The Rite of Spring, commonly referred to by its original French title, Le Sacre du Printemps (Russian: Весна священная, Vesna svyashchennaya) is a ballet with music by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, original choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, and original set design and costumes by archaeologist and painter Nicholas Roerich, all under impresario Serge Diaghilev. The music's innovative complex rhythmic structures, timbres, and use of dissonan...
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The Rite of Spring, commonly referred to by its original French title, Le Sacre du Printemps (Russian: Весна священная, Vesna svyashchennaya) is a ballet with music by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, original choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, and original set design and costumes by archaeologist and painter Nicholas Roerich, all under impresario Serge Diaghilev. The music's innovative complex rhythmic structures, timbres, and use of dissonance have made it a seminal 20th century composition.
Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, in his Six Talks at Harvard that he called The Unanswered Question, said of one passage, "That page is sixty years old, but it's never been topped for sophisticated handling of primitive rhythms...", and of the work as a whole, "...it's also got the best dissonances anyone ever thought up, and the best asymmetries and polytonalities and polyrhythms and whatever else you care to name."
While the Russian title literally means "Sacred Spring", the...
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