Paris, May 29th, 1913. At le Theatre des Champs-Elysees, Igor Stravinsky, unknown and obscure, awaits nervously the premier of his new ballet, le Sacre du Printemps. As the lights and chatter dim, audience members in the front row notice the faint sound of pacing shoes moving to and fro behind the curtain. Then the sound stops. The curtain raises. The stage illuminates. All is quiet.
A lone, nervous bassoon breaks the silence; it sings a short phrase, a pleasant phrase, complete with a quick flick of embellishment. It has no harmony yet, but no matter; the harmony is easily imaginable, and the harmony would be pleasant were it audible.
But at the end of the second repetition of that phrase–at the very final note, precisely when that expected pleasant harmony is about to be added–another bassoon comes in and misses the note. Not only does he miss the note, but he continues to ruin the pleasant phrase with its expected pleasant harmony. The first bassoon continues on in its melody, but cannot escape the noisy undermining of that incorrigible accompaniment, which plagues it till its cadence (which, of course, is also ruined).
The audience, sympathizing with the melody and detesting the harmony, boos the awful playing. But after a brief pause, the piece continues, and the audience is silenced in shock.
The phrase is repeated again with a fuller accompaniment–or, at least, the orchestra tries to repeat it, and apparently fails, for they cannot seem to get the notes right and continues to play in their awful-sounding, almost painful-to-behold delirium. More booing ensues; yet still, the orchestra presses on.
The music crescendos into a tangled, dissonant mess; the pleasant melody strive to shine, to get its head above the tumultuous sea of terrible harmonies, but is constantly pushed back under; it’s kicked around, tripped up, shoved by the oppressive harmony. The orchestra had been playing the right notes all along, of course; it was Stravinsky who had mutilated the harmony, not the instrumentalists; but the audience doesn’t know this, and continues to boo, hiss, catcall, and make a ruckus. All of this noise–music included–continues on until it slows down to a few, quiet, humble pizzicato notes.
Then, that chord is played, and all hell breaks loose.
The strings pound out the hungry chord, again, again, again, again, each time hurts and pains the ear, pounding, pounding, the crazed notes fly from the stage, steadily, steadily, the brain rattles and shakes, over and over, relentless, over and under flights of sheer insanity by the other instruments. The rhythm, the noise, the sound, the dancing, the costumes, the lighting, the staging, the energy; and the entire house explodes into a mass of tangled fury.
The audience begins crying out, screaming, writhing, biting, tearing, pounding, in a tumultuous mass of self-destruction, beating itself over the head with its madness. A man here is bouncing in his chair, eyes blankly staring forward, his fists beating in rhythm on the head of the man sitting in front of him; neither notice. A pair there have begun punching each other in the jaw. Programs flutter around in the air. The music is hardly audible above the shouting, crying, screaming of the audience. Back on stage, the choreographer calls out the cues to the dancers; the manager begs the audience to calm down; the conductor flails his arms, squeezing every last drop of sound out of his orchestra; the composer runs out of the theater, lamenting the failure of his cherished Rite of Spring: Scenes from Pagan Russia.
The work depicted pagan dancing and is divided into two parts; “Adoration of the Earth,” and “The Sacrifice,” wherein a young maiden dances herself to death for the benefit of the Spring god. It obviously struck some sort of chord within the human psyche, some strange, primal urge that the audience of that premier simply could not handle. Incidentally, it also changed the history of music; but I’m more interested in how the audience reacted.
This is not the only instance of music driving people crazy, although it is the most famous and the most startling. Music had been experimenting with dissonance for a long time before May 29th, 1913, but always in nice, tolerable doses. Stravinsky broke that boundary and flung insanity at his audience; the insanity burgeoned.
This seems proof to me that there is some fundamentally primitive aspect of humankind that cannot be reached by thinking or reasoning. It has, since our primitive days, has been buried in civility, repressed by the requirements of social interaction; something that required the abstract nature of music to momentarily unlock on that night in Paris. I assume that there are other instances where this trait resurfaces; it might, for example, explain how wartime atrocities can be committed and acquiesced to by entire civilizations–or even how, in the heat of battle, a normal man can kill another man. Of course, there are other factors; but there must be something within man’s nature that, when activated, causes this sort of thing to happen. What other shadows of man’s past lurk in the collective consciousness, waiting to be released? What horrors will result from them?
“Anonymous,” a loosely-organized group of militant internet users, has 