Offers a succinct account of the genesis of the music composed by Igor Stravinsky for The Rite of Spring, introducing – and challenging – standard scholarly narratives about authorship, the nature of genius and the ‘work’ concept. Provides a timeline to help readers appreciate the development of the score as a collaborative project involving not only Stravinsky, but also visual artist and amateur archaeologist Nicholas Roerich, choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, impresario Sergei Diaghilev and Ballets-Russes soloist Maria Piltz (who danced the role of the Chosen One at the premiere). Considers the nature and significance of Stravinsky’s published sketches, revealing their role in the creation of the ballet and the standard critical responses to it that have dominated throughout the past century.

Summarizes the contents of the volume, focusing on cross-cutting themes: the reality of the premiere; the synthesis of the arts; avant-garde currents of the early twentieth century; Russian folklore and national identity; and the legacy and afterlife of Stravinsky’s score.

This chapter explores the 1965 Bolshoi production of The Rite of Spring, choreographed by husband-and-wife team Natalia Kasatkina and Vladimir Vasilyov and set to Stravinsky’s score. The principal aim is to explain how the production fits into the characteristic aesthetics of the Thaw, the period in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the government of the USSR reformed in the wake of Stalin’s death – and when a surprising Stravinsky revival took place at the Bolshoi Theatre. During this revival, The Rite of Spring appeared not as a strictly socialist realist work, though it did preserve some markers of socialist realist ballet. Rather, it was a production characterized by an avant-garde experimentalism itself in line with an emerging twentieth-century tradition of Rite re-imaginings.

Adopting a wide-angled view of the wealth of music-theoretical literature on Stravinsky’s score for The Rite of Spring that has emerged across the past century, this chapter surveys what has been a noisy corner of music scholarship. Much of the scholarly ink devoted to the work – specifically, to its status as a self-contained, purely musical structure – explores the business of pitch: principally, whether or not Stravinsky’s music can be heard as tonal or atonal, incoherent in its pitch organization or the result of some kind of secret musical code or unifying system, there to be deduced by the all-knowing and expert music analyst. Considering Stravinsky’s own statements on the matter, alongside a succession of highly nuanced music-analytical studies (Allen Forte, Richard Taruskin, Pieter van den Toorn), this chapter provides a detailed synopsis of how and why The Rite’s music has been approached by scholars, and what the resulting literature about the work’s internal genetics can reveal about trending academic perspectives over time.

Begins by considering the visual discrepancy between the earliest photographs of the dancers from the original production of The Rite of Spring (taken by Charles Gerschel) and the sketches made by art student Valentine Gross during rehearsals and first performances: a discrepancy between a dissonant, harsh geometry and an art-nouveau-inspired, impressionistic beauty. Explores how this disjunction reflects a broader cultural anxiety of the period – as apparent in some of the first press reviews of the ballet – about dancing bodies, an aesthetics of ugliness and the grotesque. Describes how Nijinsky’s choreography and its obvious bodily deformity evoked parallels with the avant-garde practices of Futurism, Cubism and primitivism, as well as with a lineage of established ballet traditions (character dance and grotesque ballet). A final section explains how Nijinsky managed to re-frame his dancers on stage so that they could invert the power dynamics of the standard Orientalist gaze.

This chapter addresses an alternative history of The Rite of Spring: principally, as a meme of modernity within popular culture and cinema. Stravinsky’s score, we learn, has inspired countless jazz practitioners and film directors: who, how, when and why are important questions raised, giving the reader a clear sense of the contemporary currency of Stravinsky’s music with an audience of listeners and musicians for whom the original ballet has taken on new life and meaning.

With a focus on Stravinsky’s score and thus the ballet’s musical aspect, this chapter explores several waystations on The Rite of Spring’s journey from ballet to instrumental work – in concert, on record and, most recently, online. Rather than offering a complete history, this account explores a few of the key transformations that took place over the twentieth century as The Rite was re-imagined as a composition for symphony orchestra, allied not with choreography, costumes and décor but with the creative vision of a conductor, the practical skills of a sound editor and the promotional machine of a record label.

Focusing solely on the musical output of composer Igor Stravinsky, this chapter explores the evolution of what would become a characteristic compositional process – so-called ‘block form’ – in later works including Concertino, Symphony in Three Movements and Introitus T. S. Eliot in Memoriam. Close analysis of scores for these works, as well as a 1943 revision of the ‘Sacrificial Dance’ from The Rite, shows how Stravinsky crafted an idiomatic compositional technique that could produce both textural variation and structure coherence, while, in some cases, supporting a musical narrative.

This chapter explores a handful of the many new productions of The Rite of Spring that have been staged since the ballet’s original performance in 1913. Introducing the topic by way of critical reflection on the challenges facing scholars and students of such choreographic reinterpretations, this account describes three of the most canonical revisions of the ballet (by Léonide Massine, Maurice Béjart and Pina Bausch) before dwelling principally on two more recent and seemingly self-reflexive versions: Yvonne Rainer’s RoS Indexical (2007) and Nora Chipaumire’s rite riot (2014).

Offers a wide-ranging yet nuanced account of the articles and reviews of The Rite of Spring that emerged in the Parisian press – the daily newspapers and specialist music and theatre journals – around the time of the premiere in May 1913. In doing so, this chapter seeks to chip away at some of the myth-making and exaggerated rhetoric that has contributed to our (mis)understanding of the supposedly riotous first night at the newly built Théâtre de Champs-Élysées, Paris. Close examination of the press reveals what, or rather who, most angered or else stupefied spectators and how choreography, music, decors and costumes were regarded by a select audience. Broader social and political tensions come to the fore as reports in the press are read in the context of a wider cultural history of the period.

Situates the original 1913 production of Sergei Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring in its local theatrical context, exploring the scheduling and significance of the ballet within the Parisian calendar. Recounts the popular reception of the Ballets Russes’s annual ‘Saisons Russes’ in the French capital, focusing on the pre-war period but also offering a broader history of the troupe and its activities until its dissolution in 1929. Describes the principal stylistic characteristics of the troupe’s productions in terms of music, choreography and visuals (decors and costumes), suggesting historical developments and trajectories that aligned with broader strands of cultural influence during the first decades of the twentieth century. Also explores the nineteenth-century background of theatrical dance in Russia and Western Europe.

Chapter 5 introduces a series of more concentrated studies on specific seasons of the feste di ballo. By the secondo Settecento, the feste were an annual characteristic spectacle within Neapolitan theatrical life. The initial years of the reign of Ferdinando and Maria Carolina witnessed an unprecedented breadth of artistic patronage with the migration of theatrical performances (tragic and comic) and the feste di ballo to the Reggia di Caserta, the opulent palace rivaling even Versailles in expanse and splendor. In particular, during the period of 1769–71, multiple feste were organized annually for the newly finished court theater at Caserta. Surviving archival documents in the Casa Reale Antica (fasc. 2221–2224) provide copious details of the transformation of the space into a vast area for dancing, including the contractual agreements with artistic personnel, financial summaries of the considerable expenses, and ephemera about these events. The archival sources convey in greater detail many of the broad references found in contemporary notices appearing in the Diario Ordinario and Notizie del Mondo. Taken together, these materials illuminate the far-reaching resonance and reception of the carnevale seasons at Caserta.