The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky's third ballet for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, was the most revolutionary in style and impact, and remains one of the twentieth century's defining works of musical and artistic modernism. The scenario was evolved in collaboration between Stravinsky and the painter and ethnographer Nicolas Roerich, who also designed the costumes for the first production. It combines depictions of the pre-Christian festivals of Spring, as observed by ancient Slavic tribes, with Stravinsky's personal vision of a girl, a chosen sacrifice, dancing herself to death before the tribal elders.

Composed largely in 1911 to 1913, the ballet was premièred with choreography by Nijinsky at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 29 May 1913, under the baton of Pierre Monteux. The riots and violent controversy that accompanied that occasion created the greatest succès de scandale of twentieth-century music and catapulted Stravinsky, aged thirty, to an international notoriety that lasted the rest of his life. The music's dissonance and dynamism struck its more conservative hearers as a descent into a new and terrible musical barbarism, and excited its supporters as a brilliant vision of primeval man, infusing the arts with a strong and primitive power.

An orchestral showpiece of unprecedented virtuosity, The Rite of Spring has found itself as much at home in the concert hall as in the theatre.

The music may appear extremely complex at first glance, but its truly revolutionary nature lies in its radical simplicity. Unlike earlier Russian composers who had accepted Germanic symphonic techniques, Stravinsky used completely anti-symphonic methods. The elements in this music are not developed, nor is there organic growth from section to section. Separate contrasting blocks are juxtaposed and shuffled like a mosaic, or the movements accumulate individual lines and rhythmic patterns to generate a crescendo of sound and activity. (This is indeed the overall plan of the ballet's two parts, each beginning with slow, quiet gentle music and ending with the most orgiastic of outbursts.) It was in this score too, that Stravinsky emerged as perhaps the century's greatest master of rhythm — hypnotic unchanging rhythms in static ostinati, and highly dynamic rhythms with continually shifting unexpected stresses. The concluding "Danse Sacrale" is a fine example of the latter: Stravinsky said that at first he knew how to play it, but not how to write it down.

He also claimed that there was only one folk-tune in the entire work (the opening bassoon melody, derived from a published collection of Lithuanian folk music). This we now know to be untrue. Recent research has uncovered upwards of a dozen Lithuanian, Byelorussian, Russian and Ukrainian tunes in the piece, nearly all of them relevant to the ancient spring festivities, and some from published sources as venerable as the collection edited by Stravinsky's teacher Rimsky-Korsakov. But none of them is merely quoted: everything is transformed. In a sense, this makes Stravinsky's achievement more remarkable: the way he based the enormously complex music of The Rite of Spring on such raw materials makes his work the most extreme manifestation of the national tradition in which he was raised.

Notes by Malcolm MacDonald as they appear in the preface to the orchestral score published by Boosey & Hawkes in 1997