Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring: From Ballet to Modern Symphony
Almost every classical music lover has learned about Rite of Spring’s controversial premiere in 1913: a scandalous ballet choreography combined with brutal music that elicited strong reactions from the audience. Today though, the Rite of Spring is rarely performed as a ballet. Instead, it has gained popularity as a standalone orchestral piece, and is a regular feature in the programs of major orchestras around the world. The New York Philharmonic premiered this format of the Rite of Spring in 1925, and the concert’s program notes reveal how its ensuing popularity may have been by design.
It is easy to imagine the Rite of Spring alone as a storytelling piece, similar to how Berlioz based the entire structure of his Symphonie Fantastique on a story. However, the above quote by Stravinsky puts the Rite of Spring in a different category all together. He makes it clear that even the general concept of prehistoric Russian symbolism did not exist before he conceived the piece, not to mention the actual storyline. Because of this, it is clear that the inspiration for the Rite of Spring came from within Stravinsky, not from any external source.
The source of inspiration connects directly to how well a ballet score stands alone in concert. While many suites from ballets are very popular in symphony orchestra concerts, including the suite from the Firebird, they require a reimagining from the composer in order to be divorced from their accompanying ballet. In their original form, too much of the emotional content and direction of the piece relies on support from the events happening in the ballet. A more dramatic version of this issue is with a film score. Hearing an entire film score on its own would be baffling, considering the composer’s inspiration came entirely from a fully written, produced, and edited film that their music must be tailored to. In the case Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring though, his ‘architectonic’ process as he described it is more similar to a Beethoven symphony, where the composer sits down and creates a self-perpetuating structure, driven by the direction of their internal inspiration.
It surprised me to find out in the passage above that Nijinsky’s legendary choreography was discarded after just the first set of performances. It is standard practice for ballets to be rechoreographed, but Leonide Massine’s elimination of “all anecdotic or symbolic detail” reduces a revolutionary storytelling choreography about pagan Russia to a mere accompaniment to Stravinsky’s music. Massine’s interpretation can actually be used as evidence to make a bolder claim: the Rite of Spring not only works well as a standalone orchestral piece, but that is its best and most natural form. Because Stravinsky was not drawing inspiration from Nijinsky’s choreography or Diaghilev’s production, their contributions were only embellishments to the musical content that exists in the score, and Massine felt his responsibility was simply to not get in the way of that content. Given that ballet never was a crucial element, it makes sense that the Rite of Spring remains most popular when performed without it.
Edwin Evan’s was the first to use the term “modern symphony” when describing the Rite of Spring, and he seemed willing to disregard any connection to ballet or storytelling whatsoever. However, the author of these program notes called into question Mr. Evan’s inconsistency with using the exact scene titles that appear in the ballet. If it is a truly abstract work, how can it have scenes that progress logically from one to another? This shows to me the blurred line between a piece that is inspired from within the composer and one that is inspired by a pre-set story. While it may have been difficult to choreograph a ballet of the Rite of Spring that measured up to its ‘symphony’ form, it is clear that the story of pagan Russia still fits the piece like a glove; after all, Stravinsky himself developed that idea immediately after the piece’s composition. Today, programs continue to list the scene titles and explain the story behind the Rite of Spring, as it can only listeners to relate to Stravinsky’s music better.