The Rite of Spring IGOR STRAVINSKY
Born June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum
Died April 6, 1971, New York City
In the spring of 1910, while completing the orchestration of The Firebird, Igor Stravinsky had the most famous dream in the history of music: "I saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite: wise elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dancing herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring." This idea became The Rite of Spring, which Stravinsky began composing in the summer of 1911, immediately after the première of Petrushka. For help in creating a scenario that would evoke the spirit of pagan Russia, Stravinsky turned to the painter-archaelogist-geologist Nicholas Roerich, who summarized the action:
The first set should transport us to the foot of a sacred hill, in a lush plain, where Slavonic tribes are gathered together to celebrate the spring rites. In this scene there is an old witch, who predicts the future, a marriage by capture, round dances. Then comes the most solemn moment.
The wise elder is brought from the village to imprint his sacred kiss on the new-flowering earth. During this rite the crowd is seized with a mystic terror. After this uprush of terrestrial joy, the second scene sets a celestial mystery before us. Young virgins dance on the sacred hill amid enchanted rocks; they choose the victim they intend to honor. In a moment she will dance her last dance before the ancients clad in bearskins to show that the bear was man's ancestor. Then the greybeards dedicate the victim to the god Yarilo.
This story of primitive violence and nature-worship in pagan Russia-inspired in part by Stravinsky's boyhood memories of the thunderous break-up of the ice in St. Petersburg each spring-became a half-hour ballet in two parts, "The Adoration of the Earth" and "The Sacrifice."
In the music, Stravinsky drew on the distant past and fused it with the modern. His themes (many adapted from ancient Lithuanian wedding tunes) are brief, of narrow compass, and based on the constantly-changing meters of Russian folk music, yet his harmonic language can be fiercely dissonant and "modern." Even more striking is the rhythmic imagination that animates this score: Stravinsky himself confessed that parts of the concluding "Sacrificial Dance" were so complicated that while he could play them, he could not write them down. The première may have provoked a noisy riot, but at a more civilized level it had an even greater impact: no composer writing after May 29, 1913, would ever be the same.
Stravinsky's teacher Rimsky-Korsakov once divided composers into two groups-those who could compose away from the piano and those who had to be at one-and he placed Stravinsky in the latter category: Stravinsky needed to hear music as he composed it. But no simple two-hand version could encompass The Rite of Spring, so Stravinsky wrote it out for piano four-hands (played at this performance in an arrangement for two pianos); he published this version in 1913, the year of the première (the orchestral score was not published until 1921).
Inevitably, the piano version loses much of what makes symphonic performances so exciting: the richly-varied instrumental palette and the sheer sonic impact of a huge orchestra. But the original piano version offers unusual insights into this music. Shorn of orchestral color, the simple black-and-white tones of the piano reveal the rhythmic and harmonic complexities of this score with crystalline clarity. And, beyond these, the keyboard version offers the rare pleasure of watching two virtuoso pianists master the incredible difficulties of a score usually left to a hundred performers.
