This remarkable collection of essays is dedicated to perhaps the most iconic masterwork of twentieth-century art music, Igor Stravinsky's ballet Le Sacre du printemps (Vesna sviashchennaia, or The Rite of Spring). The book's contents are the revised proceedings of two interdisciplinary symposia: “Reassessing The Rite: A Centennial Conference” that took place at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in October 2012, and “Anniversary of a Masterpiece: Centenary of The Rite,” held at the Tchaikovsky State Conservatory in Moscow, Russia, in May 2013. Both conferences commemorated the 100th anniversary of The Rite of Spring, whose deliciously scandalous Parisian premiere by Sergei Diaghilev's dance company, the Ballets Russes, is the stuff of music history legend. And the goals of both conferences, as can be inferred from the layout and content of the present volume, were also similar: to assess the state of scholarship on The Rite at this, its first century mark.
The resulting collection that unites both sets of papers is commendably comprehensive. It encompasses the fields of music theory and music history, as well as cultural history, art history, and the history of dance. It addresses the work's technical analysis, its compositional process, performance, reception, and impact, both in Russia and the west. A particularly valuable feature of the volume, to this reviewer, is that it includes perspectives of leading researchers from both sides of the (former?) Iron Curtain, a most welcome but still unfortunately rare occurrence in western publications on Russian music, due partly to the financial and institutional barriers that complicate Russian scholars’ efforts to showcase their latest work outside their country's borders.
The formidable lineup of contributors alone is worth the price of purchase—and a place of honor on the shelves of every good academic library and every self-respecting Russianist. The collection features essays by both emerging scholars and superstars of Stravinsky studies from Russia, western Europe, and the United States. Among them are musicologists Tamara Levitz, Svetlana Savenko, Mary E. Davis, Natalia Braginskaya, and Stephen Walsh; music theorists Pieter C. van den Toorn, Maureen Carr, Gretchen Horlacher; and composer Vladimir Tarnopolski. Most importantly, the volume's interdisciplinarity honors the very nature of Stravinsky's Rite that “originated, very self-consciously, as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a mixed-media synthesis, and belongs to the histories of dance and stage design, as well as music, … costume design and, above all, the history of Russian art and even of Russia itself” (xix). All throughout its century-long history in theaters and concert halls, it has remained a spectacle: an embodied experience that must not only be heard, but seen—and danced. The present volume's editors make this point emphatically by giving the first word in their collection—after historian Donald J. Raleigh's general introduction to Stravinsky's Russia—not to music scholars, but to dance historians, such as the leading voice on Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Lynn Garafola, and the magnificently fearless Millicent Hodson, the creator of the controversial reconstruction of Vaslav Nijinsky's original choreography for the Rite. The volume is also accompanied by a plethora of video clips (embedded into its ebook version, or accessible via a website for the readers of a print copy).
The array of topics chosen by the book's contributors is vast. Despite its impressive credentials, however, few brave souls are likely to read The Rite of Spring at 100 from cover to cover. Some essays, such as van den Toorn's metric and Horlacher's structural analyses of the score, as well as Carr's and Braginskaya's sketch studies, may only be of interest to a hardened music theorist. The majority of the papers, however, address a broader audience. For instance, Annegret Fauser's commentary on the Parisian aesthetic concerns addressed by The Rite, and Olga Manulkina's account of Leonard Bernstein's triumphant re-introduction of the piece to its composer's homeland during his 1959 Soviet tour, should prove of interest to anyone interested in Russia's cultural history or the history of twentieth-century art. And of course, Davis's sparkling exposé of the Rite of Spring-inspired Parisian fashions is sure to be a crowd pleaser!
Equally a must-read for everyone is the volume's final essay, penned, almost inevitably, by musicologist Richard Taruskin, author of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of Works through Mavra (1996), the recent winner of the Kyoto Prize, and arguably the leading Stravinsky scholar in the world today. With his inimitable flair, Taruskin revisits the early performance history of Stravinsky's Rite in order to remind us that it is not—or not just—an immovable monument of modernist art, to be approached in gratitude and awe, but a living, breathing cultural phenomenon that stumbles, alters, morphs, and speaks in a different voice to each new generation of performers and listeners, who in turn derive from it a multitude of meanings. This very changeability, he argues, is the reason the work is still valuable to us today; the reason scholars and music lovers around the world were compelled to celebrate a centenary, not of a composer, but of a single piece of music: “It is precisely because The Rite has changed enormously, both in sound and in significance, over the century of its existence that we can celebrate it today with such enthusiasm” (441).
The Rite of Spring at 100 is a dense volume. It is not, however, an encyclopedia of The Rite—a compendium of every bit of knowledge ever unearthed about Stravinsky's masterpiece. Rather, this collection would work best as a reference source, from which each reader may pick and choose subjects, methodologies, and writing styles that best suit his or her tastes, interests, and disciplinary background. As such, it will prove a valuable resource to scholars and teachers in a variety of humanistic fields that intersect in the phenomenon of The Rite—and hopefully, continue to inspire interdisciplinary conversations that would keep the piece vital and relevant for its next century.
