Revolutions in Music:
Stravinsky‘s Rite of Spring

You never know when or where revolutions will start. They can be social or political or artistic. Often, these artistic revolutions—revolutions in taste—seem to predict other changes in society.

That’s exactly the case with The Rite of Spring. Igor Stravinsky wrote The Rite of Spring in 1913. It redefined 20th-century music, much as Beethoven’s Eroica had transformed music a century before.

With it, Stravinsky took himself far into the realm of the unconscious. The music seemed designed with no apparent order but driven by pure gut feeling.

Russian Influences

In turn-of-the-century St. Petersburg, everything fashionable seemed to be from anyplace but Russia. The architecture, the music, even the language that the “best” people spoke was French.

But artists of all kinds in Russia revolted against this dependence on European ideas. They wanted to establish a nationalist, Russian identity. A powerful mover among them was Stravinsky’s teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov.

Rimsky had been a member of the so-called “Mighty Handful,” a group of adventurous, original young composers who began writing music that sounded truly Russian. They were inspired by the old myths and epics and fairy tales. And they all used folksongs and chants to give their music a very particular Russian flavor.

Composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov provided lushly orchestrated music that served as the soundtrack for lavish operas and ballets at the imperial theater. But the imperial theater could bog down in bureaucracy and favoritism, stifling the most creative and ambitious artists of the day.

Diaghilev and Paris

Among those artists was Serge Diaghilev, a producer and aesthete with great energy and vision. He believed in the artistic future of all things authentically Russian. In the face of controversy with the imperial theater, Diaghilev went abroad.

Diaghilev knew that Parisian audiences were fascinated by Russian culture, which made Paris the perfect place for Diaghilev’s revolutionary Ballets Russes.

Diaghilev created a new ballet company built on the Parisian fantasies of old Russia. Featuring the exotic, the erotic, and the occult, the Ballets Russes astonished the world in its first season.

For the company’s second season, Diaghilev had promised a daring new ballet, but a crisis loomed when two Russian composers failed to deliver an acceptable score.

Desperate, Diaghilev turned to the young, untried Igor Stravinsky to write the music we now know as The Firebird, which premiered in Paris in 1910. Based on the Slavic myth of a phoenix-like creature who helps a prince triumph over evil, The Firebird was a huge success.

Russian Village Music

Stravinsky wanted to bring music back to the origins of dance. He frequently summered in Ustilug, where he was exposed to the old Russian culture that thrived in villages surrounding his family’s country home.

In the villages, people celebrated the times of planting and harvesting, and the mysteries of gods and fate. Naturally, the villagers celebrated with music, made with whatever they had—their natural, untrained voices, their hands and feet, and instruments which they had often built themselves. The result was a wild, enthusiastic mixture of song and noise.

This kind of music-making made an enormous impression on the young Stravinsky. He wanted to use the sophisticated symphony orchestra to evoke the wild power of village music—the way it sounded and the way it must have felt to the people making it.

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