Skandal

Chaos, catcalls, enraged heckling, even brawling: when Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) was first performed in Paris in 1913, it caused an outraged scandal. Was it even music, this stomping, orgiastic, almost obscene sensuality? Not to mention the subject: a heathen ritual celebrating spring and fertility, even including the sacrifice of a virgin. Shocking! Often, however, the highest waves are quickest to be smothered. Only a short while thereafter, it became clear what Stravinsky had propelled onto the stage with incredible force: a piece like a tornado, throwing open the gates of modernism as few others in the orchestral literature ever had – possibly even enabling it to open at all. No wonder that another work not so very unlike Stravinsky’s tended to be forgotten by comparison: exactly 25 years after this epoch-making quantum leap, the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas unleashed an archaic, magically dark snake ritual of the Maya and Aztecs, with a gripping tonal idiom of his own.