Did The Rite of Spring Really Cause a Riot? What Happened at Ballet’s Wildest Premiere in 1913

On May 29, 1913, the Ballets Russes premiered The Rite of Spring in Paris, and the audience got so loud the dancers could barely hear the orchestra. It’s remembered as the night a ballet started a riot. The truth is a little different: there really was an uproar, but several of the most famous details were added later, and according to Wikipedia, even the word “riot” only appeared years afterward.

It’s Halloween as I write this, which feels like the right night for ballet’s most notorious premiere. After all, this is a ballet that ends with a young woman dancing herself to death. I’m an adult hobby dancer, not a historian, but I’ve heard the “riot” story so many times in ballet class that I wanted to know what actually happened. Here’s what I found.

What is The Rite of Spring?

The Rite of Spring (in French, Le Sacre du printemps) is a ballet with music by Igor Stravinsky, choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, and sets and costumes by the painter Nicholas Roerich. Its Russian title means “Sacred Spring.” It was made for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the Russian company Diaghilev had launched in Paris in 1909.

There’s no real plot. The subtitle is “Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts,” and the ballet is a series of ancient spring rituals. In the second part, a young girl is chosen as a sacrifice and dances until she dies. According to Wikipedia’s article on the ballet, Stravinsky later said the idea came to him as a vision in 1910: wise elders in a circle, watching a girl dance herself to death.

It was Stravinsky’s third big ballet for Diaghilev, after The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911). Those two were hits. This one was something else entirely.

The music shocked the musicians first

Long before the audience heard it, the orchestra did, and they weren’t sure what to make of it. Wikipedia’s history of the premiere says the orchestra had 99 players, far more than the theater usually used, and the score needed 17 orchestra-only rehearsals plus five with the dancers. The musicians kept stopping because they thought the strange chords were mistakes in the parts. At one loud brass passage, they burst out laughing.

The conductor, Pierre Monteux, conducted it faithfully but never warmed to it. Decades later he said, “I did not like Le Sacre then,” and he still didn’t.

The very first sound is famous too. The ballet opens with a solo bassoon playing so high that it barely sounds like a bassoon at all. If you’ve only ever heard the bassoon as the low, grumpy voice of the orchestra, it’s a real surprise.

The dancing was even stranger

If you picture ballet as tutus, pointe shoes, and turned-out legs, Nijinsky’s choreography was close to the opposite. The dancers wore embroidered costumes by Roerich, inspired by old Russian folk dress. Instead of floating, they stamped and jumped up and down, and the ballet historian Cyril Beaumont described their “slow, uncouth movements.”

Many people at the time, and many historians since, think the dancing caused more trouble than the music. Wikipedia quotes the music historian Richard Taruskin, who blamed “the ugly earthbound lurching and stomping” that Nijinsky devised, not Stravinsky’s score. The composer Alfredo Casella also thought the protests were aimed at the choreography.

The lead role of the Chosen One was meant for Nijinsky’s sister, Bronislava Nijinska. She became pregnant during rehearsals, so the role went to Maria Piltz, a dancer who was then relatively unknown.

May 29, 1913: what actually happened

The setting was the brand-new Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, which had opened only on April 2 that year, as both Wikipedia’s article on the theater and the ballet article note. The house was packed. The evening began with the much gentler Les Sylphides. Then came The Rite.

Here’s what the sources broadly agree on:

• People started laughing and jeering almost right away. Stravinsky said the mocking laughter at the first bars disgusted him, and he left his seat to watch from the wings. A 2013 NPR report on the ballet’s 100th anniversary describes the same scene.
• It got very loud. Marie Rambert, who was assisting Nijinsky, later recalled that it soon became impossible to hear the music on stage. Nijinsky stood in the wings shouting the counts to the dancers in Russian.
• The audience split into camps. Wikipedia describes two groups in a typical Paris ballet audience: the wealthy and fashionable, and a bohemian crowd that loved anything new. Monteux believed the two sides began attacking each other, and then turned on the orchestra.
• The show never stopped. The performance went on without interruption. By some accounts, the second half was much calmer, and Maria Piltz’s final Sacrificial Dance was watched in reasonable silence.
• There were curtain calls. At the end, the dancers, Monteux, Stravinsky, and Nijinsky took several bows, as both Wikipedia and a 2013 Paris Review essay point out.

Not every critic hated it. Henri Quittard of Le Figaro called it “a laborious and puerile barbarity.” But Gustav Linor, writing in the theater magazine Comœdia, thought the performance was superb and called the noise “a rowdy debate” between two rude groups of spectators.

The myths: what probably didn’t happen

This is the part that surprised me most. A lot of the best-known riot stories don’t hold up.

• “Saint-Saëns stormed out.” The story goes that the old composer Camille Saint-Saëns heard the high bassoon and walked out in disgust. It still gets repeated, even by the Harry Ransom Center, which says he “is said to have” done it. But Stravinsky said that was impossible, because Saint-Saëns wasn’t there. According to Monteux’s biographer, cited by Wikipedia, Saint-Saëns walked out of a concert performance of the music in April 1914 instead.
• “A man pounded on my head.” The American writer Carl Van Vechten wrote that the excited man behind him beat rhythm on his head with his fists. In a 1916 letter not published until 2013, he admitted he had actually been at the second performance, not the premiere. The Paris Review essay makes the same point.
• “The police came.” Some retellings say police arrived and restored order. Wikipedia says about forty of the worst troublemakers were thrown out, possibly with police help, but calls this uncorroborated. The Paris Review essay puts it simply: it’s unclear whether the police came at all.
• “It was called a riot at the time.” According to Wikipedia, the word “riot” didn’t show up until reviews of later performances in 1924, more than a decade after the premiere.

So was it a riot? It was a real, loud, angry disturbance in a theater, and that’s remarkable on its own. But the fistfights-and-police version grew over the years, as the story got retold.

The next nights were much calmer

Here’s another detail that rarely makes the retellings. The premiere was followed by five more performances in Paris, the last on June 13, and Wikipedia says they were relatively peaceful.

They weren’t exactly love letters, though. The opera composer Giacomo Puccini went to the second performance on June 2 and called the work “the work of a madman.” He also noted that the public hissed, laughed, and applauded.

Then the company took it to London. The Paris Review essay quotes The Times of London’s review, which began: “London takes both its pleasures and its pains more quietly than Paris.” No uproar there.

How a lost ballet became a classic

After that first season, Nijinsky’s version vanished. Later in 1913, Nijinsky married while the company was touring South America, and Diaghilev, furious, dismissed him. When Diaghilev revived The Rite in 1920, nobody could remember the steps, so Léonide Massine made new choreography.

Meanwhile, the music took off on its own. At a concert performance in Paris in April 1914, Stravinsky was carried out of the hall on the shoulders of his fans. The music became a concert staple, and Leonard Bernstein called it “the most important piece of music of the 20th century.”

America came to it in stages, all according to Wikipedia:

• The Philadelphia Orchestra gave the first American concert performance in 1922.
• The ballet was first staged in the US in 1930, in Philadelphia, with Martha Graham dancing the Chosen One.
• In 1940, Disney put the music in Fantasia, which the Paris Review essay also mentions. Its Rite segment shows Earth’s prehistory and ends with the dinosaurs dying out, so a lot of people first heard this music as the soundtrack to dinosaurs.

Choreographers have never stopped trying it. The music publisher Boosey & Hawkes has estimated at least 150 productions. One of the most famous is Pina Bausch’s 1975 version for Tanztheater Wuppertal, danced on a stage covered in earth.

And in the late 1980s, the Joffrey Ballet did something remarkable. With years of research led by Millicent Hodson, built on old notes, sketches, photographs, and the memories of survivors like Marie Rambert, the company reconstructed Nijinsky’s lost 1913 choreography. PBS notes that this time there was no riot, and the performance was shown nationally on television. The Joffrey danced it again for the ballet’s 100th birthday in 2012–13.

How to watch (and listen to) The Rite today

If you get a chance to see The Rite of Spring, or even just hear it at a concert, here’s what I’d listen for:

• The opening bassoon. That thin, high, wandering melody is the bassoon nobody recognized in 1913.
• The stamping in “Augurs of Spring.” Some eyewitnesses said the noise in the hall got worse when the curtain rose on this stamping dance.
• The Sacrificial Dance at the end. This is the Chosen One’s solo, the one Maria Piltz danced on that first night. By some accounts, the audience watched it in reasonable silence.

Don’t worry: today’s audiences are very polite. My ballet etiquette guide covers when to clap. If you’d like to start with friendlier ballets first, try my list of 10 works for beginners. And if this history rabbit hole is your thing, my post on who invented ballet goes back even further, and my look at why Degas painted so many ballet dancers shows Paris ballet a few decades before the Ballets Russes arrived.

Spotted an error? Let me know.