The Sacred Dance of the Victim
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the innovative ballet and orchestral composition hailed by Modris Eksteins as a “landmark of modernism,” conjures a snapshot of pagan Russia, relating the legend that an elected youth must be sacrificed to the earth in order for spring to come (Eksteins xiv). The piece is divided into two parts, “the Adoration of the Earth” and “the Sacrifice,” and culminates in a final dance of the chosen young girl who will dance to her death as an honored martyr for spring. It is this section of the Rite of Spring, “the Sacred Dance of the Victim,” which is the culmination of the piece and the ultimate climax of the ballet’s action, emotion, energy, and suspense. Stravinsky skillfully manipulates and juxtaposes rhythms, dynamics, melodies, varying masses and choices of instruments, and evolving variations on repeated motifs to create expressions of passion, life, fight, exhaustion, foreboding, frenzy, and ultimately, death.
What is immediately striking about “the Sacred Dance of the Victim” is the extremely jarring, dissonant tone of the music. Bursting out unexpectedly from the utter silence that comes before, the instruments play unnaturally loud and high, almost like an alarm sounding. These first bars introduce a melodic and rhythmic motif that will be repeated several times throughout the section. The rhythms are vastly irregular and unorthodox (as they are in the entirety of The Rite of Spring), but it is especially evident in this section because the unusual rhythms are repeated over and over as part of a recurring motif that builds in speed and intensity. The melody moves suddenly between notes that are low, mid-range, and high on the scale, and one can visualize the sacrificial dancer’s movements occupying the same low, middle, and high ranges of motion and energy. Her dance reflects the music, and the music, her dance. During this motif she establishes her own theme of traditional movement that she will repeat and crescendo until she finally breaks, succumbing to exhaustion in her moment of sacrifice.
Suddenly, around 14:49 in part two, the motif silences and a steady, low rhythm rises. This juxtaposition of hard and soft is disconcerting, and works, in conjunction with the low, pulsating rhythm, to create a foreboding eeriness. Then, a sharp, harsh downward scale interjects sporadically. The tone of this scale is very unnatural and raw, and the mood of the music in this moment is dark and ominous. It feels, during this section, as if something is coming – perhaps the young girl is in this moment realizing her fate, and this is the expression of her fear of death. She has been designated the sacrifice and death is heading for her, whether or not she is prepared.
The tension builds even further at 15:20, when strings are added to the pulse. However, they uncharacteristically add harsh, staccato repeated notes rather than a smoother melody. With the addition of more instruments the volume crescendos, then the pitch rises in intervals. This adds tension and creates a heightened sense of terror. One can feel the anxiety mounting as the elect readies to face her coming fate.
After building during this time in intensity, instrumentation, and volume, the music suddenly returns at 15:52 to the subtler, low pulse. By doing such, Stravinsky is again employing dramatic juxtapositions of loud and quiet, harsh and soft, to create a suspenseful and unsettling mood. In the same fashion, the strings abruptly sweep into a rapid whirlwind at 16:08, playing a very high and fast melody that cascades up and down. This gives the impression that the sacrifice is being taken by the fervor of her act. The dance fuels her and sucks her in, as if she were caught in a vortex. She cannot stop.
The beginning motif again repeats at 16:18. The dancer has returned to her repeated movement, the motions she will perform until her death. During this repetition, however, there are more instruments added, the tone is even harsher, and the volume is louder. The dance is clearly growing in intensity as the victim becomes more and more desperate. She is giving the very fullest of her energy to the dance, though that energy is starting to wane. The intensity further escalates with the addition of prominent rolling drums at 16:44, creating very heavy suspense and the expectation that something huge and important is about to happen. Melodies layer atop these drums, but rather than being obviously dark or foreboding, they evoke a happier, almost regal mood and seem to be charged with life. This emphasizes the fact that although death can be terrifying, the sacrifice is a noble, mystical, and wonderful event – an explosion of life to draw forth the spring.
From here, the momentum builds even further, as more instruments are added and the volume and pitch increase. One can feel the fervor of the sacrifice mounting as her dance becomes more desperately impassioned. There are moments of quiet sharply followed with moments of harsh dissonance, again exemplifying Stravinsky’s effective use of sonic juxtaposition to evoke the suspense of the moment as well as the victim’s multi-dimensional expressions of energy and life. The passion builds and builds until a final note, then silence. There is a subtle trill – light, delicate, as if the young girl’s spirit is escaping from her body. Then, a final boom: the pronunciation of the sacrifice, the fulfillment of the event. In the ballet, the dancer’s body is raised sharply – almost thrown – into the air, high above the heads of the others. This moment is the declaration that the ritual was performed, with the young girl’s body as evidence - evidence to all present that spring was sure to come from this life.
In Rites of Spring, Eksteins describes the themes of modernism and of the prewar period as “introspection, primitivism, abstraction, and myth-making” (Eksteins xvi). Introspection is evident in “the Sacred Dance of the Victim” because it seeks to explore the psychology of human sacrifice and martyrdom – the fear, acceptance, ardent passion, and varying other emotions the victim experiences. Primitivism is evident through the primal, thudding drumbeats and ever-repeated motifs, as well as the raw, harsh, and discordant quality of the music and timbre of the instruments – raw, not refined, like animal instincts or the first primal cries. Abstraction is evident in the motif that recurs consistently throughout the piece; it is this simple idea, persistently repeating, that creates and drives the victim’s dance. The thematic content of this section is also abstraction, for it is through movement – stark and natural - that the victim takes her life, not through an elaborate or ornamented rituals or ballets. The rough and repetitive qualities of the music force focus on the heart of the action and the religiously symbolic meaning behind it. Finally, myth-making is displayed through this piece because it explores another world and a pagan ritual simply for the sake of exploration. There is no moral agenda behind Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring; he was not trying to indoctrinate society to revert to the ways of older, simpler times. He simply captured a caricature, a snapshot of ancient mysticism, purely for the sake of the audience’s entertainment and wonder.
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is a dynamic and multi-faceted piece that certainly forever changed the faces of music and ballet. His excellent implementation of juxtaposition, dissonance, and dynamic change, as well as his manipulation of instruments in pitch, timbre, and number helped create poignant emotional effects of suspense, terror, fervor, passion, and vivacity in “the Sacred Dance of the Victim.” Additionally, this section exemplifies the qualities of introspection, primitivism, abstraction, and myth-making that were described by Eksteins as the prevailing themes of modernism.
Works Cited
Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Print.
Stravinsky. Le Sacre Du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913 Version). 1913. Boston University Naxos Music Library. Web. 23 Jan. 2012.