Centennials
usually mark political events. But today, May 29, 2013, marks the hundredth
anniversary of a cultural event: the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, The
Rite of Spring, performed by the Ballets
Russes at the Théatre des Champs Elysées in Paris. That performance became the
stuff of legend, having occasioned – or said to have occasioned – a riot or
near riot.
In a Teaching
Company course about Stravinsky, Robert Greenberg relates, among other things,
that the sight of a group of ballerinas bending their heads to the right
inspired shouts of “Get a dentist!” That detail made its way into Coco
Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, a 2009 movie by
Jan Lounen that centered on an affair between the two. But the affair may be a
legend, and the riot, or at least the scale of it, may also be.
In a piece at
the Huffington Post last week, William Robin reported on a conference at the
Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow where, among other things, the historical
reality of the “riot” came into question.
Tamara
Levitz offered an analysis of the violence pregnant not only in The Rite's
scenario but also in its reception. The 2013 celebrations of The Rite have
embraced the somewhat historically-tenuous idea that it provoked a riot at its
premiere, a fact that has obscured the forgotten, real riots of the 20th
century. In fact, as Levitz pointed out, the victory of the conflation of The
Rite with a riot can be attributed to impresario Serge Diaghilev, whose
marketing ploy in engineering the scandal at the premiere has helped guarantee
the work its legendary status today.
Diaghilev was
certainly a master showman, but in previous productions of novel works by
Stravinsky and others, he had let the music speak for itself. Perhaps
contemporary as well as later accounts of the riot were exaggerated, but it is
hard to believe that they were entirely made up, or that the whole thing was
somehow stage-managed. Yet in one sense, it doesn’t matter: the important thing
is that The Rite of Spring changed the
course of classical music. Other composers like Beethoven had changed the
course of music before, but for a single work to achieve that was truly
epochal.
The ballet is
being restaged today, or its music played, all over the world. The centennial
performance at the Theatre des Champs Elysées itself by the Mariinsky Ballet
from St. Petersburg, is among those using the 1913 choreography of Vladislav
Nijinsky, revived by the Joffrey Ballet in 1987. It was thought irretrievably lost but was reconstructed after years of
research, primarily by Millicent Hodson, who pieced it together from clues in
original prompt books, contemporary sketches and photographs, and the
recollections of those still living who had taken part, including Marie Rambert
(who had worked with Nijinsky). Here (copy and paste link) is the complete Mariinsky performance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IrZLZeU0Dc
For 1913, the
choreography was as revolutionary as the music itself, and had at least as as much
shock value. But it was abandoned in later productions, and other versions
replaced it – several are being performed this year. Stravinsky himself
tinkered with the score a number of times, but hardly as much as Walt Disney in
Fantasia (1940), where the virgin
sacrifice story was replaced by imagined prehistory, especially the age of the
dinosaurs:
If nothing
else, Fantasia proved that Stravinsky had
made it as a popular composer: it’s hard to imagine that Disney would have
found any use for the music of other musical experimentalists like Alban Berg
or Arnold Schoenberg. Nearly four decades later, John Williams quoted the
opening dance of The Rite of Spring
in his score for Star Wars,
beginning at 1:03 in this clip:
Four years
before that, however, Nino Rota had quoted the same passage in “Duca di
Wurttemberg,” one of the pieces for Federico Fellini’s Casanova. Rota was known for his melodic scores for other
Fellini movies, and such international hits as The Godfather. But he was a long-time friend of Stravinsky, and
wanted to pay him homage. The clip below is from a performance that looks like
a recording session for Fellini’s Casanova, but isn’t – the orchestration for the film was a bit different, and
the singer in the version used there was a man:
Stravinsky’s
influence on classical music was being felt much earlier, as witness The
Miraculous Mandarin, a ballet composed in
1918-24 by the Hungarian Béla Bartok. It scandalized the audience and was
banned in Germany after its 1926 premiere in Cologne. Small wonder, based on
its scenario: two tramps use a seductive woman to lure victims in order to rob
them. But when they try the same thing with a wealthy Chinese, he becomes
obsessed with the woman; the tramps try to kill him several times, but he won’t
die until she embraces him. Only disconnected excerpts of the ballet itself
appear to be available online, but here’s one of those, followed by the entire
score:
Bartok had
previously composed a ballet called The Wooden Prince (1916) that was more traditional in story and
melodic music, but he later turned to an aggressively rhythmic style of music
more in the vein of Stravinsky, including two piano concertos that were more
percussive than melodic, and orchestral pieces like Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste. Yet, with his fellow countryman Zoltan Kodaly, he was
also involved in collecting Hungarian folk music – not just gypsy dances – that
could be incorporated into classical music.
Although it
wasn’t obvious to Parisians in 2013, much of the score for The Rite of
Spring itself had its roots in Russian folk
music. Folk music had been made use of before, but it had generally been
prettified; Stravinsky focused on the essence of what was then called
“primitive” music, although it wouldn’t be politically correct to call it that
today. Latin American composers soon began mixing classical music with elements
of native music, as with Brazil’s Heitor Villa Lobos, whose Choros
No. 10 (said to have been a sensation at
its Paris premiere in 1926). The first part incorporated bird calls; the
second, shown below, segues from native rhythm into a haunting melody based on
the popular Brazilian song “Rasga o Coracão” – and the singers (especially the
women) really get into it:
In Mexico,
Silvestre Revueltas’ Sensemaya (1937)
was inspired by a poem of the same name by Cuba’s Nicolàs Guillèn, which evokes
an Afro-Caribbean ritual killing of a snake. Revueltas’ piece is purely
orchestral, although there has been a choral adaptation in recent years. And
the piece is used in the movie Sin City by Robert Rodriguez, who said it had influenced the rest of the score:
Arlington
Road (1999), directed by Mark Pellington,
deals with paranoia and conspiracy, which are much in the public consciousness
these days. But its first scene, in which we see a boy on a bicycle who has
somehow been seriously wounded, and is rescued and taken to the hospital by a
neighbor who has no idea what that will get him into, is yet another example of
the influence of Stravinsky on popular music. Nothing to do with folk music
this time, or specifically The Rite of Spring, but Angelo Badalamenti embraces the method of
Stravinsky (with electronic music for the driving rhythms) in “Bloody Boy,”
which segues into a piece by British techno band Lunatic Calm called “Neon
Reprise.” For some reason, the clip below is incorrectly credited to another
movie, The Beach, on which
Badalamenti also worked:
Strangely, one
composer least influenced by The Rite of Spring was Stravinsky himself. He had already taken the ballet world by storm
with The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka
(1911), and for all the controversy
surrounding Rite, it had a good run on tour. But then something happened: the
Great War, now known as World War I. After that dreadful conflict, people
wanted to return to normalcy – Stravinsky among them, turning to
neo-classicism. His first postwar ballet for Diaghilev was Pulcinella (1920), inspired by 18th Century music.
That sort of music was played fairly straight in the first part, but he took
comic liberties with it in later sections, one of which features an orchestral
Bronx cheer. One modernist element was costumes by Pablo Picasso, but this
production has dispensed with all or most of those:
From
neo-classicism, Stravinsky turned after World War II to serial composition, a
form that follows a strict mathematical logic but doesn’t relate to the way
most people actually experience music, as witness The Flood (1962), based on the Biblical story of Noah and the Ark:
Only once
during all these years did Stravinsky return to the kind of music that had made him Stravinsky.
Oddly enough, it was during World War II, when he was tinkering with the score
of Rite, that he began work on his Symphony in Three Movements, which premiered in 1946 and shows the obvious
influence of his earlier work:
But think of
all the other music we would never have heard but for Stravinsky, because it
would never have been composed. Critics have seen his more subtle influence in
works as varied as those of Francis Poulenc and Aaron Copland (At a New York
Philharmonic retrospective on Stravinsky’s work and influence I attended many
years ago, among the works featured one evening was Poulenc’s Concerto in G
minor for organ, strings, and timpani
(1938).
I can still
remember that the program notes included an anecdote about Stravinsky. I can’t
vouch for its authenticity online, but the story went that somebody had
described Poulenc to Stravinsky as “eclectic.” Stravinsky was said to have
responded: “Eclectic? The man’s a kleptomaniac.”
Plagiarism may
be a sin, but inspired kleptomania may be a virtue in the arts.
