Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky, c. 1913. Stravinsky recalled fondly of Ravel’s defense

Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky, c. 1913. Stravinsky recalled fondly of Ravel’s defense of The Rite of Spring in later years during one of his Harvard lectures: "I hold that it was wrong to have considered me a revolutionary. When the Rite appeared, many opinions were advanced concerning it. In the tumult of contradictory opinions, my friend Maurice Ravel intervened practically alone to set matters right. He was able to see, and he said, that the novelty of the Rite consisted, not in the writing, not in the orchestration, not in the technical apparatus of the work, but in the musical entity.“