The man who consecrated spring

In 1913, when it premiered Spring consecration at the Champs Elysées theatre, the audience was left confused, or tormented. One would have to imagine what a ballet atypical in the Russia of 1913, what dissonance meant and what it meant, above all, to break a musical pattern.

People left the theater in full function, because the people who used to frequent those places already went with a preconceived choreography, with a stage plan nailed to the prefrontal cortex. The gentlemen, logically, had to be horrified. They knew what they wanted to hear. And it wasn't that.

When Diaghilev, who was already well known in the entertainment world, called on Stravinsky to create the music for the Ballets Russes, he was a young dipsomaniac with some worthy compositions. the consecration… later became one of the greatest musical works of the 20th century.

In ancient Russia—inside Stravinsky's room—a maiden was kidnapped before spring began. She had to dance to death so that the gods would have mercy on her soul.

The premonition of a sacrifice and a high-pitched bassoon could not be anything other than the horror of those times.

A Russian sitting in the theater in 1913 would expect the typical sequence, the regular rhythm, the clean flow. The classic. A Russian sitting in the theater in 1913 had to be horrified by the deafening structure, by the sudden change of beat, by the extravagant reappropriation of early music. The Russian who got up from his seat was accustomed to the spring of paintings, to the stately promenade of society ladies. Stravinsky put a sound to it all: the noise of the sacrifices, an exotic creak. Consecrated by him, then, were the Russian spring and the whole spring. Then—I imagine—he poured himself another glass.

Dance sacred

when you hear the consecration…, although the exact number is not known ballet, comes the idea of sacrifice. The idea of an alcoholic drowning the scores in the elixir of those who save the world from the eternally classic arrives. The bassoon, the ruptures, dancing until exhaustion, death itself being a dissonant, dipsomaniac, transgressive instrument. The voices, the dances and the horror made a musical revolution. But Russia did not know it then.

Time passed, Stravinsky's widow spent wanting to deny everything, poor thing. One hundred years later it was already known that Coco Chanel had fornicated to exhaustion with the tremendous figure. One hundred years later, the Russians took off their hats —and the masks of French modernism—, they returned to the theater, they said that Petrushka yes, but they preferred the consecration… History is in chaos, beautiful revolutions almost always cause repulsion among the masses, but what are the masses in the face of the consecrated? What is a Russia rising in horror in the face of the inevitable, in the face of the future of new beats?

The critics said that it was a thunderous succession of beats and noises. And it was. Of course it was. What critics ignored was the power of noise, it was the power of thunderous successions, the power of thunder. The music that aroused the sacrifice had to be condemned by an entire people, as the satanic chords of the Middle Ages were condemned. Now, although there are no spring consecrations or satanic chords, I seem to be seeing that masterful show, with everything and their full-length frowning gentlemen. I would have liked the 1920s or the Middle Ages, in both cases I would have been burned in different bonfires.

Now I listen to that again in my small postmodern device, I return to a twelve-tone, dirty feeling. I don't have the strength to dance until I'm tired, or I have more tiredness than strength, or I have the strength of a bird of fire and I'm afraid of burning, because my body isn't enough to consecrate itself, a tired body like a Russia that doesn't get up. However I dance inside, and I die in the dance as I die so many other times. That's what matters, I suppose: to die inside the body even if the gods never have mercy, even if I drink my rum without having written a symphony, even if there is more chaos than history in my little room. Sounds the consecration… and sometimes a sound is enough to start the dance, for the music to melt the two little blocks of ice, for the miracle of spring to happen in a country without seasons.