httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0xNo2894Fw

On this date in 1913 Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring premiered in Paris.

Frye in an April 1936 review of the Jooss Ballet in The Canadian Forum:

So the ballet has gone through a period of transition.  It has used incidental music not originally intended for it, and the greatest of the composers treating it seriously as an art form — Stravinsky — has been temperamentally unsuited to it, for though he clearly recognizes, and has explicitly stated, the necessity of impersonality and convention, his own style tends toward the vehement spluttering of Wagner and Tschaikowsky rather than the more objective balance required.  Behind Stravinsky there is the “emigre” Russian ballet, associated with the names Diaghilev, Massine, and Nijinsky.  A typical product of this school visited Toronto last fall, and the laboured virtuosity of its dancing, the eternal jiggling monotony of its nineteenth-century music, its set poses, rococo pictorial backgrounds, and vaguely allegorical programs amply showed how far the ballet had yet to go.  (CW 11, 80 – 1)