Le Sacre du printemps

Concept design for act 1 of the 1913 production of Le Sacre du printemps


Everything changed on 29 May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris.  

Although this modernist piece was composed over 100 years ago by Igor Stravinsky, it still sounds fresh and contemporary.

This is an orchestral piece, but is not a symphony; it is a ballet.  The story portrayed in the ballet is as unusual as the music that depicts it.  Stravinsky explains its genesis thus: "One day [in 1910], when I was finishing the last pages of L'Oiseau de Feu in Saint Petersburg, I had a fleeting vision ... I saw in my imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring. Such was the theme of Le Sacre du printemps."

I won't delve into the events involving the riot at the premiere performance, as this is all well-documented elsewhere.

Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (Paris) 
I will say that I discovered this piece in my freshman year of college as a music major.  My first composition professor mentioned it in passing one day, and at that time, I'd not heard of it.  Later that day, I sought out a recording of it in the music library at the university.  And then everything changed for me.  I didn't know you could do this with an orchestra.  "This" being everything that was contained within The Rite.  The meter changes, the very dense harmonic structures that some label as dissonant, but I am not one of those people.  The very structure of the composition itself.  Stravinsky's treatment of melodic material.  Again, those harmonies.  The nearly brutal rhythmic implications in the well-known "stomping chord" that is introduced just after the three-minute mark.  The unique way that Stravinsky opens and closes lines.  That haunting bassoon opening that, while moving and almost delicate, only hints at the terror to come.  The bassoon opening is written in a much higher register than had been previously utilized in other compositions or really in the history of the bassoon.  This higher-than-normal register almost makes the bassoon unidentifiable as an instrument.  It's as if mystery and a lack of anything familiar is established right at the outset.  The A in the second bar of the bassoon intro is overlaid or juxtaposed with the French horn's G# in the second bar.  A big exposed minor second right there in the opening in the second bar!  I knew I was going to love it right at that moment.  

Not to mention that I am a huge fan; a devotee, of metric changes and odd meters.  Even in the 4/4  and 2/4 passages in this piece, Stravinsky manipulates and distorts the time such that 4/4 and 2/4 is transformed into something you'd swear was an odd meter, except it's not easily analyzed as such, and a couple of times has sent me chasing after the score to verify or often to decrypt what I've heard.  

stomping chord (first instance)
One example is the stomping chord introduced just after the three minute mark.  This is magical to me for two reasons.  First is the harmonic structure of the chord itself.  Entirely bitonal, and it can be analyzed as an Eb7 chord superimposed over an E major triad (Eb7/E).   This kind of harmonic effect was relatively unheard of in 1913.

Second is what Stravinsky does with the rhythm of this chord.  Notated as 2/4 meter, he changes the accents across a repeating two-bar figure as follows, with the accent in red:
 
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 

Again, notated in 2/4, but it's a passage in 2/4 that's like stepping into an empty elevator shaft.  You'd be well within your analytical rights when listening to this passage to continually question "Where's 1?"

There are many recordings of this seminal work.  My personal favorite is with the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez on the Deutsche Grammophon label.  As a bonus, The Rite is paired on this recording with another Stravinsky ballet composition, Petrouchka (1911).  Another fantastic piece, but I won't go into here as it likely deserves its own blog post.  I like the Boulez recording for a couple of reasons.  The recording itself has the usual excellence in recording quality I've come to expect over many years of listening to Deutsche Grammophon recordings.  But the main reason I prefer this version is that Boulez can and does, to my way of hearing and analysis, extract more details from the score than I hear in other performances.  I've found this to be generally true of any of his recordings of 20th-century works.  In a piece as complex and multi-layered as The Rite, you certainly want a recording that really gets into the nooks and crannies of this highly complex score; Boulez pulls out details that seem to be previously hidden when compared to most other recordings.  Many times when listening to this recording, I will hear details I've not previously heard.  I also find that Boulez's tempos on this recording are, to my way of thinking and my preferences, exactly right.
Le Sacre du printemps: autograph score; page 1

I could go on and on about other passages and elements of this piece that I love, but that could easily turn into a non-ending blog post.  Instead, I'll leave it here, and suggest to you that if you like modern music, challenging music, progressive music, adventurous and exploratory orchestral and/or ballet music, harmonically dense music with ongoing metric and rhythmic changes, then you truly owe it to yourself to become familiar with The Rite of Spring.

If you do know The Rite, then may I recommend the Pierre Boulez/Cleveland recording.  

YouTube links:



-kk






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts