It was written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky with stage designs and costumes by Nicholas Roerich.

By the time of his mentor's death in 1908, Stravinsky had produced several works, among them a Piano Sonata in F♯ minor (1903–04), a Symphony in E♭ major (1907), which he catalogued as "Opus 1", and a short orchestral piece, Feu d'artifice ("Fireworks", composed in 1908).

[8] Having heard Feu d'artifice he approached Stravinsky, initially with a request for help in orchestrating music by Chopin to create new arrangements for the ballet Les Sylphides.

Stravinsky worked on the opening Nocturne in A-flat major and the closing Grande valse brillante; his reward was a much bigger commission, to write the music for a new ballet, The Firebird (L'oiseau de feu) for the 1910 season.

[6] In a note to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky in February 1914, Stravinsky described Le Sacre du printemps as "a musical-choreographic work, [representing] pagan Russia ... unified by a single idea: the mystery and great surge of the creative power of Spring".

[22] In October he left Ustilug for Clarens in Switzerland, where in a tiny and sparsely-furnished room—an 8-by-8-foot (2.4 by 2.4 m) closet, with only a muted upright piano, a table and two chairs[23]—he worked throughout the 1911–12 winter on the score.

[28] He showed the manuscript to Maurice Ravel, who was enthusiastic and predicted, in a letter to a friend, that the first performance of Le Sacre would be as important as the 1902 premiere of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande.

[39][40] It is apparent from contemporary correspondence that, at least initially, Stravinsky viewed Nijinsky's talents as a choreographer with approval; a letter he sent to Findeyzen praises the dancer's "passionate zeal and complete self-effacement".

[56] However, the critic of L'Écho de Paris, Adolphe Boschot, foresaw possible trouble; he wondered how the public would receive the work, and suggested that they might react badly if they thought they were being mocked.

[60] In his autobiography, Stravinsky writes that the derisive laughter that greeted the first bars of the Introduction disgusted him, and that he left the auditorium to watch the rest of the performance from the stage wings.

[56] Two years after the premiere the journalist and photographer Carl Van Vechten claimed in his book Music After the Great War that the person behind him became carried away with excitement, and "began to beat rhythmically on top of my head with his fists".

[65] Among the more hostile press reviews was that of Le Figaro's critic Henri Quittard, who called the work "a laborious and puerile barbarity" and added "We are sorry to see an artist such as M. Stravinsky involve himself in this disconcerting adventure".

[66] On the other hand, Gustav Linor, writing in the leading theatrical magazine Comœdia, thought the performance was superb, especially that of Maria Piltz; the disturbances, while deplorable, were merely "a rowdy debate" between two ill-mannered factions.

[65] The composer Alfredo Casella thought that the demonstrations were aimed at Nijinsky's choreography rather than at the music,[68] a view shared by the critic Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, who wrote: "The idea was excellent, but was not successfully carried out".

Although these occasions were relatively peaceful, something of the mood of the first night remained; the composer Giacomo Puccini, who attended the second performance on 2 June,[73][74] described the choreography as ridiculous and the music cacophonous—"the work of a madman.

In December 1920 Ernest Ansermet conducted a new production in Paris, choreographed by Léonide Massine, with the Nicholas Roerich designs retained; the lead dancer was Lydia Sokolova.

[61] In his memoirs, Stravinsky is equivocal about the Massine production; the young choreographer, he writes, showed "unquestionable talent", but there was something "forced and artificial" in his choreography, which lacked the necessary organic relationship with the music.

[83] Sokolova, in her later account, recalled some of the tensions surrounding the production, with Stravinsky, "wearing an expression that would have frightened a hundred Chosen Virgins, pranc[ing] up and down the centre aisle" while Ansermet rehearsed the orchestra.

[94] The New York Times critic declared the performance "a triumph ... totally elemental, as primal in expression of basic emotion as any tribal ceremony, as hauntingly staged in its deliberate bleakness as it is rich in implication".

The performance resulted from years of research, primarily by Millicent Hodson, who pieced the choreography together from the original prompt books, contemporary sketches and photographs, and the recollections of Marie Rambert and other survivors.

[121] The composer Julius Harrison acknowledged the uniqueness of the work negatively: it demonstrated Stravinsky's "abhorrence of everything for which music has stood these many centuries ... all human endeavour and progress are being swept aside to make room for hideous sounds".

[123] White also observes the music's complex metrical character, with combinations of duple and triple time in which a strong irregular beat is emphasised by powerful percussion.

[131][132] White suggests that this bitonal combination, which Stravinsky considered the focal point of the entire work, was devised on the piano, since the constituent chords are comfortable fits for the hands on a keyboard.

[136] It concludes in a series of flute trills that usher in the "Spring Rounds", in which a slow and laborious theme gradually rises to a dissonant fortissimo, a "ghastly caricature" of the episode's main tune.

The "Dance of the Earth" then begins, bringing Part I to a close in a series of phrases of the utmost vigour which are abruptly terminated in what Hill describes as a "blunt, brutal amputation".

[141] Ross has described The Rite as a prophetic work, presaging the "second avant-garde" era in classical composition—music of the body rather than of the mind, in which "[m]elodies would follow the patterns of speech; rhythms would match the energy of dance ... sonorities would have the hardness of life as it is really lived".

[148] For Olivier Messiaen The Rite was of special significance; he constantly analysed and expounded on the work, which gave him an enduring model for rhythmic drive and assembly of material.

He praised a 1962 recording by The Moscow State Symphony Orchestra for making the music sound Russian, "which is just right", but Stravinsky's concluding judgement was that none of these three performances was worth preserving.

After the revival of the work in 1920 Stravinsky, who had not heard the music for seven years, made numerous revisions to the score, which was finally published in 1921 (Edition Russe de Musique, RV 197/197b.

[30] The Paul Sacher Foundation, in association with Boosey & Hawkes, announced in May 2013, as part of The Rite's centenary celebrations, their intention to publish the 1913 autograph score, as used in early performances.