In the face of controversy with the imperial theater, Diaghilev went abroad. Diaghilev knew that Parisian audiences were fascinated by Russian culture, which made Paris the perfect place for Diaghilev's revolutionary Ballets Russes. Diaghilev created a new ballet company built on the Parisian fantasies of old Russia. Featuring the exotic, the erotic, and the occult, the Ballets Russes astonished the world in its first season. For the company's second season, Diaghilev had promised a daring new ballet, but a crisis loomed when two Russian composers failed to deliver an acceptable score.
Desperate, Diaghilev turned to the young, untried Igor Stravinsky to write the music we now know as The Firebird , which premiered in Paris in Based on the Slavic myth of a phoenix-like creature who helps a prince triumph over evil, The Firebird was a huge success. Russian Village Music Stravinsky wanted to bring music back to the origins of dance.
He frequently summered in Ustilug, where he was exposed to the old Russian culture that thrived in villages surrounding his family's country home. In the villages, people celebrated the times of planting and harvesting, and the mysteries of gods and fate. Naturally, the villagers celebrated with music, made with whatever they had—their natural, untrained voices, their hands and feet, and instruments which they had often built themselves.
The result was a wild, enthusiastic mixture of song and noise. This kind of music-making made an enormous impression on the young Stravinsky. He wanted to use the sophisticated symphony orchestra to evoke the wild power of village music—the way it sounded and the way it must have felt to the people making it. The opulent sets were designed by Nicholas Roerich, and the brilliant scores were written by the now resident composer, Igor Stravinsky.
And then came the most famous opening-night scandal in history: the premiere of The Rite of Spring. As the crowd arrived on opening night, expectations were high. Stravinsky was nervous because he knew that avant-garde pieces were risky in Paris. But danger was the exciting part. The New York Times reported the sensational Rite premiere, nine days after the event. Ticket sales for the evening, ticket prices being doubled for a premiere, amounted to 35, francs.
According to Stravinsky all went peacefully. The Rite followed. It was the ugly earthbound lurching and stomping devised by Vaslav Nijinsky. In his autobiography, Stravinsky writes that the derisive laughter that greeted the first bars of the Introduction disgusted him, and that he left the auditorium to watch the rest of the performance from the stage wings. Figure 3. Around forty of the worst offenders were ejected—possibly with the intervention of the police, although this is uncorroborated.
Through all the disturbances the performance continued without interruption. It was while he was composing The Firebird that Stravinsky began putting together ideas for what was to become The Rite of Spring. However, he had to put that on the back-burner when Diaghilev gave him another commission, to write the score for a ballet, or rather something then called four burlesque scenes, called Petrushka.
Petrushka is a kind of Russian version of Punch or Pinocchio. It had all the Diaghilev hallmarks of bringing together the best in contemporary music, dance and design — all of which were to evident in bucketloads in his next big commission, The Rite of Spring. The orchestra in turn retaliates with menacing trumpet blasts. Stravinsky immersed himself in the writing of The Rite of Spring in the summer of He was determined that it would be a significant work, even collaborating with an archaeologist and folklore expert who advised him on historic rites and rituals.
The score was written in a rented house in Switzerland, in a tiny room with just enough space for an upright piano, a table and two chairs. Stravinsky completed the composition, two parts of roughly equal length, by the beginning of and finished the instrumentation by late spring.
With the sub-title, Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts ; the ballet 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.
Stravinsky's score contains many novel features for its time, including experiments in tonality, rhythm and dissonance. In a note to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, Stravinsky described The Rite of Spring as "a musical-choreographic work, representing pagan Russia Actually, the work lacks a specific plot or narrative, and is in fact a succession of choreographed episodes.
It consists of games and ritual dances interrupted by a procession of sages, culminating in a frenzied dance as the people embraced the spring.
Part Two, The Sacrifice, is darker and featured secret night games of maidens, leading to the choice of one of them for sacrifice and her eventual dance to the death before the sages.
The first published version of The Rite of Spring was actually a four-hand piano arrangement, the first half of which Stravinsky and Claude Debussy played together in On 8th March , Stravinsky completed the orchestral score. He showed it to Maurice Ravel, who told him it would be a big and important success. Despite all this, the event was completed through the evening, although hardly to its original expectations.
Today, it is not entirely clear what caused the disturbance in the audience. There are many who also think that this entire situation could have been a publicity stunt with numerous witnesses having testified to numerous different causes.
Ultimately, The Rite of Spring has gone down in history as a few most revolutionary, iconic and disputed musical pieces ever written. Stravinsky was highly praised in his time and beyond for his whimsical, yet brilliant pieces, but this particular concoction of primitivity, variation and a total disregard for traditions, had a hugely polar reception at the beginning.
Musicologists and fans collectively accept The Rite of Spring as a very influential musical revelation of the 20 th century.
Gift Cards Wishlist Account 0. Gift Cards 0. The Rite of Spring is divided into two primary parts: Part 1: Adoration of the Earth The tune starts with an opening performance of solo bassoon that is of a high register, with the gradual introduction of woodwind instruments building up the tempo to a sudden drop.
Ritual of Abduction — This is where girls are seen coming from the river and begin the "Dance of the Abduction.
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