Dr. Bob Prescribes Igor Stravinsky, Pulcinella Suite

Yesterday’s Music History Monday marked the death of the Russian impresario and polymath Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929).

Serge Diaghilev was a facilitator of genius. His special gift was for “creative administration.” He could spot talent from 100 miles away, then bring that talent together, all the while imposing his own taste, vision, artistic and aesthetic will on a project.  He was a narcissist, an egomaniac, and a born leader, who created a way of doing things that had not existed before him.  The medium of ballet was Diaghilev’s all-inclusive art form – his gesamtkunstwerke – and through ballet he managed to influence almost all the arts of his time, not just dance but music, theater, painting, literature, design, fashion, and early cinema as well.

It was Serge Diaghilev who gave the young Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) the opportunity to become Stravinsky.  Without Diaghilev, Stravinsky would never have become an international sensation at the age of 28.  Without Diaghilev, some of Stravinsky’s greatest masterworks – Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Les Noces, and Pulcinella would never have been composed.  Without Diaghilev, twentieth century music and dance would have evolved in a manner entirely different than it did, and not for the better.

But thanks to Diaghilev’s eye and ear for talent, young Igor did have the opportunity to compose Firebird in 1910, and then Petrushka in 1911, and then Rite of Spring in 1913, the latter being the consensus “most important and influential musical composition of the twentieth century.”

No hyperbole, that. The Rite changed the way composers thought about rhythm, melody, counterpoint, and orchestration, and it continues to exert a seminal influence on composers to this very day.  The Rite of Spring appeared to be devoid of any reference to the long and glorious Western musical tradition as it existed at the time. Rather, it created what appeared to be an entirely new musical language and expressive world: a world devoid of such bourgeois niceties as elegance, prettiness, and grace; a primal, sexual, violent, thrumming, pre-moral musical world in which pure rhythmic energy for its own sake became the principal musical element and the work’s expressive reason-to-be.

The Rite of Spring opened at Paris’ Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on May 29, 1913, as a ballet performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and choreographed by Diaghilev’s lover, the phenomenal Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950).

It was, perhaps, the most famous premiere in the long history of Western music, though admittedly for all the wrong reasons. Stravinsky recalled that opening night this way:

“That the first performance of The Rite of Spring was attended by a scandal must be known to everybody.  Strange as it may seem, I was unprepared for the explosion myself.  The reactions of the musicians who came to the rehearsals were without intimation of it, and the stage spectacle did not “appear” likely to precipitate a riot.  The dancers had been rehearsing for months and they knew what they were doing, even though what they were doing often had nothing to do with the music.  ‘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 necessarily mean we had been together on the way.

Mild protests against the music could be heard from the very beginning of the performance.  Then, when the curtain opened up on the group of knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down, the storm broke.”

Stravinsky continues:

“Cries of ‘shut up!’ came from behind me.  The uproar continued, and a few minutes later I left the hall in a rage; I was sitting on the right near the orchestra, and I remember slamming the door.  I have never again been that angry.  The music was familiar to me; I loved it, and I could not understand why people who had not yet heard it wanted to protest in advance.  I arrived in a fury backstage, where I saw Diaghilev flicking the house lights in a last effort to quiet the hall.  For the rest of the performance I stood in the wings behind Nijinsky, holding the tails of his frac [tailcoat] while he stood on a chair shouting numbers to the dancers, like a coxswain.”

Various eyewitness accounts described the scene in the theater that night.…

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