resorting to Wagnerian grandiloquence. Stravinsky could never be described as a humble man, yet there was something selfless in the way he made himself a collaborator among collaborators, exchanging ideas with Fokine, Benois, and Diaghilev, adapting his music to their needs. No prophet descending from the mountaintop, he was a man of the world to whom writers, dancers, and painters could relate. Ezra Pound once said, “Stravinsky is the only living musician from whom I can learn my own job.”
One night in 1910, Stravinsky dreamed of a young girl dancing herself to death, and soon after he began to plan Vesna svyashchennaya, or Holy Spring. (The ballet’s standard Western titles, Le Sacre du printemps and The Rite of Spring, miss the “holy” element, the pagan devotion.) Taruskin’s Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions contains the definitive account of the ballet’s gestation. For help in fleshing out the scenario, Stravinsky turned to Roerich, the painter and Slavic guru, who plotted out a sequence of historically accurate springtime rituals. Stravinsky delved into folkloric sources, drawing variously on a book of Lithuanian wedding songs, Rimsky’s folk-song arrangements, and his own memories of peasant singers and professional balladeers at Ustyluh, where he had built his own summer house in 1908. He may also have seen the impeccably prepared folk collections of Yevgeniya Linyova, notated with the help of recording cylinders. Stravinsky hardly matched Bartók in the thoroughness of his research, but he thought carefully about which songs would be most appropriate, favoring geo graphical areas where paganism had persisted longest and emphasizing songs on the theme of spring.
Having assembled his folk melodies, Stravinsky proceeded to pulverize them into motivic bits, pile them up in layers, and reassemble them in cubistic collages and montages. As in Bartók’s Bagatelles, the folk material enters the genetic code of the music, governing all aspects of the organism. Bartók was one listener who had no trouble figuring out what Stravinsky was up to. In a 1943 lecture at Harvard, he called the Rite “a kind of apotheosis of the Russian rural music” and explained how its revolutionary construction was related to the source material: “Even the origin of the rough-grained, brittle, and jerky musical structure, backed by ostinatos, which is so completely different from any structural proceeding of the past, may be sought in short-breathed Russian peasant motives.”
In a resonant phrase, Taruskin calls the Rite a “great fusion” of national and modern sounds. Its folkish and avant-garde traits reinforce each other. Consider that percussive, pungent chord in “The Augurs of Spring,” the one that fuses a major triad with an adjacent dominant seventh. It is not unprecedented: something like it appears in Salome, at the line “She is truly her mother’s child.” But the aim of the gesture is not to outdo the Germans in the race toward total dissonance. Instead, it points up relationships among the simple folkish patterns that surround it. Immediately before the chords begin their stomp, the violins play a little figure that spells out the E-flat portion of the harmony. The winds resume that figure a little later. After several such back-and-forths, the ear can easily pick out the tonal components within any dissonance.
If other composers went further in revolutionizing harmony, none rivaled Stravinsky in the realm of rhythm. Off-the-beat accents had welled up in Firebird and Petrushka, although there the syncopations usually followed a set pattern. In “The Augurs of Spring,” there is no way to predict where the accents will land next. As the composer-critic Virgil Thomson once explained, the body tends to move up and down in syncopated or polyrhythmic music because it wants to emphasize the main beat that the stray accents threaten to wipe out. “A silent accent is the strongest of all accents,” he wrote. “It forces the body to replace it with a motion.” (Think of Bo Diddley’s “Bo Diddley,” with its “bomp ba-bomp bomp [oomph!] bomp bomp.”) In “Augurs” the positioning of the “bomps” and the “oomphs” changes almost from bar to bar, so that the main beat nearly disappears and the syncopations have the field to themselves.
In “Pro cession of the Sage,” Stravinsky takes a different tack: in the climactic eight-bar section, each instrument plays a regular pattern, but almost every pattern is distinct. Tubas play a sixteen-beat figure three times; horns play an eight-beat phrase six times; a guiro plays eight pulses to the bar; the timpani play twelve pulses to the bar; and so on. This is Rapsodie espagnole raised to the nth degree, and it rivals the most intricate structures of West African drumming. As in much African music, asymmetrical “time-line” patterns jostle against a hidden master pulse.
“Une musique nègre,” Debussy called the Rite. There is no evidence that Stravinsky knew African music, although a few early ethnographic studies of that largely unknown realm, such as Henri-Alexandre Junod’s Les Chants et les contes des Ba-Ronga, had circulated. Taruskin points out that irregular rhythms were also a long-standing feature of Russian folk music. But his notion of a “great fusion” in the Rite might ultimately be widened to mean something more than a thoroughgoing assimilation of folk motifs into modern music. These rhythms are global in reach, and at the time they were global in their impact. Jazz musicians sat up in their seats when Stravinsky’s music started playing: he was speaking something close to their language. When Charlie Parker came to Paris in 1949, he marked the occasion by incorporating the first notes of the Rite into his solo on “Salt Peanuts.” Two years later, playing Birdland in New York, the bebop master spotted Stravinsky at one of the tables and immediately incorporated a motif from Firebird into “Koko,” causing the composer to spill his scotch in ecstasy.
The first part of the Rite, which ends with the sweat-inducing crescendo of “Dance of the Earth,” is viscerally exciting, even celebratory. Part II is grittier, swaying between languor and violence. Debussy’s influence is palpable at the outset: the crawling sextuplet figures in the winds and the ghoulishly bouncing string figures in the Introduction come from Debussy’s Nocturnes, as does the snaking flute melody in “Ritual Action of the Ancestors.” But Stravinsky has hardly run out of original ideas. At the end of the latter section the bass clarinet plays a soft, quick, spooky solo—the lower winds periodically show up in the score like black-clad cabaret hosts, ushering the next scandal onstage—and the final “Danse sacrale” begins. Another means of forward propulsion kicks in: in place of regular pulses in simultaneous layers there are variable rhythmic “cells” that expand or contract. As Bartók observed, these features are also ethnographically precise; severe rhythmic and metric asymmetries are common in Russian and Eastern European folk music. The cumulative effect is of exhaustion, not of intensification. The every-which-way pulsation leads to a feeling of stasis. The earth seems to be tiring itself out, just as the young girl is dancing herself to death. At the end comes a morbid spasm.
The notion of a female sacrifice was Stravinsky’s special contribution. As Lynn Garafola points out, no pagan people except for the Aztecs demanded the sacrifice of young girls. Stravinsky was giving voice not to ancient instincts but to the bloodthirstiness of the contemporary West. At the turn of the century, purportedly civilized societies were singling out scapegoats on whom the ills of modernity could be blamed: Russian townspeople were enacting pogroms of Jews, white Americans were lynching young black men, and, closer to home, the denizens of the sixteenth arrondissement had cheered on the anti-Semitic campaign against the Jewish patriot Alfred Dreyfus. Against that backdrop, the urban noises in Stravinsky’s score—sounds like pistons pumping, whistles screeching, crowds stamping—suggest a sophisticated city undergoing an atavistic regression.
More than a few people left the premiere both thrilled and chilled by the experience. Jacques Rivière, who took such joy from Petrushka, spoke no less rapturously of the Rite, but in the end he found himself falling into a despondent mood. “There are works that overflow with accusations, hopes, encouragements,” Rivière wrote. “You suffer, regret, take confidence with them; they contain all the beautiful perturbations of the spirit; you give yourself to them as to the counsel of a friend; they have a moral quality and always partake of pity.” The Rite, he admitted, was not among them.
War
When the guns began firing in August 1914, French, Russian, and English composers were swept away by the same patriotic fervor that had overcome their Austro-German
