It's Spring, Right? - Page 2

Le Sacre itself was supposed to be a ballet celebrating the violent Russian spring; it harkened back to a mythical pagan Russia and was to end with a ritual sacrifice. The birthing process of the ballet was itself labored, as Stravinsky wrote:

"I will count to forty while you play", Nijinsky would say to me, "and we will see where we come out." He could not understand that though we might at some point "come out" together, this did not mean we had been together on the way. The dancers followed Nijinsky's count, too ... and as Russian numbers above ten are polysyllabic — eighteen, for example, vosemnadsat — in the fast tempo movements neither he nor they could keep up.

This accounts for at least some of the hostile reaction the piece encountered on its premiere. Stravinsky again, on that fateful opening night in 1913:

At the performance, mild protests against the music could be heard from the beginning. Then, when the curtain opened, a group of knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down, the storm broke. Cries of "ta gueule" came from behind me. I left the hall in a rage. ... For the rest of the performance, I stood in the wings behind Nijinsky holding the tails of his frac, while he stood on a chair shouting numbers to the dancers, like a coxswain.

What Stravinsky leaves out, though is the fact that much of the booing was due to a claque that had been paid by enemies of the composer to disrupt the performance. The second night's performance, was, by all accounts, significantly more successful.

Despite its origins as a ballet score, Le Sacre quickly achieved success as a concert piece. Perhaps contemporary audiences heard a musical reflection of the chaos of the First World War.

The music itself is notoriously difficult. The piece opens with a solo bassoon exploring the oft-neglected upper range of that instrument; the time signature changes eight times in the first ten bars. Other parts of the score venture into outright bizarre time signatures, like 9/4, 3/16, 2/8, and 6/4. Stravinsky could play the music before he could figure out how to write it down (he re-notated the score in the late 1940s to make it easier to read (an exercise that had the happy and not entirely unintended consequence of extending his copyright)).

When Disney approached Stravinsky with the idea of using Le Sacre as part of Fantasia, the composer was all ears. Or, more specifically, all eyes, as he was most attracted to the check that the movie company dangled in front of him.

Article Author: Paul Frankenstein

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