with imperious pretensions to ultimate art. 'We have shown the Parisians,' Alexandre Benois claimed after the 1909 Russian season, "what theater should be (...)'" [pg. 47-48]
"If however, the innovative art of foreigners elicited fascination, any native rebels, such as the Fauves, were likely to be denounced as agents of anarchy and decomposition." [pg. 48]
"When a Franco-Russian treaty materialized in 1893, ending a quarter century of diplomatic isolation that had been engineered largely by Otto von Bismarck, Paris erupted in jubilation verging on hysteria. (...) Portraits of the tsar and tsarina were hung in children's rooms. Tolstoy and Dostoyevski became favorite reading." [pg. 49]
"To the interest in Russia must be added an obsession with Germany. After the defeat of 1870-1871, after the loss of provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to the Germans, (...) Prussia-Germany became not simply the despised enemy but the incarnation of evil and thus the antithesis of France. (...) The treatment of Wagner is illustrative. Before the mid 1880s any regard for the German composer had to be almost surreptitious, and proposals to perform his works in Paris were met with outspoken opposition. By the 1890s, however, a Wagner wave was under way, and the pilgrimage to Bayreuth had become a fad." [pg. 49]
SCANDAL AS SUCCESS
"(About Le Sacre) The theme was basic and at the same time brutal. If there was any hope, it was in the energy and fertility of life, not in morality. To an audience decked out in its civilized finery, the message was jarring." [pg. 50]
"The music was equally jarring. It lacked ornamentation, moral intimation, and even, for the most part, melody. A few brief melodic lines, inspired by Russian folk tunes, did surface, but otherwise the music bore no obvious relation to the nineteenth-century tradition, even to impressionism. The laws of harmony and rhythm appeared to be violated." [pg. 50]
"Debussy said of Le Sacre that it was 'an extraordinary, ferocious thing. You might say it's primitve music with every modern convenience.'" [pg. 50]
"If the theme brought the very notion of civilization into question, and if the music underlined this challenge, then Nijinsky's choreography compounded the provocation." [pg. 51]
"The first-night audience was not alone in finding Nijinsky's work difficult to comprehend. Many of his own dancers had left no doubt that they considered the work ugly and loathsome." [pg. 51]
"...asymmetry is the essence of Le Sacre." [pg. 52]
"The ballet contains and illustrates many of the essential features of the modern revolt: the overt hostility to inherited form; the fascination with primitivism and indeed with anything that contradicts the notion of civilization; the emphasis on vitalism as opposed to rationalism; the perception of existence as continous flux and a series of relations, not as constants and absolutes; the psychological introspection accompanying the rebellion against social convention." [pg. 52]
"In the next few days the response in the press was, with few exceptions, overwhelmingly negative, not only in the daily papers but in the musical journals as well. Everyone joked about Le Massacre du printemps." [pg. 52]
Kitap: Rites of Spring: The Great War and The Birth of The Modern Age, Modris Eksteins, Mariner Books, US, 2000.
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