The dancers of the premiere of The Rite of Spring in costumes by Nicholas Roerich, 1913. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
The theatre was brand new, opened two months earlier: the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, reinforced concrete and bas-reliefs, the most modern in Paris. The audience was Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes crowd, half aristocracy in diamonds, half avant-garde in sweaters. On the evening of 29 May 1913, a new ballet by a thirty-year-old Russian, Igor Stravinsky, was being staged: Le Sacre du printemps, The Rite of Spring. It lasted thirty-three minutes. The noise it made has not stopped.
The first whistles came a few bars in, at the bassoon that climbs into its highest register and no longer sounds like a bassoon. When the curtain rose on Nijinsky’s dancers, bent over and hammering, with their feet turned in, anything but pointe work, the house split: insults hurled at the stage, insults hurled at those who insulted, ladies slapping gentlemen, challenges to duels issued from box to box. Monteux’s orchestra kept playing amid such an uproar that the dancers could no longer hear it: Nijinsky, standing on a chair in the wings, shouted out the bar numbers, and Stravinsky, who had run backstage, held him by his clothes so that he would not hurl himself onstage. Diaghilev had the house lights flicked on and off to calm the crowd. The police intervened at the intermission. The next day the newspapers coined the pun that stuck: the Massacre du printemps.
So much for the brawl, which is the famous part. The instructive part comes afterward, and fast. Less than a year later, in April 1914, the Rite was performed in the same city in concert form, without the ballet: total triumph, with Stravinsky borne out of the hall in triumph on the audience’s shoulders. Same music, same Paris, eleven months apart. Which licenses a suspicion that historians have long nursed: that evening in 1913 the scandal was made not by the music but by the choreography, and perhaps above all by the audience, who went to a Diaghilev show partly for that, the way you go to a derby. The scandal was part of the ticket.
The fact remains that no other evening in the history of music has marked a boundary so sharply: there is a before and an after the Rite, as Stravinsky himself, who nonetheless loved to dress up as a man of the past, knew perfectly well. And there is a consolation for anyone writing music today, before polite audiences who applaud everything: at least once, for thirty-three minutes, new music was something people came to blows over. The opposite of love is not respectful silence. It is indifference.