The Latin-American premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1928 in Buenos Aires caused a sensation, and in subsequent years the work was regularly performed across much of the continent. The work also found many imitators, but Latin-American composers understood the work differently from their peers elsewhere. Whereas in Europe and North America, The Rite’s avowed primitivism appeared mostly as a lurid but non-specific signifier of otherness, composers such as Alberto Ginastera and Heitor Villa-Lobos drew direct parallels between Stravinsky’s paganism and indigenismo, the evocation of the continent’s pre-Columbian past and indigenous heritage. In a move characteristic of settler colonialism, what they found in Stravinsky’s work was not a European import but an Asiatic, pre-Christian legacy that could act as a foundation for an indigenous form of musical modernism beyond Eurocentric models. By contrast, the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier associated Stravinsky’s Scythians with the descendants of the Yoruba, the largest group of enslaved Africans in Cuba. In this way, the chapter analyses transnational networks and entanglements between Russia, Europe and several Latin-American countries.

Stravinsky is a purveyor of shocking comments. Just as he could capture in a single chord the essence of The Rite of Spring, he could frame an aesthetic position with an imminently quotable aperçu: ‘music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all’.1 This remark on the nature of music, published in his 1936 autobiography, is one of his most quoted comments. In fact, it gained enough notoriety to prod Stravinsky to clarify his position some twenty years later, regarding what he called the ‘over-publicized bit about expression (or non-expression)’. Given a chance to repeat himself, he said, he would rephrase the remark; it was not so much that music is ‘powerless to express anything’, he explained, but that ‘music expresses itself’.2 In the first case, music is defined negatively as that which excludes everything but itself; it is not ‘a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature’. In the second case, music is given a positive spin as that which includes itself and nothing else; music is its own expression, ‘beyond verbal meanings and verbal descriptions’. In both cases, the composer is saying the same thing – it just depends whether your aesthetic glass is half full or half empty; music in expressing itself is ‘powerless to express anything’ other than itself. That is why Stravinsky staunchly asserted in 1959 that he still stood by his earlier remark of 1936.

From the time he wrote The Firebird (1909–10), Igor Stravinsky’s music achieved feats of compositional magic by combining musical recollection with innovation in a way that left each recognisable, yet inseparable from the other.1 Stravinsky’s works looked to the past by evoking established musical repertories and their conventions. In these same works, his frequently radical inventions created a groundbreaking musical present that motivated his own future and that of music more generally.

Born at the twilight of imperial Russia, Igor Stravinsky inevitably partook of its cultural conventions and rituals, moving closely with particular individuals, associations and vogues in what Alexandre Benois called ‘that hysterical and spiritually tormented time’.1 Among Stravinsky’s many connections in St Petersburg, for example, was the group of artists, writers and musicians known as the World of Art (Mir iskusstva) which, undoubtedly, played a formative role in his musical career.2 True, some observers are hesitant to accept the proximity, finding that ‘there is no real evidence that [Stravinsky] paid attention to the journal [Mir iskusstva] at that time or hankered after any particular association with its authors’.3 On the other hand, Stravinsky’s long friendship and professional liaison with the leaders of the World of Art (Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, Sergei Diaghilev, Nicholas Roerich), his intense collaboration with Roerich on The Rite of Spring at Talashkino (the estate of Princess Maria Tenisheva, primary financier of the World of Art journal)4 and his close alliance with the Ballets Russes – which, in many ways, was the extension of the aesthetic platform of the World of Art – would seem to furnish evidence that Stravinsky did, indeed, appreciate the cultural consistency of the World of Art.

During the reign of Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas II (1894-1917), the advocates of freedom clashed sharply and frequently with the forces of order. The standing of the authorities suffered greatly with the humiliating loss of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. As the war was fought, domestic political unrest was also coming to a head. On “Bloody Sunday” in January 1905 hundreds of workers who had gathered to petition for better conditions and modest political reforms were shot down outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, opening a year of revolutionary protest and strikes. The era’s passionate political life forced writers and artists to confront anew how their art related to politics at home. Some joined the fray with striking works of political satire; others retreated to rarified aesthetics. Young rebellious writers under Maxim Gorky’s lead captivated the public with neo-Realism. Visual artists embraced experimentation; they and a group of writers took up aesthetic Modernism under the twin banners of Symbolism and Decadence. Innovations in music and dance – notably the Ballets Russes – found admirers at home and abroad. Avant-garde artists embraced humor and publicity, in the process introducing Russia to a new melding of art and celebrity.

While artists and writers within the empire were asserting their freedom and power as artists, arts impresario Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) and his associates were doing so abroad. Their innovative mix of music, art, and dance in Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911) changed ballet forever. In the glow of fame, Diaghilev and composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) went still further in The Rite of Spring (1913), the succès de scandale of which added to their glory and their impact. That many in their elite foreign audiences had political and economic stakes in tsarist Russia and were predisposed to welcome all things Russian does not diminish the artistic accomplishments of the Ballets Russes. Its creators advanced Russia’s national cultural identity, further repositioning art and artists in relation to the autocracy. Although the Ballets Russes affected indifference to the political content of their works, Diaghilev’s finances were highly politicized from the beginning. Furthermore, in Rite the creative team depicted a shocking denigration of women’s agency and a fantasy that appealed to Russia’s contemporary extreme right (although it was not performed in Russia); that of an ancestral Slavic culture at once patriarchal, ethnically pure, and notably free of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and other minorities.