On May 29, 1913, Igor Stravinsky's ballet, The Rite of Spring was performed for the first time. Vaslav Nijinsky was the choreography, and the ballet was performed by the Ballets Russes under the direction of Sergei Diaghilev. The first performance was so divisive that about forty members of the audience had to be removed from the theater. The Rite of Spring has recovered from that shaky initial reception, though, to become one of the most beloved and influential pieces of music written in the 20th century.

Stravinsky and Diaghilev had collaborated for several years when they began work on The Rite. Stravinsky had written ballets for Diaghilev in 1910 (The Firebird) and 1911 (Petrushka); both were extremely successful. For their third ballet, Stravinsky proposed a piece about "pagan Russia unified by a single idea...the creative power of spring."

In its series of dance episodes, The Rite of Spring shows a small community's dances and rituals in honor of spring, ending with a sacrificial dance in which a young girl – the "Chosen One" – dances herself to death before the community elders. Stravinsky told several different stories about the origin of the ballet, but it seems likely that was inspired by poems on similar themes by Russian poet Sergey Gorodetsky.

The earlier Stravinsky/Diaghilev ballets had been choreographed by Michel Fokine. When Diaghilev chose his star dancer, Nijinsky, to choreograph The Rite, Fokine left the company. Stravinsky was unsure that Nijinsky was up to the job, fearing that his limited ability to read or play music would make it difficult for him to cope with the music's complex rhythms.

The music required an unusually large number of orchestral rehearsals before the premiere – seventeen rehearsals for just the orchestra, and five more with the dancers. The rhythms and harmonies of Stravinsky's music were so strange and unprecedented that conductor Pierre Monteux had to ask the orchestra to stop interrupting when they thought there was a mistake in their music; he would, he told them, let them know if he heard anything that actually was wrong.

On the night of the premiere, the audience was divided between traditional ballet fans, who expected to hear beautiful music and see graceful dance, and younger fans of new music, who hoped for something exciting and unexpected. When the piece began, those groups responded very differently to Stravinsky's pounding rhythms and discordant harmonies, and to Nijinsky's equally harsh and brutal choreography. Monteux said that much of the anger was taken out on the orchestra; "everything available was tossed in our direction."

The remaining performance in the ballet's initial run were more peaceful, though the audiences were still sharply divided. Reports at the time suggest that the harsh reactions may not have been entirely, or even mostly, about Stravinsky's music. Nijinsky's choreography was also unpopular; one critic described it as "ugly earthbound lurching and stomping."

That original choreography was not seen again for many decades. Diaghilev and Nijinsky had been lovers; when Nijinsky married in 1913, Diaghilev fired him and re-hired Michel Fokine as the company's choreographer. Fokine, still angry over not having been asked to choreograph The Rite, made it a condition of his return that the Ballets Russes would perform none of Nijinsky's choreography. Diaghilev hoped to revive the ballet in 1920 – Fokine had returned home to Russia at the outbreak of World War I -- but Nijinsky's health had declined to the point he was no longer able to take part, and Diaghilev could find nobody who remembered the choreography sufficiently to recreate it. It was not until 1987, after decades of research, that the Joffrey Ballet presented a reconstruction of Nijinsky's original choreography.

The Rite of Spring has been even more successful as a concert work – that is, performed as an orchestral work without dancers. It was first performed in concert in 1914, to great acclaim, and it is now part of the standard orchestral repertoire. It has been recorded more than 100 times (many of which are available for streaming or download at Freegal and Hoopla). It's been arranged for piano duet and for solo piano, and even for jazz trio by The Bad Plus.