Note 3 — I A SENSATION

Five short pieces of the music by Arnold Schoenberg were played for the first time in Chicago, December 31, 1913, by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

“Had Mr. Richard Swiveller been present at the performance of the new Stravinsky-Nijinsky ballet, ‘Le Sacre du Printemps,’ at Drury Lane on Friday night he would certainly have pronounced it ‘a staggerer.’ Both the music of M. Stravinsky and the choreography of M. Nijinsky are more defiantly anarchical than anything we have ever had before, and the purport of it all was a dark mystery, even though Mr. Edwin Evans was deputed to throw light on it in a long explanatory prologue. As every one knows by this time, M. Nijinsky is the apostle of a sort of ‘post-impressionist’ or ‘Cubist’ revolution of the dance, in which mere gracefulness is ruthlessly sacrificed to significance and force of expression, and everything is stated in terms of symbolism, and in the new ballet he seems to have carried his theories into the most extreme practice.... M. Stravinsky seems as determined to make the hearer sit up as his colleague. Save that he condescends to regular rhythms, his music is the last word in emancipation from form and the cacophony of it is at times distressing.”—(London Sunday Times, July 13, 1913, from its article on the new Russian ballet, the sensation of the season.)