1. Le Sacre du printemps The rite of spring
Igor Stravinsky

2. Igor Stravinsky
Born in the suburb of Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Notable for stylistic diversity.
Achieved international fame with the composition of 3 ballets commissioned by Diaghilev. These were known as the Ballet Russes.
He was a student of Nikolai Rimsky- Korsakov
He composed a piece called Fireworks as a wedding present for Rimsky- Korsakov’s daughter.

3. The Ballet Russes
A ballet company based in Paris that performed between 1909 and througout Europe.
Concieved by Sergei Diaghiliev.
The company's productions created a huge sensation, completely reinvigorating the art of performing dance, bring many visual artists to public attention and significantly affecting the course of musical composition.
The Ballet Russes employed a high standard of dancers, most of whom had been classical trained at the Great Imperial Schools of Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
The company was declared bankrupt in 1929.
Originally conceived by impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the Ballets Russes is widely regarded as the most influential ballet company of the 20th century,[2] in part because it promoted ground-breaking artistic collaborations among young choreographers, composers, designers, and dancers, all at the forefront of their several fields. Diaghilev commissioned works from composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, and Sergei Prokofiev, artists such as Vasily Kandinsky, Alexandre Benois, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, and costume designers Léon Bakst and Coco Chanel.
When Sergei Diaghilev died of diabetes in Venice on 19 August 1929, the Ballets Russes was left with substantial debts. As the Great Depression began its property was claimed by its creditors and the company of dancers dispersed.

4. The Ballet Russes - Stravinsky
L'Oiseau De Feu – The Firebird (1910)
Petrushka (1911)
Le Sacre Du Printemps – The Rite of Spring (1913)
Diaghilev hired the young Stravinsky at a time when he was virtually unknown to compose the music for The Firebird, after the composer Anatoly Lyadov proved unreliable, and this was instrumental in launching Stravinsky's career in Europe and the United States of America.
Stravinsky's early ballet scores were the subject of much discussion. The Firebird (1910) was seen as an astonishingly accomplished work for such a young artist (Debussy is said to have remarked drily: "Well, you've got to start somewhere!"). Many contemporary audiences found Petrushka (1911) to be almost unbearably dissonant and confused. The Rite of Spring nearly caused an audience riot. It stunned people because of its willful rhythms and aggressive dynamics. The audience's negative reaction to it is now regarded as a theatrical scandal as notorious as the failed runs of Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser at Paris in 1861 and Jean-Georges Noverre's Les Fêtes Chinoises in London on the eve of the Seven Years' War. However, Stravinsky's early ballet scores are now widely considered masterpieces of the genre.[14] Even his later ballet scores (such as Apollo), while not as startling, were still superior to most ballet music of the previous century

5. The rite of spring
Composed for the 1913 Paris season of Diaghiliev’s Ballet Russes.
The origional choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky.
Premiered on 29th May 1913 at the Theatre Des Champs Elysees.
The avant-garde nature of the music and choreography caused the audience to riot.
Stravinsky was a young, virtually unknown composer when Diaghilev recruited him to create works for the Ballets Russes. The Rite was the third such project, after the acclaimed Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911). The concept behind The Rite of Spring, developed by Roerich from Stravinsky's outline idea, is suggested by its subtitle, "Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts"; in the scenario, after various primitive rituals celebrating the advent of spring, a young girl is chosen as a sacrificial victim and dances herself to death. After a mixed critical reception for its original run and a short London tour, the ballet was not performed again until the 1920s, when a version choreographed by Léonide Massine replaced Nijinsky's original. Massine's was the forerunner of many innovative productions directed by the world's leading ballet-masters, which gained the work worldwide acceptance. In the 1980s, Nijinsky's original choreography, long believed lost, was reconstructed by the Joffrey Ballet in Los Angeles.
The story itself is concerned with a prehistoric society in pagan Russia, which every year must sacrifice a virgin to ensure that the gods will be pleased in order to continue the group's survival. Ultimately, one such girl is chosen, and as the other performers visually align themselves with the earth, she is forced by the elders of the tribe to dance herself to death. 
Throughout the whole ballet, Stravinsky, then a relatively unknown composer, uses unconventional music to not only create distance between the modern observer and the pagans on stage, but to bewilder, excite, and generally keep the listener alert through being utterly unpredictable. Following the debut of the piece, Stravinsky's fame had been assured. 

6. Stravinsky or not Stravinsky?
Stravinsky’s music has it’s own unique style and sound.
Listen to the following extract and note down whether you think they are composed by Stravinsky, or another composer. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

7. Parts Part 1: The adoration of the Earth Part 2: The Sacrifice
In a note to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky in February 1914, Stravinsky described The Rite of Spring as "a musical-choreographic work, [representing] pagan Russia ... unified by a single idea: the mystery and great surge of the creative power of Spring". In his analysis of The Rite, Pieter van den Toorn writes that the work lacks a specific plot or narrative, and should be considered as a succession of choreographed episodes.

8. Features of the music Based on traditional Russian folk melodies.
Extremely dissonant, bitonal and polytonal.
Contains onstinati, pounding rhythms, crossrhythms, polyrhythms, frequent changes in time signatures and compound rhythms.
Mainly polyphonic.
Composed for a large orchestra.
Composed in block form.

9. The opening melody
Which instrument can you hear playing the opening melody?
The opening melody is played by a solo bassoon in a very high register, which renders the instrument almost unidentifiable;[121] gradually other woodwind instruments are sounded and are eventually joined by strings.[122] The sound builds up before stopping suddenly, Hill says, "just as it is bursting ecstatically into bloom". There is then a reiteration of the opening bassoon solo, now played a semitone lower

10. The Augurs of Spring
The first dance, "Augurs of Spring", is characterised by a repetitive stamping chord in the horns and strings, based on E♭ superimposed on a triad of E, G♯ and B.[124] White suggests that this bitonal combination, which Stravinsky considered the focal point of the entire work, was devised on the piano, since the constituent chords are comfortable fits for the hands on a keyboard.[125] The rhythm of the stamping is disturbed by Stravinsky's constant shifting of the accent, on and off the beat,[126] before the dance ends in a collapse, as if from exhaustion.[122] Alex Ross[127] has summed up the pattern as follows:
one two three four five six seven eightone two three four five six seven eight
one two three four five six seven eight
one two three four five six seven eight

11. The Premier
On the evening of 29 May the theatre was packed. Gustav Linor reported, "Never ... has the hall been so full, or so resplendent; the stairways and the corridors were crowded with spectators eager to see and to hear".[57] The evening began with Les Sylphides, in which Nijinsky and Karsavina danced the main roles.[53] The Rite followed. Some eyewitnesses and commentators said that the disturbances in the audience began during the Introduction, and grew in a crescendo when the curtain rose on the stamping dancers in "Augurs of Spring". But music historian Richard Taruskin asserts, "it was not Stravinsky's music that did the shocking. It was the ugly earthbound lurching and stomping devised by Vaslav Nijinsky."[58] Marie Rambert, who was working as an assistant to Nijinsky, recalled later that it was soon impossible to hear the music on the stage.[59] In his autobiography, Stravinsky writes that the derisive laughter that greeted the first bars of the Introduction disgusted him, and that he left the auditorium to watch the rest of the performance from the stage wings. The demonstrations, he says, grew into "a terrific uproar" which, along with the on-stage noises, drowned out the voice of Nijinsky who was shouting the step numbers to the dancers.[55] The journalist and photographer Carl Van Vechtenrecorded that the person behind him got carried away with excitement, and "began to beat rhythmically on top of my head", though Van Vechten failed to notice this at first, his own emotion being so great
At that time, a Parisian ballet audience typically consisted of two diverse groups: the wealthy and fashionable set, who would be expecting to see a traditional performance with beautiful music, and a "Bohemian" group who, the poet-philosopher Jean Cocteau asserted, would "acclaim, right or wrong, anything that is new because of their hatred of the boxes

12. Tchaikovsky vs Stravinsky
Comparison of a traditional Russian ballet to The Rite of Spring
What do you notice about the two ballets?
What can you hear in the music?

13. The Riot at the Rite