The Stravinsky Skirmish
by Ivan Ye
Professor Dolan mentioned last week that Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring caused a huge riot at its premiere. While The Rite of Spring was Stravinsky’s most famous work and greatly influenced artists after him, it initially received very negative criticism. There were many factors that contributed to the negative reaction to his work.
The Rite of Spring premiered on May 29, 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, which had opened two months prior. The program included Les Sylphides, The Rite of Spring, Weber’s Le Spectre de la Rose, and Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances. Since the program was a premiere, ticket prices were doubled, amounting to 35,000 francs, a large sum at the time. Thus, the audience mostly consisted of the wealthy and fashionable group, who preferred and expected traditional ballet and beautiful music. While the program advertised the ballet as “real art” and art that would escape the traditional boundaries, the theater quickly sold out. It was a highly anticipated premiere.
The Rite of Spring was the second piece on the program. Now, we watched a remake of Stravinsky’s ballet performance in class. The ballet was weird; everything didn’t seem natural. The choreography included sharp angles instead of the traditional smooth and rounded curves. Stravinsky’s music was also rather dissonant. The audience was uncomfortable with the performance and showed their displeasure by hissing and shouting.
According to eyewitnesses accounts, the audience became rowdy during the introduction, literally as soon as the piece started. When the dancers entered the stage and began their dance, the audience became so loud that it was almost impossible to hear the music, according to an assistant. Soon, the audience was split into two groups: those in favor of Stravinsky’s work and those in opposition. The two groups argued and ended up fighting each other (a full out brawl), all while the dancers and the orchestra continued. During the intermission between Part 1 and Part 2, the police intervened and calmed the audience. However, they proved ineffective when the audience rioted again in Part 2.
After the show, critics were harsh in their reviews, dismissing the music as noise and calling the dance a parody of traditional ballet. Stravinsky himself had fled the theater before the show ended. It was a shocking reaction to a brand new type of music and ballet. The audience at the time was so entrenched in traditional music and ballet that they couldn’t view Stravinsky’s work with an open mind. Have we viewed new and radically different music the same way? Who could have known that this hated work would go on to be so famous and influential? It is an interesting event that shows that maybe we should view music with an open mind.
The Thousand-Year Ears 
I wonder what Stravinsky felt like that night. I would probably feel so embarrassed and misunderstood. However, he did live long enough to see his ballet become one of the most important pieces of the twentieth century. It’s unfortunate that so many great works of art are misunderstood or even despised when they debut.
We should view music with an open mind. However, I still have a very hard time wrapping my head around atonal music in general. Why/How did these atonal composers decide that they were going to create atonal music? And when does a composer decide to end their atonal piece; what made the composers we have seen in class end their compositions the way they did?
Stravinsky was certainly ahead of his time, but he wasn’t the first artist who’s work wasn’t appreciated until much later. While ideally I would like to think I have an open mind when listening to new music or new types of music, it is easier said than done. We all have pre-conceived notions of what music is or what it should be, and what sounds good or what sounds bad. If we hear music that goes against what we consider music, it certainly is easy to cast it off as garbage.
I agree with other comments that atonal music is still hard to understand for me. I can certainly see why the riots could have happened, especially with an audience expecting traditional music. Now that we have moved on to synthesizers and the minimalist movement, I think one could argue that it was atonal music and other movements that encouraged other composers to move away from traditional music. Even though we might not really enjoy atonal music, we can certainly understand its importance and consequences in music.
I get the dislike of the music, but riots? Really? They must have REALLY hated it.
It isn’t totally surprising that Stravinsky’s work has become famous and influential. You said that half of the audience hated the music, but that the other half loved it.
I also think that having an open mind about something is not synonymous with liking it. I went into Nabucco as an open-minded cynic. I had to be there for about three hours, so if for no reason but that, I wanted to like it; I just didn’t.
I’m not well-versed in ballet and have very little understanding of it, but even as soon as the clip started in class I was able to tell that this was not an ordinary ballet. Having no context of the art, I can say I actually enjoyed watching the clip. The sharp angles and quick movements seemed interesting. I knew that ballet should be smooth and round as you said, but I wasn’t sure that the sharpness of everything was necessarily bad, just not traditional.
I don’t know if the riots that broke out during the Rite of Spring’s premiere were because Stravinsky’s performance was not pleasing to the audience or whether it was just because it was radically different, although the fact that two camps of audience members fought over whether to support the performance or not seems to point to the latter. Using the motions to represent something tribal, primitive, and earthen was an interesting innovation for the time, and I think that Stravinsky’s inventiveness in music was fundamentally a positive effect on how music continued to evolve. It’s just a shame that many felt (violently) otherwise during Stravinsky’s time.
I’m not familiar with atonal music that much but i have to admit that Stravinsky’s piece was a little jarring to listen at first. From that regard i can understand why the audience may not have liked the piece at first. However, i didn’t realize how attached audiences back then were to their favorite styles of music so that they would riot when introduced to something radically different.