7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7over two years (1911–13). The first performance of The Rite
of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées on May 29,
1913, provoked one of the more famous first-night riots in
the history of musical theatre. Stirred by Nijinsky’s unusual
and suggestive choreography and Stravinsky’s creative and
daring music, the audience cheered, protested, and argued
among themselves during the performance, creating such
a clamour that the dancers could not hear the orchestra.
This highly original composition, with its shifting and
audacious rhythms and its unresolved dissonances, was an
early modernist landmark. From this point on, Stravinsky
was known as “the composer of The Rite of Spring” and the
destructive modernist par excellence.
Stravinsky’s successes in Paris with the Ballets Russes
effectively uprooted him from St. Petersburg. He had
married his cousin Catherine Nossenko in 1906, and, after
the premiere of The Firebird in 1910, he brought her and
their two children to France. The outbreak of World War
I in 1914 seriously disrupted the Ballets Russes’ activities
in western Europe, however, and Stravinsky found he
could no longer rely on that company as a regular outlet
for his new compositions. The war also effectively
marooned him in Switzerland, where he and his family
had regularly spent their winters, and it was there that
they spent most of the war. The Russian Revolution of
October 1917 finally extinguished any hope Stravinsky
may have had of returning to his native land.
By 1914 Stravinsky was exploring a more restrained
and austere, though no less vibrantly rhythmic kind of
musical composition. His musical production in the fol-
lowing years is dominated by sets of short instrumental
and vocal pieces that are based variously on Russian folk
texts and idioms and on ragtime and other style models
from Western popular or dance music. He expanded
some of these experiments into large-scale theatre pieces.