The Rite of Naturalism

I listened to The Rite of Spring yesterday*. A little earlier [also on BBC Radio 3#] a choreographer talked about a long and intensive preparation for a performance of the piece and how during the dress rehearsal he and the dancers finally understood that ‘its meaning was that it had no meaning’. ‘What a misunderstanding!’ I thought and recalled that the music (I've never seen the ballet part of it) struck me as pagan right from the beginning, the ten or twenty (or was it thirty? who cares...) years ago when I first heard it.

It doesn’t take a philosopher to grasp the meaning of the piece – it is pressed, at times painfully, into your ears, skin and heart. Whatever your intellect chooses to call it, its gist is aggressively and heartlessly shoved against you. And the gist of the piece is Naturalism. Stravinsky’s vision is one of soulless, heartless nature - a nature that is going to trod over you after it overwhelms you. It may amaze you at some point, but don’t fool yourself: you’re not going to amaze her**. If you’re still alive, you can join her procession (not that anyone cares); if you start to stumble, she’ll push you to the ground, overgrow you and leave there to be eaten by minor, equally insignificant participants of the mindless march to nowhere to reach nothing; then – at that stage you won’t care by what or whom  – what's left of you will be trodden deep into the late March or early April mud and never heard of again, neither during the next nor any other – should God decide they may come after all this naturalist blasphemy – Godless Rites of Sweet Spring…

*100^th anniversary

** sic - sounds better here.

Emotional subsistence … Fabulous Beast's Rite of Spring. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

[original Guardian caption]

PS After I wrote this I looked up a number of sources [Wikipedia] on the piece. I knew something about the first infamous performance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1913, but not about what Stravinsky had said or thought about it. What I found beat my expectations ('dance herself to death' - so beautiful, so true; in a naturalistic way, that is):

[...] in his 1936 autobiography he described the origin of the work thus: "One day [in 1910], when I was finishing the last pages of L'Oiseau de Feu in St Petersburg, I had a fleeting vision ... I saw in my imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of Spring. Such was the theme of the Sacre du Printemps".


#Intriguingly - or tellingly - there didn’t seem to have been a lot on the radio concerning the philosophical aspect of the work aired by the British state broadcaster. Why are people afraid of philosophy? Of big questions? Of God?  (well, I know why. If you want to know too, stay tuned).