The Rite Signs: Semiotic readings one hundred years on

Abstract

One hundred years on from the infamous premiere of The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky's epoch-defining ballet continues to evoke controversy and contention in both musicological and performance circles. Even to call it a ballet is to overlook, or compound, its problematic identity. Throughout its life span, most audiences will have encountered, valorised and identified the work as a landmark of orchestral musical modernism heard primarily, perhaps even exclusively, in concert halls and on audio recordings with not a dancer, theatre stage or set in sight. Still to this day it thus remains one of music's more remarkable split personalities: bifurcated along formalist and contextualist lines by Stravinsky's retrospective and opportunistic assertion that he had written "un oeuvre architectonique et non anecdotique.".