Nov 282017





  1. Allegro ma non tanto (D minor)












Parkes: Rachmaninov? Are you sure?
David: Kind of. I’m not really sure about anything.
Parkes: The Rach 3. It’s monumental.
David: Am I mad enough, professor? Am I?







May 292015


Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was first performed on this date in 1913. It was written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky, with stage designs and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. When first performed, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the avant-garde nature of the music and choreography caused a sensation and a near-riot in the audience. Although designed as a work for the stage, with specific passages accompanying characters and action, the music achieved equal if not greater recognition as a concert piece, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential musical works of the 20th century.


Stravinsky’s score contains many revolutionary features for its time, including experiments in tonality, meter, rhythm, stress, and dissonance. Analysts have noted in the score a significant grounding in Russian folk music, a relationship Stravinsky tended to deny. The music has influenced many of the 20th-century’s leading composers, and is one of the most recorded works in the classical repertoire.


In 1909 Stravinsky’s early work, Feu d’artifice, was performed at a concert in St Petersburg. Among those in the audience was the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who at that time was planning to introduce Russian music and art to western audiences. Having heard Feu d’artifice he approached Stravinsky, initially with a request for help in orchestrating music by Chopin to create the ballet Les Sylphides. Stravinsky worked on the opening “Nocturne” and the closing “Valse Brillante”; his reward was a much bigger commission, to write the music for a new ballet, The Firebird (L’oiseau de feu) for the 1910 season. Then came Petrushka (1911) to stunning acclaim. The Rite of Spring followed.

Analyzing The Rite adequately in a short piece such as this is impossible. But I’ll try to give a glimpse. I’m going to divide my comments into three parts: (1) the intellectual conception behind the overall work and the choreography, (2) the music itself, and (3) the premiere.


Let me start with the bad news first. Roerich’s vision of a “pagan” Russia where grave elders presided over fertility rites for the renewal of the earth in Spring which involved, among other things, the sacrifice of a virgin to the gods, is utterly without merit. It comes from a nineteenth century Romantic delusion conjured up by European folklorists and anthropologists (along with assorted mystical loonies) that has ZERO basis in historical fact. I have railed against this stupidity in my academic writing, as well as here, on numerous occasions (e.g. . That a worthless intellectual and historical fantasy produced a masterpiece is a charming miracle.


I can’t really say a whole lot about the choreography as such because Nijinsky’s original is lost, and, although the Joffrey made a valiant effort to reconstruct it from Nijinsky’s notes, from what little I know of the reconstruction, it seems more Joffrey than Nijinsky.

The knock-kneed Lolitas of the original Rite of Spring  rite3

The original costumes are laughable. They appear to be stylized versions of women’s clothing of Native Americans from the Great Plains (with suitable Russian embroidery) – a misguided allusion to them as “noble savages.” Equating “pagan” Russians with Native Americans stems from a, now thoroughly discredited, idea that ALL cultures evolved along the same path (although in different time periods), and, therefore, it was legitimate to take nineteenth century Plains Indians as models for ancient Russians. It is not.

Nijinsky’s choreography was apparently rooted to the ground, stomping in a parody of actual ritual, but quite natural given that the whole piece was about the worship of the earth. It was not, however, received well by audiences used to the sylphs in tutus of the classic ballet soaring high in the air. Stravinsky later described the dancers as “knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas.” Nonetheless, Stravinsky did praise Nijinsky’s work. To Maximilien Steinberg, a former fellow-pupil under Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky wrote that Nijinsky’s choreography had been “incomparable: with the exception of a few places, everything was as I wanted it.”


Addressing the technicalities of the music is a gigantic task I am not qualified to undertake (and you can skim if you wish). Just a few words. To begin, whether you know anything about how revolutionary this piece was or not, it is staggering to listen to. I first heard it (in somewhat altered form) as a teenager via Disney’s Fantasia. The Rite segment of the film depicts the Earth’s prehistory, leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Among those impressed by the film was Gunther Schuller, later a composer, conductor, and jazz scholar. The Rite of Spring sequence, he says, overwhelmed him and determined his future career in music: “I hope [Stravinsky] appreciated that hundreds—perhaps thousands—of musicians were turned on to The Rite of Spring … through Fantasia, musicians who might otherwise never have heard the work, or at least not until many years later.” Audiences were not ready for Rite in 1913; they were in 1940. An excerpt:

According to musicologist Stephen Walsh the great innovation of The Rite is not the dissonance or the immobility of the harmonic progression because both of these ideas were in practice before Stravinsky’s work. Walsh cites Debussy’s Et la Lune Descend Sur le Temple Qui Fut (1907) as being both discordant and harmonically static. The true innovation was Stravinsky’s use of musical fragments and compelling rhythms to provide a structure to drive the dramatic action.


Stravinsky’s method of composition for The Rite was to arrange and layer small cells of music. These musical fragments often consist of as few as four notes, but they are repeated and reoriented to create ostinati (constant repetitions), or stacked to generate chords, or embellished to create melodic material. The Rite was originally thought to contain only one true folk tune: the high bassoon part which begins the introduction. Later investigation into more of Stravinsky’s sketches in 1969 revealed complete folk melodies copied from published collections Although, after being thoroughly worked, reorganized and chopped up by Stravinsky very little of the actual tune remains intact: just a faint whiff.


According to Pieter Van Den Toorn another strong adhesive component in the work is the ubiquitous use of the octatonic scale and its derived chords. Stravinsky not only employed the octatonic scale as others had before, he redefined its use and context completely. By using long streams of octatonic chords and adding chunks of diatonic material, Stravinsky created a new sound. The octatonic scale is an eight note scale consisting of the pattern / H / W / H / W / H / W / H / W / [H= half step, W=whole step]. Thus,


Enough technicality. To put it in my own simplistic words, tonal music (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven etc.) appears to be going “somewhere.” It starts off in the home key, progresses in various ways, and then returns home. Atonal music can leave you with the sense that it is going nowhere. Stravinsky magically managed to compose atonally and yet leads you “somewhere.”




The premiere of Rite was held in Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, a new structure which had opened on 2 April 1913 with a program celebrating the works of many of the leading composers of the day. The theater’s manager, Gabriel Astruc, was determined to house the 1913 Ballets Russes season, and paid Diaghilev the enormous sum of 25,000 francs per performance, double what he had paid the previous year. Ticket sales for the evening, ticket prices being doubled for a premiere, amounted to 35,000 francs. The program for 29 May 1913 also included Les Sylphides, Weber’s Le Spectre de la Rose and Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances.



What actually happened at the premiere is a matter of ongoing debate. Were things thrown at the orchestra? Were the police called? Did Diaghilev deliberately plant rowdies in the audience with the specific intent of creating a “sensation,” etc. etc. Eyewitness reports vary wildly. On the evening of the 29 May the theater was packed: Gustav Linor reported, “Never … has the hall been so full, or so resplendent; the stairways and the corridors were crowded with spectators eager to see and to hear”. The evening began with Les Sylphides, in which Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina danced the main roles. Rite of Spring followed. Some eyewitnesses and commentators said that the disturbances in the audience began during the Introduction, and grew into a crescendo when the curtain rose on the stamping dancers in “Augurs of Spring”. But music historian Richard Taruskin asserts, “it was not Stravinsky’s music that did the shocking. It was the ugly earthbound lurching and stomping devised by Vaslav Nijinsky.” Marie Rambert, who was working as an assistant to Nijinsky, recalled later that it was soon impossible to hear the music on the stage. 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. The demonstrations, he says, grew into “a terrific uproar” which, along with the on-stage noises, drowned out the voice of Nijinsky who was shouting the stepping count to the dancers (which they had great difficulty with because of Stravinsky’s unusual rhythms). The journalist and photographer Carl Van Vechten famously recorded that the person behind him got carried away with excitement, and “began to beat rhythmically on top of my head”, though Van Vechten failed to notice this at first, his own emotion being so great.





Here’s an acceptable rendering:

For a recipe today I have chosen Russian honey cake because of this story:



I can’t do better for an actual recipe than this fabulously detailed one:

It is complete with step-by-step instructions and photographs.