Did the Rite of Spring really cause a riot?

There was a real uproar, but the famous word "riot" came later, and it is still debated whether the music or the dancing caused the shock. When The Rite of Spring was first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on 29 May 1913, its avant-garde music and choreography caused a sensation. But the terms "riot" and "near-riot" did not appear until reviews of later performances in 1924, more than a decade later.

Witnesses describe a divided audience. A Parisian ballet audience typically had two groups: the wealthy and fashionable, who expected a traditional performance, and a "Bohemian" group who, Jean Cocteau said, would acclaim anything new out of hatred of the boxes. The conductor Pierre Monteux believed that the trouble began when these two factions attacked each other, and that their anger was then turned on the orchestra, which carried on playing. Marie Rambert, Nijinsky's assistant, recalled that it was soon impossible to hear the music on stage. Stravinsky himself wrote that the laughter at the first bars disgusted him, and he left to watch from the wings.

And was it the music? Richard Taruskin asserts that it was not Stravinsky's music that did the shocking but the ugly, earthbound lurching and stomping devised by the choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. The critic Gustav Linor, who thought the performance superb, called the disturbances merely "a rowdy debate".

Some of the best-known details do not survive scrutiny. Stravinsky said Saint-Saëns could not have stormed out, because he was not there. The writer Carl Van Vechten, who described a neighbour beating on his head, later admitted he had attended the second night. Nevertheless the score contained experiments in tonality, metre, rhythm and dissonance, and within a year the concert performance was a triumph: Stravinsky was carried from the hall.