Born in Saint Petersburg on 17 June 1882, Stravinsky was just thirty-one in 1913. He had already been famous for three years, since the first night of his ballet Firebird, which had premiered in Paris in June 1910. Stravinsky owed a lot to his fellow Russian Serge Diaghilev, who had originally intended to become a composer himself. Discouraged by Nicolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, who told him he had no talent, Diaghilev turned instead to art publishing, organising exhibitions, and then putting on music and ballet shows in Paris. Not unlike Apollinaire, he discovered his true talent as an impresario. Diaghilev’s great passion was ballet; it enabled him to work with his three loves – music, dance and painting (for the scenery) – all at the same time.19
Stravinsky’s father had been a singer with the Saint Petersburg opera.20 Both Russian and foreign musicians were always in and out of the Stravinsky home, and Igor was constantly exposed to music. Despite this, he went to university as a law student, and it was only when he was introduced to Rimsky-Korsakov in 1900 and taken on as his pupil after showing some of his compositions that he switched. In 1908, the year Rimsky-Korsakov died, Stravinsky composed an orchestral work that he called Fireworks. Diaghilev heard it in Saint Petersburg, and the music stuck in his mind.21 At that stage he had not formed the Ballets Russes, the company that was to make him and many others famous. However, having staged concerts and operas of Russian music in Paris, Diaghilev decided in 1909 to found a permanent company. In no time, he made the Ballets Russes a centre of the avant-garde. His composers who wrote for the Ballets Russes included Claude Debussy, Manuel de Falla, Sergei Prokofiev, and Maurice Ravel; Picasso and Leon Bakst designed the sets; and the principal dancers were Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina, and Léonide Massine. Later, Diaghilev teamed up with another Russian, George Balanchine.22 Diaghilev decided that for the 1910 season in Paris he wanted a ballet on the Firebird legend, to be choreographed by the legendary Michel Fokine, the man who had done so much to modernise the Imperial Ballet. Initially, Diaghilev commissioned Anatol Liadov to write the music, but as the rehearsals approached, Liadov failed to deliver. Growing desperate, Diaghilev decided that he needed another composer, and one who could produce a score in double-quick time. He remembered Fireworks and got word to Stravinsky in Saint Petersburg. The composer immediately took the train for Paris to attend rehearsals.23
Diaghilev was astounded at what Stravinsky produced. Fireworks had been promising, but Firebird was far more exciting, and the night before the curtain went up, Diaghilev told Stravinsky it would make him famous. He was right. The music for the ballet was strongly Russian, and recognisably by a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, but it was much more original than the impresario had expected, with a dark, almost sinister opening.24 Debussy, who was there on the opening night, picked out one of its essential qualities: ‘It is not the docile servant of the dance.’25 Petrushka came next in 1911. That too was heavily Russian, but at the same time Stravinsky was beginning to explore polytonality. At one point two unrelated harmonies, in different keys, come together to create an electrifying effect that influenced several other composers such as Paul Hindemith. Not even Diaghilev had anticipated the success that Petrushka would bring Stravinsky.
The young composer was not the only Russian to fuel scandal at the Ballets Russes. The year before Le Sacre du printemps premiered in Paris, the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky had been the star of Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune. No less than Apollinaire, Debussy was a sybarite, a sensualist, and both his music and Nijinsky’s dancing reflected this. Technically brilliant, Nijinsky nonetheless took ninety rehearsals for the ten-minute piece he had choreographed himself. He was attempting his own Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a volcanic, iconoclastic work, to create a half-human, half-feral character, as disturbing as it was sensual. His creature, therefore, had not only the cold primitivism of Picasso’s Demoiselles but also the expressive order (and disorder) of Der Blaue Reiter. Paris was set alight all over again.
Even though those who attended the premier of Le Sacre were used to the avant-garde and therefore were not exactly expecting a quiet night, this volcano put all others in the shade. Le Sacre is not mere folk lore: it is a powerful legend about the sacrifice of virgins in ancient Russia.26 In the main scene the Chosen Virgin must dance herself to death, propelled by a terrible but irresistible rhythm. It was this that gave the ballet a primitive, archetypal quality. Like Debussy’s Après-midi, it related back to the passions aroused by primitivism – blood history, sexuality, and the unconscious. Perhaps that ‘primitive’ quality is what the audience responded to on the opening night (the premiere was held on the anniversary of the opening of L’Après-midi, Diaghilev being very superstitious).27 The trouble in the auditorium began barely three minutes into the performance, as the bassoon ended its opening phrase.28 People hooted, whistled, and laughed. Soon the noise drowned out the music, though the conductor, Pierre Monteux, manfully kept going. The storm really broke when, in the ‘Dances des adolescents’, the young virgins appeared in braids and red dresses. The composer Camille Saint-Saëns left the theatre, but Maurice Ravel stood up and shouted ‘Genius.’ Stravinsky himself, sitting near the orchestra, also left in a rage, slamming the door behind him. He later said that he had never been so angry. He went backstage, where he found Diaghilev flicking the house lights on and off in an attempt to quell the noise. It didn’t work. Stravinsky then held on to Nijinsky’s coattails while the dancer stood on a chair in the wings shouting out the rhythm to the dancers ‘like a coxswain.’29 Men in the audience who disagreed as to the merits of the ballet challenged each other to duels.30
‘Exactly what I wanted,’ said Diaghilev to Stravinsky when they reached the restaurant after the performance. It was the sort of thing an impresario would say. Other people’s reactions were, however, less predictable. ‘Massacre du Printemps’ said one paper the next morning – it became a stock joke.31 For many people, The Rite of Spring was lumped in with cubist works as a form of barbarism resulting from the unwelcome presence of ‘degenerate’ foreigners in the French capital. (The cubists were known as métèques, damn foreigners, and foreign artists were often likened in cartoons and jokes to epileptics.)32 The critic for Le Figaro didn’t like the music, but he was concerned that he might be too old-fashioned and wondered whether, in years to come, the evening might turn out to have been a pivotal event.33 He was right to be concerned, for despite the first-night scandal, Le Sacre quickly caught on: companies from all over requested permission to perform the ballet, and within months composers across the Western world were imitating or echoing Stravinsky’s rhythms. For it was the rhythms of Le Sacre more than anything else that suggested such great barbarity: ‘They entered the musical subconscious of every young composer.’