The Rite of Spring

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The Rite of Spring

• Music Igor Stravinsky

Choreography Vaslav Nijinsky
Scenario Igor Stravinsky and Nicholas Roerich
Costumes and Sets Nicholas Roerich
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Initial Commission

• To construct a ballet that recreates the terror
  experienced by ancient Slavs during a pagan
  sacrificial rite that takes place to ensure the
  fertility of the land and of the tribe

The Chosen
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• Envisioning a primitive society of the far
  Russian steppes involved in ritual sacrifice,
  Stravinsky worked with set and costume designer
  Nicholas Roerich.

Nicholas Roerich
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• The work was composed between 1911 and 1913 for
  Sergei Diaghilevs Ballets Russes.

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Synopsis

• The two act ballet portrays a tribe through
  several scenes with processions of maidens,
  elders, a centuries-old female diviner, a Sage
  and the Chosen One, who is plucked from the young
  women and dances to death for the sake of
  communal continuity.

The Chosen
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Premiere of the Ballet

• The Rite of Spring premiered at the Thèâtre des
  Champs Elysées on May 29, 1913.
• As soon as the curtain went up, a riot ensued.

Theatre des Champs Elysees
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Audience Reaction

• upset with the subject of barbarism, a subject
  that the world was not yet ready to deal with
• upset that Nijinsky had "turned the conventions
  of ballet inside out"
• upset with Stravinskys disregarding the accepted
  rules of musical composition

The Sage
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Ballet

• The choreography boldly dispenses with grace and
  beauty to emphasize awkward, primitive movement.
• The corps de ballet dance on the outer ball of
  their feet.
• Dancers stomp, jump, and shake uncontrollably to
  express their terror.

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• One of the dancers recalled that Vaslav
  Nijinsky's shocking choreography was physically
  unnatural to perform
• "With every leap we landed heavily enough to
  jar every organ in us."

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Influences on the ChoreographyThe Meaning

• The pull of the earth is evident in the weighted
  steps.
• Driven purpose and frenzy is expressed in the
  repetitive and jagged action, with pounding jumps
  and contorted positions.

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Influences on the ChoreographyThe Costumes

• The patterns Roerich had hand-painted on the
  dancers' coarse smocks, in fact, came to
  influence Nijinsky's choreography.
• The choreography mirrored the geometric motifs in
  circular movements and linear arrangements.

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The MusicOverview

• The music itself is angular, loud, dissonant and
  totally unpredictable so as to suggest terror.

The young maidens
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The MusicOverview

• The music violated all pre-conceptions of beauty,
  harmony, tone and rhythmic order that we are
  familiar with in "music".

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• Stravinsky's score provides percussive
  polyrhythms and jarring orchestral colors to
  create a seemingly primeval experience.

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In Stravinskys own Words

• The works embryo is a theme that came to me
  after I had finished The Firebird. As this theme
  and what followed from it was conceived in a
  brutal and forthright manner, I took as
  developmental pretext what that music actually
  evoked, that is, prehistoric Russia as I, being
  myself Russian, conceive it. But bear in mind
  that this idea comes from music, not the music
  from the idea.

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The Shock of the New

• harmonically adventurous
• emphasis on dissonance used for its own sake
• rhythmically harsh, with a number of sections
  having constantly changing time signatures and
  unpredictable off-beat accents

Pablo Picasso. Portrait of Stravinsky
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Use of Repetition to Replace Harmonic Progression

• Pitted two chords against each other at the same
  time
• Took one dissonant cluster of notes, hammering
  them over and over until he felt that a change
  was called for aesthetically
• Then another cluster of notes would follow, but
  in another pitch determined by Stravinsky himself
  rather than the old laws of sound

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Use of Harsh Sounds

• Loud
• Huge orchestra eight French horns, four
  trumpets, a piccolo trumpet and a bass trumpet,
  three trombones, two tubas and large woodwinds,
  string, and percussion sections.
• Strings play down bow
• Instruments muffled by mutes
• Plenty of jarring percussion
• Lack of melody
• Lack of harmony
• Lack of regular rhythms

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Part I Adoration of the Earth

• Introduction
• Dances of the young girls
• Ritual of abductions
• Round dance
• Ritual of the two rival tribes
• Procession of the oldest and wisest one
• The kiss of the earth
• The dancing out of the earth

)
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Introduction

• In the introduction, Stravinsky called for a
  bassoon to play higher in its range than anyone
  else had ever done.
• This introduction is very folk-like and adapted
  from a Lithuanian folk song.

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The Adoration of the Earth

• When the curtain rose and the dancing began,
  there appeared a musical theme without a melody,
  only a loud, pulsating, dissonant chord with
  jarring, irregular accents.

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The Adoration of the Earth

• The bassoon solo sets off a series of short,
  fragmented, repeating solos that begin to overlap
  and pile up on each other, building up to a
  controlled chaos that foreshadows some of the
  real tension to come.

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Part II The Sacrifice

• Introduction
• Mystic circle of the young girls
• The naming and honoring of the Chosen One
• Evocation of the ancestors (Ancestral Spirits)
• Ritual action of the ancestors
• Sacrificial Dance (the Chosen One)