The Night Paris Rioted Over a Ballet

On May 29, 1913, the curtain rose at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on a ballet nobody in the audience was prepared for. Within minutes, fistfights had broken out in the orchestra stalls.

Igor Stravinsky's score for The Rite of Spring opened with a bassoon playing in a register so high it barely sounded like a bassoon. What followed was forty minutes of polyrhythm, bitonality, and rhythmic accents that landed where they were not supposed to land. There was no melody in the conventional sense, no reassuring resolution. Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography matched: the dancers faced inward, hunched, stamping instead of gliding.

The audience split almost immediately. Supporters shouted down protesters; protesters shouted back louder. Carl van Vechten, an American critic in the house that night, later described hats flying, walking sticks brandished, a countess being slapped by the man behind her. Stravinsky watched from the wings, then left through a backstage window to avoid the crowd.

Sergei Diaghilev, who had commissioned the piece for his Ballets Russes company, later claimed he had anticipated some controversy but not a full brawl. The police arrived. The performance finished — barely.

By the following year, when the score was performed as a concert piece without the dancers, the same Paris audience gave it a standing ovation. Stravinsky acknowledged the reversal with his usual dry wit: "The audience was more attentive to the music when it had no legs to distract it."

The Rite of Spring is now performed roughly 150 times a year worldwide and is routinely listed among the most important orchestral works of the 20th century.