The Rite of Spring at 100

9Racism at The Rite

Tamara Levitz

On 29 May 2013, an eager public gathered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris to witness a special program in honor of the one hundredth anniversary of the premiere of The Rite of Spring. The highpoint of a year of centennial celebrations, the program that night included Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer’s reconstruction of what was advertised as Vaslav Nijinsky’s original choreography for The Rite performed by the Mariinsky Ballet and Orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev, followed by new choreography of the work by Sasha Waltz. Ghosts surely rustled through the hall as the dancers and musicians conjured their Rite to life, seducing the willing audience with nostalgic memories of the heroic birth of modern music and ballet.

In the weeks and months leading up to this historic performance, The Rite received an astonishing amount of publicity, most of it focused on the infamous “riot” that had allegedly occurred at its premiere, when irate audience members had supposedly reacted to the newness of the work by becoming so verbally and physically abusive that the police had intervened to contain them. For the past hundred years, many critics have fetishistically reiterated this apocryphal tale as if to convince themselves of the historical validity of its wholly mythical plot, according to which modern composers and choreographers create works so innovative that they arouse the ire of unknowing audiences, who ultimately come to accept them as the masterpieces they are.

Yet myths cannot masquerade as historical truths forever. Eventually, a slip of the tongue or an exaggerated turn of phrase points attentive listeners toward the unexplained gaps in the mythical narrative and the false foundations upon which it rests. Valery Gergiev inadvertently exposed the myth of the riot at The Rite when he hyperbolically described it in a short video advertisement for the centennial performance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées as “the most important, most bloodless revolution of the twentieth century.” “I hope there will be many revolutions like this in the future in many, many countries,” he continued. “It is only our fantasy and our imagination which can tell us to what degree you can raise the level of noise and level of anger and fury which then is magically converted to the immeasurable level of success and glory. That is exactly what was happening here.”¹

In spite of his stirring appeal to revolution, Gergiev describes here political actions that favor the status quo and consolidate existing power relations. Like countless commentators before him, he falls into the epistemological trap of assuming that the aesthetic revolution of The Rite caused the physical riot at the premiere—a speculative thesis unsupported by any surviving evidence. Gergiev uses a term—revolution—that appears related to riot but is not and that loses political relevance when transferred from the pages of history into the aesthetic sphere. The false causality Gergiev and others establish between artistic revolution and bodily revolt at the premiere of The Rite hints at the possibility that they are exaggerating the work’s revolutionary historical potential with the aim of creating a sensational marketing campaign, thereby replicating a strategy Gabriel Astruc—founder and first manager of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées—and Sergei Diaghilev successfully implemented in 1913.²

How did we—all those who participate in mythologizing the premiere of The Rite in teaching, public speaking, journalism, concert management, and academic scholarship—get entangled in perpetuating such blatantly flawed historical narratives? This question can be answered by reinvestigating the historical evidence—in this case, the first reviews in French of the premiere of The Rite on 29 May 1913—with a special eye to the etymology of and historical context for the vocabulary used by critics to describe what happened in the hall that night.³ A detailed analysis of the soundscape at the premiere reveals that the ballet did not incite an angry riot because of its newness, as Gergiev and the musicological establishment have come to believe, but rather provoked a xenophobic response from critics who associated the ballet with cultural practices of colonized people of color they considered racially inferior to themselves, and who reproduced everyday racist discourse about those peoples in their reviews. The myth of the riot at The Rite that emerged from this discursive foundation in the United States after World War I masked the dispute over foreigners at the premiere by emphasizing the ballet’s newness. Through their dissemination of the myth of a riot at The Rite into the twenty-first century, concert organizers, musicologists, and journalists cemented the exclusionary, racist foundation of the listening cultures of modern music that the premiere of The Rite had inspired.

The Soundscape at the Premiere of The Rite

The first reviews of the premiere of The Rite have been available to scholars for quite some time and yet have received surprisingly little focused attention. Truman Bullard and François Lesure collected about sixty reviews in French that relate in some way to the first five performances of The Rite on 29 May and 2, 4, 6, and 13 June 1913, fifteen of which definitively discuss the premiere. This paucity of critical response has to do with the fact that Diaghilev gave most of the critics passes to attend the dress rehearsal on 28 May and reserved no space for them to attend the sold-out premiere the next day.⁴ Many important French critics eventually attended at least one of the four remaining performances of The Rite—including a dozen critics who had also attended the controversial premiere of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande eleven years earlier and whose words carried significant weight in French musical circles.⁵ Their reviews, and the diary entries and letters written by other audience members known to have attended the premiere, prove to be the best sources for determining what happened there. These documents are highly consistent in their content.⁶

Noisy sounds came from several directions in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées at the premiere of The Rite: they originated onstage and in the orchestra pit, as well as with audience members sitting in the orchestre, corbeille, loges, and balconies.⁷ The distribution of sounds reflected demographic distribution in that distinct sounds emerged from discrete spaces in the hall occupied by different social groups set apart by their class, gender, national affiliation, aesthetic taste and experience, and mode of dress. The guests who sat in the plush armchairs in the orchestre, corbeille, and loges had paid thirty to forty francs for their seats, while the more indistinct crowd in the balconies had allegedly paid only two francs for theirs.⁸ Jean Cocteau and Gabriel Astruc identified the distinct social groups in attendance by the Parisian neighborhoods where they lived, where they were seated, and how they were dressed.⁹ Astruc remarked that the premiere fell on a Thursday, the day of the “grand gala,” and that this meant that the “most select society of the Faubourg Saint-Germain” filled the boxes (premières loges) and seats in the corbeille. “In every loge one was bedazzled by tiaras, strings of pearls, and sumptuous outfits standing out against the impeccable tails of people such as Arthur de Gabriac and Boni de Castellane. An unforgettable spectacle that we haven’t seen since, and that we won’t see again soon for all kinds of social, financial and . . . economic reasons,” he recalled.¹⁰ Some of these illustrious guests had requested tickets for armchairs in the orchestre, corbeilles, loges, and baignoires directly from Astruc.¹¹ The Opéra subscribers sat in the orchestra armchairs (fauteuils d’orchestre), wearing “fluted shirts and rush canes with gold knobs.”¹² The nineteen-hundred-seat theater also welcomed illustrious composers, impresarios, theater directors, critics, and dancers, as well as members of the Apaches, an informal artistic circle that included Maurice Ravel, Florent Schmitt, Maurice Delage, Michel-Dmitri Calvocoressi, and Émile Vuillermoz, whose tickets had been procured through Stravinsky by Ricciotto Canudo, editor of Montjoie!¹³ Astruc also noted the many “aesthetes”—“super-Debussyists, hyper-Ravelians and Stravinsky extremists armed to the teeth”—who sat scattered across the different levels of the theater, although most of them probably sat in the balconies. This group rejected tailcoats and tails in favor of dinner jackets (le smoking), checkered vests, sweaters, and trench coats.¹⁴ Finally, there were the many tourists, who came in larger numbers than was customary in other theaters in Paris and whose identity cannot be determined.¹⁵

Although they did not catch the attention of Astruc and Cocteau, the spectators in the balconies may have played the most significant role in determining how the sounds of both the music and the audience that were produced in the hall that night were recorded in history. The few critics who attended the premiere probably sat there, along with many tourists, as well as musicians and writers who later wrote diary entries, articles, or letters about their experience. These sections of the theater were prime sites for listening—locations from which keen observers transcribed the sounds traveling through the hall into the descriptive prose of their reviews. The balconies were also extremely resonant because of their concrete construction, and this necessarily influenced the aural impression these critics and musicians, and thus posterity, received.¹⁶

The spectators in the balconies experienced Nijinsky’s choreography aurally as an aggressive assault of endless stamping and visually as a distasteful display of denatured, incomprehensible movement. In their reviews they used a highly limited, specific, and slanted vocabulary to describe what they heard and saw, the paucity of their verbal expressions for movement reflecting their lack of experience with dance and cultural practices around the world. They most often noticed (in order of importance) the stamping (piétinement and trépignement),¹⁷ frenzy (frénésie),¹⁸ puppet-like movement,¹⁹ automaticity (automaticité),²⁰ trembling (tremblotement),²¹ jerky gestures (gestes saccadés),²² vibrating (trépidation),²³ and shuddering (tressaillement).²⁴ Their assessment of these unexpected movements and the accompanying harsh sounds was almost wholly negative.

Many of the critics were better versed in modern composition yet unable to judge Stravinsky’s music because of the difficulty they had in hearing it—in part because of noise coming from the audience and in part, I think, because the enormous orchestra that Stravinsky had crammed into the pit for the show sounded overwhelming to them in the resonant hall.²⁵ The sounds of The Rite appeared to them dissonant, intolerable, and foreign to their listening habits and theatrical culture.²⁶ Jean Chantavoine thought that “Stravinsky’s music, written with uncommon verve and virtuosity, was purposefully and deliberately intended to be the most cruel for the ear that we had ever had the chance, or had been inflicted upon us, to hear. . . . The wrong note is its most basic material, with the most crude, raucous, and unsociable timbres.”²⁷ Other critics complained about instruments playing in the wrong range or in an uncharacteristic manner,²⁸ and about jarring combinations of melodies, or melodies and accompaniment at the second or seventh.²⁹ Those who praised Stravinsky’s music admired it most for its tremendous rhythmic drive (which they described without mentioning any specific percussion instruments) and for its exquisite orchestration.³⁰ “This music is sometimes truly ugly,” Léon Vallas concluded, echoing the sentiments of many critics. “I mean it seems this way to us, the people living in 1913.”³¹

Nijinsky’s stamping dancers and Stravinsky’s “discordant” music unleashed an unsettling sonic chain reaction in the hall, which a handful of highly invested observers—including Stravinsky, Bronislava Nijinska, and Cocteau—described as a racket (vacarme)³² or commotion (tumulte),³³ and yet which not a single eyewitness described at that time or later as a riot.³⁴ The noisy disruptions began very early on in the performance, possibly even before the curtain rose.³⁵ Elite spectators in the orchestre, corbeille, and loges reacted to the ballet primarily by laughing (rire or ricaner) and whistling (sifflets).³⁶ They also protested (protestations),³⁷ emitted animal cries (cris d’animaux),³⁸ heckled (chahuter),³⁹ murmured (murmures),⁴⁰ booed (conspuer),⁴¹ and yelled (hurlements).⁴² Louis Vuillemin thought the audience came to the show hyped up by the preconcert publicity and ready for a fight, with the result that when “the curtain rose—what am I saying, even before it rose—they murmured, said ‘Oh!,’ sang, shouted down, whistled, clapped, insinuated ‘Bravo!’ yelped, cheered, booed, and exalted.”⁴³ Henri Quittard and others remember that the public “was incapable of holding back its mirth.”⁴⁴ Harry Graf Kessler noted that the elite spectators in the house “laughed, whispered, made jokes, and occasionally stood up.”⁴⁵ Such reactions to new works were common in the Opéra and other venues in Paris at the time; just two weeks earlier, the audience had laughed and whistled at Debussy’s Jeux.⁴⁶

Musicians and music lovers responded to the elite spectators’ laughter and whistling by clapping loudly and by hurling insults at them from the balconies.⁴⁷ Very few people heard or recorded these insults, and yet those who did later held such privileged positions in establishing the written record of the history of the Ballets Russes that their perspectives as listeners came to be naturalized as representing the overall sonic experience in the hall. The insults they described took on a life of their own in the press surrounding The Rite in the twentieth century and came to be remembered as if they had been hurled at top volume and projected sonically into every nook and cranny of the vast Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. In truth, only those sitting close to the people who uttered these insults probably heard them at all.

The virulence of these insults shocks even today. Gaston de Pawlowski and Léon Werth heard somebody shout, “Where were all those bastards raised?”—a comment directed at three femmes du monde whom Werth described as “whistling with three fingers in their mouths like Apaches calling to each other in the night to attack [carder] a passerby.”⁴⁸ Kessler heard somebody yell from the balconies in a “stentorian voice”: “Come on, whores of the sixteenth, are you going to leave us alone finally?” to which somebody responded from the loges, “There they are, those ripe for annexation”—an insult that at first appears difficult to decipher in this context.⁴⁹ In a lavish publicity supplement to the Comœdia illustré published a few days later, an unnamed critic made more sense of this insult by reversing its direction from the balconies down to the loges and by identifying an “indignant composer” (who was also “a notorious French musician”) as the person who had uttered it. That composer had apparently “yelled above the murmurs and sniggering of the high society public, ‘They are ripe for annexation.’”⁵⁰ Anatoly Lunacharsky identified the indignant composer as Florent Schmitt, a Lorrainer who clearly felt outraged at the noise made by the elite spectators—whom he may have assumed to be German—and who wanted to mock it by evoking the disregard for linguistic difference represented by the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871. Lunacharsky recalled Schmitt yelling, “You are ripe for annexation”—a phrasing that even less ambiguously directs the insult at the elite spectators rather than at the dancers onstage, at whom commentators later erroneously assumed it was directed.⁵¹

From his choice seat in front of Stravinsky, Kessler observed—and possibly embellished in his active imagination—the rapid fire of insults that ensued between aristocrats and luminaries seated in the loges around him.⁵² He heard Astruc shout, “Wait for the end, you can whistle afterward,” while someone in the orchestra seats yelled back, “How long?” to which Diaghilev replied, “In five minutes.”⁵³ “[André] Gide, [Henri] Ghéon, and the entire Nouvelle revue française stood like a phalanx in the loge aisle and tamed the people sitting in the corbeille, as well as the loges of the Polignacs, Rohans, and Murats, etc., by shouting them down,” Kessler observed.⁵⁴ Lunacharsky reported how the Russians in the balconies—whom the French had “monstrously” called “Yids and Masons”—applauded loudly when a young man stood up and said: “I invite the foreigners who are present here to deplore the behavior of the French audience who have dared to consider themselves the most developed in the world and who have displayed at the same time a shameful reception of the brilliant creation of Messrs. Stravinsky and Nijinsky.”⁵⁵

The differences of opinion between adversarial social, class-based, ethnic, religious, and national groups at the premiere took on the character of a “brawl” or “fight,” the experience of which depended entirely on where in the hall one was seated.⁵⁶ Gustav Linor observed how the “laughing, protests, and ‘shh!’ [chut!]” of the work’s detractors received an “equally as noisily energetic response” from Stravinsky’s supporters, “giving the exchange the character of a ‘meeting’” (an English word Linor perhaps used to evoke the English Parliament, a far cry from the riot historians later inferred).⁵⁷ The anonymous reviewer from the Comœdia illustré agreed with him, describing the atmosphere as being “like in the chamber,” with “interruptions and violent interpolations between the public—preservers of the traditions of dance and music—and the young modern school of composers.”⁵⁸ Gaston de Pawlowski thought such arguments from the defense were appropriate for a criminal trial court (cour d’assises) but not for the theater.⁵⁹ Lise Léon Blum felt concerned about “a hall divided into two contrary currents; and this division shows at the very least that we are reaching a dangerous moment in our aesthetic culture.”⁶⁰ Whether this uproar was loud enough to disrupt the music and dance is hard to tell, given the lack of convincing evidence on this point.⁶¹

In spite of the audience disputes and uproar in the hall, the lights were never turned on and the police never called.⁶² Stravinsky, Nijinsky, and the corps de ballets took five curtain calls amidst clapping and a few boos after the performance, and the audience calmed down enough for the show to continue, uninterrupted, with a highly acclaimed performance of Le spectre de la rose.⁶³

This is all that reportedly happened on the night of 29 May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris.

Reproducing Everyday Racist Colonial Discourse in Reviews of the Premiere of The Rite

My brief examination of the soundscape of the premiere of The Rite reveals that the ballet did not cause a riot but rather provoked a noisy dispute between antagonistic social factions in the audience. The “stamping” of Nijinsky’s dancers caused audience members in the more expensive seats to “laugh” and “whistle,” provoking their adversaries to “hurl insults” at them from the balconies. Each sound complex in this chain—stamping, laughing/whistling, and hurling insults—provides independent evidence to support the thesis that audiences were shocked not by the newness but rather by the “strangeness” of The Rite, which broke with the racially exclusionary aesthetics of Western art that had until then ensured national, class, and racial boundaries in the French concert hall.⁶⁴ That critics could perceive only interminable stomping in Nijinsky’s intricate choreography suggests that the dancers’ noisy movements unsettled their notion of Western ballet, causing them to perceive The Rite as unbeautiful, uncivilized, and consequently—from their racially informed perspective—as created by non-Europeans lesser than themselves. That the elite spectators laughed, sniggered, and whistled indicates that those spectators found The Rite funny, ridiculous, or offensive and that they may have felt discomfort over confusing it with popular, foreign, and exotic spectacles in the music hall.⁶⁵ And that the musicians hurled insults at the elite spectators points toward the fact that an acrimonious battle over national and foreign taste was about to erupt in France. Nijinsky’s experiment in radical difference, this soundscape makes clear, provoked not so much indignation about a new art as xenophobic outrage from various audience members who either feared the unknown dance movements, costumes, and music of the ballet; felt insulted by the unartful foreignness of Nijinsky’s choreography; or mistrusted the laughing, whistling spectators in the expensive seats.

In 1913 Paris was ripe for an explosion of xenophobia, a term that had originated in a French colonial context about a decade earlier.⁶⁶ In the months leading up to the premiere of The Rite, fears of vagrancy had led to the promulgation of a French law establishing anthropometric identity cards for traveling salesmen, traders, and nomads but aimed at the Roma/Sinti (tziganes), which went into effect on 16 February 1913. This was the first law requiring biometric identifiers and encouraging ethnic classification of residents without fixed domicile in France. Anxiety about borders and immigrant movement had also increased during the first Balkan war, which had ended in December 1912 and led to negotiations that concluded only with the Treaty of London, signed on 30 May 1913, the day after The Rite’s premiere. The corps of powerful diplomats in attendance at The Rite—which included Count Alexander Iswolsky from Russia, Tommaso Tittoni from Italy, Myron T. Herrick from the United States, Baron Wilhelm von Schoen from Germany, Count Nikolaus Szécsen von Temerin from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the French diplomatic liaisons André and Pierre de Fouquières ⁶⁷—would have been acutely aware of tensions created between Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire by the conflict and of the potential repercussions for the long-standing Franco-Russian Alliance.

The Ballets Russes’s increased assimilation into French cultural life during the 1912–13 season led to growing anxiety among French critics about the dancers’ status as immigrants in France. Whereas in the first years of their visits to Paris, the exoticized foreignness of the Ballets Russes had incited rapturous enthusiasm, for example, from Astruc (who had built his financial empire as an impresario on French consumers’ attraction to foreign cultural products and goods), by 1913 Jean Perros and other critics had become disillusioned with it and eager to reassert France’s cultural authority in art.⁶⁸ Vuillermoz and Chantavoine feared that Diaghilev and his troupe were gaining too much power in France and that this could lead them from their safe position as attractive foreign visitors who promptly went home once their season was done into a fraught borderland in which they would become métèques. This was a highly discriminatory label, appropriated from the Greek and popularized by Charles Maurras and L’action française, used to describe recently domiciled or naturalized immigrants to France along with their children.⁶⁹ Chantavoine felt the Russians had strayed too far from their Russianness by opening up to collaborations with French composers and by imitating French art and music. “To charm us, to distract us (in the strong sense of the term), and to instruct us,” Chantavoine wrote, “the Ballets Russes have to maintain, along with their technical perfection, their national originality. They should not come here to be inspired by our Salon d’Automne or Indépendants; they should remain native [autochtones]; they should conserve that ‘strange air’ of coming from another country—the air not of monsters but of fairies. In a word, they should remain exotiques: they shouldn’t try to become métèques. Because we have enough of these, thank you very much, as it is.”⁷⁰ Vuillermoz similarly thought the Ballets Russes had made a mistake in collaborating with French artists. “Cosmopolitanism in music broke the beautiful ethnic equilibrium of the company,” he wrote in his review of The Rite. “The imitative was laudable and pleasant but singularly dangerous.”⁷¹

Diaghilev further provoked the French audience’s xenophobia by promoting The Rite in publicity materials as evoking “the first gestures of Pagan Russia” and as “strongly stylized, the characteristic attitudes of the Slavic race becoming conscious of beauty in the prehistoric era.”⁷² Critics seemed genuinely confused by these claims, which led them to construct exaggerated images of Russian difference. Several thought such a scientific subject required a scholarly apparatus and preferably a preconcert lecture. Astruc had recognized that this problem might arise with a ballet on “ethnic origins” and had urged Diaghilev to invite the archaeologist Salomon Reinach or another specialist to give a talk before the show.⁷³ Others felt troubled by Nijinsky’s lack of historical accuracy and by his attempt to stylize prehistoric movement.⁷⁴

Perplexed by The Rite’s cultural references, critics fell back on comparing it to familiar colonial (or ethnographic) and also archaeological models—a practice that led them to racialize the ballet and to map onto it images of what they saw as racially inferior, colonial cultural practices. Victor Débay thought the “scandal” of The Rite was caused by the fact that the dances were “too primitive” and less at home on the theatrical stage than in the meadow of the Jardin d’Acclimatation, “where companies of savages reproduce the religious ceremonies and wedding celebrations of their countries to the sound of discordant music.”⁷⁵ Émile Cottinet was struck by the whirling in Nijinsky’s choreography, which reminded him of rituals of religious ecstasy he had witnessed as performed by the “Bohémiennes” (Ruska Roma) from Moscow at the Exposition Universelle in 1900, the Aissawas in Algiers and Tangiers, and Native Americans elsewhere. He saw The Rite as the apotheosis of such colonial spectacle.⁷⁶ Adolphe Boschot compared Nijinsky’s dancers to “Caribbeans” and the Kanuks from Caledonia, Paul Souday and Jean Cocteau to moujiks (Russian peasants), and Vuillermoz to Mongolian virgins.⁷⁷ Pierre Lalo—whose father, Édouard, had composed Namouna, one of France’s most popular exoticist ballets of the late nineteenth century—recognized the possible ethnographic origins of The Rite in the ritual of the Kamchatka people yet used this knowledge to make a complete mockery of Nijinsky’s choreography:⁷⁸

In the ballet invented by Nijinsky, newness consists of jumping [tressauter] and vibrating [trépider] on the spot. They still dance on their feet, and they still generally maintain a vertical position. But it would not be difficult to conceive of another ballet in which one would slither like seals; nor would it be difficult to find a troupe of Samoyed or Fuegian dancers that a Nijinsky from Kamtchatka or Patagonia would teach to jump, not on the feet, but on their heads. . . . It is indisputable that the dances we see in the Sacre du printemps make us think invincibly of the spectacle of choreographic exercises various Eskimo, Fuegian, and Maori peoples offered us on the lawn of the Jardin d’acclimatation; none of these peoples—even the most miserable and degraded—showed us anything more barbaric, more shapeless than this confused stamping [trépignements] and these heaped groups.⁷⁹

Having robbed Nijinsky’s choreography of its technical basis, balletic history, and artfulness, critics could easily conclude that it was “ugly,”⁸⁰ “primitive,”⁸¹ “barbaric,”⁸² and unworthy of presentation in a French theater such as the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.

Although Stravinsky’s music attracted far less attention than Nijinsky’s choreography, it did not escape the critics’ xenophobic wrath. Several critics thought Stravinsky had descended into “primitivism” and “noise,” exaggerating and emphasizing superficial effects to the detriment of creating art by trying to match his music to Nijinsky’s movements.⁸³ “This is a demented music of Aissawas accompanied by absurd convulsions,” Paul Souday wrote.⁸⁴ Critics also frequently metaphorically blackened Stravinsky’s music by comparing it to African and African American traditions. To make such comparisons convincing, they reduced the music and people on either side of the equation to stereotypes and made them the butt of jokes. Gaston Carraud flattened any difference when he compared The Rite to the sounds of cats fighting in a cupboard and then compared that to the painting Combat de nègres dans un tunnel (Two Negros fighting in a tunnel)—the first monochrome all-black painting, created in 1882 by Paul Bilhaud as a joke predicated on not being able to distinguish two black men in a tunnel, even if they were at odds, from a state of pure blackness.⁸⁵ Years later, Astruc remembered how Nijinsky’s “frenzied stamping” (piétinements forcenés) had commanded Stravinsky’s “dynamic rhythm,” which reminded one of “the savage dances of Eskimos and Papuans.” “The Rite has become, moreover, the gospel of musiques nègres,” he commented.⁸⁶ Reductive comparisons not only fed into the popular comedic practice of mocking foreigners in France at the time but also provided critics with a powerful, if entirely dishonest, means of racializing Stravinsky’s music with the intent of distancing him from the pantheon of French culture.

Stravinsky and his collaborators suffered from the abusive verbal tirades, demeaning racial stereotypes, and xenophobic abuse they experienced at the premiere of The Rite. Cocteau implied as much when he described how he, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and Nijinsky escaped in a carriage at 2:00 AM on the night of the premiere and drove to the Bois de Boulogne, where a tearful Diaghilev recited Pushkin to his nostalgic Russian compatriots, reminding them of the noble foundations and exalted value of Russian artistic achievement.⁸⁷ In an interview with Henri Postel du Mas the next day, Stravinsky appeared “melancholic.” He desperately tried to reaffirm his cultural modernity by emphasizing the intense labor behind The Rite and the supreme artistry and sincerity of his and Nijinsky’s efforts. “Here was the fruit of 130 rehearsals and a year of work,” he commented.⁸⁸ Like other casualties of xenophobic attack, Stravinsky responded to the injury by becoming despondent and permanently mistrustful of the French press.

Racial Exclusion in the Modernist Listening Practices Established by The Rite

To close the Pandora’s box of anxious xenophobic affect opened by Nijinsky’s experiment in radical difference and to reinstate the proper racial boundaries of national cultural practice, a powerful group of French critics and com posers sublimated Nijinsky’s stamping into a new modernist aesthetic of “primitivism” in music and dance. They reasserted their cultural authority as critics and consolidated a sense of French unity in the concert hall by denigrating and ostracizing the group of spectators who laughed and whistled and by separating the insults from the enraged listeners who uttered them and the noisy spectators at whom they were directed, thereby robbing them of their illocutionary force. Racial exclusion became the basis of the modernist listening practices that perpetuated white supremacy when stamping became art, laughter was contained, and insults hurled with causal purpose in the heat of passionate argument became random slogans reproduced for the purposes of amusing posthumous readers and of encouraging successful marketing of The Rite.

Florent Schmitt was the first major figure to sublimate the stamping into Western art by connecting it metaphorically to the music itself as a way of formulating the idea of an aesthetics of musical primitivism for The Rite. Taking his lead from Diaghilev, Schmitt lavishly praised Stravinsky for having “translated [into music] the atmosphere of a profoundly rudimentary era, the prehistoric era of a stammering and savage humanity,” a phrase he borrowed from the Ballets Russes’s publicity materials for the ballet.⁸⁹ The Rite was no longer foreign but “innovative” and shocking in its creative difference.⁹⁰ Schmitt cleverly accentuated this point by referring twice in his review to works by H. G. Wells, which allowed him to link experiences of foreignness in The Rite to the future rather than the present or the past and to reinterpret that foreignness in terms of the individual artist’s imaginative capacity to explore the unknown.⁹¹ Schmitt’s slippage between present and future, foreignness and newness, systemic racism and the artist’s individual will became characteristic of a carnivorous modernist tradition that transformed all forms of ethnic confrontation and racial intolerance into progressive aesthetic pleasure.

A few weeks after Schmitt’s review, Louis Laloy reaffirmed the boundaries of Western art by comparing Stravinsky’s musical work to Gauguin’s paintings, thus situating it squarely within the French tradition of assimilated exoticism: “The historian will note that this music responds to the boldest desires of our poets,” he wrote, “those who dream of a unanimous life while at the same time having profited from the lessons of majestic primitivism that Gauguin and his imitators sought in savage peoples; that this music arrives then, when it is time, to satisfy a need in our spirits.”⁹² Laloy thought the public would better understand this new musical aesthetic once it was stripped of its “burlesque appearances,” namely, Nijinsky’s dancers. He shared with many other critics the belief that foreign cultures had to be incorporated into a Western aesthetic framework in order to achieve the quality of beautiful art.⁹³

Jacques Rivière most radically excluded racial difference from the history of The Rite by reifying it as a formal quality of the music and dance itself. Rejecting Schmitt’s and Laloy’s interpretation of the music of The Rite as primitivist, Rivière instead chose to interpret the ballet’s novel musical and choreographic techniques within themselves and independently of the ballet’s prehistoric scenario. Rather than appeal to the myth of ancient Russia, he mythologized the creators of the ballet themselves by claiming that the music and dance manifested rather than expressed their emotions and wills.⁹⁴ Russians could so easily efface themselves as authors, Rivière had theorized in an earlier article on The Rite, because they had not individuated as Westerners and tended to fuse their souls and to feel and think similarly. “Their race is still too young for all those thousands of tiny differences to have developed in each of them, those delicate personal reticences, those thin but impenetrable defenses that guard the threshold of a cultivated mind,” he wrote.⁹⁵ Enchanted by this xenophobically modified Dostoyevskean idea, Rivière concluded that Stravinsky had dissipated and lost himself in his devotion to the compositional task at hand in The Rite, abandoning his center in a manner that led his authorial voice to metamorphose into an ethereal, symbolic source of folkish truth that could be compared to that of a niania (Polish nanny), mother Russia, or the storytelling spider in Paul Claudel’s L’échange.⁹⁶ As a consequence, the foreignness Stravinsky embodied became an aesthetic quality of the music itself.⁹⁷ Rivière concluded that The Rite represented “sociologically” a racially inferior, non-Western, prehistoric culture that he did not label Russian and that evoked in his mind a passage in Paul Claudel’s Tête d’or in which the hero confronts the primitive East and attempts to rescue it for Christianity.⁹⁸ On the other hand, Rivière thought The Rite represented “biologically” what looked to him like karyokinesis—the division of the nucleus in cell division—an interpretation that exaggerated the Russians’ racial inferiority by comparing them as a people to an archaic biological state.⁹⁹ Rivière thus masked his xenophobic reaction to The Rite’s material strangeness at the premiere by reinterpreting it as a form of alienated aesthetic experience of modern art.¹⁰⁰

Pierre Lalo, Louis Laloy, and other critics sealed the case for a reification of racial difference in a primitivist aesthetics of music about a year later, on 5 April 1914, when they used the premiere of the concert version of Stravinsky’s Rite at the Casino de Paris as an opportunity to exclude Nijinsky’s choreography from any further consideration by reiterating their racially charged condemnations of it. Nijinsky had replaced the art of dance with “elementary and savage exercises imitated from those practiced by the most miserable peoples from Kamchatka or Patagonia: Terpsichore was nothing more than an Eskimo goddess,” Lalo reminded listeners. Performed independently of this depraved non-European spectacle, Stravinsky’s music no longer expressed barbarity but rather “life,” its generalized joyfulness no longer at risk of being confused with local cultural practices.¹⁰¹

Consolidating an aesthetic of modernist primitivism that could reinstate the racial borders of Western art around The Rite went hand in hand, for most critics, with excluding from discursive participation the elite audience members who had laughed or whistled at it. The critics marked elite audience members as a despised group by comparing them repeatedly to the philistines who had disrupted Victor Hugo’s Hernani in 1830, Wagner’s Tannhäuser in 1861, and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902, thereby delegitimizing them as reliable sources of cultural knowledge.¹⁰² The critics denigrated them by referring to them with several pejorative names drawn from French literary history.¹⁰³ Florent Schmitt viciously dehumanized them by comparing them to the “beast folk” in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and the rats with which the deserter is identified in Paul Claudel’s Tête d’or. It is noteworthy that both Jacques Rivière and Schmitt refer to Paul Claudel’s Tête d’or in their reviews, Schmitt in order to identify the elite spectators with the deserter, who, as an anarchist, opposes the Christian collective, and Rivière in order to draw a connection between the audience’s experience of The Rite and Claudel’s depiction of Christian Europe’s confrontation with the East. These references suggest that both Schmitt and Rivière may have felt an affinity for Claudel’s antirepublicanism and allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church in France and that this may have played a role in their rejection both of the elite audience members laughing at the premiere and of The Rite itself.¹⁰⁴ Such charged stereotypes erased the elite spectators’ individuality and robbed them of any agency in establishing for themselves the historical record of why they laughed and whistled at the premiere.¹⁰⁵ Many of the critics felt so strongly about this point that they spent more time admonishing the elite spectators in their reviews than they did discussing The Rite’s music or dance.

The critics most effectively destroyed the legitimacy of the elite audience members’ opinions about The Rite, however, by describing them collectively as “snobs”—a social and literary type that had existed in France for centuries and that the critics could use generically as a stereotype to describe a wide range of people sitting in the audience at the premiere.¹⁰⁶ The critics condemned the snobs for their alleged “false” or shallow tastes and for the genres of music they imagined they admired—whether compositions by Paul Delmet, tango, the théâtres lyriques, or shows at the Olympia.¹⁰⁷ Miscalculating the extent to which deeply racist prejudice toward The Rite was tied up with fears of attacks on Christianity, Henri Ghéon and René Chalupt wondered how the elite public could sit through the terribly bad taste of the parody of the mass in Gustav Charpentier’s Julien without laughing and yet feel they were being mocked when Nijinsky tried to recreate a savage ritual.¹⁰⁸

The most potent weapon wielded by the critics against the snobs, however, was the accusation of racial, national, or gender inferiority: those who had laughed at The Rite, they argued, were foreigners, women, or Jews.¹⁰⁹ René Chalupt assumed the laughter at the premiere came from rich métèques and rastoquouères—a derogatory term derived from Spanish that described foreigners who practiced conspicuous consumption of luxury goods. Chalupt noted disdainfully that these foreigners made their money on tinned pork and peanuts.¹¹⁰ Roland-Manuel described how “imbecile snobs, sentimental old ladies, and moronic métèques rubbed elbows [at The Rite] with true artists who knew how to feel the work fully.”¹¹¹ “It would be difficult to remove from the hall everyone who was badly raised,” Émile Raulin remarked in response to this general concern, “but we could at least propose to eliminate [from the audience] the feminine element.”¹¹²

The critics also associated the mistrusted luxury of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées with Jewish entrepreneurship and occasionally let their contempt for its Jewish manager, Astruc, be known.¹¹³ After the theater went broke that summer, Léon Daudet, who had been opposed to its construction on the Champs-Élysées all along, wrote a devastating critique of Astruc in L’action française. He blamed the failure of the theater on the fact that Astruc had brought an “Oriental bazaar” to the theater and on “Jewish shareholders and Jewish converts in the salons [actionnaires juifs et salonnades judaïsants].”¹¹⁴ Chantavoine felt that Astruc had made music into the object of commerce and speculation and that it had attracted the snobs as a result. “The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées represents the failure of the snobbism of money,” he concluded.¹¹⁵

The critics silenced the elite audience members’ laughter and whistling with a heavy hand, thereby preventing future historians from investigating its causes and consequences.¹¹⁶ They inhibited affective responses to The Rite and circumscribed the aesthetic, national, and social context for listening to modern music. Their masterly techniques of behavioral control indicate that they had internalized what Jean-Marc Berlière theorizes as the French Third Republic’s practices of maintaining order.¹¹⁷ The law of 30 June 1881 had forbidden public gatherings for the purpose of protest in France, rendering the riot that allegedly occurred at the premiere of The Rite an illegal impossibility in the first place. As a consequence of republican control, social groups had become acculturated to self-control. Rather than calling the police or dimming the lights—tactics better suited to a riot that never was—the critics disciplined public behavior in the concert hall by consolidating the ground rules for it in the press. In this they succeeded: by the last performances of The Rite on 4 and 6 June the snobs and foreigners had calmed down, and René Chalupt could report that “the victory went to Stravinsky’s troops.”¹¹⁸

Modernism Confronts Systemic Racism in the United States: The Invention of the Myth of the Riot

The critical reception of The Rite at its premiere gives stark evidence of the discursive practices of everyday racism and racial exclusion characteristic of French music and dance criticism before World War I. Critics in every country in which The Rite subsequently premiered participated in comparable discursive practices, their frameworks shifting depending on colonial histories, forms of systemic racism, and immigration policies. After the Ballets Russes performed Nijinsky’s Rite with Pierre Monteux conducting and a preconcert explanatory lecture by Edwin Evans (that irritated the public) at London’s Theatre Royal on Drury Lane on 11 July 1913, for example, Henry Cope Colles commented that Stravinsky had intended to convey the most primitive sound known to Western ears, which was the bagpipe, and that The Rite was “simply an extension of that.” The composer could have profited, however, from Charles Samuel Myers’s research in Polynesia, which demonstrated that “savages perform[ed] ceremonial dances to the accompaniment of tom-toms.”¹¹⁹ In contrast, when Ernest Ansermet conducted the German premiere of Stravinsky’s score in Berlin on 19 November 1922 as part of a concert organized by the Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, Adolf Weissmann complained in reference to that newly founded international society that “not ‘nation’ but ‘race’ made music.” Stravinsky was “a fruit of his race, and of our times,” and “surely not a musician of culture [Kulturmusiker],” because “a piece of barbarism still pulsed through his veins, and he wasn’t ashamed to express it wholeheartedly.”¹²⁰ Similarly, when Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted The Rite in Leipzig on 1 November 1923, Alfred Heuß complained about Stravinsky’s depiction of the “gruesomeness of the Russian peasants,” which would forever remain foreign to Germans, who he felt had nevertheless fallen so far that they would perform anything that caused a sensation: “foxtrots, Coon songs [Niggersongs], Russian peasant-abominations, and whatever.”¹²¹

The myth of the riot at the premiere of The Rite emerged when a displaced European discourse on modernism came into dramatic conflict with systemic racism in the United States. The first reports on the premiere of The Rite appeared just months after the Armory Show closed in New York on 15 March 1913 and displayed from the start self-conscious efforts to establish the work, sight unseen, as ultramodern. A transatlantic wireless telegraph reproduced in the New York Times on 8 June, for example, loosely translated passages condemning the snobs from Alfred Capus’s review of The Rite in Le Figaro a week earlier while adding to them sensational and apocryphal information about how Astruc had regularly turned down the lights to tame the crowd.¹²² Such selective reporting and mistranslation caused the Parisian audience’s reaction at the premiere to appear more unified and focused on modernist innovation than it actually was and framed The Rite powerfully within a history of modernism.

The contradiction between a burgeoning nationalist pride in modernist progress and a firm commitment to entrenched systemic racism came more dramatically to the fore in the U.S. reception of the Ballets Russes when the company toured there for the first time from January to April 1916 and from September 1916 to January 1917. In several interviews he gave with Olin Downes during that tour, Diaghilev described his productions as “revolutionary,” thus adopting a popular form of politicized rhetoric to describe modern art in the United States. Carl Van Vechten cultivated similar rhetoric in an article he wrote on the eve of the Ballets Russes’s U.S. tour in which he mentioned for the first time, and likely invented, the fiction of physical violence having occurred at the premiere of The Rite.¹²³ At the same time as journalistic descriptions of the Ballets Russes’s sensationally modern productions were heating up—perhaps as a consequence of political events in Russia—U.S. miscegenation laws led critics to worry about the representation of interracial love in Schéhérazade, which was performed at the Century Theatre in New York City in January 1916. “The remarkable impersonation of the negro favorite of Zobeide, Princess of Samarcande, by Mister Bolm will render the ballet impossible of production south of the Mason and Dixon’s line,” Grenville Vernon wrote in the New-York Tribune. “Even to Northern minds it was repulsive. . . . If it had not been given so wonderfully, so poetically, it would have been bestial.”¹²⁴ “Amorous passages between white women and negroes are resented in this country, where the Negro is a problem,” another anonymous reviewer in Musical America commented. “Not so, however, in Europe and especially Russia and the East. We must remember this in judging M. Diaghileff’s motive.”¹²⁵ This production raised enough concern that the Catholic Theatre Movement published a bulletin against it, and Third Deputy Commissioner Lawrence Dunham summoned John Brown, business controller of the Metropolitan Opera, and Diaghilev to Chief Magistrate McAdoo’s office to explain themselves and negotiate modifications to the ballet. As a consequence, Diaghilev had to lighten the representatively black dancers’ makeup to make them whiter when the piece was staged a few weeks later in Chicago.¹²⁶

Emphatic celebrations of modernism clashed with racial prejudice again when Leopold Stokowski premiered The Rite with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Philadelphia on 3 March 1922 in a curious concert in which it was followed by Ernest Schelling’s Fantastic Suite for Piano and Orchestra and excerpts from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (including the Entrance of the Gods, Waldweben, and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey). Stokowski preceded the performance with a short talk in which he racialized the Russians just as Jacques Rivière had a decade earlier yet situated The Rite squarely in the tradition of modernism, creating the impression that evoking foreign images of racial inferiority—or conflating strangeness with newness—was becoming key to achieving success with modernist works in the concert hall. Stokowski felt that it was “necessary for the music-loving people of this city to hear what the modern composers are doing, even if they do not fully approve of what they hear,” so that they could display such knowledge at the upcoming sesquicentennial of the city. At the same time he explained to audiences that “the Russians, of whom Stravinsky is a type, get closer to nature than we of the more highly cultivated nations do. This work is a type of that particular feature of modern Russian composer. It is close to nature itself, being stripped of the veneer of culture, and it is perfectly adjusted psychologically to what the composer had in mind.”¹²⁷

Olin Downes sublimated the racial tension surrounding the Ballets Russes into an aesthetic argument about the importance of newness in musical modernism by integrating the vocabulary of racial conflict into a revised history of The Rite’s modernist reception in the reviews he wrote after hearing Pierre Monteux conduct a rousing, successful performance of the piece with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall on 31 January 1924. Downes described the audience’s reaction at the Parisian premiere of the ballet in 1913 for the first time in history (as far as I can ascertain) as a “riot”—adopting a term that accentuated The Rite’s unique credentials as modern art and yet that was commonly used in the U.S. press at that time to describe violent social clashes, race and prison riots, and sports matches.¹²⁸ Six months after this performance, the Immigration Act of 1924, or the Johnson-Reed Act, was passed in the United States, severely limiting the number of immigrants from Russia. The transformation of The Rite into a modernist artifact alienated from the racially inferior Russian immigrants refused by the U.S. government became complete when Leopold Stokowski led the Philadelphia Orchestra in a staged performance of the work choreographed by Léonide Massine and starring Martha Graham on a program of the League of Composers at the Metropolitan Opera House on 22 April 1930 that included Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand. Critics celebrated this performance as proof of the triumph of The Rite as a formally innovative, absolute work of modern art.¹²⁹

Fascist Ideology in The Rite and the “Double Bind” of the Postwar Concept of Racism

Interpretations of the history of The Rite shifted dramatically again after World War II, when Eurocentric organizations such as UNESCO established what Barnor Hesse has analyzed as a “double bind” in the hegemonic concept of racism by forefronting the extreme example of the Fascist ideology that had led to the Jewish Holocaust in its analyses, thereby foreclosing conversations about the everyday practices of racism in European colonialism.¹³⁰ By assuming that racial thinking or ideology motivated political action in extreme situations, intellectuals became blind to the way in which racism was constitutive of Western liberal democracy itself and to how it remained an enduring social practice of, and conventional everyday tactic of governing in, Western imperialism. This led to the contradictory situation in 1948 in which the UN Social and Economic Council resolution could call upon UNESCO to establish a resolution to abolish racial prejudice in response to the Holocaust in the very same year in which the government of South Africa first enforced apartheid.

The dialogical opposition that created the double bind of the hegemonic concept of racism established in Europe and the United States after World War II had a dramatic impact on the reception of The Rite. In 1948 Theodor Adorno highlighted The Rite’s potential ideological relationship to Fascist ideology for the first time, thereby diverting scholarly attention dramatically away from the everyday colonial racism that had marked the ballet’s early reception history.¹³¹ Decades later, Richard Taruskin reiterated this pattern when he used Jacques Rivière’s essay on The Rite from November 1913 as the basis for his critique of the Fascist ideology in the work’s score. His failure to acknowledge the racist conceptual foundation of that essay led him to reify Rivière’s discursive tactics of aestheticizing everyday colonial racism as historical truth about the racist ideology of the music itself. Adopting a methodology of comparative etymology that reduced racism from a practice to an abstract signifier that could be used to describe aesthetic quality, and basing his analysis on the affinity between his own emotional response to the sonic experience of the horrific sublime in The Rite (which reminded him of Fascism) and Rivière’s xenophobically motivated reaction to its colonial strangeness, Taruskin concluded that The Rite continued a nineteenth-century balletic tradition of “primitivism” that was synonymous with German Kultur, Russian stikhiya (or “primitive romantic immediacy”), what Rivière called “biologism,” and, ultimately, Fascism.¹³² Taruskin further evaded any discussion of the ways in which systemic racism affected The Rite’s reception by focusing solely on how racist ideology had motivated Stravinsky’s compositional choices as a liberal Western individual—a maneuver that mirrored the denial of systemic racism through an emphasis on individual initiative and personal prejudice in the U.S. media in the postwar period.¹³³

Every time we reproduce the fiction of the riot, celebrate The Rite’s premiere, or postulate a relationship between The Rite and Fascism, we, like Taruskin, fall into the trap of the double bind of the postwar concept of racism and perpetuate denial of the reality of racial exclusion in the study and performance of classical and modern music by deflecting attention away from the historical fact of everyday colonial racism that has determined The Rite’s reception to the present day.

Notes

I am grateful to Erin Brooks, Benjamin Court, Jerome Camal, Eric Drott, Marianne Wheeldon, and the students and faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Georgia at Athens, and the Midwest Graduate Music Consortium, held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for their thoughtful discussions with me on this essay.

1. Originally posted on the web site of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and now available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsUWA8qC5fc (accessed 14 June 2015).

2. For specific advertisements, see Annegret Fauser, this volume.

3. See the section titled “French Reviews of The Rite from 1913 to 1914” in the bibliography of this volume for a complete list of reviews cited. Throughout this article I will refer to source and page numbers of the original French versions as transcribed in Bullard, “The First Performance,” vol. 3. I will indicate the few instances in which a review is omitted in Bullard but included in Lesure et al., Igor Stravinsky, “Le sacre du printemps.”

4. Carraud, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” given in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:48.

5. See Pasler, “Pelléas and Power.”

6. My impression of consistent, reliable evidence contradicts that of Richard Taruskin and Esteban Buch. See Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 2:2006; and Buch, “The Scandal at Le Sacre,” 62–63.

7. A contemporary seating plan of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées is online at http://fichtre.hautetfort.com/tag/elysees (accessed 5 June 2015). For a photograph of the theater that gives a good sense of its spatial layout and dimensions, see Kelly, First Nights, 276.

8. Kelly writes that the cost of seats in 1913 was double that of a normal ballet evening but that such prices were the norm for events that included a first performance (First Nights, 282). Gustav Linor claims the premiere took in 38,000 francs (see “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” given in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:23–25), whereas an anonymous reviewer in Comœdia illustré claims it took in only 35,000. See “La première du Sacre du printemps,” given in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:94; see also Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 296n63.

9. Astruc, Mes scandales, 130–34; and Cocteau, Le coq et l’arlequin, 93. It is difficult to ascertain precisely who attended The Rite on the basis of existing historical evidence because the booking lists (feuilles de location) do not seem to have survived, although subscription lists and ticket requests for the Ballets Russes’s 1913–14 season have and are kept in the Archives nationales in Paris. There is more precise information available, however, for earlier seasons of the Ballets Russes. See Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 273–99, esp. 279.

10. Astruc notes that the cream of the Austrian, German, French, Polish, Russian, and U.S. aristocracy, as well as some of the Ballets Russes’s most important patrons, attended. For an exact list of names, see Astruc, Mes scandales, 131. See also Vuillermoz, “La Saison Russe au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” given in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:142; and Kessler, “29.V. Donnerstag,” in Das Tagebuch 1880–1937, 4:886.

11. Baron Edmond de Rothschild used a visiting card to ask Astruc for “une baignoire de première” with eight seats or “deux bons fauteuils d’orchestre” for Boris Godunov on 27 May, for example, whereas Prince Heinrich von Bayern had his attaché formally request two fauteuils de corbeille for 27 and 29 May. Prince Aga Khan III (Sultan Sir Mohammed Shah) requested a variety of seats (including fauteuils d’orchestra and de corbeille, as well as baignoires) for all thirty performances that season, racking up a total bill of 1,606 francs (adjusted for inflation, the astronomical price of $728,107 in today’s U.S. dollars). According to a receipt issued to Aga Khan III for the 1912–13 Russian season, fauteuil prices varied depending on the show and cost ten francs more than orchestra seats. Khan paid thirty francs for his fauteuil for The Rite. These ticket requests and others like them are kept in box 41, Archives nationales, Paris. I am grateful to César Leal for sharing this primary material with me and for his deep generosity as a scholar.

12. Astruc lists the names of the people in this group in Mes scandales, 131–32.

13. See Ricciotto Canudo’s request to Stravinsky for tickets in a note dated 27 May 1913, transcribed in Rodriguez, L’affaire “Montjoie!,” 15. Victor Seroff also discusses the presence of the Apaches in Maurice Ravel, 169–70. The Apaches had offered Debussy significant support at the premiere of Pelléas but appear to me to have wielded less influence as a group at the premiere of The Rite. See Pasler, “A Sociology of the Apaches”; and Pasler, “Stravinsky and the Apaches.” Astruc lists among the musicians and poets in attendance at the premiere Debussy, Florent Schmitt, Maurice Ravel, Reynaldo Hahn, Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, Erik Satie, Jean Cocteau, and Les Six; see Mes scandales, 132–33.

14. Astruc, Mes scandales, 132–33; and Cocteau, Le coq et l’arlequin, 93.

15. Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 297.

16. Kelly, First Nights, 277.

Trépignement is used in Chantavoine, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:15; Carraud, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:52; Lalo, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:74; Jullien, “Revue musicale,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:117; Touchard, “Ballets russes et français” (who claims the public stamped), in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:175; and Lalo, “Considérations sur le ‘Sacre du printemps,’” in Lesure et al., Igor Stravinsky, “Le sacre du printemps,” 32.

18. Frénésie or frénétique appears in the following reviews: Chantavoine, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:14; Pioch, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:28; Pawlowski, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:32, 35; Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:43; Schneider, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:46; Carraud, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:52; Capus, “Courrier de Paris,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:69; Lalo, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:74; Schmitt, “Les premières,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:81; Casalonga, “Nijinsky et Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:102; Vuillermoz, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:152, 155; Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:165; Rivière, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:263; and Lalo, “Considérations sur le ‘Sacre du printemps,’” in Lesure et al., Igor Stravinsky, “Le sacre du printemps,” 32.

19. Puppet-like movements are discussed in the following: Chantavoine, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:15; “Ce qu’il faut faire à Paris,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:59; Lalo, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:74; Vuillermoz, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:148; Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:165; and Touchard, “Ballets russes et français,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:176.

21. Uses of trembling (tremblotement) and its variants appear in Carraud, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:52; Lalo, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:74; Jullien, “Revue musicale,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:117; Touchard, “Ballets russes et français,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:175; and Rivière, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:268 (tremblement).

22. Jerky gestures (gestes saccadés) are referred to in the following: Pawlowski, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:35; Carraud, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:52; Vuillermoz, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:148; Leroux, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:198; and Rivière, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:270.

23. The reviews using vibrating (trépidation) are Maus, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:61; Casalonga, “Nijinsky et Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:101; and Blanche, “Un bilan artistique de 1913 (II),” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:305.

24. Shuddering (tressaillement) appears in the following reviews: Casalonga, “Nijinsky et Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:103, and Vuillermoz, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:153.

25. On Stravinsky’s orchestra, see Kelly, First Nights, 279. Seven critics noted that the music could not be heard, primarily because of “tumultuous protest” coming from the audience: Pawlowski, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:22, 35; Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:39; Lalo, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:75; Linor, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” 3 June 1913, in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:78; Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:164; Raulin, “La musique,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:182; and Chalupt, “Le mois du musician,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:207.

26. Critics used many different terms and expressions to describe the extreme dissonance they experienced in The Rite, as can be seen in the following: Chantavoine, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:15; Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:42; Quittard, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:56; Souday, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:58; Maus, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:64; Lalo, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:75–76; Schmitt, “Les premières,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:81; Linor, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” 5 June 1913, in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:90; Jullien, “Revue musicale,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:118; Laloy, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:160; Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:165–66; Touchard, “Ballets russes et français,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:176–78; Chalupt, “Le mois du musician,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:208; Marnold, “Musique; Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:226; Noël and Stoullig, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:310; and Lalo, “Considérations sur le ‘Sacre du printemps,’” in Lesure et al., Igor Stravinsky, “Le sacre du printemps,” 34.

27. Chantavoine, “Chronique musicale,” 546.

28. The following critics complained about instruments played in the wrong range or in an uncharacteristic manner: Pioch, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:26; Lalo, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:76; Schmitt, “Les premières,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:82; Vuillermoz, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:151; Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:166; and Chalupt, “Le mois du musician,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:209–10.

29. For reviews that make reference to unexpectedly jarring melodies or juxtaposition at the second or seventh, see Boschot, “Le ‘Sacre du printemps,’” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:7; Carraud, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:49; Quittard, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:55; Lalo, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:76; Schmitt, “Les premières,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:82; Casalonga, “Nijinsky et Le sacre,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:102; Vuillermoz, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:151; Roland-Manuel, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:158; Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:166; Touchard, “Ballets russes et français,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:177; and Marnold, “Musique; Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:226.

30. The following critics praised The Rite’s rhythm: Boschot, “Le ‘Sacre du printemps,’” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:10; A.D., “Théâtre des Champs Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:12; Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:43; Quittard, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:56; Maus, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:64; Schmitt, “Les premières,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:82; Casalonga, “Nijinsky et Le sacre,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:102; Calvocoressi, “Critique musicale du Sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:108–109; Vuillermoz, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:155; Roland-Manuel, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:158; Laloy, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:160; Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:166; Raulin, “La musique,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:181–82; Rivière, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:246; Blanche, “Un bilan artistique de 1913 (II),” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:302; Noël and Stoullig, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:311; and Lalo, “Considérations sur le ‘Sacre du printemps,’” in Lesure et al., Igor Stravinsky, “Le sacre du printemps,” 34.

Seven critics praised the work’s orchestration: Lalo, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:76; Schmitt, “Les premières,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:82; Vuillermoz, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:152; Roland-Manuel, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:158; Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:166; Raulin, “La musique,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:182; and Chalupt, “Le mois du musician,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:209.

31. Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:166.

32. The word vacarme is used by Stravinsky in his interview in Postel du Mas, “Un entretien avec M. Stravinsky,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:88; as well as in Noël and Stoullig, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées: 29, mai,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:308; Astruc, Mes scandales, 147; and Cocteau, Le coq et l’arlequin, 95.

33. The following reviewers described the tumult in the concert hall: Lalo, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées” (“le public avait mené tapage”), in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:77; Raulin, “La musique,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:182; Chalupt, “Le mois du musician,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:207; Blanche, “Un bilan artistique de 1913 (II),” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:280; Cocteau, Le coq et l’arlequin, 92; Nijinska, Early Memoirs, 470, included in Kelly, First Nights, 321; Valentine Gross Hugo, radio interview from 1951 quoted in Reiss, Nijinsky, 122, included in Kelly, First Nights, 322; and Sert, Misia, 182.

34. Occasionally, critics used the word manifestation (demonstration) to describe the audience’s reaction, but even in these cases, they qualified these demonstrations as noisy rather than physically disruptive. See Lalo, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:76; “Les théâtres: Échos,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:86; Linor, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” 5 and 7 June 1913, in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:93, 114; Linor, “Les Ballets Russes au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” 14 June 1913, in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:126; Débay, “Les Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:130; Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:164; and Marnold, “Musique; Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:220.

35. Alfredo Casella claims the noise began halfway through the prelude, whereas Astruc claims it began in the tenth bar. See Casella, Strawinski, 57, reprinted in Kelly, First Nights, 327; and Astruc, Mes scandales, 145–46.

36. The reviewers who wrote of laughter and/or sniggering include Boschot, “Le ‘Sacre du printemps,’” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:8, 9, 11; Chantavoine, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:16; Linor, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” 30 May 1913, in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:23; Linor, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” 7 June 1913, in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:114; Linor, “Les Ballets Russes au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” 14 June 1913, in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:126; Pioch, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:29; Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:41; “Ce qu’il faut faire à Paris,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:59; Nicolet, “Le courrier des spectacles,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:80; Schmitt, “Les premières,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:81–85; Postel du Mas, “Un entretien avec M. Stravinsky,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:87; “La première du Sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:94; Vuillermoz, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:146; Roland-Manuel, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:156; Touchard, “Ballets russes et français,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:179; Ghéon, “Julien devant un public ‘avert,’” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:190; Chalupt, “Le mois du musician,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:210; Blanche, “Un bilan artistique de 1913 (II),” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:297; and Noël and Stoullig, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:308.

In contrast, fourteen observers noted different kinds of whistling. See Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:39; Souday, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:58; “Ce qu’il faut faire à Paris,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:59; “Hier,” Le Figaro, 3 June 1913, in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:72; Linor, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” 5 and 7 June 1913, in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:93, 114; Linor, “Les Ballets Russes au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” 14 June 1913, in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:126; Débay, “Les Ballets Russes” (“sifflets à roulettes”), in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:131; Jean Perros, “Après les Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:140; Vuillermoz, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:146; Leroux, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:199; Rivière, “Le sacre du printemps, ballet par Igor Stravinski,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:201; Chalupt, “Le mois du musician,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:207; Cocteau, Le coq et l’arlequin, 93–94; Astruc, Mes scandales, 143; and Sert, Misia, 182.

37. Eleven critics mention the protestations (protests), a term Linor favors in all of his reviews. See Capus, “Courrier de Paris,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:72; Linor, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” 30 May 1913, in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:23, 25; Linor, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” 3, 5, and 7 June 1913, in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:78, 92, 114; Linor, “Les Ballets Russes au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” 14 June 1913, in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:126; “Hier,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:72; Nicolet, “Le courrier des spectacles,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:80; “La première du Sacre du Printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:94; Débay, “Les Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:130; Perros, “Après les Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:140; Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps” (protestations tapageuses), in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:165; Marnold, “Musique; Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:220; Blanche, “Un bilan artistique de 1913 (II),” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:304; and Noël and Stoullig, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:308.

Very few critics other than Paul Souday thought the audience protested out of anger. See Souday, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées: Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:58.

38. Critics who referred to animal sounds include Postel du Mas, “Un entretien avec M. Stravinsky,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:87; Vuillemin, “La semaine musicale” (beugle, or “mooing”), in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:112; Perros, “Après les Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:141; Touchard, “Ballets russes et français,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:175; and Cocteau, Le coq et l’arlequin, 94.

39. The word “heckled” (chahuter) appears in the following reviews: Pawlowski, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:32; Linor, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” 3 June 1913, in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:78; and Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:164.

40. “Murmured” (murmures) appears in only two reviews: Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:39; and “La première du Sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:94.

41. Two critics wrote of booing: Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:39; and Cocteau, Le coq et l’arlequin, 94.

42. Only two critics mentioned yelling: Rivière, “Le sacre du printemps, ballet par Igor Stravinski,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:201; and Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:40.

43. Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:39.

44. Boschot, “Le ‘Sacre du printemps,’” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:8; Quittard, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:57.

45. Kessler, Das Tagebuch, 4:886.

46. See the reviews of Jeux included in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:316–35.

47. See “Hier,” Le Figaro, 3 June 1913, given in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:72; Postel du Mas, “Un entretien avec M. Stravinsky,” given in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:87; Cocteau, Le coq et l’arlequin, 95; and Kessler, Das Tagebuch, 4:886. Astruc and Gross Hugo claim that musicians and writers came down from the balconies into the passageway that separated the premières loges from the avant-scène de corbeille to scream insults directly in the faces of the elite spectators, but I could not corroborate these observations. See Astruc, Mes scandales, 146; and Valentine Gross Hugo in Kelly, First Nights, 322.

48. “Où donc ont-ils été élevés tous ces salauds-là?” (Pawlowski, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:31). Werth quoted the insult more politely as “Where were you raised?” (Où donc avez-vous été élevées?), in Werth, “À travers la quinzaine,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:124. Cocteau reports how the disheveled seventy-seven-year-old Countess Mélanie de Pourtalès became red in the face and yelled, “That is the first time in sixty years that anybody has dared mock me”; see Le coq et l’arlequin, 95.

49. “Allons, les grues du Seizième (das 16te Arrondissement, das der eleganten Welt), allez vous bientôt nous ficher la paix?” and “Les voilà qui sont murs pour l’annexation” (Kessler, Das Tagebuch, 4:886). Stravinsky erroneously recalled Florent Schmitt shouting, “Shut up, bitches of the sixteenth [arrondissement]” (Taissez-vous, garces du seizième), in Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, 143. Three years later Pierre Monteux remembered more accurately not Schmitt but rather an anonymous audience member shouting “Down with the sluts from the sixteenth” (À bas les grues du 16ème), in Monteux, It’s All in the Music, 90–92. Robert Craft misrepresents these sources in Stravinsky and Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, 100.

50. “La première du Sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:94.

51. “Vous êtes mûrs pour l’annexion” (Lunacharskii, “Russkie spektakli v Parizhe,” 458, translated in Rabinowitz, “From the Other Shore,” 12). Compare Noël and Stoullig, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:308.

52. Kessler, Das Tagebuch, 4:886. Astruc provided an even more fantastical account of these insults over a decade later in Mes scandales, 146–47.

53. The anonymous reviewer for the Comœdia illustré heard the “fearless” Diaghilev calmly pronounce from the balcony, “The artists can no longer hear the music!” (Les artistes n’entendent plus la musique!), in “La première du Sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:94. Twenty years after the premiere, in 1933, Romola Pulsky (Nijinska) remembered Diaghilev responding with the somewhat different phrase “I beg you, let the show finish” (Je vous en prie, laissez achever le spectacle), in Nijinsky, Nijinsky, 199–200, reprinted in Kelly, First Nights, 320. In 1952 Misia Sert recalled that it was Debussy rather than Diaghilev who had remarked during the premiere that “it’s terrifying, I can no longer understand/hear” (C’est effrayant, je n’entends plus), italics in the original, a phrase she had interpreted as an indication that Debussy no longer sensed an artistic affinity with Stravinsky and found his music incomprehensible (Sert, Misia, 183). A year after that, in 1953, Sergei Leonidovitch Grigoriev remembered Diaghilev expressing similar sentiments but before the show began, when he had allegedly told Monteux that “whatever happens the ballet must be performed to the end” (Grigoriev, The Diaghilev Ballet, 92). Bronislava Nijinska remembered Diaghilev shouting “Let them finish the performance” (Early Memoirs, 469–70, reprinted in Kelly, First Nights, 321).

54. Kessler, Das Tagebuch, 4:886.

55. Lunacharskii, “Russkie spektakli v Parizhe,” translated in Rabinowitz, “From the Other Shore,” 12–13.

56. See “Ce qu’il faut faire à Paris,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:59; Vuillemin, “La semaine musicale” (bagarre), in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:112; Chantavoine, “Chronique musicale,” 546 (malmener); and Cocteau, Le coq et l’arlequin, 95 (lutte).

57. Linor, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:23. See also Débay, “Les Ballets Russes au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:130; Schneider, “Le Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:172; and Blanche, “Un bilan artistique de 1913 (II),” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:281.

58. See “La première du Sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:94.

59. Pawlowski, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:32.

60. Blum, “Le goût au Théâtre,” 246, translated somewhat differently in Kelly, First Nights, 315.

61. Jacques Rivière was the only critic to remark on how this noise disrupted the dancers, writing months after the premiere. He claims to have observed Nijinsky, oblivious to the noise, beating time with his foot while shouting to his dancers, “It’s limp! It’s limp!” (C’est mou! C’est mou!), a possibly invented story Romola Nijinsky, Valentine Gross Hugo, and Bronislava Nijinska later corroborated in part, but only decades after the fact (Rivière, “Le sacre du printemps, ballet par Igor Stravinski,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:202, and excerpts in Kelly, First Nights, 320–22).

62. Esteban Buch reports on the disappearance in the archives of the Préfacture de police in Paris of file Cb.29.47 relating to police intervention for “tumultuous protests” between February 1913 and April 1914. He notes, however, that a police supervisor had to attend all performances in the main Parisian theaters and that uniformed republican guards would have been on guard in the foyer (Buch, “The Scandal at Le Sacre,” 59–60). Linor, who attended all four performances of The Rite and meticulously described them in his reviews, noted that the lights were turned on only during the second performance (Linor, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” 3 June 1913, in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:78).

63. Linor, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:25; Quittard, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:57; and Kessler, Das Tagebuch, 4:886.

64. The adjective étrange (strange or foreign) and noun étrangeté (strangeness or foreignness) appear frequently in reviews of The Rite. Critics using forms of “strange” or “foreign” include Boschot, “Le ‘Sacre du printemps,’” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:7–8; Pioch, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:26–28; Pawlowski, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:31–34; Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:40; Carraud, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:51–52; Quittard, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:55; “Ce qu’il faut faire à Paris,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:59; Maus, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:62–63; “Hier,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:72; Schmitt, “Les premières,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:82; Postel du Mas, “Un entretien avec M. Stravinsky,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:88; Calvocoressi, “Critique musicale du Sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:108; Curzon, “La semaine,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:120; La Dame au Masque, “La grande saison française,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:127; Débay, “Les Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:132; Perros, “Après les Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:138; Vuillermoz, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:146, 152; Laloy, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:162; Touchard, “Ballets russes et français,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:176; Marnold, “Musique; Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:225; Rivière, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:245–49, 259–60, 266; Blanche, “Un bilan artistique de 1913 (II),” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:279, 280, 283, 286, 291; Noël and Stoullig, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:309; and Chantavoine, “La musique française en 1913,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:312, 314.

65. Compare Annegret Fauser’s essay in this volume.

66. Xénophobe was defined for the first time in French in 1906 as “qui déteste les étrangers” (a person who detests foreigners) in Augé, Petit Larousse illustré, 4:244.

67. Astruc provides this list in Mes scandales, 132.

68. See Astruc, “Confession d’un xenophile,” 197; Perros, “Après les Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:138; and Leroux, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:196.

69. See Maurras, “L’hospitalité,” 1; Maurras, La politique religieuse; and Maurras, “Les métèques.”

70. Chantavoine, “Chronique musicale,” 547.

71. Vuillermoz, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:144. See also Touchard, “Ballets russes et français,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:173.

72. See “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:1.

73. Astruc, Mes scandales, 130. Vuillemin and another anonymous critic also thought the ballet required explanation. See Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:39, and the anonymous critic in “Ce qu’il faut voir,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:60.

74. See Lalo, “Considérations sur le ‘Sacre du printemps,’” in Lesure et al., Igor Stravinsky, “Le sacre du printemps,” 32; and Curzon, “La semaine: Paris,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:120. “What archeological research is this work based on?” Curzon asked.

75. Débay, “Les Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:132. See also Touchard, “Ballets russes et français,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:175. Compare Annegret Fauser’s essay in this volume.

76. Cottinet, “La Saison Russe.”

77. Boschot, “Le ‘Sacre du printemps,’” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:8, 11; Souday, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:58; Cocteau, Le coq et l’arlequin, 91; and Vuillermoz, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:153.

78. On Nikolai Roerich’s interest in Siberian ethnography, see Misler, “Dance, Memory!”

79. Lalo, “Considérations sur le ‘Sacre du printemps,’” in Lesure et al., Igor Stravinsky, “Le sacre du printemps,” 32–33.

80. The word laid (ugly) is used in Boschot, “Le ‘sacre du printemps,’” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:9; Pawlowski, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:31, 33; Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:39; Souday, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:58; Lalo, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:73–74; Nicolet, “Le courrier des spectacles,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:80; Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:166; and Blanche, “Un bilan artistique de 1913 (II),” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:294.

81. Primitif is used in Boschot, “Le ‘Sacre du printemps,’” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:8; Chantavoine, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:15; Pawlowski, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:32–34, 37; Carraud, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:51–52; Quittard, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:56; Lalo, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:73; Schmitt, “Les premières,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:83, 85; Casalonga, “Nijinsky et Le sacre,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:101–104; Calvocoressi, “Critique musicale du Sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:105–107; Jullien, “Revue musicale,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:117; Débay, “Les Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:132; Perros, “Après les Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:137; Roland-Manuel, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:157; Laloy, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:161; Raulin, “La musique,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:181; Ghéon, “Julien devant un public ‘avert,’” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:193; Chalupt, “Le mois du musician,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:210; Laloy, “Stravinski,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:215; Marnold, “Musique; Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:221, 226; Rivière, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:260, 272, 274; Blanche, “Un bilan artistique de 1913 (II),” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:282, 291–92, 296, 300; and Noël and Stoullig, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:310.

82. Barbare is used in Boschot, “Le ‘Sacre du printemps,’” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:10; Chantavoine, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:15; Pawlowski, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:33; Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:40; Schneider, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:45; Carraud, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:51; Quittard, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:54–56; Capus, “Courrier de Paris,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:69; Lalo, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:73–76; Schmitt, “Les premières,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:82; Linor, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” 5 June 1913, in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:90; Casalonga, “Nijinsky et Le sacre,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:100; Jullien, “Revue musicale” (also bestial), in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:118; Débay, “Les Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:132; Perros, “Après les Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:137–38; Vuillermoz, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:152; Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps” (also bestial), in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:165; Schneider, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:171; Touchard, “Ballets russes et français,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:177; Marnold, “Musique; Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:221, 226, 232; Blanche, “Un bilan artistique de 1913 (II),” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:282, 296; and Noël and Stoullig, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:310.

For two rare positive descriptions of the choreography, see Casalonga, “Nijinsky et Le sacre,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:101–102; and Calvocoressi, “Critique musicale du Sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:106–107.

83. The following critics wrote on Stravinsky’s descent into “primitivism” and “noise”: Boschot, “Le ‘Sacre du printemps,’” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:10; Chantavoine, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:16; Carraud, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:51; Quittard, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:56; Jullien, “Revue musicale,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:118; Werth, “À travers la quinzaine,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:123; Débay, “Les Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:132; Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:166; and Raulin, “La musique,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:181–82.

The word exagérer is used in Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:42; Linor, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” 5 June 1913, in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:91; and Raulin, “La musique,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:181.

84. Souday, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:58. See also Jullien, “Revue musicale,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:117–18.

85. Carraud, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:49.

86. Astruc, Mes scandales, 143.

87. See Cocteau, Le coq et l’arlequin, 95–96; Blanche, “Un bilan artistique de 1913 (II),” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:304 (who identifies the poem as Pushkin’s “Aux îles”); and Kessler, Das Tagebuch, 4:887.

88. Postel du Mas, “Un entretien avec M. Stravinsky,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:87–88.

89. Schmitt, “Les premières,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:81–82. Diaghilev spoke of “these stammerings of a half-savage humanity” in “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:1 (the original is not signed by Diaghilev). Only a handful of other critics emphasized The Rite’s newness: Calvocoressi, “Critique musicale du Sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:107–109; Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:167; Chalupt, “Le mois du musician,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:208; Marnold, “Musique; Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:230; and Rivière, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:237–75. Compare this to the number of critics who found The Rite strange (note 64).

Critics who explicitly rejected the idea that The Rite was new included Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:38; Carraud, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:48; Quittard, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:55; and Raulin, “La musique,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:180–81.

90. Schmitt spoke of the newness (nouveauté) and strangeness (étrangeté) of Petrushka and The Rite in one breath, as if those two adjectives were interchangeable (Schmitt, “Les premières,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:82). Astruc had marketed foreignness similarly as newness since the premiere in France of Strauss’s Salome in 1907. This is the theme of Mes scandales.

91. Schmitt, “Les premières,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:85.

92. Laloy, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:161. Other spectators who compared The Rite to Gauguin include Marnold, “Musique; Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:225; Cocteau, Le coq et l’arlequin, 89; and Kessler, Das Tagebuch, 4:886.

93. Laloy, “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:162–63; and Pawlowski, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:34.

94. Rivière mythologized Stravinsky and Nijinsky to accentuate their extreme racial difference; he thought critics misrecognized Stravinsky’s difference by comparing him to exoticized Persians. See Rivière, “Le sacre du printemps, ballet par Igor Stravinski,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:201; and Rivière, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:250n4.

95. Rivière, “Le sacre du printemps, ballet par Igor Stravinski,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:201. “I was really stupid to fear you [Stravinsky] would find Paris contagious,” Rivière continues on the next page. “There hasn’t been a dent made in this little troupe of men [the Ballets Russes]. They lived, in our midst, as if in the middle of a steppe. The air they breathe is not the same. It’s not the same ideas that are born in their brains. Between them and us there is the distance of one race to another. Nothing of us will ever reach back to them.” For similar ideas about the Russians as an unindividuated race, see also Perros, “Après les Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:136–37; and Blanche, “Un bilan artistique de 1913 (II),” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:281, 288–89, 298, 304.

96. Rivière, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:249–51. In Claudel’s play, Louis, the protagonist, describes to Martha how a spider attached itself to his wrist and told him stories. Claudel introduces the spider as a vehicle of nonverbal communication.

97. “The strangeness [of the oddities in Stravinsky’s music] comes from the fact that they take on all that is impossible, inaccessible, and revolting in the things they want to express. They absorb all the mystery of these things in order to reveal them for us” (ibid., 3:248).

98. Rivière quotes a devastating passage from act 3 of Claudel’s Tête d’or in ibid., 3:271.

99. Ibid., 3:273.

100. Ibid., 3:274–75.

101. Lalo, “Le ‘Sacre du printemps’ au concert,” in Lesure et al., Igor Stravinsky, “Le sacre du printemps,” 49–50.

102. The premiere of The Rite is compared to that of Tannhäuser and other scandalous works in Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:41, 43; Lalo, “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:77; Schmitt, “Les premières,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:83; Débay, “Les Ballets Russes,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:131; Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:164; “Comme Wagner!,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:169; Touchard, “Ballets russes et français,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:179; Chalupt, “Le mois du musicien,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:206; and Laloy, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Lesure et al., Igor Stravinsky, “Le sacre du printemps,” 51. Compare Annegret Fauser’s essay in this volume.

103. Panurge’s sheep is used in Boschot, “Le ‘Sacre du printemps,’” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:7; and Cocteau, Le coq et l’arlequin, 93. Dilettante appears in Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:41. Gens du monde appears in Schmitt, “Les premières,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:83; Werth, “À travers la quinzaine,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:123; and Vuillermoz, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:146. Merles appears in Vuillermoz, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:146. Sots (fools) appears in Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:41; Raulin, “La musique,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:180; and Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:164. Finally, “Parisians” appears in Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:164–65.

104. Schmitt, “Les premières,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:82–83.

105. None of the people who laughed and whistled at The Rite left a written or oral record of why they did so. The only existing evidence of their behavior at the premiere comes from those who despised them.

107. Werth, “À travers la quinzaine,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:124; Vallas, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:164–65; Touchard, “Ballets russes et français,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:179.

108. Ghéon, “Julien devant un public ‘avert,’” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:194–95; and Chalupt, “Le mois du musician,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:210–11.

109. Vallas describes the snobs as foreigners in “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:164.

110. Chalupt, “Le mois du musician,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:205–206. The term rastoquouère derives from the Spanish words arrastrar and cueros and was first used to describe Argentine tanners or wholesale sellers of leather (menials and merchants), but it came to be used for a range of foreigners from South America.

111. Roland-Manuel, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:156.

112. Raulin, “La musique,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:183. See also Lunacharskii, “Russkie spektakli v Parizhe,” translated in Rabinowitz, “From the Other Shore,” 19.

113. La Dame au Masque referred to Astruc and Gunsbourg as “barnums” and “strangers” (étrangers); see La Dame au Masque, “La grande saison française,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:127.

114. Daudet, “Le krach du Théâtre Astruc.”

115. Chantavoine, “La musique française en 1913,” 289 (section omitted from Bullard, “The First Performance”).

116. Cocteau and Jacques E. Blanche were the only intellectuals to analyze the elite spectators’ laughter at the time. See Blanche, “Un bilan artistique de 1913 (II),” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:297, 302–304; and Cocteau, Le coq et l’arlequin, 91–92.

117. Berlière, “Du maintien de l’ordre républicain.”

118. Chalupt, “Le mois du musician,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:211. Ernest Newman saw through the crass public relations maneuver that led to the triumph of the pro-Stravinsky critics at the premiere of The Rite and condemned it in “The End of a Chapter,” in Lesure et al., Igor Stravinsky, “Le sacre du printemps,” 74–75.

119. Colles, “‘Le Sacre du Printemps’ at Drury Lane,” in Lesure et al., Igor Stravinsky, “Le sacre du printemps,” 68. For a selection of English responses to The Rite, see Lesure et al., Igor Stravinsky, “Le sacre du printemps,” 61–77; and Macdonald, Diaghilev Observed.

120. Weissmann, “Konzert,” in Lesure et al., Igor Stravinsky, “Le sacre du printemps,” 105.

121. Heuß, “Igor Strawinsky im Gewandhaus,” in Lesure et al., Igor Stravinsky, “Le sacre du printemps,” 106, 110.

122. “Parisians Hiss New Ballet”; compare Capus, “Courrier de Paris,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:66–70.

123. See, for example, Downes, “The Revolutionary Mr. Diaghileff.” The word “revolutionary” is used extremely sparingly in reviews of the Parisian premiere of The Rite, and even then, only in a questioning manner and in relation to Nijinsky’s dance. See Vuillemin, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:38; Maus, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:61; Calvocoressi, “Critique musicale du Sacre du printemps,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:109; and Leroux, “La Saison Russe,” in Bullard, “The First Performance,” 3:198. See also Van Vechten, “Igor Stravinsky: A New Composer,” 88. Decades later, Valentine Gross Hugo, Sergei Leonidovitch Grigoriev, Pierre Monteux, and Victor Seroff added fuel to the fire by providing more elaborate (fictional) accounts of such physical aggression.

124. Vernon, “Russian Ballet a Dream World,” quoted in Macdonald, Diaghilev Observed, 139.

125. Hanna Järvinen quotes this report from 29 January 1916 in “Failed Impressions,” 100n25.

126. See Macdonald, Diaghilev Observed, 143–44.

127. Stokowski, quoted in “Strawinsky the Feature of Orchestral Concert.”

128. See Downes, “Music: ‘Sacre du printemps’ Played”; and Gilman, “Stravinsky’s ‘Sacre du printemps’ Sells Out,” in Lesure et al., Igor Stravinsky, “Le sacre du printemps,” 94, 96. Downes frequently used the word “riot” to describe reactions at the Parisian premiere of The Rite in articles he wrote in the U.S. press. My comments on him here reflect my examination of his complete reviews in his archive at the University of Georgia, Athens. These reviews give strong evidence of his sharply racialized perspective on modernism. The term “riot” is also closely associated with Monteux and was used often in reviews of his performances of The Rite in the United States throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Notably, the word “riot” was not used in reviews of The Rite in the U.K., I believe, until 1947.

129. See, for example, Martin, “The Dance.”

130. Hesse, “Im/Plausible Deniability.”

131. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, 110.

132. See Taruskin, “A Myth of the Twentieth Century.” Taruskin appears to have rediscovered Rivière through Millicent Hodson, who prioritized him in developing the conceptual frame for her reconstruction of The Rite. See, for example, Hodson, “Nijinsky’s Choreographic Method.”

133. Although Taruskin has varied his position on this thesis over the years, he continues to believe that The Rite is a “dark masterpiece” with an “antihumanitarian” message that Stravinsky and his audiences have resisted for the last century; see Taruskin, “Shocker Cools.”