June 29, 2011 • 23 mins
Riots are a distressingly common part of human history, and the strangest events can trigger widespread violence. In this episode, Deblina and Sarah take a closer look at one of history's strangest riots. Tune in to learn more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fair Dowdy and I'm to bling a Chruck reporting
and today we're gonna be doing a listener suggestion. So
dance teacher Emily wrote in to suggest that we cover
(00:22):
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 impresario. Plus there are a lot of
scandals and mental breakdowns and some pretty salacious performances to
(00:44):
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
we you know how we love those. On May there
was a riot during the debut of the Right of Spring,
(01:04):
and this was different from the last artistic riot that
we podcasted on You may remember it the Astra Placed Riot,
and that one wasn't about the work, which was Macbeth,
that's your 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.
(01:24):
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
(01:46):
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
(02:08):
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 Voslav Nijinsky, and
(02:30):
of course it was staged by the hottest ballet company
in Europe at the time, the Ballet Rouss a complete
smash since Sergei Diagle have 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 the only fitting we
talked about him. I really think that all three of
(02:50):
those men we mentioned could be their own podcast subjects.
They have very interesting lives. But kind of condensed it
a little because we're talking about the riot, not everybody involved.
But Diego Love was born in Russia in eighteen seventy
two to 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
(03:12):
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
(03:32):
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
(03:53):
up to them. They went bankrupt and diego Love had
to support them while studying law, but he also indulged
in his artistics. It had once in a while he
started hanging out with a group of sophisticates he met
through his cousin slash boyfriend, not something that you think
slash yeah. So this group made up some of the
core members of the eventual ballet rus So after graduation,
(04:16):
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.
(04:38):
They took inspiration from throwing things like Russian folklore and
fairy tales, and they scored the Imperial ballets and operas. Yeah,
so Diego Loov got this meeting with Rimsky Korsakov, who
at this point it's sort of the godfather of Russian music,
and he has his work completely dismissed by this this
old master, and he does stick up for himself a
(05:01):
little bit. I think he actually is kind of smart.
He I mean, and I mean that in a bad way.
He I think he tells him, you're gonna 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
(05:23):
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 gonna be a
patron of arts and not have your own money, you've
(05:43):
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 enchanted by
(06:06):
the idea of old Russia, its opulence, it's 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, Diaglav
pulled the best dancers from Russia and formed the Ballet
Ruth and the company's early years really capitalized on that
(06:28):
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, Boslo Nadjynski, and he eventually became
(06:51):
Diagla's lover. And Najynski was the son of dancers, so
he had grown up in this environment and he was
really famous for his leap, almost like he could fly.
So when he debuted in in Paris and in the
rest of Europe, 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
(07:13):
particular really stood out. And the third member of our
trio also came in near the beginning of this whole
story of the Ballet russ 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
(07:35):
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,
(07:59):
none other than Kikorsikov. So Rimsky Korsikov gave him a
better reaction than he had given to Diagolov, and actually
took him on as a private student. So his story
turned out a little better there for him, it 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,
(08:21):
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 Balletrous 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
(08:42):
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? No? I wasn't then at all.
I was in a Nutcracker though does that counting different composers?
(09:03):
Completely different? Ll at 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, Nazynski 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 gonna learn, but something that's
(09:25):
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 Diaglev, and he really
liked fairy tales and Russian legends especially, so he had
grown up summering in a small village called the Stulug,
(09:48):
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 song with
their untrained voices and play homemade instruments and really just
have a good time. And it produced a very unique
(10:09):
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 an entirely happy occasion. It's a
pagan human sacrifice. Spoiler alert In case you you didn't
(10:29):
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
(10:51):
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 quite druplets. 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 of the premiere first heard.
(11:29):
So that's a very unusual sound. And a composer who
was in attendance at the premiere, 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
(11:49):
that is a bassoon, I am a baboon and walked out.
So he did not like hearing the bassoon played in
this eerie and you usual register at all. Well, and
that wasn't even the only instrument that people had trouble with.
There were some other strange sounding instruments that chimed in
as well. There was an English horn and e flat clarinet,
(12:12):
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. Yeah, 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. Yea, yeah,
(13:07):
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 and they were jumping up and down with
both feet together. And it looks painful. It looks very violent,
(13:28):
and 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,
(13:50):
get them a dentist. So people were not only upset
by what they were hearing, the strange bassoon noise and
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,
(14:10):
you know, they wanted to see dancers and and see
the classical, the pretty, you know, the really beautiful costume
exactly that the two too kind of get up and um,
these folks were wearing tunics, they were wearing long fake braids,
they had padded lace legs, and you can look up
these costumes as I mentioned, but the best way to
(14:32):
picture it is almost like buckskins. There. They don't look graceful,
they look very primitive. And people they hated it. They
did not like that aspect of it. Stravinsky panic at
this point. 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
(14:52):
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 so
the orchestra just keeps on playing the music, which must
have been difficult because there's some crazy rhythms in the
(15:13):
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
from basically chanting for them, and Stravinsky held his coat
(15:33):
tails to keep him from falling. He was leaned that
far out, and the police were of course called in.
And uh, 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
(15:55):
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 two two
and and the pirouetting, but people didn't go to the
ballet roots for that kind of experience anyway. And recently, UM,
(16:16):
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 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,
(16:39):
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 Sara
and I both watched it, and the program kolstro Vinsky's
score and artistic revolution, something that redefined twentieth century music
(17:00):
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 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
(17:23):
Stravinsky's work. I mean, after 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
(17:45):
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. 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
(18:06):
about this. That 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 Nijynski 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 though,
(18:27):
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
(18:50):
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
disc ever in nineteen eighty two. And to me, the
idea of reconstructing a dance is so it's almost impossible
for me to to comprehend. Yeah, it's one of those
(19:11):
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 also really modern at the
same time. And the fact that people would go to
such trouble to restore a ballet really just speak to
(19:31):
the effect and the importance of the ballet roosts on dance. Yeah,
after Diagolev's death in ninety nine, the Ballet Routs 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,
(19:54):
as our companies everywhere. So listener, Emily, who we mentioned
at the beginning of this podcast so that there'd be
no exhamation 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 Diagolov. I mean, the reason there was no
(20:16):
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 artistic exclamation. There's no body involved,
but some dance, ye know, close enough. I'm I was
pleased by by discovering this and getting to watch it.
It's rehearsal, so it's it's not it's not the Right
(20:38):
of Spring. It it's it is the nice costumes and
it looks very proper, but still it's the ballet roufs,
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
(21:01):
Walt Disney's Fantasia. There's of course a long extended sequence
of the Ride 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 from where if
(21:23):
you if you still have a VCR you can for
you could look up you could look up 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. All right, Well, I'm going to
head to the video store apparently and um pick up
(21:45):
a copy of Fantasia. If anyone has anything else to
add to this podcast, any stories that we missed. Obviously,
Sarah said, we could have done an individual podcast on
any of these characters, so I'm sure there's lots of
details of their lives that we haven't covered yet. Maybe
we will in the future. Or if you have any
great performances stories that you want to share with us,
because I don't know, I've been to some pretty good ones,
(22:07):
have been to some pretty good ballets and some you know,
there's some really interesting interpretations and stuff happens that at
theater and ballets. For sure, it really does so give
us a give us an email. It's about to say
give us a call, but you can't call us. Just
send us an email at history podcast, how stuff Works
dot com or you can look us up on Twitter
at Miston History or on Facebook. Yeah, and I have
(22:30):
one last cool fact for you. It's kind of a
fun fact. That's why we didn't included in the body
of the podcast. But the final four notes of the
base part in the sacrifice means at the very end
of the right of spring coincidentally spell D E A D.
We're gonna leave you on that spooky musical note. It's
(22:52):
the coincidence Trumancy was Russian. He wasn't trying to work
English codes into the composition. But or was he? Perhaps
we'll never know now. So I'm all on that for
a little bit. And uh, check out the blogs while
you're at it. We're at www dot how stuff Works
dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast,
(23:16):
Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as
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The How Stuff Works iPhone app has a rise. Download
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fair Dowdy and I'm to bling a Chruck reporting
and today we're gonna be doing a listener suggestion. So
dance teacher Emily wrote in to suggest that we cover
(00:22):
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 impresario. Plus there are a lot of
scandals and mental breakdowns and some pretty salacious performances to
(00:44):
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
we you know how we love those. On May there
was a riot during the debut of the Right of Spring,
(01:04):
and this was different from the last artistic riot that
we podcasted on You may remember it the Astra Placed Riot,
and that one wasn't about the work, which was Macbeth,
that's your 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.
(01:24):
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
(01:46):
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
(02:08):
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 Voslav Nijinsky, and
(02:30):
of course it was staged by the hottest ballet company
in Europe at the time, the Ballet Rouss a complete
smash since Sergei Diagle have 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 the only fitting we
talked about him. I really think that all three of
(02:50):
those men we mentioned could be their own podcast subjects.
They have very interesting lives. But kind of condensed it
a little because we're talking about the riot, not everybody involved.
But Diego Love was born in Russia in eighteen seventy
two to 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
(03:12):
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
(03:32):
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
(03:53):
up to them. They went bankrupt and diego Love had
to support them while studying law, but he also indulged
in his artistics. It had once in a while he
started hanging out with a group of sophisticates he met
through his cousin slash boyfriend, not something that you think
slash yeah. So this group made up some of the
core members of the eventual ballet rus So after graduation,
(04:16):
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.
(04:38):
They took inspiration from throwing things like Russian folklore and
fairy tales, and they scored the Imperial ballets and operas. Yeah,
so Diego Loov got this meeting with Rimsky Korsakov, who
at this point it's sort of the godfather of Russian music,
and he has his work completely dismissed by this this
old master, and he does stick up for himself a
(05:01):
little bit. I think he actually is kind of smart.
He I mean, and I mean that in a bad way.
He I think he tells him, you're gonna 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
(05:23):
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 gonna be a
patron of arts and not have your own money, you've
(05:43):
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 enchanted by
(06:06):
the idea of old Russia, its opulence, it's 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, Diaglav
pulled the best dancers from Russia and formed the Ballet
Ruth and the company's early years really capitalized on that
(06:28):
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, Boslo Nadjynski, and he eventually became
(06:51):
Diagla's lover. And Najynski was the son of dancers, so
he had grown up in this environment and he was
really famous for his leap, almost like he could fly.
So when he debuted in in Paris and in the
rest of Europe, 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
(07:13):
particular really stood out. And the third member of our
trio also came in near the beginning of this whole
story of the Ballet russ 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
(07:35):
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,
(07:59):
none other than Kikorsikov. So Rimsky Korsikov gave him a
better reaction than he had given to Diagolov, and actually
took him on as a private student. So his story
turned out a little better there for him, it 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,
(08:21):
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 Balletrous 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
(08:42):
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? No? I wasn't then at all.
I was in a Nutcracker though does that counting different composers?
(09:03):
Completely different? Ll at 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, Nazynski 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 gonna learn, but something that's
(09:25):
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 Diaglev, and he really
liked fairy tales and Russian legends especially, so he had
grown up summering in a small village called the Stulug,
(09:48):
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 song with
their untrained voices and play homemade instruments and really just
have a good time. And it produced a very unique
(10:09):
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 an entirely happy occasion. It's a
pagan human sacrifice. Spoiler alert In case you you didn't
(10:29):
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
(10:51):
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 quite druplets. 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 of the premiere first heard.
(11:29):
So that's a very unusual sound. And a composer who
was in attendance at the premiere, 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
(11:49):
that is a bassoon, I am a baboon and walked out.
So he did not like hearing the bassoon played in
this eerie and you usual register at all. Well, and
that wasn't even the only instrument that people had trouble with.
There were some other strange sounding instruments that chimed in
as well. There was an English horn and e flat clarinet,
(12:12):
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. Yeah, 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. Yea, yeah,
(13:07):
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 and they were jumping up and down with
both feet together. And it looks painful. It looks very violent,
(13:28):
and 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,
(13:50):
get them a dentist. So people were not only upset
by what they were hearing, the strange bassoon noise and
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,
(14:10):
you know, they wanted to see dancers and and see
the classical, the pretty, you know, the really beautiful costume
exactly that the two too kind of get up and um,
these folks were wearing tunics, they were wearing long fake braids,
they had padded lace legs, and you can look up
these costumes as I mentioned, but the best way to
(14:32):
picture it is almost like buckskins. There. They don't look graceful,
they look very primitive. And people they hated it. They
did not like that aspect of it. Stravinsky panic at
this point. 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
(14:52):
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 so
the orchestra just keeps on playing the music, which must
have been difficult because there's some crazy rhythms in the
(15:13):
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
from basically chanting for them, and Stravinsky held his coat
(15:33):
tails to keep him from falling. He was leaned that
far out, and the police were of course called in.
And uh, 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
(15:55):
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 two two
and and the pirouetting, but people didn't go to the
ballet roots for that kind of experience anyway. And recently, UM,
(16:16):
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 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,
(16:39):
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 Sara
and I both watched it, and the program kolstro Vinsky's
score and artistic revolution, something that redefined twentieth century music
(17:00):
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 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
(17:23):
Stravinsky's work. I mean, after 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
(17:45):
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. 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
(18:06):
about this. That 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 Nijynski 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 though,
(18:27):
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
(18:50):
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
disc ever in nineteen eighty two. And to me, the
idea of reconstructing a dance is so it's almost impossible
for me to to comprehend. Yeah, it's one of those
(19:11):
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 also really modern at the
same time. And the fact that people would go to
such trouble to restore a ballet really just speak to
(19:31):
the effect and the importance of the ballet roosts on dance. Yeah,
after Diagolev's death in ninety nine, the Ballet Routs 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,
(19:54):
as our companies everywhere. So listener, Emily, who we mentioned
at the beginning of this podcast so that there'd be
no exhamation 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 Diagolov. I mean, the reason there was no
(20:16):
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 artistic exclamation. There's no body involved,
but some dance, ye know, close enough. I'm I was
pleased by by discovering this and getting to watch it.
It's rehearsal, so it's it's not it's not the Right
(20:38):
of Spring. It it's it is the nice costumes and
it looks very proper, but still it's the ballet roufs,
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
(21:01):
Walt Disney's Fantasia. There's of course a long extended sequence
of the Ride 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 from where if
(21:23):
you if you still have a VCR you can for
you could look up you could look up 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. All right, Well, I'm going to
head to the video store apparently and um pick up
(21:45):
a copy of Fantasia. If anyone has anything else to
add to this podcast, any stories that we missed. Obviously,
Sarah said, we could have done an individual podcast on
any of these characters, so I'm sure there's lots of
details of their lives that we haven't covered yet. Maybe
we will in the future. Or if you have any
great performances stories that you want to share with us,
because I don't know, I've been to some pretty good ones,
(22:07):
have been to some pretty good ballets and some you know,
there's some really interesting interpretations and stuff happens that at
theater and ballets. For sure, it really does so give
us a give us an email. It's about to say
give us a call, but you can't call us. Just
send us an email at history podcast, how stuff Works
dot com or you can look us up on Twitter
at Miston History or on Facebook. Yeah, and I have
(22:30):
one last cool fact for you. It's kind of a
fun fact. That's why we didn't included in the body
of the podcast. But the final four notes of the
base part in the sacrifice means at the very end
of the right of spring coincidentally spell D E A D.
We're gonna leave you on that spooky musical note. It's
(22:52):
the coincidence Trumancy was Russian. He wasn't trying to work
English codes into the composition. But or was he? Perhaps
we'll never know now. So I'm all on that for
a little bit. And uh, check out the blogs while
you're at it. We're at www dot how stuff Works
dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast,
(23:16):
Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as
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