Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring

Peter Hill
                         
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         

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© Peter Hill 2000

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2000

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeset in Ehrhardt 10.5/13pt []

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Hill, Peter, 1948–
Stravinsky: The rite of spring / Peter Hill.
p. cm. (Cambridge music handbooks)
Includes bibliographical references and discography.
ISBN 0 521 62221 2 (hardback) ISBN 0 521 62714 1 (paperback). Stravinsky, Igor,
1882–1971. Vesna svëı̀shchennaëı̀. I. Title: Rite of spring. II. Title.
III. Series.
ML410.S932 H55 2000
784.2'1556 – dc21 00-023703

ISBN 0 521 62221 2 hardback

ISBN 0 521 62714 1 paperback
 Contents

Preface page vii

Part I Prelude
1 Origins 3
2 Sketches 10
3 Rehearsals and first performance 26

Part II The music

4 Language 35
5 Commentary 60

Part III Aftermath

6 Anthology 93
7 Stravinsky’s collaborators 105
8 The Rite recorded 118
9 Conclusion 140

Notes 146
Select discography 162
Bibliography 165
Index 168

v
 1

Origins

The idea of Le Sacre du printemps came to me while I was still composing

The Firebird. I had dreamed a scene of pagan ritual in which a chosen
sacrificial virgin danced herself to death. This vision was not accompanied
by concrete musical ideas, however . . .¹

So runs Stravinsky’s last and best-known account of his first inspiration

for the Rite. There are, however, at least four others from earlier in his
life, each of which has features which are unique. One of the earliest of
these directly contradicts the legend of the Rite’s conception which
Stravinsky later chose to foster. It comes in an article by Stravinsky
written to coincide with the Rite’s first revival, in 1920, in a new
production with supposedly abstract choreography by Massine. Hence
Stravinsky was at pains to stress that the pagan setting of the original
production had been secondary to purely musical ideas. Since these were
in a ‘strong and brutal manner, as a point of departure I used the very
image evoked by the music. Being a Russian, for me this image took
form as the epoch of prehistoric Russia. But bear in mind that the idea
came from the music and not the music from the idea’.²
The earliest of Stravinsky’s accounts, dating from 1912, is the
simplest:³ a ‘first thought’ which ‘came to me as I was finishing The
Firebird, spring 1910’. What the ‘thought’ was Stravinsky does not say,
but in 1931 in the biography by André Schæffner, based largely on
conversations with Stravinsky, this had become a ‘dream’ – ‘A ballet
unfolded, consisting of a single dance, danced to the point of exhaus-
tion, of a young girl before a group of elders of fabulous age, desiccated
almost to petrifaction.’⁴ Four years later, in Stravinsky’s autobiography,
the dream is a ‘fleeting vision’ – ‘I saw in imagination a solemn pagan
rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself
3
4 Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring

to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.’⁵

Thought, vision, dream – it hardly matters, though it is worth noting
how often in Stravinsky’s life he had such premonitions (L’Histoire du
Soldat and the Octet are notable examples).⁶ The discrepancies suggest
that Stravinsky’s memoirs need to be treated with caution.⁷ Nonetheless
the progression between the second and third of these accounts may well
describe the evolution of Stravinsky’s ideas in 1910 – the dancer’s
exhaustion becomes her death, this in turn leads to the idea of human
sacrifice, and so to a setting in pagan prehistory. And the best evidence
that, details apart, this is the true version of events – that the idea of the
ballet did indeed come to Stravinsky before the music – is the fact that
he at once turned for help to Nikolai Roerich, Russia’s leading expert in
folk art and ancient ritual. As Stravinsky put it in his first account of the
ballet’s conception, ‘who else could help me, who else knows the secret
of our ancestors’ close feeling for the earth?’⁸
Stravinsky moved fast. Already only two months later, by the time he
left for Paris in May to attend rehearsals of The Firebird, he and Roerich
had met, had decided on a title – ‘The Great Sacrifice’ – and a libretto
was in existence together with a sheet of musical sketches. So much is
clear from the earliest letter in the Stravinsky–Roerich correspondence
to have survived.⁹ It was written in haste from Stravinsky’s home at
Ustilug whence he had returned, a week after The Firebird ’s première
(25 June 1910), in order to bring his family to Paris so that his wife,
Catherine, could enjoy at first hand the ballet’s triumph (the Paris run
had been extended after planned performances in London had been
cancelled on the death of Edward VII on 6 May).¹⁰ Stravinsky’s letter
has a faintly deferential tone. Its main purpose seems to have been to
reassure Roerich of Stravinsky’s credentials by dwelling on the details of
The Firebird ’s reception – before this triumph Stravinsky’s standing as a
composer had been negligible.
The correspondence makes clear the value Stravinsky placed on
Roerich’s participation. Roerich was a rare blend of scholar with artist
and visionary. He began his career as an archaeologist, training as a
painter at the St Petersburg Academy, and his subsequent prolific
output was rooted in his studies in anthropology and archaeology.
Benois remembered him as ‘utterly absorbed in dreams of prehistoric,
patriarchal and religious life – of the days when the vast, limitless plains
 Origins 5

of Russia and the shores of her lakes and rivers were peopled with the
forefathers of the present inhabitants. Roerich’s mystic, spiritual experi-
ences made him strangely susceptible to the charm of the ancient world.
He felt in it something primordial and weird, something that is intimate-
ly linked with nature – with that Northern nature he adored, the
inspiration of his finest pictures’.¹¹ The Forefathers was painted in 1911,
precisely at the time of Roerich’s collaboration with Stravinsky. The
picture might almost be a sketch for the opening of the Rite, whose early
pages quiver with the sound of dudki (pipes). Here, Orpheus-like,
primitive man charms with his piping a circle of wild beasts, in this case
bears, reflecting the Slavic tradition that bears were man’s forefathers.¹²
One reason for Stravinsky’s approach to Roerich must have been the
success of his famously austere designs¹³ for Act 2 of Borodin’s Prince
Igor, produced as part of Diaghilev’s Saison Russe in Paris in 1909.
Although Stravinsky cannot have seen the production he must have
been aware of the sensation they created – ‘an empty, desolate landscape,
in which are pitched the beehive tents of the Polovtsi, and the smoke of
their camp-fires rises against a tawny sky. The Parisian audience have
the strange sensation of being transported to the ends of the earth’.¹⁴
Roerich must have received the approach from Stravinsky with a
strong sense of destiny. The previous year Roerich had published ‘Joy in
Art’, a lengthy essay whose climax Richard Taruskin calls ‘a lyrical
Neolithic fantasy’.¹⁵ A passage from this describes the springtime festivi-
ties – ‘A holiday. Let it be the one with which the victory of the
springtime sun was always celebrated. When all went out into the woods
for long stretches of time to admire the fragrance of the trees: when they
made fragrant wreaths out of the early greenery, and adorned themselves
with them. When swift dances were danced . . . When horns and pipes of
bone and wood were played . . .’¹⁶
The resemblance to the Rite gives some support to Roerich’s later
claim that the idea for the Rite was entirely his and had nothing to do
with Stravinsky. According to this version of events, it was Diaghilev
who had the idea of teaming Roerich with his new discovery,
Stravinsky.¹⁷ Roerich then offered Stravinsky two ready-made scenarios
– ‘A Game of Chess’ and ‘The Great Sacrifice’ – Stravinsky choosing
the latter.¹⁸ However, the correspondence between Stravinsky and
Roerich, in which it is clear that the new ballet was for the time being to
6 Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring

be a secret from Diaghilev, proves otherwise.¹⁹ When, in the aftermath

of the success of The Firebird, Diaghilev approached Stravinsky with the
idea of a ballet based on Poe’s The Mask of the Red Death, Stravinsky had
to admit that he had another project in view. Diaghilev, scenting
disloyalty, was so enraged that Stravinsky was forced to admit the details
of the new ballet; fortunately, Diaghilev’s reaction to the proposal was
one of delight.²⁰ The likely explanation for the discrepancies between the
accounts by Roerich and Stravinsky is that the composer’s vision of
human sacrifice was indeed the spark, while the details of the festivities
to which the sacrifice would be the climax came from Roerich.²¹
Having revealed his plans for the new ballet to Diaghilev and received
his encouragement, Stravinsky was impatient to begin work. Writing to
Roerich from La Baule in Brittany, Stravinsky reveals that he has started
making sketches for the music even while still waiting to receive from
Roerich the two versions of the ballet’s libretto. He asks, ‘Have you done
anything for it yet?’ a reference to Roerich’s projected designs for the
sets and costumes.²²
In the event ‘our child’ (as Stravinsky called the ballet in his letters to
Roerich) had to wait another year for, as Stravinsky describes in his
autobiography, he was unexpectedly side-tracked. ‘Before tackling the
Sacre du Printemps, which would be a long and difficult task, I wanted to
refresh myself by composing an orchestral piece in which the piano
would play the most important part . . . I had in mind a distinct picture
of a puppet, suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of
the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios.’²³ Initially conceived
as a Pièce Burlesque,²⁴ the idea rapidly took shape in Stravinsky’s mind
for a dramatic work, with the maverick piano part representing the
Russian folk puppet, Petrushka. Thus it was that when Diaghilev and
Nijinsky visited Stravinsky in Lausanne at the end of September 1910
expecting to hear work in progress on the Rite, they heard instead
Stravinsky play this new composition, which he called ‘Petrushka’s
Cry’.²⁵
For almost exactly a year – the year of Petrushka – the Stravinsky–
Roerich correspondence ceases, their only contact being a message via
Benois (in a letter dated 3 November 1910) with an apology for inter-
rupting their work and an excuse – ‘I’d never be able to have ‘‘The Great
Sacrifice’’ ready by April, which was the deadline Diaghilev set . . .’²⁶ But
 Origins 7

by July the following year Stravinsky, now back in Russia at his home in
Ustilug, was impatient to recommence. ‘I feel it is imperative that we see
each other to decide about every detail – especially every question of
staging . . .’²⁷ Roerich, however, was hard at work with another project.
He had designed (in neo-Russian style) the church on the estate of his
patron Princess Tenisheva at Talashkino (near Smolensk) and was now
executing interior and exterior murals and mosaics – the painting
discussed earlier (The Forefathers) is a study for the mosaic over the
church’s main entrance. So there was nothing for it but to go to
Talashkino, a trip which proved unexpectedly hazardous as well as
inconvenient: in order to expedite the journey Stravinsky travelled the
section from Brest-Litovsk to Smolensk in a cattle car in which he found
himself penned in with a none-too-friendly bull.²⁸
There is something so apt about Talashkino as the birthplace of the
Rite that the place and its formidable owner deserve a digression. The
Princess was a passionate admirer of Russian folk art, and had founded a
wood-carving workshop on the lines of the museum and workshops at
Abramtsevo founded in the 1870s by the railway tycoon Savva Mamon-
tov.²⁹ Despite or perhaps because of their common interest, relations
between the two were strained: the Princess regarded the products of
Abramtsevo as unimaginative. Moreover the Princess harboured a
grudge: as a singer she had been rejected in 1885 on auditioning for
Mamontov’s opera company.³⁰ Nonetheless the two had agreed jointly
to sponsor Diaghilev’s World of Art magazine (the first issue appeared in
1898) on the understanding, largely unfulfilled, that the magazine would
emphasise crafts and industrial design.³¹ Relations between the Princess
and Diaghilev, always uneasy, finally foundered in 1903 when she failed
to persuade Diaghilev to appoint Roerich as editor in place of Benois.
The magazine closed the following year.
In the propitious surroundings of Talashkino work on the Rite
prospered and within a few days, as Stravinsky later recalled, the plan of
action and titles of the dances had been decided. Roerich began work on
the designs, sketching backdrops and seeking inspiration in the Prin-
cess’s collection for his costume designs.³² No documents have survived
from the meeting, but a few months before the première Stravinsky
enclosed a summary of the libretto in a letter to Nikolai Findeyzen,
editor of the Russian Musical Gazette.
8 Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring

In a few days we worked out the libretto which – roughly – follows. ‘The
name of the First Part is The Kiss of the Earth. It contains the ancient
Slavic games, ‘‘The Joy of Spring.’’ Orchestral introduction: a swarm of
spring pipes [dudki]. Then after the curtain rises, fortunetelling;
Khorovod (ritual games of dancing in a ring); a Khorovod game ending in
exhaustion; Khorovod games between two villages. All of this is interrup-
ted by the procession of ‘‘The Old Wise Man’’, who kisses the earth. The
first part ends in a frenzied dance of the people drunk with spring.
Part Two. The secret night-games of the maidens on the sacred hill. One
of them is consecrated for the sacrificial offering. She enters a stone
labyrinth while the other maidens glorify her in a wild, martial dance.
Then the ‘‘Old Wise Men’’ arrive, and the chosen one is left alone with
them. She dances her last ‘‘Sacred Dance’’, The Great Offering, which is
the title of the Second Part. The Old Wise Men witness this last dance,
which ends with the death of the chosen one.’³³

The next account by Stravinsky was the much more detailed résumé
published in the avant-garde journal Montjoie! on the very day of the
Rite’s first performance, 29 May 1913. This fascinating document –
hotly disputed by Stravinsky who condemned it as a travesty despite
overwhelming evidence that he was its author – adds many vivid
details.³⁴ The first scene features a woman of immense age ‘who knows
the secrets of nature and who teaches her sons Divination . . . The
adolescent boys beside her are the Augurs of Spring who mark with their
steps, on the spot, the rhythm of spring’. The games become war-like as
the groups ‘separate and enter into combat, messengers going from one
to another, quarrelling’. In Part II the stone labyrinth is replaced by the
marking out of a circle within which the Chosen One will be confined.
Finally as she dances her Sacrificial Dance the Ancestors perceive her
exhaustion and ‘glide towards her like rapacious monsters, so that she
may not touch the ground in falling; they raise her and hold her towards
the sky . . .’³⁵
Finally there is the programme note written by Stravinsky at the
request of the conductor Koussevitzky for the first Russian concert
performance of the Rite (18 February 1914). In this we learn two further
details which are clearly reflected in Stravinsky’s score. Besides the old
woman and the adolescent boys the first scene is overlooked by cel-
ebrants seated on hills who blow dudki. Later the choosing of the maiden
 Origins 9

is made more specific than in earlier accounts – ‘Fate points to her twice:
twice she is caught in one of the circles without an exit’³⁶ – fateful
moments pinpointed by the stinging tocsins³⁷ for muted horns and
trumpets which interrupt the maidens’ round dance.