The two groups in the audience began to fight with each other, even throwing vegetable at the orchestra and up on the stage. About forty people were forced to leave, but the performance continued to the end.
Harvard University professor Thomas Kelly explained:
One of the reasons that the Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring created such a furor was that it shattered everyone's expectations. The evening's program began innocently with a performance of "Les Sylphides." However, as the follow-up piece, "The Rite of Spring" turned out to be anything but spring-like. One of the dancers recalled that Vaslav Nijinsky's shocking choreography was physically unnatural to perform. 'With every leap we landed heavily enough to jar every organ in us.' The music itself was angular, dissonant and totally unpredictable. The pagans on-stage made pagans of the audience." Despite its inauspicious debut, Stravinsky's score for "The Rite of Spring" today stands as a magnificent musical masterpiece of the twentieth century."
In the introduction, Stravinksy called for a bassoon to play higher in its range than anyone else had ever done. In fact, the instrument was virtually unrecognizable as a bassoon. When the curtain rose and the dancing began, there appeared a musical theme without a melody, only a loud, pulsating, dissonant chord with jarring, irregular accents. The audience responded to the ballet with such a din of hisses and catcalls that the performers could barely hear each other. The ballet's premiere managed to instill in the audience the true spirit of the music.
The music critic at French daily Le Figaro, Henri Quittard, wrote that the ballet was an "exercise in puerile barbarity," basically intimating the idea that Stravinsky must have been corrupted by both Nijinsky and Sergei Diaghilev (the impresario who founded the Ballets Russes).
The audience was disturbed by both Stravinsky's score and Nijinsky's choreography, and some still speculate that all of this must have been orchestrated as an elaborate publicity stunt on the part of Diaghilev, or even as an operation planned by disgruntled traditionalists.
The London Daily Telegraph's Ivan Hewett wrote this very recently, just last week:
"Stravinsky had scored a massive hit the previous year with Petrushka, which added an exciting element of modernist collage to colorful Russian folklore. Vaslav Nijinsky, the choreographer, had caused a minor scandal a few months previously, with his blatantly erotic portrayal of the lovesick faun in Debussy's L'Aprà ¨s-midi d'un faune. Stravinsky was hoping the new ballet would be an even bigger hit than Petrushka."
"From all indications I can see that this piece is bound to 'emerge' in a way that rarely happens," he wrote gleefully to Nicholas Roerich, who was the guiding spirit behind the ballet's vision of pagan Russia.
At a deeper level, the music negates the very thing that for most people gives it meaning: the expression of human feelings.
As Stravinsky put it, "there are simply no regions for soul-searching in The Rite of Spring."
This is what separates it so decisively from Stravinsky's hit of 1911, Petrushka. Therein, we're immersed in a human world, which exudes the very specific cultural ambiance of Russia. It's true that the main characters are puppets, rather than rounded human beings. But they have characters, even if they're somewhat rudimentary, and at the end there's even a suggestion that Petrushka might have a soul.
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Daniel Weymouth, associate professor of composition and theory at Stony Brook University, wrote:
"The stories of the 'near riot' may have become exaggerated over time. There is evidence that the ruckus started between two factions at the Paris Opera -- those who liked things tame and 'pretty' and those who were eager for something new -- who were already primed for a confrontation." By the early 1900s, Paris had become an important pivotal bridge between tradition and modernism, and this accelerated with the unveiling of the Eiffel Tower in 1889, the huge metallic structure that drew scathing critiques, controversy, and millions of tourists. Telephones and elevators were arriving in homes, and there was a looming sense of change and technological upheaval. Picasso explored Cubist representations, and Gertrude Stein and other Parisian writers tested the limits of language, to try to transcend prior forms of literature."
This all seems to have boiled over with the premiere of Rite of Spring, an "explosive cultural shift unlike any in recent memory. It's difficult to imagine any single piece of art sparking the kind of turmoil that Stravinsky's did a century ago. Stravinsky's fierce discordance and rhythms and his strange forced melodies are very much avant-garde.
The French writer Jacques Rivià ¨re observed after the performance:
"There is something profoundly blind about this dance. There is an enormous question being carried about by all these creatures moving before our eyes. It is in no way distinct from themselves. They carry it about with them without understanding it, like an animal that turns in its cage and never tires of butting its head against the bars."
Dissonance, complex rhythms, and repetitive melodies still seem avant-garde, and Stravinsky himself once said that "there are simply no regions for soul-searching in The Rite of Spring."
Eric Charnofsky, a composer and lecturer at Case Western Reserve University, wrote this:
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