It's Spring, Right?

I was three years old when I first heard Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (or, The Rite of Spring for those of use who can't pronounce French worth a damn).

My parents had taken me to see Disney's Fantasia (the original version, not the pale imitation that was Fantasia 2000) and I was entranced by it. Specifically, I was entranced with the dinosaurs (I don't know what it is about three-year-old boys and dinosaurs, but there's some kind of primal link there — someone should do a study). I thought that it was the coolest thing ever.

And that music! So alien, so otherworldly, just so right for those mighty, fearsome beasts with their scales and claws and teeth (disregarding the fact that Disney had shuffled the order of the music around to make it fit the story better, but more on that later). Something about it struck a chord in my heart. This was my music. Loud, irregular, primordial.

My sister still tells the story: our parents were out, perhaps gone shopping, perhaps to go visit the neighbors, and the two of us were home alone. I must have been about four. I put the LP on the stereo (I am, I know, dating myself — we actually had (and probably still have in a box somewhere) a Kenwood turntable that played real vinyl records) and turned up the volume to a level somewhere between pants-wetting and eardrum-breaking. Le Sacre (or, as I called it back at that nascent age, the dinosaur music) has one of the widest dynamic ranges of any pieces of music ever written. Or, in other words, there are bits that are very, very quiet, and then there are bits that are very, very loud. And there's not a lot of transitioning between the two: it goes from v.v.q. to v.v.l. in the space of a single downbeat. So there I was, dancing away when these thunderous hammered chords came blasting out of the stereo. Scared the bejeezus out of my sister. Probably would have scared the bejeezus out of me, too, if I didn't know it was coming.

It is an article of faith among musicologists that Le Sacre was so controversial, so radical, so revolutionary, that the first public performance caused a riot. And that's mostly true. But explaining the legend requires a little bit of backstory.

In 1910, Igor Stravinsky wrote The Firebird, one of the great Russian ballet scores. The success of the relatively conventional Firebird encouraged him to write Petrushka, another ballet, for the great choreographers Serge Diaghilev and Vaslav Ninjinsky. The music of Petrushka is rather different than that of The Firebird; it's more angular, more syncopated, more dissonant; in short, it points the way to Le Sacre.

Article Author: Paul Frankenstein

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