Stravinsky composed part of his elemental masterpiece, The Rite of Spring, on his family estate in the Ukraine, but the work was completed in the Swiss village of Clarens, overlooking Lake Geneva, with spectacular views of Mont Blanc and of the Swiss Alps down the Rhone Valley. Coincidentally, Clarens was also where Tchaikovsky had composed his Violin Concerto forty years earlier. The famous premiere, on 29 May 1913, took place at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. The riot that ensued was largely the result of engineering by Serge Diaghilev, an impresario who learned early on that all publicity was good publicity for his Ballets Russes. By inviting a large group of students to sit alongside the regular subscribers, and by putting The Rite of Spring at the end of the first half of the programme – straight after the Chopin ballet Les Sylphides – the work had maximum shock value. Stravinsky was furious that his score couldn’t be heard, but delighted when its first concert performance in Paris a year later was greeted with such enthusiasm that he was carried through the streets afterwards. A few weeks before the first night, Stravinsky had played through the work in his piano four-hands arrangement with Debussy, and it was in this form that the work first appeared in print. It is a work that has never lost its power to astonish – and in this four-hand arrangement it loses nothing of its rhythmic daring and what Messiaen called its “magic power”.

Nigel Simeone © 2012