Guildhall Symphony Orchestra

Part 1: The Adoration of the Earth

Introduction

Auguries of Spring

Dances of the Young Girls

Game of Capture

Round-Dances of Spring

Games of the Rival Tribes

Procession of the Sage

Adoration of the Earth

The Sage

Dance of the Earth

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Part 2: The Sacrifice

Introduction

Mysterious Circles of the Young Girls

Glorification of the Chosen One

Evocation of the Ancestors

Ritual Action of the Ancestors

Sacrificial Dance of the Chosen One
 

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33 minutes

The Rite of Spring was the last in the early trilogy of Russian-themed ballets Stravinsky created for the visionary impresario Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes company. The composer was only 30 and had already been catapulted to international fame with The Firebird (1909–10) and Petrushka (1910–11), but the premiere of The Rite had been especially anticipated. Among the audience were Ravel, Delius and Picasso. So too was Debussy, who had heard a piano playthrough by Stravinsky and declared he was awaiting the premiere “like a greedy child who has been promised sweets”. The conductor on the occasion, which took place at Paris’ Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913 – was Pierre Monteux who had come away from a different playthrough convinced that the composer was “raving mad”. Monteux remembered “The crudity of the rhythms was emphasised, its stark primitivism underlined. The very walls resounded as Stravinsky pounded away, occasionally stamping his feet and jumping up and down to accentuate the force of the music.”

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Some accounts of the ‘riot’ may have been exaggerated but the American writer Gertrude Stein reported laughter, insults and a gentleman in a box being beaten over the head with a cane by a fellow listener. Perhaps with an eye to publicity Diaghilev had seeded the controversy by promising “a new thrill that will doubtless inspire heated discussion”.

Dark streaks had stalked through Stravinsky’s previous two ballets – the evil sorcerer Kashchey and his hideous cronies in The Firebird, and the malevolent ghostly titular puppet in Petrushka. Subtitled ‘Scenes of Pagan Russia in Two Parts’, The Rite concerns the primitivism of ancient Russian tribes and the disturbing ritual sacrifice of a young woman to appease the God of Spring.

With youthful vision and audacious skill, Stravinsky imbued the score with bracing dissonances, complex destabilising rhythms and densely layered textures. More than 110 years after its premiere, the effect is still both exhilarating and overwhelming. Leonard Bernstein called it a “monument to rhythm”; Pierre Boulez simply “the cornerstone of modern music”.

Part One, The Adoration of the Earth, opens with an effortful birth – the famous high bassoon solo, borrowed from a Lithuanian folk song. The awakening of spring that emerges from it, with its growing chorus of birds and beasts, is no pastoral idyll but reflects Stravinsky’s recollection that the season “seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking”. Brutal chords rain down in ‘Auguries of Spring’, after which the search begins for the Chosen One to be sacrificed. An alarming Presto follows in the ‘Game of Capture’ and after two further dances comes the most brutal and frenzied music of all, for the ‘Procession of the Sage’ and ‘Dance of the Earth’, which ends abruptly, mid-climax.

In Part Two, The Sacrifice, we enter the realm of night with a mystical Introduction. Some of the most heightened music comes with the ‘Glorification of the Chosen One’ as the victim is isolated, signalled by eleven almighty thwacks on timpani, bass drum and strings. Finally, in the ‘Sacrificial Dance’ the victim performs her duty in a dance to the death – enacting the most extreme version of the truth that the renewal of nature must come at a cost.

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Programme notes © Edward Bhesania