Steam escapes; exhausts breathe heavily. The weird orchestral
introduction to the second scene has all the oppressive silence of
machines immobile at night. And in the hurtling finale the music and the
dancers create figure that is at once the piston and a sexual action.
For Strawinsky has stripped away from man all that with which
specialization, differentiation, have covered him, and revealed him
again, in a sort of cruel white light, a few functioning organs. He has
shown him a machine to which power is applied, and which labors in blind
obedience precisely like the microscopic animal that eats and parturates
and dies. The spring comes; and life replenishes itself; and man, like
seed and germ, obeys the promptings of the blind power that created him,
and accomplishes his predestined course and takes in energy and pours it
out again. But, for a moment, in "Le Sacre du printemps," we feel the
motor forces, watch the naked wheels and levers and arms at work, see
the dynamo itself.
The ballet was completed in 1913, the year Strawinsky was thirty-one
years old. It may be that the work will be succeeded by others even more
original, more powerful. Or it may be that Strawinsky has already
written his masterpiece. The works that he has composed during the war
are not, it appears, strictly new developments.
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