The Scandal at Le Sacre: Games of Distinction and Dreams of Barbarism

International audienceFor a century, the riot has pursued The Rite like a shadow, or like some strange alter ego. Between them they came to signify the end of the world of yesterday, the triumph of modernity, even the first fruits of the Great War or totalitarianism: “It turned out opportune that the century of abominations to come was thus symbolically consecrated by some such eulogy of barbarism in sound.” Between them they were able to sum up, on a more technical level, the unstable alliance between music, dance and painting, made by the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk and unmade into the multiple fragments of the avant-garde. Or again to construct, together with Schoenberg’s Skandalkonzert in Vienna a few weeks earlier, a scandalous double portico for the whole history of twentieth-century musi