Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Sping) is one of the most powerful and emblematic works of twentieth-century music history. Coming after The Firebird and Petrushka, it was Stravinsky’s third ballet composed for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company in Paris. Subtitled ‘Pictures of Pagan Russia’, the concept of the work came from the composer who described his vision where, ‘I saw in my imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of Spring.’ Composed between 1911 and 1913, the two-part work consists of the following scenes. Part I (Adoration of the Earth): Introduction – The Augurs of Spring (Dances of the Young Girls) – Ritual Abduction – Spring Khorovod (Round Dance) – Ritual of the Rival Tribes – Procession of the Sage – Adoration of the Earth (The Sage) – Dance of the Earth; Part II (The Sacrifice): Mystic Circles of the Young Girls – Glorification of the Chosen One – Evocation of the Ancestors – Sacrificial Dance (The Chosen One).
The Rite of Spring is a product of Stravinsky’s ‘Russian’ period. Rooted in folk music, it often consists of motifs of a few notes only. The deliberately primitive simplicity of the melody is offset by the exciting novelty of the musical construction, the dissonant harmonies and the complexity of rhythm and tempo. The sacrificial dance, for example, owes its elementary effect to the many emphases that throw out of balance the natural accentual relations, and to the irregular alternation of double and triple time. Like one critic fittingly said, ‘Sacre arrived like a bomb, and in the explosion the constituents of the musical idiom were scattered to the point that they would never again be reassembled as before.”