The Rite of Spring

arranged for two pianos and percussion by John Melbourne

Part I: Adoration of the Earth

Introduction: Lento, tempo rubato -

The Augurs of Spring (Dances of the Young Girls): Tempo giusto -

The Game of Abduction: Presto -

Spring Rounds: Tranquillo -

Games of the Rival Clans: Molto allegro -

Procession of the Wise Elder –

Adoration of the Earth: Lento -

Dance of the Earth: Prestissimo

Part II: The Sacrifice

Introduction: Largo -

Mysterious Circles of the Young Girls: Andante con moto -

Glorification of the Chosen Victim: Vivo -

Invocation of the Ancients: Vivo –

Ritual of the Ancients: Lento -

Sacrificial Dance (The Chosen Victim)

Alongside the orchestral score which accompanied the famously riotous first performance of The Rite of Spring, and which is now familiar in every concert hall, there is only one “official” alternative version – the piano-duet arrangement made by the composer himself for the many rehearsals that had to take place before the ballet reached the stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris in 1913. Four hands at one piano might seem an inadequate substitute for the largest orchestra Stravinsky ever used and indeed, in some places, it is. On the other hand, it is worth recalling that most of the work was conceived at the keyboard. “Almost the whole of The Rite of Spring,” the composer recalled, “was written in a tiny room… whose only furniture was a small upright piano which I kept muted (I always work at a muted piano), a table and two chairs.”

In today’s performance the piano will definitely not be muted – or, rather, the pianos, since Sally Bishop and Anne-Marie Hastings treat the duet version as a duo, taking advantage of the comparatively spacious new situation to include details Stravinsky had to leave out of his piano score. The keyboard arrangement will be further enhanced by percussion parts supplied by John Melbourne. While admiring the Bishop-Hastings interpretation, Melbourne “missed,” he says, “the impact and drama that the percussion can provide.” Certainly, music written for a ballet about a pagan spring ritual, culminating in the death of a sacrificial maiden, needs more than a little impact. Even so, Melbourne uses only those percussion instruments prescribed by the orchestral score – five timpani, bass drum, tam-tam, triangle, tambourine, guiro, cybals and antique cymbals – and deploys them in the same way, in so far as that can be accomplished by two percussionists in place of the five usually employed in orchestral performances.

Looking at the score from this point of view, it is interesting to see how economical Stravinsky is in his use of percussion. There is none at all in the Introduction, a mainly melodic episode based on a Lithuanian folk song, and in The Augurs of Spring its brief but striking first intervention (timpani and bass drum) is delayed until nearly halfway through, after which it is used (timpani, triangle and antique cymbals) only to mark the entry of a new theme that is to reappear in Spring Rounds. The violence of The Game of Abduction involves no more than timpani and bass drum, which same instruments (and later tam-tam) add weight to the heavily accented first beats of the bar in Spring Rounds. Although one of Stravinsky’s most original orchestral ideas, the combination of timpani and bass drum with trombones and tubas in the openng bars of Games of the Rival Clans, cannot be authentically reproduced here, it is effective enough with low piano sounds in place of the brass. On the approach to the climax of Part I the percussion instruments have a still more prominent role – a regular rhythm of quavers on timpani contradicted by off-beat strokes of the tam-tam and a counter-ostinato on the guiro in the Procession of the Wise Elder, eerie timpani colouring in the four bars of Adoration of the Earth, and then, following a crescendo on bass drum and tam-tam, a sustained rumble of timpani and bass-drum ostinatos in Dance of the Earth.

As in Part I, the percussionist have little to do in the melodious early stages of Part II, the Introduction and Mysterious Circles of the Young Girls. At the end of the latter movement, however, they make up for it with another tam-tam crescendo and the famous series of eleven loud thumps on timpani and bass drum that leads into the Glorification of the Chosen Victim which, though it is not without melodic interest, is a largely percussive inspiration, its rythms pounded out not only by timpani and bass drum but by the pianos too. The Invocation of the Ancients is achieved by an alternation of percussion crashes with a peremptory chorale on the pianos. Beginning with the first entry of the tambourine (with timpani and bass drum) in the ostinato accompaniment to interweaving lines of chromatic melody, the Ritual of the Ancients calls at its crushingly primtive climax for all the timpani together with tam-tam, tambourine, cymbals and bass drum.

As for the violently convulsive Sacrificial Dance, it converts the strings and wind of the orchestra, or in this case, the two pianos into a gigantic percussion ensemble. The percussion section itself, apart from prominent timpani, is held in reserve until about halfway through at which point it adds another dimension of brutality to an already savage dance of death.

Part I: Adoration of the Earth

Introduction: Lento, tempo rubato -

The Augurs of Spring (Dances of the Young Girls): Tempo giusto -

Game of Abduction: Presto -

Spring Rounds: Tranquillo -

Games of the Rival Clans: Molto allegro -

Procession of the Wise Elder: Lento -

Adoration of the Earth: Lento -

Dance of the Earth: Prestissimo

Part II: The Sacrifice

Introduction: Largo -

Mysterious Circles of the Young Girls: Andante con moto -

Glorification of the Chosen Victim: Vivo -

Evocation of the Ancients : Vivo -

Ritual of the Ancients: Lento -

Sacrificial Dance (The Chosen Victim)

The Rite of Spring can never again make the impact it made on its celebrated first performance in 1913 and continued to make as it spread from concert hall to concert hall between the wars. The once unheard of size of the orchestra has become a standard requirement and music of far greater violence has since been written. But the keyboard arrangement - made by Stravinsky himself to accompany the rehearsals (the so-called “arithmetic classes”) for the first performance of the ballet - is the ultimate piano duet. Like the original Rite of Spring, it strains the medium to its limits and asks as much of the performers now as it always did. It retains the exhilarating technical precariousness which has been eliminated in orchestral performances by the sophisticated security of most modern orchestras.

More than that, there are moments in the piano-duet version, as in the piano solo arrangements of three movements from Petrushka, when the music seems to have been restored to its original colours. Stravinsky once recalled that almost the entire Rite was written in a tiny room, “in an eight-feet-by-eight closet, rather, whose only furniture was a small upright piano which I kept muted…” Here it is with the mutes off.

Obviously, not all the music in the Rite of Spring sounds as well on the pianos as it does on the orchestra. Generally speaking, the lyrical passages, those requiring a sustained line and particularly those where instrumental colour assists in separating the contrapuntal lines, are less well adapted to the piano. The Introduction, where the Lithuanian folk song is the most prominent strand in the texture of several melodic lines, is a case in point. On the other hand, the chords at the beginning of Augurs of Spring - harmonies basic to the work, incidentally - are a keyboard inspiration. The harmonic tensions are more vivid here and the whole movement seems quite natural in the piano-duet form, even though the massive accumulation of material in the final bars is beyond its resources.

The Game of Abduction is another percussive movement which is highly effective on the piano. It lacks only the almost human quality of the outcry on horns at one point in the orchestral score. In Spring Rounds the ostinato accompaniment has an appropriate weight in the lower part of the keyboard and, but for the unfavourable placing of the main theme in the middle voices shortly after the introduction, this would be another keyboard natural - like the Games of the Rival Clans and, above all, the Procession of the Wise Elder. The four bars of the Adoration of the Earth, where the old man kisses the earth, are deprived of their high double-bassoon colours and pizzicato muted basses and, alas, of their mystery. The explosion of energy in Dance of the Earth loses none of its power.

The evocation of a pagan night-time atmosphere before the curtain rises on the second part of the ballet is not the kind of thing in which the piano duet excels. The octave tremolandos suggested by Stravinsky as an alternative to the held notes in the primo pianist’s right hand are no substitute for the quietly sustained oboe and horn colours in the original, just as there is no keyboard equivalent to the violin harmonics, the four solo violas with five solo cellos and the eerie duet of muted trumpets. The Mysterious Circles of the Young Girls, introduced by six violas against background of pizzicato and long-bowed harmonics on cellos and basses, is another are in which the piano duet cannot compete.

But then, with the eleven violently stamped-out chords before the Glorification of the Chosen Victim and in that dance itself, the piano is back in its percussive element. It is true that in the Ritual of the Ancients the sinister chromatic figures near the beginning and the two complex climaxes require the colour and textural resources of the orchestra for their full effect. The Sacrificial Dance on the other hand is a keyboard conception, as Stravinsky himself implied when he remarked that he could play it before he could write it down. The degree of precision possible here in the convulsive jerkings of the rhythm and the metallic feel of the piano chords perhaps even heighten the effect of the deadly inevitability with the spontaneous irregularity.

Gerald Larner

Part I: Adoration of the Earth

Introduction: Lento, tempo rubato -

The Augurs of Spring (Dances of the Young Girls): Tempo giusto -

Game of Abduction: Presto -

Spring Rounds: Tranquillo -

Games of the Rival Clans: Molto allegro -

Procession of the Wise Elder: Lento -

Adoration of the Earth: Lento -

Dance of the Earth: Prestissimo

Part II: The Sacrifice

Introduction: Largo -

Mysterious Circles of the Young Girls: Andante con moto -

Glorification of the Chosen Victim: Vivo -

Evocation of the Ancients : Vivo -

Ritual of the Ancients: Lento -

Sacrificial Dance (The Chosen Victim)

The Rite of Spring can never again make the impact it made on its celebrated first performance in 1913 and continued to make as it spread from concert hall to concert hall between the wars. The once unheard of size of the orchestra has become a standard requirement and music of far greater violence has since been written. But the keyboard arrangement – made by Stravinsky himself to accompany the rehearsals (the so-called “arithmetic classes”) for the first performance of the ballet – is the ultimate piano duet. Like the original Rite of Spring, it strains the medium to its limits and asks as much of the performers now as it always did. Even when performed on two pianos, as on this occasion, It retains the exhilarating technical precariousness which has been eliminated in orchestral performances by the sophisticated security of most modern orchestras.

More than that, there are moments in the piano version, as in the piano solo arrangements of three movements from Petrushka, when the music seems to have been restored to its original colours. Stravinsky once recalled that almost the entire Rite was written in a tiny room, “in an eight-feet-by-eight closet, rather, whose only furniture was a small upright piano which I kept muted…” Here it is with the mutes off.

Obviously, not all the music in the Rite of Spring sounds as well on piano as it does on the orchestra. Generally speaking, the lyrical passages, those requiring a sustained line and particularly those where instrumental colour assists in separating the contrapuntal lines, are less well adapted to the piano. The Introduction, where the Lithuanian folk song is the most prominent strand in the texture of several melodic lines, is a case in point. On the other hand, the chords at the beginning of Augurs of Spring – harmonies basic to the work, incidentally – are a keyboard inspiration. The harmonic tensions are more vivid here and the whole movement seems quite natural in piano form, even though the massive accumulation of material in the final bars is beyond its resources.

The Game of Abduction is another percussive movement which is highly effective on the piano. It lacks only the almost human quality of the outcry on horns at one point in the orchestral score. In Spring Rounds the ostinato accompaniment has an appropriate weight in the lower part of the keyboard and, but for the unfavourable placing of the main theme in the middle voices shortly after the introduction, this would be another keyboard natural – like the Games of the Rival Clans and, above all, the Procession of the Wise Elder. The four bars of the Adoration of the Earth, where the old man kisses the earth, are deprived of their high double-bassoon colours and pizzicato muted basses and, alas, of their mystery. The explosion of energy in Dance of the Earth loses none of its power.

The evocation of a pagan night-time atmosphere before the curtain rises on the second part of the ballet is not the kind of thing in which the piano excels. The octave tremolandos suggested by Stravinsky as an alternative to the held notes in the primo pianist’s right hand are no substitute for the quietly sustained oboe and horn colours in the original, just as there is no keyboard equivalent to the violin harmonics, the four solo violas with five solo cellos and the eerie duet of muted trumpets. The Mysterious Circles of the Young Girls, introduced by six violas against background of pizzicato and long-bowed harmonics on cellos and basses, is another are in which the piano duet cannot compete.

But then, with the eleven violently stamped-out chords before the Glorification of the Chosen Victim and in that dance itself, the piano is back in its percussive element. It is true that in the Ritual of the Ancients the sinister chromatic figures near the beginning and the two complex climaxes require the colour and textural resources of the orchestra for their full effect. The Sacrificial Dance on the other hand is a keyboard conception, as Stravinsky himself implied when he remarked that he could play it before he could write it down. The degree of precision possible here in the convulsive jerkings of the rhythm and the metallic feel of the piano chords perhaps even heighten the effect of the deadly inevitability with the spontaneous irregularity.