Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

by Modris Eksteins
Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

by Modris Eksteins

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Overview

This award-winning cultural history reveals how the Great War changed humanity.
 
This sweeping volume probes the origins, the impact, and the aftermath of World War I—from the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring in 1913 to the death of Hitler in 1945. “The Great War,” as Modris Eksteins writes, “was the psychological turning point . . . for modernism as a whole. The urge to create and the urge to destroy had changed places.”
 
In this “bold and fertile book” (The Atlantic Monthly), Eksteins goes on to chart the seismic shifts in human consciousness brought about by this great cataclysm, through the lives and words of ordinary people, works of literature, and such events as Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and the publication of the first modern bestseller, All Quiet on the Western Front. Rites of Spring is a rare and remarkable work, a cultural history that redefines the way we look at our past—and toward our future.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780547525525
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date: 06/01/2018
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 416
Sales rank: 418,222
File size: 979 KB

About the Author

Modris Ekstein is a professor of history at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

I. Paris

New meditations have proved to me that things should move ahead with the artists in the lead, followed by the scientists, and that the industrialists should come after these two classes.

HENRI DE SAINT-SIMON 1820

I'm terribly sensitive to certain physical beauties — dancing girls, etc., and out of them I shape a sort of artificial paradise on earth. I've got to be close to dancing to live. As I think Nietzsche wrote, "I'll have faith in God only if he dances."

LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE

Who wrote this fiendish Rite of Spring? What right had he to write this thing? Against our helpless ears to fling Its crash, clash, cling, clang, bing, bang, bing? Letter to the Boston Herald 1924

Vision

A libretto, in Igor Stravinsky's hand, reads in translation:

The Rite of Spring is a musical choreographic work. It represents pagan Russia and is unified by a single idea: the mystery and great surge of the creative power of Spring. The piece has no plot ...

First Part: The Kiss of the Earth. The spring celebration ... The pipers pipe and young men tell fortunes. The old woman enters. She knows the mystery of nature and how to predict the future. Young girls with painted faces come in from the river in single file. They dance the spring dance. Games start ... The people divide into two groups, opposing each other. The holy procession of the wise old men. The oldest and wisest interrupts the spring games, which come to a stop. The people pause trembling ... The old men bless the spring earth ... The people dance passionately on the earth, sanctifying it and becoming one with it.

Second Part: The Great Sacrifice. All night the virgins hold mysterious games, walking in circles. One of the virgins is consecrated as the victim and is twice pointed to by fate, being caught twice in the perpetual dance. The virgins honor her, the chosen one, with a marital dance. They invoke the ancestors and entrust the chosen one to the old wise men. She sacrifices herself in the presence of the old men in the great holy dance, the great sacrifice.

May 29, 1913

Many have claimed to describe it, that opening night performance of Le Sacre du printemps on May 29, 1913, a Thursday, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées: Gabriel Astruc, Romola Nijinsky, Igor Stravinsky, Misia Sert, Marie Rambert, Bronislava Nijinska, Jean Cocteau, Carl Van Vechten, Valentine Gross. Their accounts conflict on significant details. But one thing they all agree on: the event provoked a seismic response.

Many in the audience were exceptionally elegant that evening as they arrived for the 8:45 curtain. All were excited. For weeks rumors had circulated about the artistic delights that the Russian ballet company had prepared for the new Paris season. Advance publicity talked of the "real art," the "true art," an art not confined by space and time, that Paris would experience. Seat prices had been doubled. There was certainly an air of expectation. Debussy's Jeux, choreographed and danced by Nijinsky, had premiered a fortnight earlier, the first ballet ever performed in modern dress — sports clothes of the day, in this case — and had been given a cool reception even by those sympathetic to modern art. Great virtuosity had been expected of the new Vestris, Nijinsky; only childish movements, so many thought, had been performed. A "haphazard essay in affectation" Henri Quittard called the performance in Le Figaro, and suggested that the audience would have been happier just listening to the music. Many now anticipated that Le Sacre would make up for that disappointment and revive the enchantment and sensation of previous "Russian seasons," when Parisian high society, together with the artistic and intellectual community, had been intoxicated by oriental bacchanals and other exotica.

This evening the beau monde was well represented. Against the black and white background of tails and the plush amaranth of the theater décor, tiaras sparkled and silk flowed. In addition to lavishly attired social snobs, there were aesthetic snobs too, who had come in ordinary suits, some with bandeaux, some with soft hats of one sort or another, which were considered a mark of revolt against the stiff toppers and bowlers of the upper classes. Gabriel Astruc claimed that there were about fifty passionate fans of the Russians present, including those he called "some radical Stravinskyites in soft caps." Long hair, beards, and mustaches were also in abundance. Of the crowd of aesthetes, whether becapped or hirsute, who attended this and similar events Cocteau said that "they would applaud novelty at random simply to show their contempt for the people in the boxes." In short, a readymade cheering section was present, prepared to do battle against sterility.

Dress, nonetheless, was no foolproof means of identifying artistic or any other inclination in 1913. Unpredictability was the smartest fashion. At a subsequent performance of Le Sacre, Gertrude Stein was to observe the poet Guillaume Apollinaire — who proclaimed himself the "judge of this long quarrel between tradition and innovation" — in the seats below.

He was dressed in evening clothes and was industriously kissing various important looking ladies' hands. He was the first one of his crowd to come out into the great world wearing evening clothes and kissing hands. We were very amused and very pleased to see him do it.

Shock and surprise, in other words, were the ultimate chic.

Regardless of attire, the audience on that opening night played, as Cocteau noted, "the role that was written for it." And what was that role? To be scandalized, of course, but, equally, to scandalize. The brouhaha surrounding Le Sacre was to be as much in the reactions of members of the audience to their fellows as in the work itself. The dancers on stage must have wondered at times who was performing and who was the audience.

Shortly after the wistful bassoon melody of the opening bars, the protests began, first with whistling. When the curtain went up and the dancers appeared, jumping up and down and toeing, against all convention, inward rather than outward, the howling and hissing started. "Having already made fun of the public once," wrote Henri Quittard in Le Figaro, referring to Jeux, "a repeat of the same joke, in such a heavy-handed way, was not in very good taste." To turn ballet, the most effervescent and fluid of art forms, into grotesque caricature was to insult good taste and the integrity of the audience. That was the attitude of the opposition. It felt offended. It jeered. Applause was the response of the defenders. And so the battle was joined.

Personal insults were certainly exchanged; probably some punches too; maybe cards, to arrange a semblance of satisfaction afterward. Whether a duel was fought the next morning as a result of the exchanges, as the melodramatic Romola Nijinsky asserts; whether a society lady actually spat in a man's face; whether the Comtesse de Pourtalès did in fact, as Cocteau tells it, get up, coronet askew, waving her fan, and exclaim, "I am sixty years old and this is the first time anyone has dared to make fun of me"; all of these details are froth on the meaning of the agitation. Of outrage and excitement there was plenty. Indeed, there was such a din that the music may have been almost drowned out at times.

But drowned out completely? Some reports leave the impression that no one, apart from the musicians in the orchestra and Pierre Monteux, the conductor, heard the music after the opening bars — not even the dancers. Cocteau first and then Stravinsky have left us with a picture of Nijinsky standing in the wings, on a chair, shouting numbers to the dancers. But he did so because of the difficulty of the choreography and the lack of conventional rhythms in the musical score — Nijinsky had done this consistently in rehearsal — rather than, as Cocteau and Stravinsky would have us believe, because of any problems the dancers had in hearing the orchestra. Valentine Gross, whose sketches of the Ballets russes were being exhibited that night in the foyer, has given us a delightfully airy but slightly preposterous account:

I missed nothing of the show which was taking place as much offstage as on. Standing between the two middle boxes, I felt quite at ease at the heart of the maelstrom, applauding with my friends. I thought there was something wonderful about the titanic struggle which must have been going on in order to keep these inaudible musicians and these deafened dancers together, in obedience to the laws of their invisible choreographer. The ballet was astoundingly beautiful.

Does the picture she paints here — musicians who cannot be heard, dancers who cannot hear — not have an abstract and absurd quality to it? And yet while, as she implies, she could not hear the music and while she did not know what rhythms the dancers were dancing to, Valentine Gross says she found the ballet "astoundingly beautiful"! Was she responding to what she heard and saw in the work of art presented, or was she responding in retrospect to the whole delicious affaire?

A touch of the modern dramatist is also present in Carl Van Vechten's accounts. He had been music and dance critic — the first such creature in the United States — for the New York Times before going to Europe in 1913 as drama critic of the New York Press. Some months earlier he had helped Mabel Dodge launch her famous salon in New York. "Cat-calls and hisses succeeded the playing of the first few bars," he wrote about the premiere of Le Sacre,

and then ensued a battery of screams, countered by a foil of applause. We warred over art (some of us thought it was and some thought it wasn't) ... Some forty of the protestants were forced out of the theater but that did not quell the disturbance. The lights in the auditorium were fully turned on but the noise continued and I remember Mile. Piltz [the chosen maiden] executing her strange dance of religious hysteria on a stage dimmed by the blazing light in the auditorium, seemingly to the accompaniment of the disjointed ravings of a mob of angry men and women.

The image of the dancers dancing to the noise of the audience is wonderful, and telling. The audience was as much a part of this famous performance as the corps de ballet. And to which side did the ejected protesters belong? Forty of them? Surely that number would have required a whole detachment of security men to clear. And no one, not even the manager of the theater, Gabriel Astruc, makes any mention of such precautionary personnel in attendance or of such a large-scale evacuation. Moreover, Bronislava Nijinska claims, contrary to Van Vechten, that Maria Piltz's "dance of the chosen maiden" met with relative quiet.

Another version of the opening night excitement, which Van Vechten gave elsewhere, reveals that he is hardly a reliable source for detail. He apparently attended both the first and second performances of Le Sacre, and, to put it kindly, seems to have confused incidents from both.

I was sitting in a box in which I had rented one seat. Three ladies sat in front of me and a young man occupied the place behind me. He stood up during the course of the ballet to enable himself to see more clearly. The intense excitement under which he was laboring, thanks to the potent force of the music, betrayed itself presently when he began to beat rhythmically on the top of my head with his fists. My emotion was so great that I did not feel the blows for some time. They were perfectly synchronized with the beat of the music. When I did, I turned around. His apology was sincere. We both had been carried beyond ourselves.

In this account the music obviously could be heard! Van Vechten would like us to believe that his is a description of the raucous opening night, but we know from Gertrude Stein that she was one of the "three ladies" sitting in front of Van Vechten, and she attended only the second performance on Monday! And according to Valentine Gross, who was present at all four performances of Le Sacre in Paris that May and June, the battle of the first night was not repeated. This merely suggests that Gertrude Stein's account is no more credible than the rest: "We could hear nothing ... one literally could not, throughout the whole performance, hear the sound of music." Literally? A score for over a hundred instruments could not be heard? Gertrude Stein went home with Alice B. Toklas and wrote not an article about the ballet but a poem, "The One," inspired by the stranger in her box, Carl Van Vechten. Perhaps she simply had not been listening.

Whom are we to believe? Gabriel Astruc claims in his memoirs that he shouted from his box shortly after the beginning, on opening night, "Ecoutez d'abord! Vous sifflerez après!" and that immediately, as if in response to the trident of Neptune, the storm abated: "The end of the work was heard in distinct quiet." Despite all the evident contradictions in the memoir accounts, these have been cited indiscriminately in all the secondary literature describing that opening night on May 29, 1913.

But what about the press reports? They are no more reliable than the memoirs in helping us determine exactly what happened. They were written by critics in attendance rather than by reporters in the strict sense, and consequently all displayed partipris attitudes similar to the divisions in the audience. The critical comments addressed themselves more thoroughly to Stravinsky's score than to Nijinsky's choreography — a reflection of the training of the critics — but this at any rate would suggest that much of the music had in fact been audible.

Where does all this confusion leave us? Is there not sufficient evidence to suggest that the trouble was caused more by warring factions in the audience, by their expectations, their prejudices, their preconceptions about art, than by the work itself? The work, as we shall see, certainly exploited tensions but hardly caused them. The descriptions of the memoirists and even the accounts of the critics are immersed in the scandale rather than the music and ballet, in the event rather than the art. None of the witnesses ever mentions the rest of the program that first evening, the reception accorded Les Sylphides, Le Spectre de la Rose, and Prince Igor. Some people, like Gertrude Stein, so captivated, even if in retrospect, by this early twentieth-century "happening," have implied that they were present when they clearly were not. Can one blame them? To have been in the audience that evening was to have participated not simply at another exhibition but in the very creation of modern art, in that the response of the audience was and is as important to the meaning of this art as the intentions of those who introduced it. Art has transcended reason, didacticism, and a moral purpose: art has become provocation and event.

Thus, Jean Cocteau, who in his staccato prose — which corresponds so well with the percussive diction of Le Sacre — has given us many of our lasting images of that opening night, did not hesitate to admit that he was more concerned with "subjective" than "objective" truth; in other words, with what he felt, what he imagined, not with what actually occurred. His account of what happened after the performance of Le Sacre — his claim that he, along with Stravinsky, Nijinsky, and Diaghilev, drove out at two o'clock in the morning to the Bois de Boulogne and that Diaghilev, tears streaming down his face, started reciting Pushkin — has been denied by Stravinsky and is a passage that is a piece of theater, poetry, and prose combined. But most of our other witnesses are of a similar kind.

Valentine Gross's images are equally literary: the composers Maurice Delage, "beetroot-red with indignation," and Maurice Ravel, "truculent as a fighting cock," and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue "spitting out crushing remarks at the hissing boxes." The composer Florent Schmitt is said to have called the society ladies of the Sixteenth Arrondissement "whores" and the ambassador of the Austro-Hungarian Empire "an old bum." Some have claimed that Saint-Saëns went storming out early; Stravinsky has said that he was not even present. All this is the stuff of literature, or fact fermented by ego and memory and turned into fiction.

But what about the other camp, les pompiers, or philistines, as they were called by the aesthetes? Their testimony is naturally more limited. Most of the criticism poured out in the press almost immediately, yet it too was thoroughly engrossed in the event, in the social implications of the art, rather than the art itself.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Rites of Spring"
by .
Copyright © 1989 Modris Eksteins.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Title Page,
Contents,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Map of the Western Front,
Preface,
Prologue: Venice,
ACT ONE,
I. Paris,
II. Berlin,
III. In Flanders' Fields,
ACT TWO,
IV. Rites of War,
V. Reason in Madness,
VI. Sacred Dance,
VII. Journey to the Interior,
ACT THREE,
VIII. Night Dancer,
IX. Memory,
X. Spring Without End,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Selected Sources,
Index,
About the Author,
Connect with HMH,
Footnotes,

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