There is a sudden mysterious stillness. The tribe, which has been busy with boisterous seasonal games and dances, notices that a procession is coming to a halt in its midst and falls silent. In the stillness and silence a ritual act is performed. It triggers a terrific upsurge of noise and communal energy. Wild round dances fill the stage—for a stage it is, as these are the final minutes of ‘The Adoration of the Earth’, the first tableau of Igor Stravinsky and Nikolai Roerich's ballet Le Sacre du Printemps. Four performances of Le Sacre were given by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in July 1913, only a few weeks after the work's stormy premiere in Paris; and it would be good to know whether Ralph Vaughan Williams and his folklorist colleague Cecil Sharp—their friend Alice Gomme too—were at any of them. Sharp was a close observer of Diaghilev's company, especially when it was at its most folk-Russian. Vaughan Williams had liked Stravinsky's earlier score for L'Oiseau de Feu and had more recently encountered the Russians directly when he met Diaghilev over a possible (though in the end abortive) ballet-collaboration with Edward Gordon Craig. So it's likely that, if Sharp and Vaughan Williams were in town for any of the performance- nights in July 1913—Vaughan Williams was away on holiday in the Tyrol for part of that month—they would have been at Drury Lane for those ‘Scenes of Pagan Russia’.