The Night a Ballet Premiere Drowned Out Its Own Orchestra

On the evening of May 29, 1913, Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes premiered Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps — The Rite of Spring — at the new Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Vaslav Nijinsky had choreographed it. Pierre Monteux was conducting. Within minutes of the curtain rising, parts of the house began to laugh, then to whistle, and then to shout.

The score broke nearly every habit Paris audiences had: pounding cross-rhythms, dissonant chord stacks (the "Augur of Spring" hammered 32 times), folk melodies piled on top of one another. The choreography was just as deliberate. Dancers turned in instead of out. Knees and elbows bent. Feet flat. Half the evening-dress audience had not expected pagan barbarity served straight.

Accounts of what followed have been embroidered for a century. What is reasonably solid: factions traded insults loud enough to drown the orchestra, the police removed dozens of people, and Nijinsky climbed on a chair offstage and shouted dance counts at the company, who could no longer hear Monteux's beat. Stravinsky later wrote that he left his seat and joined Nijinsky in the wings.

The press did not call it a riot at the time. The word entered the story through reviews of a 1924 revival — by then Sacre was established — and backfilled into legend. There were also political reasons: anti-Russian, anti-Diaghilev factions had come to disrupt before a note played.

By the second night the score's reputation was set. Within a decade conductors were programming it as a concert piece. Nijinsky's original choreography was thought lost for over 70 years until a reconstruction by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer premiered in 1987.