Eotvos Conducts Stravinsky:The Rite of Spring

Eotvos Conducts Stravinsky:The Rite of Spring

Le sacre du printemps is the most original and most influential composition of the music of the time, inspiring dumbfounded enthusiasm in colleagues like Debussy and Bartók, and both of them (although the former was shocked by the music’s unbridled savagery, and the latter commented on the work’s fragmentary nature) sensed its importance for music history.

He parades the distinctive traits of nineteenth-century Russian opera (Glinka and Tchaikovsky) and Italian opera buffa (Rossini and Donizetti), seasoned with gypsy music and ragtime. This musical language is a cavalcade of irreconcilably heterogeneous elements, and cannot for one moment be taken seriously. Mavra is a parody, not a resurrection, of the genre of comic opera. How can an already humorous genre be parodied? Stravinsky’s humour is purely musical in origin, and derives from the constant clash of non-matching elements.