In “The Firebird’s First Flight,” an essay from 1962, Stravinsky has some hard and humorous words to say about the 1910 ballet score that propelled him to fame as a young man. To the 80-year-old composer, who had long before succumbed to neoclassicism, the work seemed overlong, overwrought, and lacking in “real musical invention.” Commenting on the live horses trotted out by impresario Sergei Diaghilev at the Paris premiere, Stravinsky wrote that “one of them, a better critic than actor, left a malodorous calling card.” Even the positive reaction of the Paris audience seemed suspect to him in retrospect. “The Parisian audience wanted a taste of the avant-garde; and The Firebird was just that,” he wrote. “To this explanation I would add that The Firebird belongs to the styles of its time, and that while it is more vigorous than most of the music of the period, it is also not too original—good conditions for a success.”
To be sure, there were a few aspects that continued to “delight” Stravinsky in his old age: He still liked the innovative natural-harmonic string glissando “which the bass chord touches off like a Catherine wheel,” and he was still fond of the rhythmic irregularities in the finale and the intervallic ones in the introduction and Kashchei sections. “When, one day in the future, some poor doctoral candidate sifts my early works for their ‘serial tendencies,’” he predicted, “this sort of thing will, I suppose, rate as an Ur-example.”
For most of us, Stravinsky’s retrospective grumblings are swept away by the splendor and magic of the music. Of the many transitional works from the period—Mahler’s symphonies, Scriabin’s tone poems, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Gurre-Lieder—The Firebird retains what is perhaps the most endearing freshness and vital sense of possibility. It is in the “twilight of Romanticism” genre, but it also points the way irresistibly forward. The exhilarating violence of the “Infernal Dance,” the ominous bass rumblings in the introduction, the breathless shimmer of strings at the beginning of the finale, and the granitic blocks of sound at the end all have the distinctive Stravinsky sound and personality—a tantalizing forecast of Pétrouchka and The Rite of Spring. Even the more Rimsky-Korsakovian moments, such as the dream-like lullaby and the limpid Khorovod, seem part of a new context.
To remedy what he considered to be the “wastefully large” orchestra of the original ballet score and the first suite from late 1910, Stravinsky composed two pared down suites (“criticisms stronger than words,” as he called them)—one in 1919, the other in 1945. Nevertheless, as singer-journalist William Zakariasen has pointed out, it is only in the opulent uncut version that The Firebird stands as “the one great bridge between Romanticism and modernism in Russian music.”
“Primitive with every modern convenience”: That’s how Claude Debussy described The Rite of Spring in an ironic form of praise that perfectly sums up the conjunction of primitivism and modernism in Stravinsky’s revolutionary score. The original ballet conception involved the pagan sacrifice of a young girl to the ancient god of spring—a spring, in Lawrence Gilman’s words, “as it was before there were Spring poets and Corot landscapes and the bleatings of young love.” But the music itself, with its enormous sophistication and complexity, was utterly new.
The Rite, in fact, is arguably the landmark of 20th-century modern music. Although atonal and polytonal works by Schoenberg, Webern, and Ives preceded The Rite, nothing else had as much influence, notoriety, and sheer sensational impact. Stravinsky partisans viewed the work as nothing less than a new art form; horrified detractors saw it as the destruction of music as an art altogether. The Rite was to music as Joyce’s Ulysses was to fiction and Eliot’s The Waste Land was to poetry: Nothing could ever be quite the same after it.
The 1913 Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring at Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was probably the most raucous in musical history, noisier even than the music itself. Stravinsky recalls that “mild protests against the music could be heard from the beginning”; during the first scene, “the storm broke … I left the hall in a rage.” By the end, with shouts, jeers, cheers, and bodily blows being exchanged throughout the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the Paris riot police were called in. Pierre Monteux continued conducting to music that could barely be heard: “I kept my eyes on the score, playing the exact tempo Igor had given me and which, I must say, I have never forgotten. As you know, the public reacted in a scandalous manner.” In Stravinsky’s words, Diaghilev kept “switching the house lights on and off in the hope that this might quiet the hall,” while choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky “stood on a chair shouting numbers to the dancers, like a coxswain.”
The next year, Stravinsky heard Monteux conduct the score as a concert piece to a crowd of young people, an altogether different experience: At the end, recalled Stravinsky, “the entire audience stood up and cheered. I came on stage and hugged Monteux, who was a river of perspiration—it was the saltiest hug of my life. A crowd swept backstage. I was hoisted to anonymous shoulders and carried …” Later, Stravinsky decided that he preferred The Rite as a concert piece, undermining the elaborate “pagan” program with the famous quip that the music is “architectonic, not anecdotal.”
The Rite of Spring certainly needs no ballet scenarios, which almost invariably pale beside what the music ignites in our imagination. Its sheer visceral power is spellbinding. As has been frequently pointed out, it restored the primacy of rhythm to music and changed, in the words of Pierre Boulez, “the direction of rhythmic impulse.” Its violent, continually shifting pulsation carried a charge (many say a sexual one) that still, when performed with full ferocity, sounds avant-garde. “Nothing can dilute,” says Boulez, its “tension and rhythmic life.” Combined with Stravinsky’s densely polytonal harmonies and hallucinogenic colors, this pulse is like an elemental force, a tornado of energy.
According to Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring is much less tied to tradition than other “revolutionary” works of the period. Unlike Berg and Webern, who “were supported by a great tradition,” Stravinsky was “guided by no system whatsoever … I had only my ear to help me; I heard and I wrote what I heard.” The piece was inspired by a “fleeting vision” of a young girl dancing herself to death during a savage rite. According to musicologist Richard Taruskin, however, Stravinsky was actually steeped in his own tradition—that of Russian folklore and poetry—and his vision was rather typical: “This was by no means an unusual sort of dream for a creative artist to have in St. Petersburg in 1910.” Still, no one transmitted such a dream into anything remotely like The Rite of Spring.
—Jack Sullivan