Music: Tohu-Bohu in Paris

The audience remained quiet for the first two minutes. Then came boos and catcalls . . . Neighbors began to hit each other over the head with fists, canes or whatever came to hand . . . Everything available was tossed in our direction, but we continued to play on . . . Stravinsky had disappeared through a window backstage, to wander disconsolately along the streets of Paris.

—Pierre Monteux in Dance Index

Last week the scene—Paris' Theatre des Champs-Elysees—and the principals were the same as at that uproarious premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in 1913, and again there was bedlam....