In 1909, a young Russian composer named Igor Stravinsky was recruited to orchestrate some music by Chopin for a ballet project. The project was called Les Sylphides, and the performances would take place in Paris under the auspices of a brand new dance company. This was the Ballets Russes, the first Russian ballet company to tour internationally, featuring leading dancers from the country’s imperial theatres. Masterminded by the impresario (and failed composer) Sergei Diaghilev, the company enjoyed a wildly successful first season in Paris … but their programme lacked any original Russian works. And so it was that the 27-year-old Stravinsky was approached, on the back of his Chopin orchestrations, to compose a score to a story that Diaghilev and his colleagues had determined would be their 1910 hit: The Firebird. Stravinsky fans will know that The Firebird and its successor, Petrushka, were the works that catapulted the composer to international fame overnight. With each passing year, Stravinsky’s ambition—and, indeed, his power within the company—grew. In collaboration with the designer Nikolai Roerich, he dreamed up the ‘vision’ of an ancient pagan ritual, in which the arrival of spring is marked by a young maiden forced by tribal elders to dance herself to death as a virgin sacrifice.

The score took Stravinsky two years to finish, and the lead-up to the premiere was fraught with difficulties and complaints not only from the orchestra, who thought the score unfeasibly difficult, but also the dancers. Choreographed by the young Vaslav Nijinsky, the piece required the company to ignore all their previous training that focused on fluid, beautiful lines, and instead move in awkward, shuffling steps that bent their bodies in unfamiliar ways.

It was this extraordinary combination that turned the Parisian premiere, on 29 May 1913, into a scandalous event and an episode recalled in so many memoirs that, if all the people who claimed to have been there actually were in attendance, the theatre would have been filled several times over! So what is it about this piece that made it so explosive? In fact, many of the techniques that Stravinsky used in constructing the score had also featured in Petrushka: complicated rhythmic play, music that was written in several keys at once, and colourful new methods of orchestration that pushed instruments into unusual ranges and demanded virtuosic solos from many of the players. The major difference is that the Petrushka score folds all these techniques into a more familiar musical idiom—whereas the Rite is supposed to sound violent and unfamiliar.

There’s the uncomfortably high, lonely solo for the bassoonist with which the piece begins, and the crunching chords of the ‘Augurs of Spring’, in which Stravinsky asks the strings to accent notes in different beats per bar, tripping up our sense of timing. More than this, much of the music is constructed of short blocks that are assigned to a group of instruments (high winds, for instance, or horns, or low strings), and these are played in sequence without smooth transitions between them, or simply stuck on top of each other.

In the closing ‘Sacrificial Dance’, almost every bar of music has a different number of beats, brutally forcing the young girl onwards until she falls at last to the floor. The ‘Rite’ is complete: the earth has been paid its sacrifice.

Katy Hamilton © 2025