The Rite of Spring Riot Wasn't Really a Riot

On May 29, 1913, the Ballets Russes premiered Le Sacre du Printemps at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. The audience yelled, fought over seats, and shouted insults at the stage. Stravinsky left the auditorium and watched from the wings, where he could hear Nijinsky shouting step counts to the dancers over the noise. About forty hecklers were ejected. Then the curtain fell, the dancers came out for five calls, and the evening continued with another ballet on the same bill.

That last detail tends to drop out of the story. So does the fact that no contemporary review from 1913 calls what happened a riot. Musicologists tracing the word have shown it appears in print years later, deployed in the 1920s to sell American performances of the work as a brush with civilizational scandal. By the time Stravinsky wrote his autobiography in the 1930s, the legend was already running ahead of him.

Once the score is no longer the villain, the question is what people were actually reacting to. Richard Taruskin, in his Stravinsky biography, argues that the disturbance was triggered less by the orchestra than by what the audience saw on stage: Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography, deliberately stripped of every ballet convention, dancers turned inward, knees buckled, feet slamming the boards. The Parisian elite had paid for elegance. They got stamping.

Diaghilev had spent the spring telling reporters the new ballet would be a scandal, and the first season still ran six more performances without incident. A year later the score was performed without dancers in a Paris concert hall, and the same audience gave Stravinsky an ovation.

What the night really proved is how fast a story hardens. A noisy premiere with no arrests, in front of a crowd primed by a publicist, became, within ten years, the night an audience supposedly tried to tear a theater apart over a few minutes of music.