The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Igor Stravinsky · Le Sacre du printemps, a ballet score subtitled Tableaux de la Russie païenne en deux parties, “Pictures of pagan Russia in two parts” · fourteen sections, played without a break within each part · about thirty-two to thirty-five minutes in performance
Mode
Ballet score as concert music; ritual built from ostinato, block and cut, with rhythm in place of melody as the agent of form
Mythos
The rite of spring: the earth adored, then a chosen victim sacrificed so that the land renews; the seasonal cycle and the scapegoat
Phase
Two parts, each from a slow introduction to a dance cut off; the earth waking to the moment of death
Presentation
Concert music; a score in two parts and fourteen sections for very large orchestra, woodwinds in fives, eight horns and two tubas, with printed titles and no words
Register
From an unaccompanied bassoon high in its register to hammered polychords and metres counted in sixteenths; terror, awe and cold beauty
Scale
One people, one season, one chosen girl; a little over half an hour
Governing Proposition
A single bassoon wakes a pagan earth, a people dance their spring in blocks of rhythm that stop instead of ending, and a girl chosen from among them dances until she dies, with no music to mourn her. The wager of the work is that rhythm can carry a whole form, and that a community’s renewal by a sanctioned killing can be shown from inside the festival, without taking the victim’s side.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work begins with one instrument, alone. A bassoon plays high in its register, unaccompanied, marked Lento, tempo rubato: a slow, free, winding tune in a narrow compass that keeps turning back on itself. It is the first sound of the first part, L’Adoration de la terre, the Adoration of the Earth, in a score subtitled Tableaux de la Russie païenne en deux parties, “Pictures of pagan Russia in two parts”. Before there is a people or a rite there is this line, and an earth waking.
Other woodwinds crowd in, one after another, each with its own short figure, until the texture is no longer a melody with accompaniment but a thicket, line on line, each repeating and varying its cell. The polyphony is like growth, and its harmony leads nowhere. At its fullest it is cut off, and the bassoon’s tune returns alone. The procedure is the whole work’s in miniature: short figures of narrow range, repeated, layered and stopped, never developed and never concluded.
Stravinsky said the bassoon’s melody was the one folk tune in the score. In 1980 Richard Taruskin showed that it and several other melodies came from published anthologies of folk song, broken into cells and reassembled so that their sources had stayed hidden; he set out the case in full in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (1996). The score is in two parts and fourteen sections, played without a break within each part, and each part runs the same long course, from a slow introduction to a dance that is cut off. About a third of the work is slow. The violence it is known for is set inside a frame of stillness.
Movement II
Then the earth is struck. Les Augures printaniers – Danses des adolescentes, the Augurs of Spring and Dances of the Young Girls, opens on one chord, repeated in the strings, every stroke a down-bow. Over it the horns throw accents that fall irregularly against the steady pulse. The chord is two chords at once: an E flat dominant seventh above an F flat major triad, which sounds as E. It is held and hammered, and it does not resolve. Dissonance here is not a tension waiting for release but a material, and the strings are played as drums.
In this music rhythm does the work that melody and harmony did in the tradition Stravinsky had from Rimsky-Korsakov, his teacher. Ostinatos of different lengths are laid over one another, and accents are displaced against the pulse. A section does not develop its material; it piles it up, then stops, and the next begins. The Jeu du rapt, the Ritual of Abduction, is a short burst of pursuit. The Rondes printanières, the Spring Rounds, are the slow centre of the part: clarinets in octaves, then a slow, heavy round that mounts to a brutal climax.
The Jeux des cités rivales, the Ritual of the Rival Tribes, extends the games already under way, and into it comes the Cortège du sage, the Procession of the Sage, two tubas bringing the elder in. The blocks are set side by side, each cut off by the next, and the order of the blocks is the order of the rite. Some take their length from the stage action they were made for, and in the concert hall the Abduction and the Rival Tribes are the stretches most easily imagined away. The Augurs, the Rounds and the procession are not.
Movement III
The procession arrives, and the music nearly stops. Le Sage, the Sage, is a few hushed bars, the shortest section in the score: in the scenario its titles name, the elder kisses the earth. After all the noise of the games it is a near-silence, and it is the hinge of the first part. The earth has been adored, and what follows is its answer.
The Danse de la terre, the Dance of the Earth, erupts out of that silence. It is a whirl for the full orchestra, and it does not end. It stops. There is no cadence, no closing chord to say the part is complete; the music is cut off at full force, and the first part is over. The two closing dances, this one and the Danse sacrale, take about a sixth of the running time between them, and the first prepares the second: the same course from slow beginning to violent close, the same refusal to conclude.
Part I has moved from a single line to the whole orchestra, from rubato to rigid pulse, from the earth waking to the earth adored. Its two decisive moments are both absences: a silence where a climax might stand, and an end where a cadence should be. The form never explains. It sets one block against another and lets the cut speak. A sonata form would have given the music a hero and a history. This one has a people, a season and an elder, and none of them develops.
Movement IV
The second part, Le Sacrifice, begins again in stillness. Its Introduction is slow and cold, the coldest beauty in the work, and it takes about an eighth of the whole. The Cercles mystérieux des adolescentes, the Mystic Circles of the Young Girls, follow from it, a quiet music of the girls in their ring. Nothing in it is violent. It is beautiful, and the beauty is impersonal.
It ends by force. A run of fortissimo strokes breaks the circle, and the Glorification begins: in the scenario, the Chosen One has been selected. The choice is not shown as a decision anyone makes; it falls, like the strokes. The Glorification de l’élue, the Glorification of the Chosen One, is a dance in her honour, and the girl it celebrates is given no theme of her own, no music that marks her as a person. She is a type without a name: l’élue, the chosen one.
Then the dead are called. The Évocation des ancêtres, the Evocation of the Ancestors, is built of blocks of tutti and timpani, grandeur by mass, and the Action rituelle des ancêtres, the Ritual Action of the Ancestors, extends the state they set. The ancestors are the hinge of the second part, as the elder’s kiss was of the first: the community’s ground is its dead, and the sacrifice is made before them. Of all the blocks in the score, the Ritual Action is the one most easily shortened. It has a single state to hold, and it holds it.
Movement V
The Danse sacrale (L’Élue), the Sacrificial Dance of the Chosen One: the girl dances until she dies. The metre changes almost from bar to bar, in sixteenth-note units, 2/16, 3/16 and 5/16 among them, so that the pulse is never regular and every accent falls on a body that cannot settle into it. The irregularity is the form of compulsion: a body driven by a rhythm it does not choose. Stravinsky rebarred the dance more than once, decades later, changing how the players read it, not what they play. No lament is heard. The score ends at the moment of death, with a single stroke, and stops.
The work was first performed as a ballet by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on 29 May 1913, conducted by Pierre Monteux, with choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky and a scenario by Stravinsky and Nicholas Roerich, who designed the sets and costumes and to whom the score is dedicated. Contemporary press reports and later memoirs record an uproar in the hall during the performance, with laughter, whistling, shouting and quarrelling among the audience, loud enough that the dancers had difficulty hearing the orchestra; Nijinsky is reported calling the counts from the wings. How violent it was, and whether the music or the dancing provoked it, are disputed. The disturbance itself is documented.
In April 1914 Monteux gave the score in Paris as a concert work, without the stage, and it was a triumph. Nijinsky’s choreography was lost; the score has not left the concert hall since. Disney’s Fantasia (1940) used it, cut and reordered under Leopold Stokowski, for the forming of the earth and the age of the dinosaurs. In 1949 Adorno accused the work of siding with the collective against its victim, and Taruskin later showed what it had hidden about its own sources. Both answer to what the score does. It shows a festival from inside, the many acting as one, and it does not stop the dance to mourn.
Act III · The Twelve
The work is short and nearly free of connective tissue; the subtractive test meets resistance at both ends of each part. Remove the Introduction and the Augurs’ chord has no waking world to break into; remove the Sage’s few bars and the Dance of the Earth loses the silence it erupts from; remove the Glorification and the Danse sacrale has no chosen one. The test finds give, and the form invites it: a work of juxtaposed blocks loses a block more easily than a sonata loses a paragraph. The Ritual of the Rival Tribes and the Ritual Action of the Ancestors each extend a state already set, and Spring Rounds could be shortened with little loss.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a community renews itself by killing one of its members, and the order that does it is collective, impersonal and joyful. The score takes no one’s side. There is no lament for the Chosen One, no theme that marks her as a person, no voice that dissents; the Glorification and the Danse sacrale treat her death as the festival’s climax, and the work ends at the moment of death. Adorno’s charge in Philosophy of New Music (1949), that it sides with the collective against the victim, reads exactly this; complicity is still disclosure. Held down because, with no words, the step from sonority to meaning rests on the printed titles.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Height reaches the top in the sublime of terror and force, and it comes often. The Introduction is the sublime of origin: the bassoon alone, then woodwinds crowding in until polyphony is growth. The Augurs’ chord is force made physical. The Dance of the Earth is a whirl that stops. Part II’s Introduction and the Mystic Circles reach a still, cold beauty, which the fortissimo strokes turn to dread; the Evocation’s blocks of tutti and timpani are grandeur; the Danse sacrale is a convulsion held for some four minutes. Held below the top because the Abduction and the Rival Tribes are vigour more than height and, lightly, because the elevation is narrow in kind.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Myth built, not cited. The structure is a rite: the adoration of the earth, then the sacrifice it demands. The seasonal cycle bears the whole of Part I and the scapegoat, the chosen victim whose death renews the land, the whole of Part II; the elder’s kiss of the earth is the first part’s hinge, the ancestors the second’s. The particular stays particular in sound: folk cells, the bassoon’s high arabesque, the guiro, the antique cymbals. Held down on three counts. The rite is invented, a pagan Russia the record does not document; the Chosen One is a type without a name; and without the titles the score builds ritual, not this ritual.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the Russian school of Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s teacher, and the Paris ballet of Diaghilev’s first seasons. The departures are many: rhythm made the agent of form, irregular accent, changing metres and ostinato replacing melody and progression; dissonance held and hammered as sonority, not resolved; form made of blocks cut off rather than developed; folk tunes broken into cells and hidden; the orchestra, strings included, used as percussion. The stake was real: after The Firebird and Petrushka Stravinsky had Paris, this score risked it, and the disturbance at the premiere shows the risk was taken. Held below the top by his own path: Petrushka had already cut blocks against one another and superimposed keys.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows, which is the collective: an order in which nothing develops as an individual does, and the many act as one until one is destroyed. The form is ostinato and block. Patterns repeat, layered and cut off, not argued. Sonata form would give the music a protagonist and a history, and the work could not say that the rite has neither. In the Danse sacrale the metre changes almost bar by bar, and the irregular pulse is the form of compulsion. Held down by the ballet: the Abduction and the Rival Tribes take their length from stage action, and in concert the form there comes nearest a container.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence, not promise, over more than a century: Boulez’s rhythmic analysis, “Stravinsky demeure”, and Messiaen’s teaching of its rhythmic cells; Allen Forte’s The Harmonic Organization of The Rite of Spring (1978); Pieter van den Toorn’s octatonic readings and his book on the work (1987); Taruskin’s discovery of the folk sources (1980), which overturned the composer’s account; Adorno’s ethical attack and the argument it began; Modris Eksteins’s Rites of Spring (1989). How its harmony works is still disputed. Performance is unsettled: which version, the Danse sacrale’s tempo, Stravinsky’s own three recordings against later readings. Choreographers remake it: Béjart (1959), Pina Bausch (1975). Held below the top on elapsed time and a narrower range of meaning.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The work reorganised the possibilities of Western concert music around rhythm, showing that pulse, accent and metre could carry a large form, and that dissonance could be a material rather than a tension to resolve. The reach is discounted a little: it is shared with Stravinsky’s other Russian scores and Schoenberg’s break of the same years, and Stravinsky himself turned to neoclassicism. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was fast and wide. The concert triumph came within a year; its means passed through Varèse, Bartók, Orff, Copland, Messiaen and Boulez into the century’s teaching; and Fantasia (1940) put it before a mass audience.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Survival is demonstrated: the score has been in continuous concert life since 1914, is among the most performed and recorded orchestral works of its century, and is a standard test for orchestras and conductors. The loss of Nijinsky’s choreography is not charged: the score, which makes the work, survives whole. The surface fixed to its moment is real but small: the subtitle’s pagan Russia and the primitivism of 1913 belong to a fashion the score has outlived. The cost particular to this work is wear. Familiarity has dulled the shock that was part of its force; concert audiences hear the Augurs as a showpiece, and Fantasia set it to dinosaurs. It has outlived each domestication.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The making bears weight throughout: the orchestration, from the bassoon’s high solo and the woodwind thicket of the Introduction to the eight horns’ accents and the antique cymbals of Part II; rhythmic control, with ostinatos layered at different lengths and accents displaced against a steady pulse in the Augurs; a harmony that holds polychords and folk-derived cells in one sonority; and the long accelerating span of each part, from slow introduction to cut-off dance. The costs are in the notation. Stravinsky rebarred the Danse sacrale more than once, decades after the premiere, and the 1947 edition changed doublings and balance. The barring changes the players’ reading, not the sound intended, so the charge is small.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements, the Introduction’s free, rubato woodwind polyphony and the Danse sacrale’s metric violence. One law governs them, and its unit is the cell: short melodic figures of narrow range, repeated and varied by displacement rather than development, layered rather than progressed, stopped rather than concluded. The same law joins the still Mystic Circles to the Evocation’s blocks, and the folk cells to the polychords. The range covered is wide, from near-silence to the full tutti, from rubato to the most rigid pulse. The tension is in the joins. A law of juxtaposition governs by being cut, and at some of the cuts it is asserted rather than shown.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Through its titles and its structure the work holds the natural order, the earth and the season, across Part I and into Part II; the community, in games, rounds, rival tribes and the circle of girls; the sacred, in the elder’s adoration, the ancestors and the sacrifice; the body, driven by rhythm to its end; death, and the dead as the community’s ground; and time as cycle. One rite holds them, and they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis here is absence. Individual consciousness is excluded on purpose, and the family, labour, the state and history do not appear. A wordless rite holds more orders than a quartet can and fewer than an epic.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.7 and The Swerve at 9.6, with The Sublime, The Bottomless Well, The Imperishable and The Made at 9.4 behind them. A score that made rhythm the agent of a large form, held dissonance as sonority and built in blocks cut off rather than developed, against the school it came from and at the risk of the standing its composer had won; and a reorganisation that passed through Varèse, Bartók, Orff, Copland, Messiaen and Boulez into the teaching of the century.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: one rite holds the natural order, the community, the sacred, the body, death and time, but individual consciousness is excluded by design and the family, labour, the state and history are absent. Below the rest, The Unconcealment at 8.7, where a wordless disclosure rests on the printed titles, and The Inevitable at 8.9, held by a block form whose separable blocks, the Rival Tribes and the Ritual Action, could be removed most cleanly.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.4, The Living Form at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five, one by two tenths: Pressure on Tradition at 9.7, The Swerve at 9.6, The Imperishable at 9.4 and The Archetypal Deep at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment clears it at 8.7. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.7, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · the score of Le Sacre du printemps, Tableaux de la Russie païenne en deux parties, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition or recording was in hand, and the running time is a range across the recorded tradition, not a measurement. The score as it stands in the concert repertoire, two parts and fourteen sections, is scored as one work; no single performance or recording is the object, and neither is the ballet. The subtitle and the section titles are printed in the score, so the scenario they name is part of the object; Nijinsky’s choreography and Roerich’s designs are context. The later revisions change barring, notation and some doublings, not the material, the order or the form, and which version is played bears on no score. There are no sung words. The French titles are given as printed, each with a plain English gloss; no other words are quoted. The share of time taken by each section was computed by script from approximate durations. Figures that could not be verified, among them the dates of composition, the rehearsal numbers, the bassoon’s first note and the number of strokes that end the Mystic Circles, are not given. Of the premiere only the documented disturbance is stated; later accounts of its violence and its cause vary and are not used. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.