Hello, and Happy Saturday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Not long ago, we read an email from listener Ava, who was responding to our episode on the Nutcracker and suggested we do something similar about the right of Spring. I mentioned that former host of the show had done one on the right of Spring riot, and I was not sure how far it went beyond the riot itself because I hadn't listened to it in a while. Now I have listened to it. I think maybe I had not listened to it ever, because a lot of it felt like new information to me. The episode does indeed talk about right of spring as a piece of music, it's influences on both music and ballet. So we are pulling it out for today's Saturday Classic. This is from previous host Sarah and Bablina and it came out on June. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Fair Dowdy and I'm to bling a truck rebording and today we're gonna be doing a listeners suggestion. So dance teacher Emily wrote in to suggest that we cover the ballet Ruth, and she said she couldn't guarantee us an exhimation. She knows that's one of our favorite topics, as it long has been. But she also said that the material really sold itself. They're great dancers, they're great composers. There's an influential impressario. Plus there are a lot of scandals and mental breakdowns and some pretty salacious performances to the Afternoon of the Fawn. I think that's all I have to say there. If you you know about dance. If you don't, you can go look that one up on your on your own if you want. She's not going to get into the details. But what we really got drawn into was the promise of a riot here. You know how we love those. On May there was a riot during the debut of the Right of Spring. And this was different from the last artistic riot that we podcasted on. You may remember it, the Astra Place riot. And that one wasn't about the work, which was Macbeth. That the standard question. It was about the rivalry rather between the two actors, about class conflict, and about Anglo American intentions as well. Yeah, this one, though, is about the work. It's the premier. It's about the dance and the music and even the costumes get people in rage, all shockingly and at the time disturbingly different and new to the audience. That was what set them off in the first place. But before we get to the people involved, we're gonna be talking about a few of them, the composer, the choreographer, the patron of the arts we mentioned, or before we start talking about the work, just try to imagine a piece of music and a dance that just was so out side of the norm, so outside of what you were used to, that and infuriated you to the point of getting out of your plush red seat and screaming at the stage and and getting really really upset, yelling and causing a ruckus. I mean, just just try to get in that mindset before we get going. Yeah, and once you have that going, we'll start off with a little bit of background. So when The Right of Spring premiered, all indications suggested that it would be a huge hit. First and foremost, it was written by young superstar composer Igor Stravinsky. I'm sure many of you have heard of him. It was choreographed by the beloved dancer Vasilov Nijinski, and of course it was staged by the hottest ballet company in Europe at the time, the Ballet Russ a complete smash since Sergei diagle Of started it five years before this. Yeah, and because he's the man who founded the company, and because he brought together the people who were involved in creating the Right of Spring, it's only fitting we talked about him. I really think that all three of those men we mentioned could be their own podcast subchecks. They have very interesting lives. But kind of condensed it a little because we're talking about the riot, not everybody involved. But Diago Love was born in Russia in eighteen seventy two. Two landed nobility, and he had, I guess, kind of a sad start to life. His mother died only a few weeks after he was born. His father was a colonel, but his stepmother really was an influential presence in his life. She encouraged his artistic inclinations and he had a really happy, luxurious upbringing. The family, for instance, had an apartment in St. Petersburg, a country estate and a provincial twenty room mansion, and they were really friendly and open. They hosted people they had folks living with them. I think I saw in one account the either the estate or the twenty room mansion had an outdoor table, a porch table that seated fifty. So you can imagine the kind of upbringing this this man had. Yeah, and his family was really generous. But unfortunately that generosity caught up to them. They went bankrupt and diego Lov had to support them while studying law. But he also indulged in his artistic side once in a while. He started hanging out with a group of sophisticates he met through his cousin slash boy friend, not something that you think slash yeah. So this group made up some of the core members of the eventual Ballet Ruse. So after graduation, diego Lov decided he would become a composer instead of a lawyer. He would follow his dreams through that artistic inclination. And at this time one of the pre eminent Russian composers was Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov, and classical music fans will know him as one of the Five or the Mighty Handful, a group of young composers who decades earlier had tried to get Russian music back to its roots. They took inspiration from throwing things like Russian folklore and fairy tales, and they scored the Imperial ballets and operas. Yeah, so diego Lov got this meeting with Rimsky Korsakov, who at this point it is sort of the godfather of Russian music. And he has his work completely dismissed by this this old master, and he does sort of stick up for himself a little bit. I think he Actually he's kind of smart, he I mean, and I mean that in a bad way. He I think he tells him, you're going to regret what you said. It's going to be printed in your biography someday and you'll be so embarrassed, and by then it'll be too late to take it back. So I mean just imagining this young man saying this to the master. But he did stop composing, so I guess he took the lesson to heart. Diaglev decided that was not his career track, probably for the best, because his true talent lay in management. He decided he'd become a patron of the arts, not an artist, though of course he had to. He had to be clever about that because he was not a wealthy man anymore. If you're going to be a patron of arts and not have your own money, you've got to be resourceful. Yeah. So, after a few years of staging artistic exhibitions in Russia and a job at the then bureaucratic Imperial Theater, he took his show on the road. For one thing, he did this for a couple of reasons. For one thing, he was patriotic. He wanted Europe to know his country. But he also knew that just as all things French were all the rage in Russia at the time, Parisians were also in chant to by the idea of old Russia, its opulence, its exoticism, and so he thought that it would be an easy cell. Yeah, they had a romantic idea of what Russia was or what it is still. So in nineteen o nine, Diagolov pulled the best dancers from Russia and formed the Ballet Ruth. And the company's early years really capitalized on that perception of Russia as exotic and romantic. And if you look up some pictures from the costumes, for instance, at this point, you can you can tell that the flyers they're very they're almost erotic in some cases and um. The epitome of that aesthetic, that romantic, exotic aesthetic, was the company's principal dancer, Voslav Najynski, and he eventually became Diaglov's lover. And Najynski was the son of dancers, so he had grown up in this environment, and he was really famous for his leaps, almost like he could fly. So when he debuted in in Paris and in the rest of your up, it was unlike anything people had ever seen before. And I mean the same goes for many of the other dancers in the company, but Nijinsky in particular really stood out. The third member of our trio also came in near the beginning of this whole story of the Ballet rouss. He was also young and also obviously Russian, Igor Stravinsky. Now Stravinsky was the son of a famous operatic bass and he had grown up just behind the Imperial Theater, so kind of an auspicious place to grow up if you're interested in music. I guess he took piano and music theory, and his house was filled with music and theater too, But still when it was time for school, he studied law and philosophy. That seems to be a theme here, the study of law. These would be lawyer. But while at St. Petersburg University, he showed some of his early works to someone that we have heard of before, the father of a fellow student, none other than Rimsky Korsikov. So Rimsky Korsikov gave him a better reaction than he had given to Diaglov, and actually took him on as a private student. So his story turned out a little better there for him, definitely. Will Stravinsky obviously displayed some more talent at composing, but Rimsky Corskov also helped him get some gigs going too, so he started having performances, started having his music performed, And Diaglov came into the picture in nineteen o nine when he attended one of these performances and heard Stravinsky's music and decided he wanted to commission him right away for the Balletrue summer season, so got some music for that, and then for the nineteen ten season he commissioned The Firebird. And I mean, of course, this is probably one of the most famous ballets. It's it's absolutely one that's staged by most companies I think pretty frequently, right, even my ballet company I was in in Northeast Alabama when I was growing up, did a production of the Firebird every year. Were you in the Firebird? Know? I wasn't then at all. I wasn't a nutcracker though, does that counting? Different composer, completely different ballet, never mind moving on, But anyway, this made Stravinsky blow up overnight, and then the next year it was another hit for him and the ballet rous with Petrushka, and in this one Nagynsky dance the lead. But all the while, while Stravinsky is working on Petrushka, he's also working on something else, something that has a very modern sound, as we're going to learn, but something that's ancient too, certainly has ancient roots. So we're gonna have to go back again a little bit to to explain. Stravinsky also wanted to make something uniquely Russian. He was also patriotic, like Rinsky, Korsakov or Diogolov, and he really liked fairy tales and Russian legends, especially so He had grown up summering in a small village called Usta Lug, and villagers would still come out and celebrate the harvest and the planting during during his youth, and they'd celebrate with festivals and dances, and they would sing songs with their untrained voices and play homemade instruments and really just have a good time. And it produced a very unique sound that sort of captivated Stravinsky. So he wrote The Right of Spring to try to capture that celebratory chaos, even though in the ballet's case, it's not just harvest festival. It's not it's not um an entirely happy occasion. It's a pagan human sacrifice. Spoiler alert In case you you didn't know what happened at the end of the Right of Spring, we gotta mention it. The chosen One, who is a young maiden, dances herself to death. So it's a disturbing story of celebration. Yeah. And to achieve that haphazard, distorted sound of the celebration, and to imitate the untrained voices and the homemade instruments, Stravinsky knew he'd have to manipulate the traditional instruments of the orchestra, so he paired them up in odd combos. He would have one group played triplets while the other one played quadruplets, and most memorably, he moved some of the instruments so far outside of their range they became unrecognizable. So those are just a few things he did to achieve that really unique sound. And here's what the Paris audience at the premiere first heard. So that's a very unusual sound. And a composer who was in attendance at the premier, Camille San San, basically said, what is that? What instrument is that? And his seat mate told him it's the bassoon, And Saint San was supposedly so scandalized by this information he reportedly said, if that is a bassoon, I am a baboon and walked out. So he did not like hearing the bassoon played in this eerie, unusual register at all. Well, and that wasn't even the only instrument that people had trouble with. Were some other strange sounding instruments that chimed in as well. There was an English horn, and e flat clarinet, a bass clarinet, and actually a contemporary San Francisco Symphony musician has described the sound as a quote jungle, just to give you an idea of what it what the impressions might have been like. So people were hissing, they started to yell somewhere cheering. A few folks liked it, they wanted to keep hearing it. Then the first dance tableau opened and the music made a kind of terrifying transition. Yeah, so that's scary stuff. And you've just heard the music. But we're going to talk about the dance to what was going on on stage with this pounding, frightening music, The dancers weren't gracefully pirouetting about. They were grouped in a circle. They were jumping up and down with both feet together. And it looks painful. It looks very violent. An Ajinsky dancer later recalled quote, with every leap, we landed heavily enough to jar every organ in us. And it and it looks like that. It looks heavy and uncomfortable. But because the dancers were also doing this move where they rest their heads on their hands and switch hands and pitch their heads back and forth, some people started shouting, get them a dentist. So people were not only upset by what they were hearing, the strange bassoon noise and all of that, but what they were seeing. And a third issue was the costumes. The dancers weren't wearing these scanty form fitting costumes that you know, some people at the time we're going to the ballet to see that, you know, they wanted to see dancers and and see the classical, the pretty, you know, the really beautiful costs. Exactly that the two to kind of get up and um, these folks were wearing tunics, they were wearing long fake braids, they had padded lace legs, and and you can look up these costumes as I mentioned, but the best way to picture it is almost like buck skins. There. They don't look graceful, they look very primitive. And people they hated it. They did not like that aspect of it. Stravinsky panicked at this point and he starts to head backstage. Diaglov and for his part, flashes the house lights at this point, trying to calm people down. But the orchestra kept playing, and diag Lov must have guessed that something like this would go down. He he hadn't mentioned that fear to Stravinsky or Najynski at all, but he had told the conductor, Pierre Monte, to keep playing no matter what. So so the orchestra just keeps on playing the music, which must have been difficult because there's some crazy rhythms in the right of spring. I have to imagine it would be tough to play if if you couldn't hear what you were playing. But that wasn't the only problem. Yeah, I mean what about the dancers. They couldn't hear either, and it makes it pretty hard to dance if you can't hear the beat of the music. So Najynski got on a chair and leaned out to call off the numbers he was from, basically chanting for them, and Stravinsky held us coat tails to keep him from falling. He was leaned that far out, and the police were of course called in. And um, there's a really good quote, I think from Harvard professor Thomas Kelly describing the effect of the music on the audience. He said, the pagans on stage made pagans of the audience. And I mean, we have to wonder who were these people? What this is now a classic piece of music, it's a um, it's a ballet that was certainly influential. Who were the people who just couldn't stand it? And it was long assumed that they were just kind of old fogies, you know, they wanted to see, Like we mentioned earlier, the classic too Too and and the pirouetting, but people didn't go to the ballet rous for that kind of experience anyway. And recently, UM, one of the latest biographies on Diaglov, has shaken up that assumption that that these were the old fogies, said that they were actually the the avant garde, the people who were at the head of trends. But they felt like this piece of music, this dance, just eclipsed even then. They didn't want to get left behind so violently. They were one up to an edginess they were. So of course, the right of Spring doesn't sound quite so shocking now, and that's because a lot of later twentieth century music was influenced by it. PBS actually hosts this great series by the San Francisco Symphony called Keeping Score, and Sarah and I both watched it, and the program called Stravinsky's score an artistic revolution, something that redefined twentieth century music, and one of the symphonies musicians even calls it rock and roll. And I think why it doesn't sound so shocking to us now is because it is very familiar. You you'll recognize it in later classical music, but in other music forms too. I mean, even if you don't listen to it and I think that's rock and roll, I mean, it clearly has an effect on on where music went for the rest of the century. And it certainly defines Stravinsky's work. I mean, a or this the Firebird might have made him blow up overnight, but this defined his career. And he did, of course go on to enjoy a very long career, probably making this even more impressive that he had something like this so early on. He went on composing In the fifties and sixties, he started composing twelve tone music, and he lived until the nineteen seventies. Actually the recordings we heard were conducted by Stravinsky. Yeah, and this work didn't just influence music, it also influenced choreography as well. Uh, the choreography of Nijynski here was really influential. I mean, if you look at it, it it looks like modern dance. That's what I thought when I first read about this. As well as well when you see it, I mean, the costumes, the movements, everything kind of reminds you of that. But because The Right of Spring was only performed eight times, and because Nijinsky had a mental breakdown at age twenty nine and ended up spending the rest of his life in and out of asylums. The choreography was until recently presumed lost. Yeah, in nineteen seven, though, we have this really interesting sort of forensic dance story. The Jeoffrey Ballet restored the original choreography, and they brought in a dance historian and an art historian, and those two drew from reviews and from dancers quotes, and from drawings and photos, and even from Stravinsky's notes on the stage direction, which had sort of general instructions like there are this many groupings on the stage, but not exactly what they were doing to to get that information, they finally found this score with choreographic notes, and it was discovered in nineteen eighty two. And to me, the idea of reconstructing a dance is so it's almost impossible for me to comprehend. Yeah, it's one of those instances where history and art meet, so clearly I think it's it's really fascinating. But when watching the restored ballet, you also get a peek at what the costumes would have looked like in action. They were designed by Nicholas Rerick and they look primitive, but all were really modern at the same time. And the fact that people would go to such trouble to restore a ballet really just speak to the effect and the importance of the ballet Rouss On Dance. Yeah, after Diagal's death in the ballet rouss disbanded, I think it almost immediately, but his employees branched out across the world to start some of the pre eminent companies of today, the American Ballet Theater, New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet. They're all direct descendants from the ballet routs as our companies everywhere. So listener Emily, who we mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, so that there would be no exhimation in the story, but there actually is one of sorts. In February of this year, the BBC reported that some footage of the Ballet rous the only known footage that is, had been discovered mislabeled in an online archive in Diego Love. I mean, the reason there was no footage before is because he had prohibited filming of the ballet since he didn't think that it could do his movements justice. So it's an art, a stick exclamation. There's no body involved, but some dance, you know, close enough. I'm I was pleased by by discovering this and getting to watch it. It's a rehearsal, so it's it's not it's not the Right of Spring. It it's it is the nice costumes and it looks very proper, but still it's the ballet roofs, and it's it's all we got. And I just want to mention, even if you haven't ever seen this ballet, or you don't really even go to ballet or listen to classical music, you probably are familiar with the Right of Spring because it is maybe most famously associated with Walt Disney's Fantasia. There's of course a long extended sequence of the Right of Spring with the dinosaurs, the you know, it's it's kind of a sad part of Fantasia for sure. I don't know if I've ever seen Fantasia. Oh no, Share looks Sarah looks so shocked right now. I'm sure I have like a VHS of it somewhere if you, if you still have a va are put up, you could look up. You could look at this part online. I mean, it's it's not It's not the part that you normally watch with Fantasia, like the Dancing Hippo or Mickey and the Broom, but it's still a pretty pretty memorable scene in Fantasia. By so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of Art Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H m HM

Hello, and Happy Saturday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Not long ago, we read an email from listener Ava, who was responding to our episode on the Nutcracker and suggested we do something similar about the right of Spring. I mentioned that former host of the show had done one on the right of Spring riot, and I was not sure how far it went beyond the riot itself because I hadn't listened to it in a while. Now I have listened to it. I think maybe I had not listened to it ever, because a lot of it felt like new information to me. The episode does indeed talk about right of spring as a piece of music, it's influences on both music and ballet. So we are pulling it out for today's Saturday Classic. This is from previous host Sarah and Bablina and it came out on June. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Fair Dowdy and I'm to bling a truck rebording and today we're gonna be doing a listeners suggestion. So dance teacher Emily wrote in to suggest that we cover the ballet Ruth, and she said she couldn't guarantee us an exhimation. She knows that's one of our favorite topics, as it long has been. But she also said that the material really sold itself. They're great dancers, they're great composers. There's an influential impressario. Plus there are a lot of scandals and mental breakdowns and some pretty salacious performances to the Afternoon of the Fawn. I think that's all I have to say there. If you you know about dance. If you don't, you can go look that one up on your on your own if you want. She's not going to get into the details. But what we really got drawn into was the promise of a riot here. You know how we love those. On May there was a riot during the debut of the Right of Spring. And this was different from the last artistic riot that we podcasted on. You may remember it, the Astra Place riot. And that one wasn't about the work, which was Macbeth. That the standard question. It was about the rivalry rather between the two actors, about class conflict, and about Anglo American intentions as well. Yeah, this one, though, is about the work. It's the premier. It's about the dance and the music and even the costumes get people in rage, all shockingly and at the time disturbingly different and new to the audience. That was what set them off in the first place. But before we get to the people involved, we're gonna be talking about a few of them, the composer, the choreographer, the patron of the arts we mentioned, or before we start talking about the work, just try to imagine a piece of music and a dance that just was so out side of the norm, so outside of what you were used to, that and infuriated you to the point of getting out of your plush red seat and screaming at the stage and and getting really really upset, yelling and causing a ruckus. I mean, just just try to get in that mindset before we get going. Yeah, and once you have that going, we'll start off with a little bit of background. So when The Right of Spring premiered, all indications suggested that it would be a huge hit. First and foremost, it was written by young superstar composer Igor Stravinsky. I'm sure many of you have heard of him. It was choreographed by the beloved dancer Vasilov Nijinski, and of course it was staged by the hottest ballet company in Europe at the time, the Ballet Russ a complete smash since Sergei diagle Of started it five years before this. Yeah, and because he's the man who founded the company, and because he brought together the people who were involved in creating the Right of Spring, it's only fitting we talked about him. I really think that all three of those men we mentioned could be their own podcast subchecks. They have very interesting lives. But kind of condensed it a little because we're talking about the riot, not everybody involved. But Diago Love was born in Russia in eighteen seventy two. Two landed nobility, and he had, I guess, kind of a sad start to life. His mother died only a few weeks after he was born. His father was a colonel, but his stepmother really was an influential presence in his life. She encouraged his artistic inclinations and he had a really happy, luxurious upbringing. The family, for instance, had an apartment in St. Petersburg, a country estate and a provincial twenty room mansion, and they were really friendly and open. They hosted people they had folks living with them. I think I saw in one account the either the estate or the twenty room mansion had an outdoor table, a porch table that seated fifty. So you can imagine the kind of upbringing this this man had. Yeah, and his family was really generous. But unfortunately that generosity caught up to them. They went bankrupt and diego Lov had to support them while studying law. But he also indulged in his artistic side once in a while. He started hanging out with a group of sophisticates he met through his cousin slash boy friend, not something that you think slash yeah. So this group made up some of the core members of the eventual Ballet Ruse. So after graduation, diego Lov decided he would become a composer instead of a lawyer. He would follow his dreams through that artistic inclination. And at this time one of the pre eminent Russian composers was Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov, and classical music fans will know him as one of the Five or the Mighty Handful, a group of young composers who decades earlier had tried to get Russian music back to its roots. They took inspiration from throwing things like Russian folklore and fairy tales, and they scored the Imperial ballets and operas. Yeah, so diego Lov got this meeting with Rimsky Korsakov, who at this point it is sort of the godfather of Russian music. And he has his work completely dismissed by this this old master, and he does sort of stick up for himself a little bit. I think he Actually he's kind of smart, he I mean, and I mean that in a bad way. He I think he tells him, you're going to regret what you said. It's going to be printed in your biography someday and you'll be so embarrassed, and by then it'll be too late to take it back. So I mean just imagining this young man saying this to the master. But he did stop composing, so I guess he took the lesson to heart. Diaglev decided that was not his career track, probably for the best, because his true talent lay in management. He decided he'd become a patron of the arts, not an artist, though of course he had to. He had to be clever about that because he was not a wealthy man anymore. If you're going to be a patron of arts and not have your own money, you've got to be resourceful. Yeah. So, after a few years of staging artistic exhibitions in Russia and a job at the then bureaucratic Imperial Theater, he took his show on the road. For one thing, he did this for a couple of reasons. For one thing, he was patriotic. He wanted Europe to know his country. But he also knew that just as all things French were all the rage in Russia at the time, Parisians were also in chant to by the idea of old Russia, its opulence, its exoticism, and so he thought that it would be an easy cell. Yeah, they had a romantic idea of what Russia was or what it is still. So in nineteen o nine, Diagolov pulled the best dancers from Russia and formed the Ballet Ruth. And the company's early years really capitalized on that perception of Russia as exotic and romantic. And if you look up some pictures from the costumes, for instance, at this point, you can you can tell that the flyers they're very they're almost erotic in some cases and um. The epitome of that aesthetic, that romantic, exotic aesthetic, was the company's principal dancer, Voslav Najynski, and he eventually became Diaglov's lover. And Najynski was the son of dancers, so he had grown up in this environment, and he was really famous for his leaps, almost like he could fly. So when he debuted in in Paris and in the rest of your up, it was unlike anything people had ever seen before. And I mean the same goes for many of the other dancers in the company, but Nijinsky in particular really stood out. The third member of our trio also came in near the beginning of this whole story of the Ballet rouss. He was also young and also obviously Russian, Igor Stravinsky. Now Stravinsky was the son of a famous operatic bass and he had grown up just behind the Imperial Theater, so kind of an auspicious place to grow up if you're interested in music. I guess he took piano and music theory, and his house was filled with music and theater too, But still when it was time for school, he studied law and philosophy. That seems to be a theme here, the study of law. These would be lawyer. But while at St. Petersburg University, he showed some of his early works to someone that we have heard of before, the father of a fellow student, none other than Rimsky Korsikov. So Rimsky Korsikov gave him a better reaction than he had given to Diaglov, and actually took him on as a private student. So his story turned out a little better there for him, definitely. Will Stravinsky obviously displayed some more talent at composing, but Rimsky Corskov also helped him get some gigs going too, so he started having performances, started having his music performed, And Diaglov came into the picture in nineteen o nine when he attended one of these performances and heard Stravinsky's music and decided he wanted to commission him right away for the Balletrue summer season, so got some music for that, and then for the nineteen ten season he commissioned The Firebird. And I mean, of course, this is probably one of the most famous ballets. It's it's absolutely one that's staged by most companies I think pretty frequently, right, even my ballet company I was in in Northeast Alabama when I was growing up, did a production of the Firebird every year. Were you in the Firebird? Know? I wasn't then at all. I wasn't a nutcracker though, does that counting? Different composer, completely different ballet, never mind moving on, But anyway, this made Stravinsky blow up overnight, and then the next year it was another hit for him and the ballet rous with Petrushka, and in this one Nagynsky dance the lead. But all the while, while Stravinsky is working on Petrushka, he's also working on something else, something that has a very modern sound, as we're going to learn, but something that's ancient too, certainly has ancient roots. So we're gonna have to go back again a little bit to to explain. Stravinsky also wanted to make something uniquely Russian. He was also patriotic, like Rinsky, Korsakov or Diogolov, and he really liked fairy tales and Russian legends, especially so He had grown up summering in a small village called Usta Lug, and villagers would still come out and celebrate the harvest and the planting during during his youth, and they'd celebrate with festivals and dances, and they would sing songs with their untrained voices and play homemade instruments and really just have a good time. And it produced a very unique sound that sort of captivated Stravinsky. So he wrote The Right of Spring to try to capture that celebratory chaos, even though in the ballet's case, it's not just harvest festival. It's not it's not um an entirely happy occasion. It's a pagan human sacrifice. Spoiler alert In case you you didn't know what happened at the end of the Right of Spring, we gotta mention it. The chosen One, who is a young maiden, dances herself to death. So it's a disturbing story of celebration. Yeah. And to achieve that haphazard, distorted sound of the celebration, and to imitate the untrained voices and the homemade instruments, Stravinsky knew he'd have to manipulate the traditional instruments of the orchestra, so he paired them up in odd combos. He would have one group played triplets while the other one played quadruplets, and most memorably, he moved some of the instruments so far outside of their range they became unrecognizable. So those are just a few things he did to achieve that really unique sound. And here's what the Paris audience at the premiere first heard. So that's a very unusual sound. And a composer who was in attendance at the premier, Camille San San, basically said, what is that? What instrument is that? And his seat mate told him it's the bassoon, And Saint San was supposedly so scandalized by this information he reportedly said, if that is a bassoon, I am a baboon and walked out. So he did not like hearing the bassoon played in this eerie, unusual register at all. Well, and that wasn't even the only instrument that people had trouble with. Were some other strange sounding instruments that chimed in as well. There was an English horn, and e flat clarinet, a bass clarinet, and actually a contemporary San Francisco Symphony musician has described the sound as a quote jungle, just to give you an idea of what it what the impressions might have been like. So people were hissing, they started to yell somewhere cheering. A few folks liked it, they wanted to keep hearing it. Then the first dance tableau opened and the music made a kind of terrifying transition. Yeah, so that's scary stuff. And you've just heard the music. But we're going to talk about the dance to what was going on on stage with this pounding, frightening music, The dancers weren't gracefully pirouetting about. They were grouped in a circle. They were jumping up and down with both feet together. And it looks painful. It looks very violent. An Ajinsky dancer later recalled quote, with every leap, we landed heavily enough to jar every organ in us. And it and it looks like that. It looks heavy and uncomfortable. But because the dancers were also doing this move where they rest their heads on their hands and switch hands and pitch their heads back and forth, some people started shouting, get them a dentist. So people were not only upset by what they were hearing, the strange bassoon noise and all of that, but what they were seeing. And a third issue was the costumes. The dancers weren't wearing these scanty form fitting costumes that you know, some people at the time we're going to the ballet to see that, you know, they wanted to see dancers and and see the classical, the pretty, you know, the really beautiful costs. Exactly that the two to kind of get up and um, these folks were wearing tunics, they were wearing long fake braids, they had padded lace legs, and and you can look up these costumes as I mentioned, but the best way to picture it is almost like buck skins. There. They don't look graceful, they look very primitive. And people they hated it. They did not like that aspect of it. Stravinsky panicked at this point and he starts to head backstage. Diaglov and for his part, flashes the house lights at this point, trying to calm people down. But the orchestra kept playing, and diag Lov must have guessed that something like this would go down. He he hadn't mentioned that fear to Stravinsky or Najynski at all, but he had told the conductor, Pierre Monte, to keep playing no matter what. So so the orchestra just keeps on playing the music, which must have been difficult because there's some crazy rhythms in the right of spring. I have to imagine it would be tough to play if if you couldn't hear what you were playing. But that wasn't the only problem. Yeah, I mean what about the dancers. They couldn't hear either, and it makes it pretty hard to dance if you can't hear the beat of the music. So Najynski got on a chair and leaned out to call off the numbers he was from, basically chanting for them, and Stravinsky held us coat tails to keep him from falling. He was leaned that far out, and the police were of course called in. And um, there's a really good quote, I think from Harvard professor Thomas Kelly describing the effect of the music on the audience. He said, the pagans on stage made pagans of the audience. And I mean, we have to wonder who were these people? What this is now a classic piece of music, it's a um, it's a ballet that was certainly influential. Who were the people who just couldn't stand it? And it was long assumed that they were just kind of old fogies, you know, they wanted to see, Like we mentioned earlier, the classic too Too and and the pirouetting, but people didn't go to the ballet rous for that kind of experience anyway. And recently, UM, one of the latest biographies on Diaglov, has shaken up that assumption that that these were the old fogies, said that they were actually the the avant garde, the people who were at the head of trends. But they felt like this piece of music, this dance, just eclipsed even then. They didn't want to get left behind so violently. They were one up to an edginess they were. So of course, the right of Spring doesn't sound quite so shocking now, and that's because a lot of later twentieth century music was influenced by it. PBS actually hosts this great series by the San Francisco Symphony called Keeping Score, and Sarah and I both watched it, and the program called Stravinsky's score an artistic revolution, something that redefined twentieth century music, and one of the symphonies musicians even calls it rock and roll. And I think why it doesn't sound so shocking to us now is because it is very familiar. You you'll recognize it in later classical music, but in other music forms too. I mean, even if you don't listen to it and I think that's rock and roll, I mean, it clearly has an effect on on where music went for the rest of the century. And it certainly defines Stravinsky's work. I mean, a or this the Firebird might have made him blow up overnight, but this defined his career. And he did, of course go on to enjoy a very long career, probably making this even more impressive that he had something like this so early on. He went on composing In the fifties and sixties, he started composing twelve tone music, and he lived until the nineteen seventies. Actually the recordings we heard were conducted by Stravinsky. Yeah, and this work didn't just influence music, it also influenced choreography as well. Uh, the choreography of Nijynski here was really influential. I mean, if you look at it, it it looks like modern dance. That's what I thought when I first read about this. As well as well when you see it, I mean, the costumes, the movements, everything kind of reminds you of that. But because The Right of Spring was only performed eight times, and because Nijinsky had a mental breakdown at age twenty nine and ended up spending the rest of his life in and out of asylums. The choreography was until recently presumed lost. Yeah, in nineteen seven, though, we have this really interesting sort of forensic dance story. The Jeoffrey Ballet restored the original choreography, and they brought in a dance historian and an art historian, and those two drew from reviews and from dancers quotes, and from drawings and photos, and even from Stravinsky's notes on the stage direction, which had sort of general instructions like there are this many groupings on the stage, but not exactly what they were doing to to get that information, they finally found this score with choreographic notes, and it was discovered in nineteen eighty two. And to me, the idea of reconstructing a dance is so it's almost impossible for me to comprehend. Yeah, it's one of those instances where history and art meet, so clearly I think it's it's really fascinating. But when watching the restored ballet, you also get a peek at what the costumes would have looked like in action. They were designed by Nicholas Rerick and they look primitive, but all were really modern at the same time. And the fact that people would go to such trouble to restore a ballet really just speak to the effect and the importance of the ballet Rouss On Dance. Yeah, after Diagal's death in the ballet rouss disbanded, I think it almost immediately, but his employees branched out across the world to start some of the pre eminent companies of today, the American Ballet Theater, New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet. They're all direct descendants from the ballet routs as our companies everywhere. So listener Emily, who we mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, so that there would be no exhimation in the story, but there actually is one of sorts. In February of this year, the BBC reported that some footage of the Ballet rous the only known footage that is, had been discovered mislabeled in an online archive in Diego Love. I mean, the reason there was no footage before is because he had prohibited filming of the ballet since he didn't think that it could do his movements justice. So it's an art, a stick exclamation. There's no body involved, but some dance, you know, close enough. I'm I was pleased by by discovering this and getting to watch it. It's a rehearsal, so it's it's not it's not the Right of Spring. It it's it is the nice costumes and it looks very proper, but still it's the ballet roofs, and it's it's all we got. And I just want to mention, even if you haven't ever seen this ballet, or you don't really even go to ballet or listen to classical music, you probably are familiar with the Right of Spring because it is maybe most famously associated with Walt Disney's Fantasia. There's of course a long extended sequence of the Right of Spring with the dinosaurs, the you know, it's it's kind of a sad part of Fantasia for sure. I don't know if I've ever seen Fantasia. Oh no, Share looks Sarah looks so shocked right now. I'm sure I have like a VHS of it somewhere if you, if you still have a va are put up, you could look up. You could look at this part online. I mean, it's it's not It's not the part that you normally watch with Fantasia, like the Dancing Hippo or Mickey and the Broom, but it's still a pretty pretty memorable scene in Fantasia. By so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of Art Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H m HM