More dissonance. And a riot!

What can I tell you about Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) that you don't already know?  The premiere of this legendary work has so much myth and buzz around it that it's sometimes hard to figure out what really happened.

Picture it: May 29, 1913, Paris.  The lights come up on stage and the audience hears a lone bassoon, playing in the very high part of its range.  Bassoons are low-playing instruments, so the sound was exotic and ethereal.  (There is an old musician joke that the bassoon is singing: "IIIIIIII am not an English horn! This is too High for me! IIIIIIIII am not an English horn!) 

Stravinsky's chaotic, dissonant note choices where actually not that unusual to cultured Parisian listeners, who had been hearing these kinds of things already (to a much lesser degree, of course).  Instruments that were called for were the ordinary members for an orchestra, but they were now being asked to play to the extremes of their capabailities (the very high bassoon, screeching Eb clarinet, blaring horns). 

In reality, though, it was the dancing that got everyone so riled up.  The Rite of Spring was written by Stravinksy as a ballet, choreographed by the great Vaslav Nijinsky, with a collaboration with the Ballets Russes' Serge Diaghilev.  The ballet is about a pagan sacrifice, which isn't really what concert goers expected from their ballets.  The costumes, instead of being form-fitting and ethereal, were heavy, dark, and obscured the dancers' shapes.  And it was placed on the second half of a program that started with a very normal performance of Les Sylphides. 

Up until then, ballet dancing was always reaching upwards, with bodies turned out and open.  Pointe shoes made ballerinas seem like they were floating, and huge leaps made men appear to fly.  Nijinsky had the dancers turn in their feet and stomp into the ground.  Then the (in)famous "Rite of Spring chord" starts in, jagged accents, polychords and all.  It's made up of an Eb major chord stacked on top of an E major chord.  Very dissonant.

The audience couldn't handle it.  Catcalls, boos, yelling.  So much noise that Nijinsky was standing on a chair in the wings, shouting counts to the dancers.  Diaghilev tried to gain control by flashing the house lights.  Stravinsky was furious that the audience reacted this way to his music.  And there you have the Rite riot.

To get an idea of what the audience experienced, check out the Joffrey Ballet's recreation of the 1913 choreography.  It's amazing.