“Bluffing the idle rich of Paris through appeals to their snobbery is a delightfully simple matter.... The process works out as follows: Take the best society possible, composed of rich, simple-minded, idle people. Then submit them to an intense régime of publicity. By pamphlets, newspaper articles, lectures, personal visits and all other appeals to their snobbery, persuade them that hitherto they have seen only vulgar spectacles, and are at last to know what is art and beauty. Impress them with cabalistic formulæ. They have not the slightest notion of music, literature, painting, and dancing; still, they have heretofore seen under these names only a rude imitation of the real thing. Finally assure them that they are about to see real dancing and hear real music. It will then be necessary to double the prices at the theater, so great will be the rush of shallow worshipers at this false shrine.”
Mr. Carl Van Vechten describes the scene in his book: Music after the Great War:
“I attended the first performance in Paris of Stravinsky’s anarchistic (against the canons of academic art) ballet, The Rite of Spring, in which primitive emotions are both depicted and aroused by a dependence on barbarous rhythm in which melody and harmony, as even so late a composer as Richard Strauss understands them, do not enter. A certain part of the audience, thrilled by what it considered to be a blasphemous attempt to destroy music as an art, and swept away with wrath, began very soon after the rise of the curtain to whistle, to make cat-calls, and to offer audible suggestions as to how the performance should proceed. Others of us, who liked the music and felt that the principles of free speech were at stake, bellowed defiance. It was war over art for the rest of the evening, and the orchestra played on unheard, except occasionally when a slight lull occurred. The figures on the stage danced in time to music that they had to imagine they heard, and beautifully out of rhythm with the uproar in the auditorium. I was sitting in a box, in which I had rented one seat. Three ladies sat in front of me, and a young man occupied the place behind me. He stood up during the course of the ballet to enable himself to see more clearly. The intense excitement under which he was laboring, thanks to the potent force of the music, betrayed itself presently when he began to beat rhythmically on the top of my head with his fists. My emotion was so great that I did not feel the blows for some time. They were perfectly synchronized with the beat of the music. When I did, I turned around. His apology was sincere. We had both been carried beyond ourselves.”
There were five performances in Paris that season.
When this ballet was brought out at Drury Lane, London, on July 11, 1913, with Mr. Monteux conductor, it was thought advisable to send a lecturer, Mr. Edwin Evans, in front of the curtain, to explain the ideas underlying the ballet. At the end of the performance there was greater applause than hissing.
The music of this ballet was performed for the first time in concert form by an orchestra conducted by Mr. Monteux at one of his concerts at the Casino de Paris in Paris on April 5, 1914, when it was enthusiastically applauded.
And now The Rite of Spring is acclaimed by many as Stravinsky’s “greatest work.”
The orchestration is as follows: piccolo, 3 flutes (the third interchangeable with a second piccolo), bass flute; five oboes (the fourth interchangeable with English horn); small clarinet in E flat, three clarinets and bass clarinet; three bassoons, two double bassoons; eight horns (two interchangeable with tenor tubas); small trumpet in D, three trumpets in C, bass trumpet; three trombones; two bass tubas; kettledrums, bass drum, two antique cymbals, tam-tam, scratcher, and strings.
JOSEPH DEEMS
TAYLOR
(Born at New York, December 22, 1885)