The Rite of Spring: Genesis of a Masterpiece

Author(s): Robert Craft

Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Autumn - Winter, 1966), pp. 20-36
Published by: Perspectives of New Music
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/832386
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THE RITE OF SPRING

Genesis of a Masterpiece
ROBERT

CRAFT

PREFACE

I
PERHAPS I should begin by offering some justification for my
choice of subject.1 There is no longer any novelty in The Rite of
Spring, you will say, and the fallout from the explosions it once made
has long since settled. Certainly no one would claim that it exerts any
immediate influence on the new music of today, or at any rate on the
new-fangled new music, except in the sense of an ancestor which, like
a prize bull, has inseminated the whole modern movement. Composers, with Stravinsky himself at their head, have tended to regard
it as a dead end (bang rather than whimper) for at least the latter
four decades of its existence, during which time the compilers of
cinema sound tracks have diluted its originality and the "titans of the
podium" have conquered, or at least subdued, it and added it as a
trophy (or scalp) to the repertory. Why talk about it, then, if its
musical mysteries are now profane knowledge (the desacralization
complete), if I have no new theory to propound, and if in any case the
music is neither neglected nor in need of reevaluation?
The answer is in a cache of manuscript sketches-as many as
four-fifths of the total, at a guess-recently acquired by the Andre
Meyer Collection in Paris from M. Boris Kochno, Diaghilev's heir
and the librettist of Stravinsky's Mavra. They have been inaccessible
until now even to students, and few people indeed can have had an
opportunity to examine them, which I say not as an attempt to inveigle you with a bibliographical scoop, but rather because I have been
living only a very short time with the discovery myself and am still
greatly excited by it: I will not promise not to impose my own feelings.
Preliminary drafts by Stravinsky are rarely seen. After disposing
of his earlier autograph manuscripts among patrons and friends, the
composer has kept the later ones under lock and key. Having inspected
1 The text was read as a lecture at Ohio State University, Columbus, November
29, 1966; copyright 1966 by Robert Craft. A facsimile volume of sketches for The
Rite of Spring with notes by Robert Craft will be published shortly.

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virtually all of them myself, however, I can testify that, at least for
me, the present collection contains by far the most interesting material.
At the time of The Rite Stravinsky's language was uncodified and his
ambit was unknown and unpredictable-all comparatively, of course,
for it might be claimed, without arrogation, that the same holds true
today, in a reduced context, which is why the composer, who has
reflected as much of the century in which we live as any artist, continues to irritate musical historiographers and to elude the successive
niches they prepare for him. The composition process exposed in these
sketches is often akin to Debussy in the development of harmonic and
intervallic cells from small units to unity, but it is also and for the
most part quite unlike anyone else. In fact, the collection could be
called in evidence both for and against facit e nihilo explanations of
the creation of The Rite; "for"in those examples which seem to appear
in bursts, fully formed, like asteroids, and "against" in the pages on
which slower gestations are chronicled. In many cases of the latter we
are able to examine (and with little effort, thanks to a legibility compared to which Beethoven's manuscripts look like tachiste art) the
nascent conception, and to trace it as it develops, transmutates, crossbreeds, or serves as a springboard to other directions; and if we cannot
actually invade the creating mind, we are able, as we watch its leaps of
logic and the sharpening of its images, to follow the mind's footsteps.
To anyone interested in musical embryology, these facsimile pages
are a major document.
The depth of discovery will vary with the equipment of the
individual, to be sure, and each reader will form his compromises
with the material as he does with life itself-a high-flown statement
with which I hope to paper over the gaps in my own work. I give no
conspectus of The Rite as a completed composition, and I have provided only a skeleton Baedeker, the slenderest of guide-rails, to the
sketches, the "genesis" of my title being a description of the manuscripts themselves, not the postulate of this preface. At no point do I
dilate on the structure of the music, or offer a general musical analysis,
and I have even shirked the task of cataloguing the mass of detail on
grounds that musicians can perform this largely mechanical labor
for themselves, and that it would be useless for anyone else. The
point of view of the commentary, for the time has come to define it,
is that of an observer in possession of an omnipotent advantage, the
ultimate implement of every remark: I mean the power of hindsight.
At the same time this historical superiority constitutes an important
handicap because of which all of our investigations are deterministic.
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We are unable to imagine the completed Rite of Spring as other than

inevitable.
Further but incidental justifications for my choice of topic are at
hand in two timely developments, the reissue (in September 1965)
of a newly corrected but still not completely correct (in fact, a full
recension of all the texts is long overdue) score; and the several recent
revivals of the ballet (in Europe; there have been but two very minor
American stagings, both a long time ago). Wherever it seemed to be
useful, and connection could be made, I have related the commentary
to questions of performance which musicians may pursue in this new
full score, as well as in the four-hand reduction of 1913 (which names
Stravinsky as co-author of the staging) and the revised scores of
1921, 1943 (the Sacrificial Dance), and 1947. Each of these editions
and each recording-including player piano rolls-by the composer
is a guide to performance; or at least a confrontation of choice for in
my opinion (though not in the composer's) the revisions are not
necessarily definitive according to chronological progression. In the
case of The Rite, Stravinsky's alterations continue to outdate new
issues of recordings and scores, and at present he performs, or directs
others to perform, one of the dances, the Evocation of the Ancestors,
with radical divergencies from the notations in all publications. No
absolutely conclusive answer can be fixed for every question concerning anything so circumstantial as a performance, of course, and neither
could any score convey all of the nuances Stravinsky was at one time
able to bring to his own readings of The Rite. In spite of his complaints about interpreters, Stravinsky is a practical musician who
enjoys collaboration with instrumentalists, who is sensitive to the
different requirements of each occasion, and who learns from them all.
Indeed, those who regard the score as an inviolable text beyond tampering even by the author are often shocked by his temerarious overriding of the printed page in matters of dynamics, articulation, and
metronomic markings; in short, by his readiness to adjust to conditions.
The most notable in the new wave of European stage performances
have taken place in Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest, Brussels, London,
Paris, and Moscow, in that chronological order. None of these follows
even the general intentions of the authors, though in all fairness those
intentions have been difficult to discover. Hence, a further aim of this
paper will be to reestablish the argument of the ballet as it was at the
time of composition, insofar as Stravinsky's memories and my collocations of them are able.
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II
It may be useful at this point to retrace some of the outward career
of the work from inception to first performance. Like many of Stravinsky's ideas, that of The Rite of Spring had an oneiric origin. In
March 1910, while composing the Finale of The Firebird, he dreamed
a scene in which a chosen virgin of an archaic Russian tribe dances
herself to death, the culmination of rituals of propitiation to the gods
of spring. Though the composer disclaims connection between the two
scores, some of the musical resemblances are striking, especially the
incidence, in both, of the Khorovod form; of the volcanic glissandos
in the horns; of the alternations of metrical units of twos and threes;
and even of melodic content: cf. No. 182 in The Rite, and the beginning of the second tableau of The Firebird. Stravinsky confided his
prefiguration of the new ballet to Nicolas Roerich, painter, ethnographer, archaeologist, designer of Rimsky-Korsakov's tomb, and it
was one of the most fortunate confidences of his life, for Roerich's
knowledge, whatever it may have been, inspired Stravinsky and
helped to sustain his vision. Roerich was the catalyst of the subject, an
incomparably more effective function than that of set and costume
designer by which he is remembered.
A little more than a year later, the interval during which Petrushka
was composed and performed, Stravinsky and Roerich met at the
home, near Smolensk, of the Princess Tenichev, patroness of Diaghilev. Here they composed the scenario, Stravinsky contributing the
idea of the division in two parts to represent day and night, and
Roerich suggesting the episodes based on primitive ceremonies; the
anthropological titles, with the exception of a single word, are by
Roerich. At the beginning of July (1911), the composer visited
Diaghilev in Carlsbad and it was there that the ballet was commissioned. Stravinsky has said elsewhere that the French title Le Sacre
du printemps was dubbed by Bakst only shortly before the first performance, but it is already found in the composer's hand in a receipt
dated November 19, 1911 (whether 0. S. or N. S. is not indicated,
though both are regularly given in the composer's Russian correspondence) for partial payment (4,791 francs) of the commission.
Stravinsky spent the summer in Ustilug, his home in Russian
Volhynia, composing the Augurs of Spring, Spring Rounds, and part
of the Rival Tribes. He recalls that his first idea was the focal chord of
F-flat major in the bass combined with the dominant-seventh chord of
A-flat in the treble (to adopt his own nomenclature, for he has always
referred to the triadic combinations in The Rite in terms of bi- or
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polytonality; at the same time it should be said that he rarely employs

and never thinks in the vocabulary of musical theory, and that he
recently remarked of this chord that he could not explain or justify it
at the time but that his "ear accepted it with joy"). As a first idea, the
chord, above all its dominant-seventh superstructure and the majorseventh frame of the outer voices, was indeed a discovery. The dominant-seventh is reiterated for some 280 beats in The Augurs of
Spring alone, interrupted in all that time by but a single measure of
cadence;2 it then forms a bridge to and becomes a large part of the
substance of the next movement as well, and thereafter flourishes as a
root of the entire piece-though, of course, there is more prospectiveness (or less adventitiousness) in Stravinsky's exploitation of it than
my phrasing implies.
The remainder of Part One was composed in a pension in Clarens,
"The Lindens," in the autumn and early winter of 1911-1912. Part
Two was begun at the same address on March 1, 1912, but, as the
sketches show, at a later point in the score than the beginning as we
know it. Part Two emerged in more helter-skelter fashion than Part
One: the Sacrificial Dance was already in germination during the
composition of the Introduction. Then, too, several notations for The
Nightingale are interspersed among the sketches, as well as drafts of
the first two Japanese Lyrics. The interposition of these other opera
is partly accounted for by a change in Diaghilev's plans and the decision that The Rite could not be staged in 1912. Until then the
composer had worked toward a performance dateline in June of that
year and accustomed himself to the idea that the new ballet would
follow The Firebird and Petrushka, a third premiere in as many years.
But in spite of the fact that the final dances existed in outline by
mid-April ("Voila 'Le Sacre' bientot fini," he writes on April 11 to
M. D. Calvocoressi, who was preparing the French translation of
The Nightingale), it is unlikely that the full score could have been
completed in time and, in fact, drafts for instrumentation are found
as late as eleven months after that date. Diaghilev's disappointing
news must have come by the end of January 1912: Stravinsky spent
most of February in London with the Ballet, which he would hardly
have done if The Rite were still docketed for spring performance. But
though work on the composition was suspended, the interruption did
not slacken the composer's pace or result in a loss of momentum. Nor,
in my judgment and in spite of "everything that grows/holds in per2 In a television interview for the Norddeutscher Rundfunk, March
1965, the
composer criticizes his repetition of the chord, comparing it to the "more interesting
development" of the melodic material of Augurs of Spring.

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fection but a little moment," did it damage the time scale. In fact, the
break may have been necessary to the time architecture of Part Two
in which plateaus of slower, less eventful music prepare for the high
point of the final dance. Stravinsky has always known when he and his
work required a change of scene, a fact that helps explain his sudden,
restless junketings about the globe. In 1912, owing to Diaghilev's
ministrations-and at his expense, because of the postponementStravinsky attended premieres and galas of The Firebird and Petrushka all over Europe. His concern for the performance of his music
dates from this time, incidentally, and I might add that it still propels
him, for though it hardly seems possible that after 53 years yet another reading of The Rite of Spring could interest him I assure you
it does.
Between sojourns to Monte Carlo, Paris, and Venice, work went on
apace, more of it in Ustilug, where the composer returned for the
summer, than anywhere else. By November 17, 1912, back in Clarens
but now at the Hotel du Chatelard, the end seemed to have been
reached. The sketches contain three premature notifications of the
fact, though the actual finish line was still four months away. In
Paris at the beginning of November Stravinsky had unveiled the
music in a piano reading to a group of friends, among them Florent
Schmitt, Maurice Delage, and Ravel, the respective future dedicatees
of the Three Japanese Lyrics. Schmitt, then music critic for La
France, left his impressions of the event in the November 12 issue of
his paper, and they seem to me remarkable enough, predating the
performance by more than half a year as they do, to warrant quotation in full:
. . je ne puis vous en parler que par oui dire: a la meme heure, en
un lointain pavillon d'Auteuil,3 que desormais revet a mes yeux la
magnificence du plus somptueux des temples, M. Igor Strawinsky
faisait entendre a ses amis les 'Sacres4 du printemps' dont je vous
dirai un jour la beaute inouie et vraiment la revelation, quoique
privee, de cette nouvelle preuve du genie du jeune compositeur russe
avait a elle seule plus d'importance que toute la musique qui,
pendant ce temps, pouvait se jouer dans l'univers entier, pour ce que
l'oeuvre contient de liberte, de nouveaute, de richesse et de vie.
Stravinsky also played the score for, and this time together with,
3 Stravinsky recalls that it was in the home of Delage, and he remembers that
Maximillian Steinberg who was also present, "jerked his shoulders in mockery of
the 'primitive' rhythm and this, as you see, has offended me until now."
4 Schmitt pluralizes the title in his every reference to the work even including his
notice of the first performance (La France, June 4, 1913).

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Debussy5 on the same trip, but privately, at the home of Louis Laloy6
in Bellevue.
We next hear of Stravinsky working at the orchestra score in a
Lausanne-to-Berlin train sometime between the 18th and 20th of
November: he attended the Berlin Urauffihrung of The Firebird on
the 21st. While in Berlin he met Arnold Schoenberg, and the two
composers heard each other's newest works, Petrushka at the Kroll
Opera on December 4, the Lieder des Pierrot lunaire (as it was then
called) at the Choralion-Saal on December 8: Stravinsky still has his
Pierrot ticket stub and the program with the quotation from Novalis.
I mention this conjunction for the reason that by December 18,
Stravinsky, back in Clarens, had composed the first two of the
Japanese Lyrics inspired, according to his own accounts, by Pierrot
lunaire, though as we come upon these miniatures in the present
collection they seem to devolve naturally from The Rite. At the end
of December Stravinsky entrained for Budapest and the baptism of
The Firebird there, continuing on January 4 to Vienna for a stay of
two weeks in the Bristol Hotel. A letter from Delage reached him
there with the information that Roerich's costumes were ready and
"splendides," but Stravinsky's own correspondence at this time fails
to mention The Rite or, indeed, anything other than the acrimonious
treatment of Petrushka by the orchestra of the Vienna Opera, the
bruises from which were so deep that the composer still licks them
today in even his casual declarations of dislike or disregard for the
Austrian capital. I turn again to Schmitt for contemporary evidence,
and then to Stravinsky himself in an interview from his rooms at
the Savoy Hotel in London the following month. Schmitt writes:
La generation de l'an 2,000 fermee aux Berlioz ou aux Moussorgski de l'epoque, s'exaltera tardivement a la cent-soixante-douzieme
des Sacres de [sic] printemps et les Farnesiens de la musique
mettront a vif le sol austro-balkanique pour y recueillir pieusement
les megots d'Arnold Schoeneberg [sic].
5 On the occasion described by Schmitt, Stravinsky was at the piano alone; the
composer says that Cocteau's famous drawing, though dated 1913, is an impression
of this performance. The two-hand reduction antedates the four-hand, the latter
having been prepared to give a fuller account of the music at ballet rehearsals.
Stravinsky believes that the four-hand score was complete to about the middle of the
Sacrificial Dance when he played it with Debussy.
6 This audition is wrongly ascribed by Laloy to the spring of 1913. Debussy's
letter to Stravinsky concerning it is undated, but the postmark is November 8, 1912
(misprinted as November 8, 1913, in Conversations With Stravinsky, Faber, 1959).
Laloy's own letters to Stravinsky shed further light on the relations of the two
composers, incidentally, as for example in this extract dated November 16, 1916:
"Nous devons dejeuner samedi chez Debussy. Le matin on repete deux morceaux
de Saint Sebastien. Pourriez-vous venir aussi? Je sais qu'il en aurait grande joie."

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La preuve en est que je regois cette lettre d'Igor Strawinsky:

"J'arrive de Vienne ou le 'fameux' orchestre de l'Opernhaus a
sabote mon Petrouchka. On a declare qu'une aussi laide et sale
musique ne pouvait se jouer mieux. Vous ne vous figurez pas les
ennuis et les injures que l'orchestre m'a fait subir." (La France,
January 21, 1913.)
Says Stravinsky: Petrushka was performed at St. Petersburg the
same day as here and I see the newspapers are now all comparing
my work with the "smashing of crockery." And what of Austria?
The Viennese are barbarians. Their orchestral musicians could
not play my Petrushka. They hardly know Debussy there, and
they chased Schonberg away to Berlin. Now Schonberg is one of
the greatest creative spirits of our era. (The Daily Mail, February 13, 1913.)
Stravinsky remained in London throughout February for the debut
of Petrushka in Covent Garden. The triumph of the ballet was not
only a pleasant contrast to Vienna but it was also the most unanimously acclaimed success of the composer's career, even to today;
from the contents of his social scrapbooks of the time I would say
that he has never again been lionized or, at any rate, allowed himself to be lionized to such an extent. A number of interviews appeared
during this visit, some of them surprisingly charitable about Wagner
and Tristan (at that late date!) and including a variety of statements about The Rite. "My new ballet, The Crowning of Spring,
has no plot," he told the Daily Mail. "It is a series of ceremonies
in ancient Russia, the Russia of pagan days." But the London
Budget for February 16 quotes him as saying that "Monsieur Nijinsky
has worked out the story, and we are calling it 'Le Sacre du printemps,' which might be translated 'The Innocence of Spring.'"
Work on the Introduction to Part Two was recommenced at the
beginning of March. The manuscript of the full score, now with
Stravinsky's son Theodore in Geneva, is dated March 8 at the end,
but the eleven measures from No. 86 to No. 87 were added three
weeks later, on the 29th, and, though I have been unable to discover
when and in what precise way, the ending was altered after that; the
present collection does not include the ending in the form we know
but only the three premature, and truncated, versions mentioned
above. Once, about ten years ago, Stravinsky confessed that the idea
of changing the ending came from Sergei Rachmaninov, a composer
as inimical to him as any I can imagine. It appears that the two compatriots found themselves together one day in the Berlin establish. 27 ?

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ment of the Russische Musik Verlag when the author of THE

prelude, leafing through a copy of Stravinsky's score, ventured to
suggest that the treble-register ending was a mistake and that a solid
bass chord was needed. (More recently Stravinsky recalls that
Rachmaninov merely noticed a misprinted treble clef in the horn
parts.) But for whatever reasons, by whatever vicissitudes, Stravinsky did add such a chord, a classical close that accomplishes what
Rachmaninov had in mind, if the story is true, and what he would
have had in mind, if it is false, for the final cadence is both anachronism and anticlimax.
The publicity attending the premiere of The Rite, May 29, 1913,
has obscured the fact of four subsequent performances7 owing to
which, though all four were still noisily contested, a few musicians
and cognoscenti recognized that a masterpiece had been born.8
III
All dances were originally sacred . . . and any sacrifice is
the repetition of the act of Creation . . . all sacrifices are
performed at the same mythical instant of the beginning;
through the paradox of rite, profane time and duration are
suspended.
Mircea Eliade: The Myth of the Eternal Return
A description of the stage action being a necessary preliminary
to even a cursory inspection of the sketches, I will proceed to the
question of what the ballet The Rite of Spring is about. But a glance
at the title page discloses that nothing is said about a ballet, and the
word "pictures" in the subtitle is conspicuously non-choreographic.
No less conspicuous is the absence of a Russian title-for the reason,
one might assume, that Le Sacre du printemps does not accurately
translate it, except that the Russian headings of the thirteen subsections are retained, even in the latest edition, along with French versions (composed by "someone with a special taste in titles," says
7 Stravinsky did not hear any of these. The day after the premiere he dined on
oysters and on the 31st was taken to a hospital in Neuilly with typhoid. While
convalescing there, incidentally, he corrected the proofs of that last work of his
nonage (or so he thinks of it) the Symphony in E-flat and added the clarinet
counterpoint to the strings at the recapitulation in the Largo movement; this explains
the high D-sharp in the bassoon, too: it was written after The Rite.
8 Several of the German reports of the event drag in Schoenberg's name for homefront comparison, and the Stravinsky/Schoenberg syndrome that imposed its nationalist and, as I now think, deleteriously exclusive dialectical character on the musical
thought of half a century, seems to date from the aftermath of The Rite. Thus, the
Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung for August 8, 1913 states that "Strawinski erfreut sich
hier einer iihnlich exponierten Stellung wie in Deutschland Arnold Schinberg."

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Stravinsky) that are also largely inexact. But I must go back to the
beginning and try to be methodical. The composer prefers the Russian title of Part One, A Kiss of the Earth-"of" meaning both "by"
and "to"-to the unspecific French, which means The Adoration of
the Earth; and he objects to the first subtitle, Danses des adolescentes.

The dancers, young females of a primitive tribe, are demi-savages,

and their dance is a celebrationof puberty. They appearon the scene,
which represents the country of the northern steppes-"a yellowish
foregroundand a violet distance"as StravinskyremembersRoerich's
backdrop-two measures before No. 27, not, as the composer has
said elsewhere, at No. 13, which is the curtain cue, marked "Day"
in the four-handscore.
The composer prefers the English Ritual of Abduction to the
French Jeu de Rapt as a title of the next movement, even though
the title in the sketches, as he translates it, is "Game of Chasing
a Girl." Stravinskysays that a ceremony of young men locking arms
in a circle around a young girl survived in country weddings in
Russia in our own century, and that he had seen it once, near Novgorod, in his youth. At No. 37 the men appear,each of them seizing
one of the unbreachedgirls; the composerwarns choreographersthat
it is a Sabine-typemass-rapeand not an action that can be symbolized
by a single pair of dancers: except for a short passage in the first
dance of Part Two the only solo dancers in the entire ballet are the
Sage and the Chosen Maiden. The next title, Spring Rounds, or
Khorovods, describes a form of "singing and dancing in a circle,"
"Khor"meaning chorus, and "vod," leading. In the first part of
the piece, five small circles of dancers slowly gyrate, then in the
orchestral tutti coalesce into a single large circle. During what
Stravinsky calls the Khorovod Chant (Nos. 48-49 and Nos. 56-57)
the women stand apart from the men extending their arms in gestures of exorcism; at No. 57 they leave the stage and the men dance
the orchestral coda (Vivo) alone. Choreographicallyspeaking, the
music of The Rite was conceived in terms of male-femaledialogues
of action, like any other ballet.
The composer's present English title for the next episode, The
Ritual of the Two Rival Tribes, contains more information than the

Russian original.9 The ritual is a tribal war-game, a contest of

strength as determined,for example in a tug of war.10Two sharply
9 A misprint in the Russian has been carried over to the 1965 edition: dvukhgoro
is one word, not two.
10 Ritual combats between two opposing groups and the pursuit of girls are
characteristic of New Year's or "renewal of the world" ceremonies in many primitive
societies. (See Eliade, op.cit.)

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contrasted groups are identified, the first by heavy, comparatively

slow figures in bass register (the first two measures at No. 57 and
the brass chords before No. 59), the second by fast figures in treble
register (the third measure of No. 57). The clash occurs (the fifth
measure of No. 57) where the music of both is superimposed.The
next event, the Procession of the Oldest and Wisest One is heralded

by the entranceof the tubas at No. 64. A clearing is preparedat the

center of the stage and the Sage's arrival there, with the women of
the tribe in his train, coincides with the first beat of No. 70, the
orchestral tutti which signifies the gathering of all the people. The
next Russian title (at No. 71) is translated: The Kiss of the Earth
(The Oldest and Wisest One.) The Sage, helped to his knees by

two attendants,bestows his sacramentalkiss in time with the chord

of string harmonics. The next title should be changed from The
Dance of the Earth to The Dancing Out Of The Earth, or The Dance

OvercomingThe Earth; the word vypljasyvanie(dancing out) is, incidentally, Stravinsky's aforementioned unique contribution to the
titles. The composer has said that he imagined the dancers "rolling
like bundles of leaves in the wind" during the orchestralconvulsions
at the beginning of this piece, and "stompinglike Indians trying to
put out a prairie fire"during the latter part of it. The curtain closes
on the second beat of the third measure before the end, as in the
four-handscore, not, as in the sketches, at No. 78. Stravinsky had
intended no more than a short pause between the two parts, but at
the first performancean intermission was instituted as a stratagem
to check audience hostilities. The composer recalls that the second
part did begin under an amnesty,but then the music itself is much less
provocative.
In accordancewith the musical representationof day and nightwhich is also a further dialogue of the sexes, Part Two being essentially femalel--the house lights were to have been extinguished at
11 M. Bejart observed this in his staging at the Paris Opera (May 1965) at the
same time making Part One exclusively male. The sexes were united in his version
only in the Sacrificial Dance, but there so literally that the spectacle was adjudged
unfit for the chaste regard of Madame la Pr6sidente (who apparently wishes to
reestablish the prudery of the Corneille-period bienseance). In fact, the unmistakably
explicit mesial movements of the dancers did serve notice that in ca. three-quarters
of a year the tribe could expect a population explosion, but the effect was merely
comic and, anyway, sex in ballet is always epicene. To match the Elue of Part Two
Bejart created an Elu in Part One, a reasonable notion given his stag first half,
though these twin eloi suppose an altogether different kind of drama (Adam and
Eve). The choreographer was on the right path, I think, in that he eschewed "choreography" for various imitative actions which, however, except for a beautiful birdlike hopscotch by the Elue in the next-to-last dance, and a brilliant leap-frogging
exit by the men at the end of Part One, were on the animated cartoon level. The
dancers were nude, of course (an exceptionally warm spring that year), and so was

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the end of Part One, and Part Two was to have begun in darkness.
As a title for the second part, Stravinsky prefers The Exalted Sacrifice-rather than the "great,"which suggests size-but the French,
which omits the adjective, seems a still better choice. The curtain
opens two measures before No. 91-at the word "Night"in the fourhand score-to a dance, again in Khorovodcharacter,by six females.
The French title, Cercles Mysterieux, is wrongly plural and richly
ambiguous (problems of geometry? a kind of Eleusinian cliques?),
though the English version favored by record-sleevewriters, Mystic
Circle of the Adolescents, is also misleading, conjuring as it does,
scenes of teenagers hooked on heroin or LSD. In fact, the dancers
pace the perimeter of a circle (drawn on the ground) which represents the cycle of nature and in which the Chosen One is to die. The
alto flute (at No. 93) and the clarinet duet thereafter accompany
the movements of, respectively, one and two solo dancers, and these
are the exceptions cited above. The Khorovod is interrupted one
measure before No. 101, then briefly resumed and abruptly concluded, at one measurebefore No. 102 where, to quote the four-hand
score, "One of the maidens is chosen by lot to fulfill the sacrifice;
from this point to the Sacrificial Dance the Chosen One stands motionless." During the ensuing orchestral crescendo the men appear
at the sides of the stage, as though for an ambuscade, and in the
eleven-beat measure the women retire. The composer imagined the
next dance, The Naming and Honoring of the Chosen One, as a
"choreographichocket," a ricochet of movement from stage left to
stage right, the men on one side leaping during the rhythmic groups
of threes, those on the other side leaping during the rhythmic groups
of twos. The Evocation of the Ancestors, or Evocation of the Ancestral Spirits, is another male dance. At No. 125 the elders12appear
and at No. 128 squat before the sacred circle like a court of judges.
Of the actual action of the ancestors Stravinsky recalls only that he
intended a type of ghost dance known to virtually all archaic communities, and that the women were to perform it while the men
hovered at the sides marking time. At the beginning of the Sacrificial
Dance the Chosen One is alone with the elders. Then, at No. 149
the men reappear and mark time to the ostinato figure, the quintuplet figure being associated with the Chosen One. At No. 167 the
dance is again resumed in the presence of the elders only, until at
the stage, except for a phallic totem in bulk like a fifty-foot Mickey Mouse balloon
in a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.
12 On different occasions
Stravinsky has said that they are five like the bassoons,
and seven, like Baudelaire's Septs vieillards.

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No. 174 the men are reushered in with the bass and timpani figure.
From No. 186 only the Chosen One moves. Then, at No. 201, the
elders stand like witnesses at an execution, and extend their hands
to the victim as she falls in time with the flute scale.
IV
Now, by way of exordium to the sketches themselves, I will
attempt to educe from them a few fundamental points concerning
Stravinsky's creative processes. The first, which is the fact that
Stravinsky's musical imagination was profoundly engaged by "the
story," has already been betokened in the foregoing. The sketches
manifest that he composed with choreographic action as vividly and
precisely in mind as he did with the cinematographically synchronized story-ballet Petrushka. Denotations for stage action are found
in them as they are not in the published scores, and the label of
assignment to one or another of the thirteen descriptive headings
attached to each entry on its appearance is an immediately remarkable feature of the collection, as well as one of the few matters
concerning which future transplanting rarely takes place. In the
case of the Ritual Action of the Ancestors, for example, the sketches
designate the actual starting point of the action as the score does not,
the detailed stage picture having vanished from the composer's mind,
as he says, as soon as it had served its adjuvant purpose. It was
known that The Firebird and Petrushka were composed in this way,
of course, but the same was not assumed in the case of The Rite both
because its stage career has been so much more limited and because
its musical form is less dependent-is in fact wholly independentof stage action. But Stravinsky has always composed with yardsticks in hand and his imagination has always found its toe-holds
at the most concrete level. If "perceptual" and "conceptual" are meaningful distinctions in relation to a musical mind, then Stravinsky's
powers in the category of the former often appear to be the greater.
My second point involves a question of basic technique that will
have to be localized by musical example. The manuscripts reveal that
many of the composer's first notations were simple folk-tune-type
melodies which he transforms by a number of face-lifting devices
including changes of note-order, the extracting of essences (musical
placer-mining), and the grafting of new rhythms and new characters
of tempo. These transformations are sometimes so extensive that in
retrospect the original material may seem to have been more a point
of departure than a root. This, I think, is the case in the following
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quotation: how many readers will recognize, at a glance, the first

subject of the Dance of the Earth?

ifjc-f$f

'r

rf'

Ex. 1

In comparingthe full score with this source, it seems to me the reader

will have to acknowledgethat the paramounttransformingtricks are
the rhythmic overhauling and the changing of the tempo (if it was
changed; there is no indication, but I think we-though it would be
safer to speak only for myself--naturally attributea slow, choral characterto the example). As for the melodyitself, the readerwill detect its
family resemblanceto the principalKhorovodtheme, coming upon it
in context, and with the characterizationof the second group of contestants in the Ritual of the Two Rival Tribes; and having established
these connections and other interrelationsof the sort he will soon be
deducing that all of the melodic material of The Rite belongs to a
common morphology with common stylistic characteristics. Let us
compare this example and the lode that Stravinsky found in it (or
investedit with), though not so much to enlightenthe listenerwho, no
doubt, can easily spell out these simple operationsfor himself, as to
offer him a sample of things to come and hence a warning, if he is
still undecided, that perhaps the remainderof the lecture should be
cut. We discover, first, that the composertranslates the melody from
the top to a middle voice (see page 33 of the sketches); second, that
he forms harmonicaggregates from it, superimposingthe notes as if
they were appoggiature;third, that he exploitsits whole-tonecontentthe harmonizationin major thirds-in an ostinatobass-figurewith the
F-sharp (rather than the C) as the root tone; and, fourth, that he
renovatesthe rhythm. Stravinskywas well aware that the latter was
his most powerful transforming stroke; he has written in the manuscript at this point (page 34) that "music exists if there is rhythm,
as life exists if there is a pulse."
The remainingitems on my list requireno more than enumeration.
They are, principally, the fact that the pitch of an entry sometimes
differs in early and final sketches; and that metronome marks are
often at such variancewith the score as to suggest a radicallydifferent
conceptionof the characterof the music; which is importantbecause a
composermay have a characterin mind before he has, say, a theme.
The fact that ideas do not always occur in the sequence of the completed composition is not a phenomenonpeculiar to Stravinsky, of
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course, but the unfailing appearance, in the latter part of whatever

movement he is composing, of a capsule sketch of the next movement,
is extraordinary. Finally, it should be said that while instrumental
specifications are rarely drastically different between sketches and full
score, the changes are more substantial, nevertheless, than in the case
of any other Stravinsky opus except Les Noces. The present collection
does not afford a complete survey of the instrumental formation of the
work, and the late stages are not accounted for at all, a fact I judge
from a few draft pages for the full score still in Stravinsky's possession.
V
-the mujic of the footure on the barbarihams of the bashed?
Finnegans Wake
It is difficult or impossible to sweep away the incrustations of fifty
years and reconstruct the effect of The Rite of Spring in 1913. (Cf.
Huizinga's classic discussion of the problem of trying to imagine the
vividness of color and sound in medieval life.) Moreover, the attempt
to compare that remote musical age with our own would entail a full
modern history of the art; and not only of the art, for if we can no
longer imagine the original effect even of the sheer noise of The Rite,
it is also because we have suffered so many louder and less musical
concussions since. We know that the music was received, and was in
part intended as an act of iconoclasm; Stravinsky still associates the
creation of it with his hatred of the Conservatory and of the three
syllables, which, pronounced in the order Gla-zu-nov, will spoil
his temper even now. Only yesterday the composer remarked that
he "knew nothing of the classical tradition at the time of The Rite"he meant the St. Petersburg academic tradition, and he was not giving
himself hard marks-"but I did know how to write The Rite." Which
seems good enough.
Let us try, nevertheless, if only as an illustration of the problem, to
probe some of the reasons for the impact, in 1913, of the rhythmic
element alone; or, isolation being impossible, of the dominant aspects
of rhythmic novelty, for no one was unmoved or uninfluenced by its
rhythmic innovations, even those who perceived that the structural
basis of them was the simple device of ostinato which was employed
in every dance. Consider the exoticism of the polyrhythms in the
Procession of the Sage, and how in 1913 they must have seemed to
have had more in common with African than with other European
music; and remember that the prestige of the philobarbaro (to borrow
Plutarch's word) in all the arts was much greater then than now.
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Imagine, too, how the semblance of mechanisation in the robotic beat,

which at times holds the stage virtually by itself, must have seemed
as modern as airplanes in 1913. And contrast this with 1965 when
crude pulsation has melted away to such an extent that we rarely
denigrate conductors as time-beaters anymore but only as cue-givers,
stopwatch watchers, coordinators or arbiters between chance effects
and calculated and controlled ones; in such surroundings The Rite
holds no sway, of course (Goethe: "in great art chance and fancy are
gone. What is there is there of necessity"), but that should surprise
no one, for children at a certain age are never as impressed by their
parents as they are by their playmates. In 1913, with The Rite, new
music acquired a modern facade (no pejorative connotations), a twodimensional, icon-like objectivity (three cliches of the time) it had
hitherto lacked, and which made it seem newer (it is nearly the other
way around today) than, for example, the music of Schoenberg, with
its tumescent Innigkeit and paranoid self-consciousness (all periodpiece adjectives, like the Stravinsky), for it is not difficult to suppose
something of the effect of The Rite as a challenge to the emotion of
Middle-European music, and to see why the new spirits in French
music welcomed the young Russian as though he were a second front.
Other factors of the new rhythm were the primacy of syncopation,
of which Stravinsky became the patron saint, and the irregularity of
accentuation and meter. The shifting of accents by varying the meters
or by dislocating the beat is, in fact, the one ingredient of the early
Stravinskyan legacy that is still a part of the canon of contemporary
music, and is still in daily circulation. But the irregularity, in the
case of the long-familiar Rite, has lost its effect. Most of the seven
and five meters subdivide into groupings of twos and threes, a fact the
revised editions acknowledge; and the possible patterns of twos and
threes, no matter how they are juggled, do not offer a high potential of
the unexpected, for after one or two or three repetitions of either the
time will always seem to be ripe for the other. In the last section of
the Sacrificial Dance, the case in point, where the basic meter is three
and twos are the exceptions, the effect can sound precariously like a
waltz with jumped record grooves.
The most subtle aspect of rhythm in The Rite lies in a very different
area, and one that, so far as I can discover, has never been noticed. It
is the absence of dotted rhythms, of the iambics of Bach and eighteenth-century classicism and, indeed, of European music as a whole
during the three centuries preceding our own. It is surely an achievement, of a kind, merely to have created a work of such scope without
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them, though I advance the point not for that reason, but as a measure
of the rhythmic revolution of The Rite and of its anticlassicism.
Whether or not The Rite began as a bomb hurled at classicism, it
has become (what an old story this is) a classic itself. And if it is a
classic, at present, only in the sense of popularity, it will eventually
satisfy other senses as well, for however alien it may be to the ground
in which musical classics have heretofore occurred, the ground is
changing and the center of gravity shifting. In the reapportioning of
the background brought about by such younger composers-and now
world powers-as Pierre Boulez, whose own music lies outside the
Central European tradition as Stravinsky's does and for whom the
Russian composer's masterpiece paved a part of the way, The Rite of
Spring is as much a classic as a Beethoven symphony. It contains as
much of the genius of its age, of the ethos of this so-far century, as any
one musical creation, and it has already demonstrated an impressive
resilience to fashion: a "Spring" that survives not only its own investiture but fifty years of our heavy season-to-season mortality is already,
by today's standards, a ver perpetuum. Who, I wonder, could predict
anything about the musician's world at the end of another fifty yearsassuming there will be one, that the future will happen-and with
results so perfectly on target as Florent Schmitt's crystal gazing in
La France, December 30, 1912:
... vers Noel 1960, leurs arriere-rejetons [de la publique] egalement
en retard d'un demi-siecle, decouvriront enfin Debussy et Strawinsky devenus officiellement acclamables....

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