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soon developed. The libretto as conceived by its two sophisticated authors was a metaphysical version of the story of the Baptist and Salome, with Joseph as a God-seeker “whose secret is that of growth and transmutation, whose holiness is that of creating and begetting, whose perfection is that of things which have not yet been.” He is confronted by a sensual woman who is ruined “by perception of the divine which she cannot conquer.” These were not the most suitable ideas to express in music, much less the dance. Squirming, Strauss complained, “The chaste Joseph isn’t at all up my street and if a thing bores me I find it difficult to set to music.” He complained that Joseph in the ballet did nothing but resist the Queen’s advances; “this God-seeker is going to be a hell of an effort.” Hofmannsthal explained carefully that Joseph’s resistance was “the struggle of man’s intensified intellectuality” against woman’s urge to drag him down, a clarification which did little to relieve Strauss’s boredom with his task. His first sketches, which he played for Hofmannsthal in December, 1912, left his collaborator “disturbed” and conscious that “there is something wrong between the two of us which in the end will have to be brought into the open.” For the time being he implored Strauss not to feel constrained by the demands of the dance but to write “unrestrained pure Strauss” expressing his own personality “with every conceivable freedom in polyphony and modernism in a manner as bold and bizarre as you may wish.” Joseph remained chaste, however, and Strauss uninspired. In the meantime Diaghilev had another premiere ready for the season of 1913.

It was Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) by Stravinsky. Its theme was elemental, the rejuvenation of earth in spring. The form was a celebration of pagan rites in which a sacrificial maiden dances herself to death to renew the life of the soil. In contrast to the tired sophistry of Joseph, Stravinsky’s scenario was simply a framework for dancers and music. He opened not with a bang, as Strauss had advised, but with a slow trembling of woodwinds as if to suggest the physical mystery of budding. As the curtain rose on tribal games and dances, the music became vibrant and frenetic with primeval rhythms, the chant of trumpets, the driving beat of machinery, jazz metres and pitiless drums never before used with such power and abandon. It rose in intensity and excitement to a blazing climax and all the promise of a new age. It was the Twentieth Century incarnate. It reached at one stride a peak of modern music that was to dominate later generations. It was to the Twentieth Century what Beethoven’s Eroica was to the Nineteenth, and like it, never surpassed.

The premiere conducted by Monteux on May 28, 1913, created almost a riot in the theatre. The abandonment of understood harmony, melody and structure seemed musical anarchy. People felt they were hearing a blasphemous attempt to destroy music as an art and responded with howls and catcalls and derisive laughter. Counter-demonstrators bellowed defiance. One young man became so excited he began to beat rhythmically with his fists on the head of an American in the audience whose own emotion was so great that “I did not feel the blows for some time.” A beautifully gowned lady in a box stood up and slapped the face of a man hissing in an adjoining box. Saint-Saëns indignantly rose and left the hall; Ravel shouted, “Genius!” The dancers could not hear the music above the uproar and Nijinsky, who had choreographed the ballet, stood in the wings pounding out the rhythm with his fists and shouting in despair, “Ras, Dwa, Tri!” Monteux threw desperate glances to Diaghilev who signed to him to keep on playing and shouted to the audience to let the piece be heard. “Listen first, hiss afterwards!” screamed Gabriel Astruc, the French manager, in a rage. When it was over the audience streamed out to continue their battle in the cafés and the critics to carry it to the press, but as the music had hardly been heard, opinion was largely emotion. Not until