'What I Wished to Express in The Consecration of Spring'

A few days before May 29, 1913, Igor Stravinsky gave an interview to the writer Ricciotto Canudo. Published in the Parisian journal Montjoie! on the morning of May 29--the day The Rite was to premiere--it bore the title "What I Wished to Express in The Consecration of Spring."

Some years ago the Parisian public was kind enough to receive favorable my Firebird and Petrushka. My friends have noted the evolution of the underlying idea, which passes from the fantastic fable of one of these works to the purely human generalization of the other. I fear that The Rite of Spring, in which I appeal neither to the spirit of fairy tales nor to human joy and grief, but in which I strive towards a somewhat greater abstraction, may confuse those who have until now manifested a precious sympathy towards me.

In The Rite of Spring I wished to express the sublime uprising of Nature renewing herself--the whole pantheistic uprising of the universal harvest.

In the Prelude, before the curtain rises, I have confided to my orchestra the great fear which weighs on every sensitive soul confronted with potentialities, the "thing in one's self," which may increase and develop infinitely. A feeble flute tone may contain potentiality, spreading throughout the orchestra. It is the obscure and immense sensation of which all things are conscious when Nature renews its forms; it is the vague and profound uneasiness of a universal puberty. Even in my orchestration and my melodic development I have sought to define it.

The whole Prelude is based upon a continuous "mezzo forte." The melody develops in a horizontal line that only masses of instruments (the intense dynamic power of the orchestra and not the melodic line itself) increase or diminish. In consequence, I have not given this melody to the strings, which are too symbolic and representative of the human voice; with crescendi and diminuendi, I have brought forward the wind instruments which have a drier tone, which are more precise, less endowed with facile expression, and on this account more suitable for my purpose.

In short, I have tried to express in this Prelude the fear of nature before the arising of beauty, a sacred terror at the midday sun, a sort of pagan cry. The musical material itself swells, enlarges, expands. Each instrument is like a bud which grows on the bark of an aged tree; it becomes part of an imposing whole. And the whole orchestra, all this massing of instruments, should have the significance of the Birth of Spring.

In the first scene, some adolescent boys appear with a very old woman, whose age and even whose century is unknown, who knows the secrets of nature, and teaches her sons Divination. She runs, bent over the earth, half-woman, half-beast. The adolescents at her side are Augurs of Spring, who mark in their steps the rhythms of spring, the pulse-beat of spring.

During this time the adolescent girls come from the river. They form a circle which mingles with the boy's circle. They are not entirely formed beings; their sex is single and double like that of the tree. The groups mingle, but in their rhythms one feels the cataclysm of groups about to form. In fact they divide right and left. It is the realization of form, the synthesis of rhythms, and the thing formed produces a new rhythm.

The groups separate and compete, messengers come from one to the other and they quarrel. It is the defining of forces through struggle, that is to say through games. But a Procession arrives. It is the Saint, the Sage, the Pontifex, the oldest of the clan. All are seized with terror. The Sage gives a benediction to the Earth, stretched flat, his arms and legs stretched out, becoming one with the soil. His benediction is as a signal for an eruption of rhythm. Each, covering his head, runs in spirals, pouring fourth in numbers, like the new energies of nature. It is the Dance of the Earth.

The second scene begins with an obscure game of adolescent girls. At the beginning, a musical picture is based upon a song which accompanies the young girl's dances. The latter mark in their dance the place where the Elect will be confined, and whence she cannot move. The Elect is she whom the Spring is to consecrate, and who will give back to Spring the force that youth has taken from it.

The young girls dance about the Elect, a sort of glorification. Then comes the purification of the soil and the Evocation of the Ancestors. The Ancestors gather around the Elect, who begins the "Dance of Consecration." When she is on the point of falling exhausted, the Ancestors recognize it and glide toward her like rapacious monsters in order that she may not touch the ground; they pick her up and raise her toward heaven. The annual cycle of forces which are born again, and which fall again into the bosom of nature, is accomplished in its essential rhythms.

I am happy to have found in [Vaslav] Nijinsky the ideal choreographic collaborator, and in [Nicholas] Roerich the creator of the decorative atmosphere for his work of faith.

In a follow-up interview published six days later, also in Montjoie, Stravinsky took back every last one of his words.