by John Higgs
Exactly what happened is still debated. The myth which has grown around the performance paints it as a full-scale riot. The music and performance were so groundbreaking, or so the story goes, that the performance was just too shocking to behold. Stravinsky’s work was powerful and atavistic, modern and yet primitive, and it drove the wealthy Parisian cultural elite to violence. The Rite of Spring was ‘The work of a madman … sheer cacophony,’ according to the composer Puccini.
The stage manager Sergei Grigoriev recalled how, after the curtain rose, ‘not many minutes passed before a section of the audience began shouting its indignation; on which the rest retaliated with loud appeals for order. The hubbub soon became deafening; but the dancers went on, and so did the orchestra, though scarcely a note of the music could be heard. The shouting continued even during the change of scene, for which music was provided; and now actual fighting broke out among some of the spectators; yet even this did not deter Monteux [the conductor] from persisting with the performance … Diaghilev tried every device he could think of to calm the audience, keeping the lights up in the auditorium as long as possible so that the police, who had been called in, could pick out and eject some of the worst offenders. But no sooner were the lights lowered again for the second scene than pandemonium burst out afresh, and then continued till the ballet came to an end.’
The concert hall was full, and the audience included Marcel Proust, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy. There are many eyewitness accounts of what occurred that evening, but these multiple perspectives bring more confusion than clarity to the account. One claims that about forty people were arrested, while others fail to mention the mass arrival of police that this would entail. The relevant police file is missing from the Paris prefecture archives. Some say vegetables were thrown at the orchestra, yet it seems unlikely that a high-society audience would have brought vegetables to the concert. There are also conflicting reports about whether Stravinsky received an ovation at the end, and whether the outrage was spontaneous or planned by a small group of traditionalist protesters. The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where the performance was held, was a modern building with a concrete and steel exterior which many French found too Germanic for their liking. A general unease with the emergence of modernism seems to have played a part in the audience’s reaction.
The demographic of the crowd was marked by a split between the modern and the establishment. It included, according to the then twenty-three-year-old Jean Cocteau, ‘a fashionable audience, low-cut dresses, tricked out in pearls, egret and ostrich feathers; and side by side with tails and tulle, the sack suits, headbands, showy rags of that race of aesthetes who acclaim, right or wrong, anything that is new because of their hatred of the boxes.’ This has led to claims that the riot was a form of class warfare. The French composer Florent Schmitt was reported to have been shouting, ‘Shut up, bitches of the seizième!’ at the grandes dames of that prestigious area of Paris.
The riot is a great story, but we’ve wandered deep into the seductive forest of myth. There is no mention of an actual riot in contemporary reviews and newspaper articles about the premiere. The remaining performances proceeded smoothly, and the piece was soon recognised as a classic – ‘the most important piece of music of the twentieth century’ in the view of the American composer Leonard Bernstein. It may have had a divided and vocal audience on its first night, but no violence or arrests were recorded in 1913.
An actual riot only tells us about the impact of the performance on one particular day. A mythic riot, on the other hand, shows us that the impact of the music transcends that point in time. Myths don’t just crop up anywhere. They need something powerful to form around. There are many badly received premieres, but they do not usually inspire tales of rioting. Perhaps the myth that formed around The Rite of Spring tells us there was something rare and powerful in the music itself.
The Rite came to Stravinsky in a vision. As he described it in his 1936 autobiography, ‘I had a fleeting vision which came to me as a complete surprise, my mind at the moment being full of other things. I saw in [my] imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched 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. I must confess that this vision made a deep impression on me.’ Stravinsky set about inventing a musical language that could capture the deep, animalistic feelings that his vision conjured. As the German choreographer Sasha Waltz later described that music, ‘It conceals some ancient force, it is as if it’s filled with the power of the Earth.’
The basis of the music was Russian folk tunes, taken in wild new directions. Stravinsky added dissonance and played at times in more than one key. He included wild clashing polyrhythms with unpredictable stresses which startled the brain and provoked a surge of adrenaline. When Stravinsky first played it to Diaghilev the ballet impresario was moved to ask, ‘Will it last a very long time this way?’ ‘Til the end, my dear’ was Stravinsky’s response. The ballet company, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, were able to match Stravinsky in capturing this uninhibited frenzy. The dancers, dressed in Russian folk clothes, stomped and flailed as if possessed. Yet for all the focus on recreating the ancient and primal there was no sacrifice of young women in pagan Russia, or indeed in most pagan culture of the last millennium bar the Aztecs and Incas. That addition was the product of the early twentieth century.
The visceral thrill of the music was later captured in Lost Girls (1991–2006), a highly literate and highly pornographic graphic novel by the British writer Alan Moore and the American artist Melinda Gebbie. Here the premiere is thematically linked to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and the impact of the music causes not a riot among the audience, but an orgy. The mounting sense of sexual abandon is intercut with the descent into the chaos and berserk rage of the Great War.
At the end of the nineteenth century the imagination of the reading public was captured by Arthur Conan Doyle’s great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. Holmes was a symbol of intellect and rationality, and these were qualities that the prevailing culture held in high esteem. Rationality was promoted as an important virtue that would lead to progress and prosperity. But this focus on the intellect neglected another part of the human psyche. The wild and irrational could not be ignored for ever and, having been repressed for so long, its return would be explosive. For Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, this point was marked by the premiere of The Rite of Spring and a global descent into total war.
We can also see this moment in W.B. Yeats’s 1919 poem ‘The Second Coming’. Yeats was a Dublin-born poet and mystic with a great love of Celtic romanticism. ‘The Second Coming’ was inspired by his belief that the Christian era was coming to an end, and that it would be replaced by something uncertain and violent and unstoppable: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,’ he wrote. ‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’
In 1899 the sharp-faced Austrian neurologist and father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. It was the book that introduced the wider world to Freud’s most important preoccupation: the unconscious mind.
In the same way that Einstein didn’t ‘discover’ relativity but found a way to understand it, Freud did not discover the concept of the unconscious. The idea that there is a part of our mind that we are not consciously aware of, but which still affects our behaviour, was evident in nineteenth-century literature such as the works of Dostoyevsky or The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson. Freud’s insight was to realise that our sleeping mind could be a key to accessing this hidden part of our selves. ‘Dreams,’ he wrote, ‘are the royal road to the unconscious.�
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Before Freud, doctors had been largely clueless about how to treat neurosis. The word ‘neurosis’ covered a wide range of distressing behaviours, such as hysteria or depression, which were outside of socially acceptable norms but which did not include delusions, hallucinations or other hallmarks of the current understanding of mental illness. Neuroses baffled doctors because there didn’t appear to be anything causing them. All they could really do was attempt to treat the symptoms.
This wasn’t acceptable to Freud. He believed in causality. He worked on the principle that there must be something causing neurosis, even if the doctor or patient was not aware of what it was. If what we were consciously aware of was only a fraction of what was actually occurring in the mind, he realised, the causes of neurosis must therefore exist in the unconscious part. This was a radical stance. Economists and moralists had long assumed that people were rational beings who knew what they were thinking and who were responsible for their own actions.
Imagine an iceberg. If this iceberg represents Freud’s initial model of the mind, then the small part above the surface is the conscious mind. This contains whatever you are thinking about or aware of at that particular moment in time. The area of the iceberg around the water level corresponds to what he called the preconscious mind. This contains thoughts that you may not presently be aware of, but which you could access without trouble should the need arise. Information such as your birthday, email address or your route to work can all be found in the preconscious mind.
Some parts of the preconscious mind are harder to access than others, but this does not mean that those memories and experiences are lost for good. Under certain circumstances they can be recalled, such as a chance meeting with an old friend who reminds you of a highly embarrassing incident which, until then, you had successfully managed to forget. The sense of smell is a particularly evocative way of recalling memories otherwise lost to the unconscious.
Most of our iceberg lies under water, and this great mass represents the unconscious. This is the domain of things that we are not only unaware of, but which we don’t have any means to gain awareness of. This, Freud decided, must be the part of the mind that contains the root causes of neurosis. Much of his work was dedicated to developing techniques to somehow bring the contents of this dark place into the light of awareness. As well as dream analysis, he developed the technique of free association, in which patients were encouraged to express whatever crossed their minds in a non-judgemental atmosphere.
Freud developed another model of the mind in 1923, which helped him illustrate how neuroses form. He divided the mind into three separate sections, which he called the ego, the super-ego and the id. The id was like a hedonist, seeking pleasure and desiring new experience. It was driven but addiction-prone and it was, by definition, unconscious. The super-ego, in contrast, was like a Puritan. It occupied the moral high ground, remained steadfastly loyal to the laws and social conventions of the surrounding culture, and attempted to limit or deny the urges of the id.
The task of negotiating between the id and the super-ego fell to what Freud called the ego, which roughly corresponded to the conscious part of the mind. In some ways the name ‘ego’ is misleading, for the word is commonly associated with an exaggerated and demanding sense of the self. Freud’s ego attempted to compromise between the demands of the id and super-ego in a realistic, practical manner, and would provide rationalisations to appease the super-ego when the urges of the id had been indulged. The ego acted like a pendulum, swinging back and forth between the id and the super-ego as events changed.
A rigid, hierarchical culture promotes the arguments of the super-ego, for this was the part of the mind that strove to please its lord or master. The drives of the id, in such an environment, become taboo, for they are seen as working against a well-ordered society. When the imperial world collapsed in the early twentieth century, the psychological hold that an emperor had over the population weakened. At this point, motivations other than obedience to social norms surface. This was the move from Crowley’s patriarchal Age of Osiris into his child-focused Age of Horus, and the shock that so affected the audience of The Rite of Spring. The result was that, for many, the ego swung away from the super-ego and found itself facing the long-ignored id.
The surrealists were a group of modernist artists who were heavily influenced by Freud. Their aim was to use and explore the great realm of the unconscious mind that he had revealed to them. The light in their paintings was usually stark, clear, slightly unnerving and highly reminiscent of dreaming. Their art depicted surprising, irrational images displayed with a realistic precision, as if giving validity to the products of the dream world.
Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel met in 1922, when they were both art students in Madrid. Dalí was a cubist-inspired painter who was becoming increasingly interested in the irrational. Buñuel practised hypnotism and was fascinated by the workings of the mind, but his great love was cinema. Ever since he was mesmerised by a screening of Fritz Lang’s 1921 silent movie Der müde Tod, he saw cinema as a powerful medium for exploring surrealist ideas. The very act of entering a dark cinema and losing yourself in silver shadows dancing on a wall put the audience into a state somewhere between waking and dreaming. When Buñuel’s mother gave him a gift of some money, the pair had the opportunity to make their first silent film.
In discussing ideas for this first film, Dalí and Buñuel rejected anything based on memories or which was clearly connected to the other images in the film. As Buñuel later explained, writing in the third person, he and Dalí only used scenes which, although they ‘moved them profoundly, had no possible explanation. Naturally, they dispensed with the restraints of customary morality and of reason.’
Buñuel told Dalí of a dream in which ‘a long tapering cloud sliced the moon in half, like a razor slicing through an eye’, and Dalí told Buñuel of his dream about ‘a hand crawling with ants’. ‘There’s the film,’ said Buñuel, putting those two scenes together. ‘Let’s go and make it.’ They called the finished film, for no clear reason, Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog).
Earlier attempts at translating surrealism to film, notably by Man Ray and Antonin Artaud, had not been successful. Dalí and Buñuel assumed their effort would get a similar reaction. When the film was first screened in Paris, Buñuel, who was playing phonogram records by the side of the screen to provide a soundtrack for his silent movie, kept his pockets full of stones in case he needed to throw things at hecklers. This proved not to be necessary. The film was a triumph and André Breton, the author of the Surrealist Manifesto, formally accepted the Spanish filmmakers into the ranks of the surrealist movement. The film is still screened regularly by film societies to this day, not least because it is short, and surprisingly funny. The opening scene, where a shot of a woman calmly having her eye sliced by a razor is intercut with a thin cloud crossing the moon, is still one of the most striking and powerful images in cinema.
The reaction earned Dalí and Buñuel the opportunity to make a second, longer and more substantial movie, which was financed by a wealthy patron. This was L’ge d’or (1930). A falling-out between the pair meant that Dalí’s involvement did not extend beyond the script. Buñuel was not the only significant figure in Dalí’s life to break with him at this point. His father threw him out of the house following his exhibition of a drawing entitled Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother’s portrait.
Buñuel finished the film himself. As the reviewer in Le Figaro put it, ‘A film called L’ge d’or, whose non-existent artistic quality is an insult to any kind of technical standard, combines, as a public spectacle, the most obscene, disgusting and tasteless incidents. Country, family and religion are dragged through the mud.’ At one screening the audience threw purple ink at the screen before heading to a nearby art gallery in order to vandalise surrealist paintings, and the patrons who financed the film were threatened with excommunication by the Vatican. The scandal resulted in the film being withdraw
n. It was not seen again in public for nearly fifty years.
Officially, the reason for the offence was the end sequence. This referenced the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, a story about four wealthy libertines who lock themselves away for a winter in an inaccessible castle with dozens of young victims whom they proceed to rape and murder in order to experience the ultimate in sexual gratification. The book was an exploration of the darker extremes of the ‘Do what thou wilt’ philosophy. It was written in 1785 but could not be published until 1905. It was, in Sade’s own estimation, ‘the most impure tale that has ever been told since our world began’. L’ge d’or did not depict any of this depravity, with the exception of one off-screen murder, but instead showed the four exhausted libertines exiting the castle at the end of the story. The problem was that one of the four was depicted as Jesus.
This blasphemy was officially the reason for the great scandal. But what was actually shocking about the film was its depiction of female desire. This ran throughout the main section of the film, and culminated in the unnamed female character, unsatisfied and frustrated after the casually violent male character leaves, lustfully licking and sucking the toes of a marble statue.
Not even early cinema pornographers went that far. They may have stripped women naked, but those women were still portrayed as coy and playful. Even depictions of predatory women steered away from such an uninhibited expression of lust. Banning the film on the grounds of the Jesus scene was like jailing Al Capone for tax evasion. It was the easiest way to get the job done, but it was clearly an excuse.
L’ge d’or was, in the words of the American novelist Henry Miller, ‘a divine orgy’. Miller had arrived in Paris in 1930, as the film was released, and immediately began to write similarly frank depictions of sexuality. Like James Joyce’s Ulysses, Miller’s first published book, Tropic of Cancer (1934), was banned from being imported into the United States by the US Customs Service on the grounds of obscenity. Prosecutors won that battle, but they were losing the war. Culture was becoming increasingly open about sexuality and there was no hope of prosecuting everybody.
