On The Rite of Spring
As seen in the GDP newsletter.
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By the end of May, a 7:30 dinner reservation no longer feels like midnight, the wind is ripping down Market Street, and you have to sell a kidney to get an outdoor table at Balboa on a Saturday afternoon. It’s springtime in San Francisco.
On May 29, 1913, Parisians would have also been enjoying their first few weeks of spring, perhaps donning a light wrap as they traveled to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées for the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s latest ballet.
My first encounter with The Rite of Spring was freshman year at the Manhattan School of Music. Already feeling like a Midwestern outsider, I was desperate to comprehend and revere it at the same level as my brilliant, orchestral classmates. Except… I didn’t. I didn’t even like it.
Luckily for my ego, neither did just about anyone at its Premiere Parisienne. At least at first. Because nearly 100 years before my first exposure, Le Tout-Paris was rioting. Literally.
Perhaps they thought a ballet about spring would be joyful, floral and effervescent like the glass of champagne they’d enjoy at intermission. Instead, they were hit with the first notable example of modernism in music, filled with brutality, barbaric rhythms, and dissonance. Mon dieu!
The uproar grew so loud the dancers could no longer hear the music. Stravinsky's depiction of pagan Russia through various primitive rituals was unsettling, then highly upsetting as a young girl was chosen as a sacrifice (naturellement) and danced herself to death. Fin.
I myself was rioting only on the inside. I’d become a pro at not grimacing every time I sipped a beer, so fatuously extolling Stravinsky’s genius? Piece of cake. That opening high-register bassoon solo? Evocative. Those polytonal chords? Brilliant. The short, irregular motifs? Not at all ugly or weird. Wow, was that 40 minutes? It flew by.
But since that first awkward experience, something strange has happened.
Every spring, through some instinct for self-flagellation, I revisit Stravinsky’s masterpiece, and every spring I understand more and more what those nerds were gushing about.
Along with my emerging appreciation of black coffee, blue cheese, and gin martinis, my adult brain accepts and even revels in the dissonance. Conventional melody be damned. My tolerance for discomfort, intensity, and ambiguity has risen as the ballet’s themes of ritual, sacrifice, and the cyclical nature of humanity have started to feel less abstract and more frighteningly real.
Not everything that leaves a lasting impression can or should be loved at first sip, taste, or listen. From beyond the grave, Stravinsky has turned resistance into reflection. For me, that’s the definition of true and lasting artistry. Because over the years, The Rite of Spring hasn’t changed.
But I have.
