1913
The scandalous Paris premiere of Stravinsky's ballet Rite of Spring - audience noise so loud the dancers couldn't hear the music - has come to represent the shock of the new, and audiences' response to it. It epitomises the impact of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes at the peak of its achievement. Curiously, a year earlier, in Berlin, Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire had been a popular success, though his Five Orchestral Pieces had been hissed at the Proms in London.
1927
Mossolov's Zavod (Iron Foundry), a celebration of Soviet industrialisation premiered at a concert marking the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution, was one of a number of pieces toasting the machine age. Other works celebrating technology, machines or industry written in or premiered in 1927 include Prokofiev's ballet The Age of Steel, Vladimir Deshevov's Rails, Frederick S Converse's Flivver 10 Million, a Joyous Epic, subtitled Fantasy for Orchestra Inspired by the Familiar Legend The Ten Mil- lionth Ford Is Now Serving Its Owner, Dane Knudaage Riisager's poeme mecanique T- DOXC, and James Dunn's We, celebrating Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic (the "we" being the pilot and his plane).
1934
The Nazis banned Hindemith's opera, Mathis der Maler, because Hitler hadn't liked a scene in Neues vom Tage where the heroine sang an aria sitting in her bath. Berg prepared a Symphonic Suite from Lulu, to attract foreign interest, because he knew an opera dealing with female sexuality had little hope of production within the Nazi sphere of influence. The opening Leningrad production of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk clocked up 83 performances. But when Stalin saw the work in Moscow he objected to the blatant extramarital sex and thought he was being pilloried in a scene in a police station. The outcome, Pravda's 1936 attack on Shostakovich, marked the beginning of the composer's trouble with the Soviet authorities.
1952
The year of John Cage's famous silent piece, 4'33["], still, nearly half a century after its first "performance", able to raise a rousing cheer in concert, as was shown recently by the Crash Ensemble.
