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Madison Symphony Orchestra Program Notes
February 13, 2022
96th Season
Michael Allsen
One of our most
popular features over the past few seasons have been
presentations in the Beyond the Score® series developed by the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra. These innovative programs combine
live actors, multimedia, and the orchestra to present deep and
entertaining background on a featured work—followed by
performance of the full work. At this program, actors James
Ridge, Kelsey Brennan, and David Daniel from American Players
Theatre will be on stage for the story of Stravinsky’s
revolutionary ballet score, The Rite of Spring.
Notorious
for the riot at its first performance in 1913, Stravinsky’s
ballet The Rite of Spring is one
of the defining works of the early 20th century. Rite tells a story of
ritual and human sacrifice in ancient pagan Russia. Its music
was uncompromisingly avant
garde for the day, ranging from moments of lyricism and
mystery to primitive violence.
Igor Stravinsky
Born:
June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum, Russia.
Died:
April 6, 1971, New York City.
The
Rite of Spring
•
Composed: 1911-1912.
•
Premiere: May 29, 1913, under
the direction of Pierre Monteaux, at a performance of the
Ballet Russe in Paris.
•
Previous MSO Performance:
2007.
•
Duration: 35:00.
Background
By 1909, Stravinsky, a student of the great
Russian nationalist Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, had already made
his mark in Russia with works such as the Symphony No.1 and Fireworks. His big
break came in late 1909, however, when he received a telegram
from Serge Diaghilev, inviting him to Paris to write a ballet
score for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. Diaghliev was a
phenomenally successful impresario who had more or less
singlehandedly engineered a craze for Russian art and music in
early 20th-century Paris. He had put together successful shows
of Russian traditional painting, and productions of Russian
opera in the years before 1909. His most successful venture,
however, was the Ballets Russe, a company largely comprised of
Russian dancers and choreographers. It became the most
influential ballet company of its day, and gained a reputation
for cutting-edge dances that expanded the tradition-bound
limits of classical ballet.
Stravinsky quickly completed The Firebird, on a
scenario based upon an old Russian folk tale. The score was
largely finished by the time he arrived in Paris, and the
ballet was the hit of the 1910 season in Paris. Reaction to
his second score for Diaghilev, Petrushka of
1911—also on a Russian-inspired theme—was every bit as
enthusiastic. The origins of Stravinsky’s third score for
Diaghilev seems to date back to 1909 or 1910. According to
Stravinsky:
“One day, when I
was finishing the last pages of l’Oiseau
de feu [The Firebird] in
St. Petersburg, I had a fleeting vision which came to me
as a complete surprise, my mind at the moment being full of
other things. I saw in my imagination a solemn pagan rite.
Sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance
herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the
God of Spring. I heard and I wrote what I heard. I am the
vessel through which Le
sacre passed.”
He mentioned the idea to a fellow Russian
expatriate, Nicolas Roerich. Roerich was among the most
colorful characters among the large population of Russians in
Paris: a talented painter and poet, he had worked as a set-
and costume-designer for Diaghilev and for other theaters in
Paris. He was had wide-ranging interests in aesthetics and
spirituality—he was one of the first Westerners to advocate
the practice of Yoga, for example. More to the point, Roerich
was also an amateur archeologist and an expert on the culture
and ritual of pre-Christian Russia. Together, he and
Stravinsky created a detailed two-part scenario, and presented
it to Diaghilev, who was supportive.
The
third member of the team that created the ballet was
Diaghilev’s lead dancer, Vaclav Nijinsky. Nijinsky, possibly
one of the finest dancers of all time, was interested in
choreography that would push the boundaries of ballet. His
first effort as a
choreographer was a controversial
and sexually explicit 1912 ballet on Debussy’s Prelude to “The Afternoon
of a Faun” with motions based in part on the stylized
two-dimensional world of Greek vase paintings. For Rite, he created he
created movements that were brutal and deliberately awkward
and primitive: dancers standing pigeon-toed and knock-kneed
rather than the more usual graceful turnout position. Though
much of the score was finished by the time Nijinsky was
involved, he and Stravinsky collaborated closely on the final
version. In many cases, Stravinsky’s rhythms suggested
specific motions, and in others Nijinsky’s choreography
necessitated revisions to the score. The result was something
entirely different than traditional ballet, with its
free-flowing relationship between musical rhythm and dance.
Virtually every note of Rite’s score was reflected in the dancers’ often
violent motions. Though Nijinsky never notated his
choreography, it was reconstructed some 70 years later by
dance historian Millicent Hodson, and performed by the
Chicago's Joffrey Ballet in the 1980s. It was also revived
successfully in 2008 by the Marinsky Theater Ballet of St.
Petersburg.
The
Riot
The premiere of Rite is infamous as
the scene of a riot. An open dress rehearsal on the day before
had been well-attended and uneventful, but on opening night,
the jeers and catcalls began almost immediately, followed
quickly by cries of “Ta
guele!” (“Shut up!”). Twenty years later, Stravinsky
remembered:
“During the whole
performance I was at Nijinsky’s side in the wings. He was
standing on a chair, screaming ‘sixteen, seventeen,
eighteen’—they had their own method of counting to keep time.
Naturally, the poor dancers could hear nothing by reason of
the row in the auditorium and the sound of their own dance
steps. I had to hold Nijinsky by his clothes, for he was
furious, and ready to dash on stage at any moment and create a
scandal. Diaghilev kept ordering the electricians to turn the
lights on or off, hoping in that way to put a stop to the
noise. That is all I can remember about that first
performance.”
Why were they so upset? The riot seems to
have been the work of a small group, a clacque who came
determined to disrupt the performance. The main objection was
probably to Nijinsky’s revolutionary choreography. (Parisians
took their ballet seriously.) But according to biographer
Stephen Walsh: “...the music might
well have merited a riot. Certainly it was to remain the
most notoriously violent score of a time when huge, noisy
orchestras and harsh dissonance were more or less
commonplace appurtenances of the new music.” In any case,
the next night’s performance and several later performances
by the Ballets Russe were received warmly.
The Scenario
Roerich and Stravinsky described the action
of Rite as follows
(Section-titles have been inserted into their synopsis.):
“The
Rite of Spring is a musical-choreographic work. It
represents pagan Russia and is unified by a single idea: the
mystery and great surge of the creative power of Spring. The
piece has no plot, but the choreographic succession is as
follows:
“First Part: THE ADORATION OF THE EARTH—
The Spring celebration. It takes place in the hills. The
pipers pipe and the young men tell fortunes [Augurs of Spring].
The old woman enters. She knows the mystery of nature and
how to predict the future. Young girls with painted faces
come in from the river in single file. They dance the spring
dance. Games start [Dance
of the Abduction]. The Spring Khorovod [Spring Rounds].
The people divide into two groups, opposing each other [Ritual of the Rival
Tribes]. The holy procession of the wise old men [Procession of the Sage].
The oldest and wisest interrupts the spring games, which
come to a stop. The people pause trembling before the great
action. The old men bless the earth. The Kiss of the Earth [The Sage]. The
people dance passionately on the earth, sanctifying it and
becoming one with it [Dance
of the Earth].
“Second Part: THE GREAT SACRIFICE — At
night the virgins hold mysterious games, walking in circles
[Mystic Circles of the
Young Girls]. One of the virgins is consecrated and is
twice pointed to by fate, being caught twice in the
perpetual circle. The virgins honor her, the chosen one,
with a marital dance [Glorification
of the Chosen One]. They invoke the ancestors and
entrust the chosen one to the old wise men [Ritual Action of the
Ancestors]. She sacrifices herself in the presence of
the old men in the great holy dance, the great sacrifice [Sacrificial Dance].”
This is strong stuff—even for progressive
Paris in 1913—and Stravinsky’s revolutionary score is every
bit as powerful as the scenario. Much of the melodic material
of Rite was drawn
from Russian folk songs, though often in highly altered forms
that suggested some of the work’s distinctive rhythms. Rite’s constantly
shifting meters, complex rhythms, and the technical demands
made on virtually every member of a vastly expanded orchestra
make this one of the most challenging pieces in the orchestral
repertoire.
What You’ll Hear
The work begins quietly with the famous
bassoon solo, playing at the extreme upper end of the
instrument’s range. The introduction is dominated by woodwind
timbre. Augurs of
Spring is signaled by a barbaric string rhythm, and when
the young girls enter, the music is only marginally more
gentle. Brass gradually dominate during the violent Ritual of Abduction,
until a sudden break in the tension: high woodwind trills
above a mysterious melody and the ponderous rhythm of the Spring Rounds. The
rounds climax with great gong crash and a savage brass phrase.
The violent games of the rival tribes are represented by in
angry barks from the tubas, and wild trumpet and horn phrases.
The games are gradually taken over by the slow, shambling
approach of the Sage, and the music reaches a peak of
intensity before the Adoration itself: a mysterious chord
played as the Sage painfully falls prone on the ground to kiss
the earth. The concluding Dance of the Earth is
partly a reprise of ideas from the games, but here it reaches
a furious conclusion.
Part II again opens quietly. The scene is
set with a lengthy introduction with delicate woodwind and
string textures above a harmonically static background. The
opening is a scene of thirteen young girls dancing an
intricate interweaving circle dance, played by woodwinds and
strings. This is serious business, as the girl who makes a
mistake becomes the sacrificial victim. Her two missteps are
clearly audible as sudden breaks in the dance. On the second,
she is placed in the center of the Mystical Circle—she has
become the Chosen One, never to leave the circle alive—and the
dance suddenly becomes brutally joyful as the other girls
glorify her. The mysterious entry of the Ancestors is signaled
by low woodwinds—alto flute and bass clarinet—and the music
moves inexorably towards another ferocious climax. The Sacrificial Dance itself
alternates the Ancestors’ ritualistic music with the
increasingly frantic music of the Chosen One as she dances
herself to exhaustion, and finally to death.
________
program
notes ©2021 by J. Michael Allsen