The Premiere of Le Sacre du printemps

Two opposed ideals gather under one roof,
a concrete bastion adorned with marble and stucco.
The Muse-leader, flanked by his Parnassian daughters,
sits in serene meditation over the threshold,
oblivious to the discord already fermenting
in that Art Deco capital of the Belle Époque.

The ensconced wealth arrives in velvet form.
Their entrance lavish and grand,
their sensibilities glacial to the extreme.
Proud wardens of the canonical and orthodox,
Their bedrock is institution, their sustenance old-line beauty.
Practiced eyes and critical brows flood the boxes.

Just as eager come their foils: the dissidents and iconoclasts,
mavericks and malcontents, bohemians and heretics.
They pour out of fiacres and taxis, these Parisian firecrackers,
scarlet-flushed with brasserie wine and dazzled by electric lights.
Caught up in reveries of revolution and promises of novelty,
Cocteau’s own avant-garde battalions glut the auditorium.

Here then, are the codified combatants,
the dogmatists and firebrands, the old and the new,
uncompromising in their eternal bellicosity.
The essence of their feud evokes the first fatal transgression
perpetrated on the herder of sheep by that maligned tiller of the soil.
Here it plays out again on the Champs-Élysées.

Murmurs and whispers teem together in a stream
that runs babbling through the embryonic darkness.
Then comes the rise of the curtain, and the jeers follow apace
at the uncanny bassoon resonance, so high
in its ghastly modulation as to inflame tensions
that already run torrid between our two volatile factions.

Now the dancing begins, a blasphemous pantomime of pagan ritual,
wherein consummate coryphées jerk and lurch,
wrenched and flung across the stage, the marionettes of some cracked god.
An uproar schismatic has already fomented in the seething sea of seats.
Shouting, raucous taunts of basest scorn from the haut monde,
mirrored and repelled in turn by thrilled cries of recusant zeal and laughter.

The music itself:
Now cautious and quivering.
Now intrepid and thunderous.
Now facile, fluid and flowing,
Now frantic, frenetic, frenzied.
A riot proper erupts among the fractured assemblage.

Chaos descends on the house reft asunder.
“Here is something profane and repulsive!”
“There is something modern and marvelous!”
The orchestra persists, even drowned out by the clamor,
and the lunatic choreographer screams over the din,
keeping delirious time for daunted dancers.

Shadowed in the gallery stands the epochal innovator,
the Firebird himself, who watches in abjection
as his crowning composition is met with ravaging howls,
his relentless ostinati with peals of jarring mirth.
He slips away disheartened to watch in the wings;
legend yesterday, a madman today, immortal tomorrow.

The source of the pandemonium? To consider one party:
ballet, that venerable refuge of class and gilt-edged coterie,
haven of ceremony decorous and immaculate,
has been made carnal and corporeal,
A dissonant animal rite of wanton idolatry:
pirouette supplanted by prancing profligates.

Yet this purported perversion, this prurient performance,
this is the inevitable avenue for all aspects of artistry:
the beguiled maiden, afraid and athirst; fervent and fanatical,
chosen by the barbarous masses to await the dimmet
and dance herself to death in the dark
as the sacrifice to bring forth wet and tender spring.