The Rite of Spring's famous 'riot' wasn't called a riot until 1924.
On 29 May 1913, Stravinsky's ballet about a pagan sacrifice opened in Paris to jeers, fights and an uproar that drowned out the orchestra. It became music's most famous scandal. But the word 'riot' came a decade later, and some of the best-known eyewitness stories were embellished.
Igor Stravinsky was a young Russian composer when the impresario Sergei Diaghilev commissioned him to write ballets for his Ballets Russes. After the success of The Firebird and Petrushka came The Rite of Spring, subtitled 'Pictures of Pagan Russia', in which ancient rituals welcoming spring end with a young girl chosen as a sacrifice who dances herself to death. Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed it. The conductor Pierre Monteux, on first hearing the music, left the room and told Diaghilev he would never conduct it; Diaghilev changed his mind.
At the premiere at the new Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, trouble began early. Stravinsky said derisive laughter greeted the opening bars and he left for the wings. The noise grew until the dancers could not hear the music, and Nijinsky had to shout counts at them. Monteux believed that fashionable patrons and bohemian enthusiasts began attacking each other, then turned on the orchestra; objects were thrown, and around forty people were thrown out, possibly with police help, though that is not confirmed. The performance never stopped, and there were curtain calls at the end.
The historian Richard Taruskin argues that Nijinsky's lurching, stamping choreography shocked more than the score did. And memories grew in the telling. The critic Carl Van Vechten wrote that a man behind him had beaten rhythmically on his head; a letter published in 2013 shows he had actually attended the second night. Descriptions of the evening as a 'riot' only appeared in reviews of performances in 1924.
The music soon won. At a Paris concert performance in April 1914, Stravinsky was carried from the hall on admirers' shoulders. Its experiments in rhythm, metre and dissonance made it one of the first modernist works and one of the most influential scores of the 20th century.
Source: Wikipedia — The Rite of Spring · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
