Paris 1913: The Rite of Spring.. and other rites.

Richard Witts : Paris 1913: Music: Script for BBC Radio 3 programme ‘The Essay’ on Paris in 1913, first broadcast Tuesday 8 January 2013, 2245-2300. It seems that all of the major musical events of Paris 1913 took place in one plush theatre, the Théâtre des Champs Élysees. Its owner, Gabriel Astruc, opened his proto art-deco doors in April and shut them, bankrupt, in October. It was on his stage that, one notable night in May, the Parisian élite watched for the first time a poor young woman surrounded by a pagan mob whose actions ended in ritual slaughter to placate the supreme god. Very-well received on the 10th of May was Gabriel Fauré’s opera Pénélope, his setting of the revengeful end to Homer’s Odyssey. But only five nights later in the same theatre all thought of Pénélope vanished when Debussy’s music for Jeux was first performed there. This new ballet was choreographed and danced by the adored Nijinsky. He was teamed with Tamara Karsavina and Ludmilla Schollar as his female tennis partners, whose jeux – games – mixed racquets with erotics. Although Debussy grumbled about the overly stylized ’ill-omened feet’ of Nijinsky’s choreography, the work proved a sufficiently shocking ‘sensation’ for the Ballets Russes’ first – and last – season at the new venue. Debussy had succeeded in his aim to make the sensual orchestra sound as if ‘lit from behind’, as he put it. He also made the ballet – built out of many sections and shifts – flow through what he called ‘colours of rhythmicised time’. It remains a score to wonder at. But barely two weeks later all thought of Jeux was eclipsed when another poor young woman was surrounded by a pagan mob whose action ended in ritual sacrifice to placate the supreme god. For it was in Astruc’s new theatre, on the 29th May, that the notorious riot of the Rite of Spring took place. Was it really a riot? By all accounts it was riot-ish. The police were called and some of the more heated protestors were removed. Astruc stood on stage between the two parts of the ballet and begged for calm, which he didn’t get, until finally the sacrificed girl, danced by Maria Pilz, took command of the theatre in her closing solo. For the main part, disorder, shrill arguments, and raucous insults were reported in all of the written accounts, including those penned by the likes of Gertrude Stein, who weren’t even there. They wanted to be there, that’s the point. What was the riot about? Was the audience dismayed at being shown ‘pictures of pagan Russia’, as the ballet’s subtitle had it? Hardly: one of the Ballets Russes’ reliable showstoppers was the macho staging of Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances. And by now the Parisian public was accustomed to the company’s integration of the theatrical effect – of the dance, the décor and the music worked-up together. In the end, the uproar on the 29th May didn’t seem to be directed at the idiomatic choreography of Nijinsky, or the psychedelic make-up and folk designs of Nicholas Roerich, or Stravinsky’s audacious score. It may be argued that the source and subject of the revolt was not the artists, but Astruc. Astruc was the highly successful agent of the dancer Mata Hari. He invented the Paris Spring ‘Season’ for modish, foreign art to visit the capital. When the Slavic impresario Serge Diaghilev started his Russian seasons at the Paris Opéra in 1907, it was Astruc who managed the French end of business. He acted as Diaghilev’s associate in 1909 when the Russian Ballet, les ballets Russes, was formed at the Châtelet Theatre. By 1913 Astruc had sensed that there was a fresh market for the exotic, the opulent, the novel and the modernistic. His refined audience had developed its own channels of circulation to promote their voguish interests, such as the salons and soirées in their own homes. Astruc believed that the imperial theatres of the Opéra and the Châtelet failed to offer the most seductive structure and ambience for this beau monde denomination. His new audience comprised subsidised bohemians, intellectuals, the new industrialists, their investors and – highly important in this scene – their wives. Among them were Countess Severine Phillipine Decazes de Glückberg (otherwise known as Daisy Fellows), Maria Godebska also known as Misya Natanson, Edwards or Sert depending on the date, and the Princess de Scey-Montbeliard also known as Princess Edmond de Polignac, also known as Winnerretta Singer, the sewing machine heiress. They were patrons of what Debussy acidly termed ‘the success market’. For these, their affluent husbands (in stiff hats), and those they patronized (in soft hats), Astruc had his own theatre built. The thing was, Astruc was Jewish. The Dreyfus Affair still poisoned the air. Astruc was refused permission to build on the Champs-Elysées itself, where his theatre would be the one closest to the homes of the art-loving tycoons of the 8th and 16th arrondissements. Instead he built his elegant venue further down near the river. Due to its weight on silty ground, a new construction material was given its first public use in Paris. Many books have been written about the result, and my favourite reveals the innovation in its very title: ‘Théâtre des Champs Elysées – the Magic of Reinforced Concrete’. Astruc’s auditorium held nearly two thousand seats. And it was designed in such a way that the curved dress circle, the large boxes and a linking promenade were close enough for conversation to mesh. What was uttered by the stiff hats in the boxes could be heard by the soft hats in the seats. So, on the evening of the 29th May, it needed only a murmur of incredulity at any aspect of the Rite of Spring to ignite a blaze of indignation. When the Countess de Pourtales, her tiara askew, shouted that ‘For the first time in sixty years someone has dared to make fun of me!’, her comment was reported so widely that we can be sure it wasn’t. Yet her remark exposes the social rather than the artistic dimension of this riot. Jean Cocteau claimed that the audience played the part allotted to it, by generating editorial hype for the première. Astruc first opened his venue on the 2nd of April with a triumphant gala concert. Five French composers conducted their own works. The veteran Saint-Saëns was followed by Debussy, d’Indy, Fauré and Dukas, who directed his Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Through this classy event Astruc was uniting for one evening the rival musical factions of the capital. Saint-Saens loathed d’Indy, while Debussy once said, ‘I have a horror of sentimentality and I cannot forget that its name is Saint-Saëns’. The all-embracing concert neglected only the latest French trends – the evocations of Ravel, the satires of Satie, and the social realism of Charpentier. Ravel was able to rest on his laurels. He’d gained immense success in the previous season, through his symphonic score to the Ballet Russes’s Daphnis and Chloe. Although his former teacher Fauré complained about ‘this new-fangled music’ with its ‘lavish profusion’ and ‘big effects’, Ravel’s sophisticated instrumentation would influence generations to come, from Berg to Berio and Benjamin – which is not very far alphabetically, but it is so otherwise. Yet Ravel did contribute to Astruc’s new theatre. He worked with Stravinsky on a realization of Khovanschina, an opera that Mussorgky had left unfinished thirty years earlier. The premiere of the Stravinsky-Ravel version was given the week after that of the Rite of Spring. But the star bass, Feodor Chaliapin, insisted on singing with a more conventional orchestration, and so a version was cobbled together which flopped. As for Erik Satie, he could never be accused of lavish profusion. It was said that Satie’s job was to ‘decongest music’. A story went around at this time that someone had offered Stravinsky a commission which he’d turned down because the fee was too low. The work was then offered to Satie who declined it because the fee was too high. Earning his keep as a cabaret pianist, he wrote in June seven little dances for a stuffed monkey, which he inserted into a surreal play he’d just written called The Trap of Medusa. It was for this play that Satie could be said to have invented the prepared piano by placing sheets of paper between the strings to give it a spikier sound. Meanwhile the least chic though most popular of Parisian composers was crusading socially and musically like Astruc, but in the opposite direction. Gustave Charpentier sought to bring art to the disenfranchised. His opera Louise was the most successful French stage work of the Belle Époque. In it, the city of Paris itself epitomized the prospect of freedom from emptiness and pauperism. At the opera’s opening run at the head of the century, Charpentier had given blocks of seats away in the Opéra-Comique to young dressmakers. The socialist composer went on to open the Conservatoire Populaire Mimi Pinson. He named it after the heroine of Musset’s story about a penniless working girl. Offering free music tuition to seamstresses and the like, Charpentier’s Conservatoire ran until the start of the second world war. But it was in 1913 that Charpentier completed a partnering opera to Louise, that of Julien, the story of her lover. In this archetype of magic realism, the entertainment district of Pigalle symbolized all that was magical about Paris (apart, of course, from its reinforced concrete). The premiere of Julien took place in Paris one week after that of the Rite of Spring, and so we shouldn’t be surprised that it got lost to fortune. So much did in the wake of the Rite. It’s been said many times that since Stravinsky’s intimidating score was first played, all composers have wanted to create their ‘Rite’. Regrettably, there have been more wrongs than Rites. Yet even at the time, the Rite’s significance was justly recognized. The critic Roland-Manuel argued that: ’Stravinsky has deliberately changed the colour of his music – and ALL music.’ Another exclaimed that ‘Stravinsky’s work marks an epoch not only in the history of music and dance, but in that of all the arts.’ The history of dance? Frankly, the Rite of Spring has never made for a great ballet. Its seismic ferocity and harmonic insolence has always overwhelmed the stage behind it. Jean Cocteau believed that the cause of the stiff hats’ derision on the Rite’s first night was the ballet’s ‘monotony of automata’. The climax, he wrote, was like ‘a factory blowing up’. That’s a potent phrase in a period of conspicuous rearmament. But it would take a year for Stravinsky’s score to triumph, and that was in a concert performance in Paris, after which Stravinsky was carried shoulder-high around the Place de la Trinité. His best ballet came next, in The Wedding – Les Noces – and that took a decade to realize. Stravinsky spent so long on it because he was looking for a more objective soundworld. He found it first in automata, in player pianos, and percussion. After all, 1913 was the year that Luigi Russolo wrote his Futurist manifesto The Art of Noise. Stravinsky was interested enough to visit a show of Russolo’s noise machines. The exhilarating world of the motorised and the automated had become the passion of Parisian investors. Even Astruc’s programme books contained ads for the latest cars by Peugot and Rolls-Royce. No wonder that one critic on the Rite’s first night hit on the ultimate insult by claiming that Stravinsky’s music sounded like ‘the creaking of a hundred un-oiled cartwheels’. The most interesting review that evening came from Jacques Rivière, the future Editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française. He used the Rite to attack Debussy. Rivière believed Debussy to be the morbid manipulator of blurs and veils. In contrast, Stravinsky’s Rite was ‘whole and tough’, he wrote, ‘its parts raw… Everything crisp, intact, and clear… Instead of evoking it, he utters it.’ This portrayal suggests to me Stravinsky in his postwar ‘objective’ phase. So for Rivière to hear the Rite as the launch of that, rather than the climax of his Russian period, is quite remarkable. The ballet was given six times in Astruc’s theatre and then six times in London. There were no more riots. Astruc carried on with his impressive programme, but he stretched his ‘season’ beyond the appeal and purse of his patrons. In October out of desperation he revived Fauré’s opera. Fauré wrote to his wife that ‘Astruc will bring the price of seats back to the normal level and will then bring Pénélope into contact with the real public.’ But after seven performances the theatre went bust. Astruc earned enough from Mata Hari to survive, until she was arrested as a German spy and executed by firing squad. His experiment in mingling two publics had failed. Yet Astruc identified an appetite for the avant-garde which would ensure that Paris, once the Great War was over, would call nearly all the neo-classic tunes. 6 6