On May 29, 1913, a riot broke out among audience members witnessing the premiere of a piece that changed classical music history. The composer, Igor Stravinsky, was horrified; the impresario, Serge Diaghilev, was delighted.
Feelings ran high at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris that night, from the very opening bars of Stravinsky’s ballet “Le Sacre du Printemps” (“The Rite of Spring”), choreographed by the great Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.
The audience was not expecting a ballet with such extreme primitive and anti-balletic movement. What they got was a pagan spectacle with savage, pulsing rhythms, performed by dancers with bent torsos and turned-in feet. Boos and catcalls escalated to slaps and fisticuffs. The brouhaha was so loud, according to reports from the scene, that the dancers could not hear the music pounding up out of the orchestra pit.
Diaghilev flipped the house lights on and off hoping to quell the disturbance, while Nijinsky yelled out the beats from the wings to give the dancers something to dance to.
Left: Piano score for “Le Sacre du Printemps” (“The Rite of Spring”), 1913. Music Division. Right: Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, 1913. Music Division.
Gendarmes arrived and hauled out some of the most obstreperous patrons between parts I and II, but the mania broke out again following that intermission.
Stravinsky, writing about the incident later—after “Le Sacre du Printemps” was safely recognized as a classic—said the incident left him deeply dismayed. But buzzmeister Diaghilev famously remarked, “It was just what I wanted.”
