#le sacre du printemps
A posed group of dancers (left to right: Julitska, Marie Rambert, Jejerska, Boni, Boniecka, Faithful) in the original production of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring (1913), showing costumes and backdrop by Nicholas Roerich.
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Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring)
{ Music by Stravinsky, choreography by Nijinsky + costumes by Roerich; first performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1913 }
Valentine Gross-Hugo’s sketches of Nijinsky’s choreography for the Sacrificial DancefromThe Rite of Spring, 1913.
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Pastel drawing by Valentine Gross-Hugo showing a moment from the end of the first scene of Le Sacre du Printemps, 1913.
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Camille Saint-Saëns performing Mozart at the Salle Gaveau, Pierre Monteux conducting—Paris, November 5th, 1913.
Earlier that year, Saint-Saëns was awarded France’s highest order, the Grand-Croix de la Légion d'honneur. It has often been recounted that Saint-Saëns stormed out of the première of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring on 29 May 1913, infuriated over what he considered the misuse of the bassoon in the ballet’s opening bars. In fact, according to Stravinsky, he was not present on that occasion, but did walk out of the first concert performance of the score, conducted by Pierre Monteux in April 1914; Saint-Saëns remarked that Stravinsky was “mad”.
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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.“
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Jean Cocteau in 1909, the year he met Sergei Diaghilev, who encouraged him to venture into the genre of ballet. Cocteau wrote the story for Le Dieu bleu which premiered in May of 1912. A year later, he was in attendance at the premiere of The RIte of Spring, and remarked, rather scathingly, of the crowd “the smart audience in tails and tulle, diamonds and ospreys, was interspersed with the suits and bandeaux of the aesthetic crowd. The latter would applaud novelty simply to show their contempt for the people in the boxes… Innumerable shades of snobbery, super-snobbery and inverted snobbery were represented.”
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Gabriel Astruc, French journalist, agent, promoter, theatre manager, theatrical impresario and founder of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where the first performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was staged in 1913.
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Ballets Russes conductor, Pierre Monteux, posing with crabs. (I really wish I knew the story behind this photo.)
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Sheet showing preliminary sketches of the Danse SacralefromLe Sacre du Printemps, by Valentine Gross, 1913.
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A page from the original manuscript of The Rite of Spring—showing a few bars from The Sacrificial Dance—in Stravinsky’s own hand, with corrections, annotations and scribbles.
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Backdrop forLe Sacre du Printemps, for League of Composers’ production, Philadelphia.
Nicholas Roerich, Tempera on canvas, 1930
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