The instrumentation, magical with all
the magic of the Russian masters in the earlier ballets, here is
informed by the sharpness, hardness, nakedness which is originally
Strawinsky's. Besides, the latter work has the thing hitherto lacking
somewhat in the young man's art--grandeur and severity and ironness of
language. In it he stands completely new, completely in possession of
his powers. And in it the machine operates. Ostensibly, the action of
the ballet is laid in prehistoric times. Ostensibly, it figures the
ritual with which a tribe of stone-age Russians consecrated the spring.
Something of the sort was necessary, for an actual representation of
machines, a ballet of machines, would not have been as grimly
significant as the angular, uncouth gestures of men, would by no means
have as nakedly revealed the human engine. Here, in the choreography,
every fluid, supple, curving motion is suppressed. Everything is
angular, cubical, rectilinear. The music pounds with the rhythm of
engines, whirls and spirals like screws and fly-wheels, grinds and
shrieks like laboring metal. The orchestra is transmuted to steel. Each
movement of the ballet correlates the rhythms of machinery with the
human rhythms which they prolong and repeat. A dozen mills pulsate at
once.
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