Igor Stravinsky
“Le Sacre du printemps”, Ballet

From scandal to soundtrack: few 20th-century works have undergone such a dramatic shift in perception as Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps. At its notorious 1913 premiere in Paris, the ballet provoked a riot; less than thirty years later, its archaic rhythms accompanied stomping dinosaurs in Walt Disney’s animated film Fantasia. The score also plays a key role in another cinematic work: the documentary Rhythm Is It!, which captures an education and dance project with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Simon Rattle and choreographer Royston Maldoom. Today, this landmark of modern music is a firm favourite with audiences.

Stravinsky’s uncompromising evocation of primal forces is fuelled by the explosive energy of a massive orchestra. In scenes of collective ecstasy, the ballet’s musical eruptions celebrate the untamed cycle of nature – a “beautiful nightmare,” as fellow composer Claude Debussy described it with slight bemusement. Jean Cocteau called Sacre “a symphony filled with the birth pangs of the Earth.”

Stravinsky drew direct inspiration from a vision of prehistoric Russia: “Old men sit in a circle and watch the dance to the death of a young girl, whom they sacrifice to appease the god of spring.” This idea came to him in 1910, during work on his first ballet, The Firebird. In collaboration with painter and archaeologist Nicholas Roerich – a specialist in Slavic prehistory – he developed the scenario in the summer of 1911.

Like The Firebird and Petrushka, Sacre was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev’s famed Ballets Russes. Diaghilev’s protégé, Vaslav Nijinsky, was entrusted with the choreography for the premiere.

Stravinsky’s Sacre – which, incidentally, Pierre Boulez later subjected to detailed analysis – is far from “primitive,” but organized with provocative progressivity. Its visceral force lies in its radical modernism: instead of conventional melody, the composer builds his score from small diatonic cells whose jagged, breathless energy seems to poke and stir some pre-folkloric melodic primordial soup. The very opening is telling: a bassoon in its highest, odd-sounding register plays a Lithuanian folk tune. This plaintive call soon grows into a chaotic polyphony of woodwind signals – until suddenly, the piece’s true driving force seizes control: rhythm. Obsessive pulses dominate, frequently disrupted by lightning-like accents. With gleeful anarchy, Stravinsky undermines metre and predictability. Constant changes of time signature create a sense of instability, and listeners are deprived of any harmonic footing. Bitonal and polytonal fields give rise to glaring, dissonant blocks. As if the percussion section weren’t large enough, even the strings are used percussively. The bruitist rawness of these primal outbursts is kept in motion by artfully timed build-ups and sudden breaks – all the way to the work’s astonishing final bars.