Now over a century after its infamous Paris premiere, The Rite of Spring remains one of the most discussed and debated works in the intertwined histories of music and theatrical dance. Indeed, criticism – in the broadest sense of the term – has been The Rite’s constant companion. Following its polemical treatment within the daily and specialist press in the weeks and months after the first public performance of 29 May 1913, The Rite has generated a continuous outpouring of literature across the disciplines of music history, music theory and analysis, dance, theatre and cultural studies, aesthetics and philosophy, as well as histories of Russian and Western European art. This literature has taken various forms, from straightforward reportage, proto-celebrity biography and archival dossiers de presse to highly specialized studies of the ballet’s component parts. In more recent decades, following now-entrenched post-structuralist enthusiasms, scholars have tended towards ‘framing’ issues of culture and society, situating the ballet alongside an embarrassment of interdisciplinary themes or ‘isms’, including nationalism, primitivism and exoticism, as well as (the more obscure) nihilism, atavism and biological psychologism. Moreover, as scholars have claimed increasing performativity for the ballet, The Rite has been considered less a passive reflection than an active and controversial participant within prevailing historical debates over a range of factors from aesthetic attitudes and morality to social politics and ethnicity. According to the ever-accumulating wealth of scholarly wisdom, the ballet helped construct a vital space for artistic and intellectual change in a historical period where the arts and society, as well as culture and politics, were profoundly and symbiotically interconnected.

Given all this literature, we might question the need for more – might wonder, even, if The Rite of Spring can still be a stimulating subject of attention for students and academics, besides seasoned concert- and theatre-goers. Yet it is perhaps because of the multiplicity and diversity of the extant academic offerings – not forgetting the not-quite-scholarly coffee-table tomes – that a Cambridge Companion will be useful. Broadly speaking, this volume of newly commissioned essays fulfils an important function, offering a serviceable and synoptic guide to The Rite that takes into account the astonishing quantity and variety of studies. This point bears emphasis. Faced with an unending bibliography, it can be difficult for the reader to know where to start. The Rite of Spring has attracted so much attention and speculation, so many competing historical and interpretive viewpoints, that it can seem effectively out of reach. The primary goal of this volume, then, is to collapse this sense of distance, allaying some of the genuine confusion or unease experienced by someone attempting to get a secure fix on what The Rite might have looked like or sounded like to its original audience, not to mention to those of subsequent decades. Experts in their specialist fields, contributing authors condense and disseminate the latest research, offering careful and reflexive commentaries, while bringing The Rite, its component parts and live theatrical assembly, more closely and sharply into view.

The chapters that follow bring to attention two prominent themes or leitmotifs that help focus discussion. Both themes are cross-disciplinary, addressing the ballet as ballet, a theatrical complex of music, gesture and visuals; both are central to the original history of The Rite in 1913; and both are thought to have helped determine the legacy and impact of the ballet over the years that followed. They remain, as this volume will amply illustrate, at the forefront of present-day scholarly debates, and are vital to a clear-sighted and properly critical assessment of the ballet, its diverse cultural contexts and reception histories.

One of these themes is newness or, in academic parlance, ‘modernism’, a quality strongly identified with The Rite of Spring from the beginning. Indeed, claims of innovation, complexity, experimentation and revolution – of the exhaustion of Western art and the necessary regeneration from ‘without’ – have long characterized the reception of the work. The idea of modernism is so frequently and freely invoked – in everything from programme notes and CD sleeves to university academic curricula – that its meaning and significance can be unclear. This volume adopts a questioning stance towards the topic, asking: what makes The Rite modernist? what kind of quality or aesthetic category is implied by modernism? where are its roots, in music and theatrical dance in particular? what are its artistic and historical affiliations? and why is it so important to engage with here?

The second recurring theme also invites a questioning perspective. Now well into the new millennium, can we still speak productively of something called The Rite of Spring? Do we best call this thing a ‘work’, or should we utilize some other descriptor? Ballet, clearly, is an option, but then how do we account for the myriad manifestations that The Rite has taken, from stage reconstruction, puppet theatre, pointe-slipper-solo and film animation to concert-hall performance, YouTube video and digital music download? And what of the profusion of scholarly literature, the continual circulation of ideas and the constant reinvention of the work as an intellectual construct? Clearly, the legacy of The Rite of Spring is complex, involving a multiplicity of factors (aesthetic, ideological, social, cultural, political, institutional) and mediums (ballet, film, modern dance, instrumental music, player-piano rolls). This volume will acknowledge and explore the ballet’s remarkable ability to sustain itself, for over a century, in the theatre, the concert-hall and also in print, prompting readers to ponder the usefulness of the now-notorious ‘work’ concept (a vestige of the nineteenth century) and conjure up more persuasive alternatives (for the twenty-first).

As for the structure of this volume, Part I offers a concise yet comprehensive overview of The Rite of Spring’s original story: the collaborative venture that was the 1913 Paris production. Following an opening chapter that introduces The Rite and the legendary Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev, identifying the company’s creative and commercial priorities, authors concentrate on the various individual contributions to the ballet: Igor Stravinsky’s music, Nicholas Roerich’s costumes and décors, and Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 offer detailed accounts of the conceptualization and stage realization of each, describing practical working methods while assessing inter-relationships between the ballet’s component parts. Chapter 5, a useful addition to these separate synopses, addresses the fate of the ballet in the French press, making a case for the centrality of critics and audiences to the inflammatory ‘lore’ that has accumulated around the original production.

If Part I looks inwards upon the ballet’s core components, Part II gestures outwards towards broader contexts for historical understanding. Chapters 6 and 7 situate the ballet alongside salient trends in French art and visual culture, and entrenched folk traditions, rituals and festivities observed in Russia. Chapter 8 offers a specifically musicological perspective on Stravinsky’s score and its significance within the composer’s oeuvre, while Chapter 9 addresses a lesser-known Soviet context, exploring the ballet’s production and reception at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre.

Part III makes connections of a different kind, tracing the history and genesis of some of the ballet’s most well-known reconstructions and re-imaginings: as concert-hall music for orchestra, piano roll, animated film score, popular soundtrack and accompaniment to an ever-increasing number of new choreographies. Chapters 10, 11 and 12 collectively investigate a continuous effort of renewal and transformation, describing notable new productions, performances and recordings, while establishing patterns and trends in creative practice.

Part IV offers a thoroughly contemporary overview of the specialist literature, scholarly knowledge and institutionalized pedagogy that has built up around the ballet over the years. Adopting a wide-angled critical perspective, the authors of Chapters 13 and 14 review scholarship on The Rite in the fields of music analysis, music history and dance studies, identifying major contributions, scholarly methods and investigative agendas. The impetus, here, is not only to consider what this literature can reveal about The Rite; authors also explore what the history of The Rite can reveal about the disciplines in which we are trained. To put this in simpler terms, authors address The Rite as an object of study, acknowledging how and why our research, teaching and learning has changed over the years, often alongside ever more sophisticated and nuanced understandings of cross-disciplinary themes such as formalism, authorship, theatricality, hermeneutics and ethnicity.

In sum, it is hoped that this volume will offer an invaluable and up-to-date resource, providing illuminating accounts of The Rite, its history, reception and reworking, in the concert hall, the theatre, film, scholarship and in the general cultural consciousness. In engaging and readable prose, authors put some critical pressure on familiar slogans of scandale and revolution, as the ballet is shown to blur conceptual boundaries between music, dance and visuals, as well as text, performance and event. Indeed, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, The Rite may be best understood as a collective cultural project, a predicament or spectrum of possibility. Certainly, it remains a battleground for contesting academic ideas and creative interpretations. This volume functions as a Companion not only to The Rite of Spring – the historical actuality of 29 May 1913 – but to The Rite’s legacy: the coterminous narratives that the original production set in motion, intertwining music, theatrical ballet and modern dance with the wider world of ideas.

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It is tempting to end here, with somewhat ambitious statements of intent and accomplishment, but I would rather bow out with a slice of personal history, one that might help focus a searchlight on The Rite’s uniqueness and impact – or, more specifically, the uniqueness of its impact, at least as I registered it recently.

I had the good fortune to be editing chapters of this volume while on a working summer holiday in Venice. Ostensibly, I was over in northern Italy to attend and deliver a paper at the annual meeting of the international research network ‘France: Musiques, Cultures, 1789–1918’, held at the Palazzetto Bru Zane, the home of the Centre de Musique Romantique Française. I took the opportunity to see the Venetian sights, passing a pleasant hour on the Grand Canal, among the winding alleyways of the Dorsoduro, at the Biennale, and inside some magnificent churches – the Basilica dei Frari, the Chiesa di San Simeone Piccolo, the Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo and the Salute.

It was while I was in the cathedral church of San Marco, heaving with tourists, that The Rite of Spring came to mind. No, there was no live performance that day: concerts of ‘classical’ music, including opera and ballet highlights, are much more likely to take place outside the Basilica, in the open-air Piazza San Marco, than inside the iconic building. What I experienced was more of an impromptu auditory hallucination: not at all bothersome or vexing, like those we associate with the mentally declining Robert Schumann, but rather physical and full-bodied – a re-awakening of my felt response, my sensible absorption, to Stravinsky’s score. Instantly, I was hyper-conscious of my breath, my heartrate and the myriad transient sensations that arise from even minuscule variations in these semi-autonomic bodily functions. And I recalled the vividness of my previous embodied experience of The Rite: how my top lip had shaken (who knew it could?) as my younger self, playing third flute in a concert performance at the BBC Proms, had struggled to intone the treacherous harmonics that feature prominently within Stravinsky’s Introduction to Part 2, The Sacrifice. Other physical immediacies quickly followed (sweaty palms, diaphragmatic tension, a craning of the neck), along with a heightened visual response. From my anxious perch among the woodwinds at the Royal Albert Hall, London, I imagined myself seated comfortably in the stalls of the Aotea Centre, Auckland, where I witnessed British choreographer Royston Maldoom’s one-off production of ‘Sacre: The Auckland Dance Project’, in which 180 youngsters from across the city performed a voyage across the South Pacific.

As for why this hallucinatory episode occurred during the forty-or-so minutes in which I sat and then shuffled my way around San Marco, I was also reminded of the vibrant history – what has been called the ‘liveliness’ – of the architectural space in which I found myself. For the cathedral has a long and established tradition of multi-sensorial aesthetics: that is, body-centred rituals addressed to the ears, eyes, hands, mouth and even the nose. Musicians will likely be familiar with San Marco’s late Renaissance polychoral tradition, large-scale vocal works designed to be physically experienced by a congregation. Composers such as Adrian Willaert and Giovanni Gabrieli took advantage of the cathedral’s cross-shaped floor plan, pitting choir against choir – on either side of the altar – in order to create exceptionally resonant antiphonal effects.¹ Another genre of music, of a similar sonorous grandeur, was the organ toccata, developed by San Marco’s chief organists, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, and Claudio Merulo. Thought to have derived from the intonazione that originally supplied the choir with a central pitch, the toccatas written by San Marco’s organists tended to emphasize the opulence of sound itself, as performer-virtuosos enacted a dazzling display of finger-work and sonic effects – one that would act as a kind of aural incense, impressing listeners and instilling religious awe.² Recent research has suggested how this newly sensuous and spectacular music became virtually palpable: how, when combined with prayer and the changing ambient conditions within the basilica, music helped induce a synaesthetic experience replete with phenomenal transformations. Shifting effects of light and shadow, drafts of air and human breath, layers of smoke and burning fragrance: these functioned to animate the richly textured surfaces of the gilded interior – the mass of gold ground mosaics, the tessellated marble floor, the Byzantine icons crafted from pearls, sapphires, emeralds and garnets. All, together with the Basilica’s characteristic sound effects, were designed to overwhelm the human senses and induce a feeling of spiritual presence unique to the religious ritual.³

The experience of being inside San Marco that summer, beholding the opulent display and exuberant materiality of the Byzantine surfaces, prompted me to re-engage physically with a different kind of rite – a dance not of shimmering gold but of stamping feet and pagan pre-history. Diaghilev’s ballet has so often been used (some might say abused) as the site of complex theoretical argumentation, sophisticated analytical manoeuvring and densely interwoven philosophical speculation that it is easy for us to forget its intense corporeal impact – the sensory immediacies that gripped audiences back in 1913. Yet, as musicologist Sarah Gutsche-Miller suggests in Chapter 5 of this volume, critics of the first few performances of the ballet likely responded viscerally to the scenes unfolding on stage before them. The Rite, they noted, aroused ‘an absolutely new feeling’, a feeling ‘never before experienced and of the most incisive acuity’. The ballet had an ‘overwhelming’, ‘intoxicating’, ‘suffocating’ effect: it ‘crushes us’; it ‘knocks us flat’.⁴ To be sure, this kind of intense physiological response was not unusual in the face of a Russian theatrical extravaganza. Describing, at the outset of his review of The Rite, the effect of Diaghilev’s first Paris productions, composer-critic Xavier Leroux observed:

The Russian company’s visceral impact seems only to have intensified with The Rite. In a long and perceptive review of the ballet, critic Jacques Rivière maintained that the ‘oddities’ of Stravinsky’s score were designed not to startle or to provoke admiration, but, rather, ‘to put us into direct contact, into immediate communion with the most wonderful and amazing things’: ‘[they] bring us close … to introduce us to the object on an equal footing’.⁶ As for ‘the passions of the soul’:

Presence, immediacy, embodiment; visceral reactions and almost erotic stimulation. Today’s critical theorists might speak of the defining ingredients of ‘haptic’ aesthetics: a type of multi-sensorial experience specific to distinct historical periods, such as early twentieth-century modernism, when ‘meaning came to reside in the embodied and inter-subjective relationship between work and viewer’. Referencing a ‘modernist revaluation of tactility’ (‘the return of materiality to the mediums of art and literature’), film scholar Laura U. Marks has identified the modernist period with a flare-up of interest in the subjectivity and physiology of vision, gesturing towards attempts ‘to redeem aesthetics from their transcendental implications by emphasizing the corporeal and immanent nature of the experience of art’.⁸ We might do well to keep these words in mind – not to mention those of Rivière and Leroux – as we contemplate the subjectivity and physiology not only of vision but of audition and kinesis, too. As this volume sets out to explain, it was a shifting complex of sound, image and movement that saturated the senses of The Rite’s period audience. Let us celebrate in recalling the ballet’s bodily imprint as we train our eyes and our minds across the chapters that follow.