Rite of Spring Premieres: Paris Riots Over Avant-Garde

The audience started rioting before the dancers reached the second movement. On May 29, 1913, Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring premiered at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris, and the reaction was so violent that the music could barely be heard over the shouting, stomping, and fistfights in the seats. Stravinsky had composed the score for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The music depicted pagan Russia, a world of fertility rituals, tribal dances, and human sacrifice. Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed movements that deliberately violated every rule of classical ballet: turned-in feet, hunched postures, heavy stomping, and angular gestures that looked more like seizures than dance. The trouble began during the Introduction. Stravinsky's dissonant chords and irregular rhythms confused an audience expecting the lush romanticism of Tchaikovsky. When the curtain rose and the dancers began stamping and jerking, the fashionable Parisian crowd split. Supporters cheered. Traditionalists hissed, whistled, and shouted insults. Fistfights broke out between factions. The Comtesse de Pourtales reportedly yelled, "This is the first time in 60 years that anyone has dared make fun of me." Nijinsky stood in the wings shouting counts to his dancers, who could not hear the orchestra over the audience. Diaghilev ordered the house lights flicked on and off to quiet the crowd. The police were called. The performance continued to its conclusion, including the sacrificial dance in which the chosen maiden dances herself to death. The scandal was short-lived. A concert performance of the score one year later received an ovation. Within a decade, The Rite of Spring was recognized as the most important composition of the twentieth century. Its rhythmic innovations, polytonal harmonies, and raw primitivism influenced every subsequent school of modern music, from jazz to minimalism. Stravinsky had composed a 33-minute piece that demolished the boundary between beauty and barbarism and forced Western music to rebuild itself from the wreckage.