You might be surprised to learn that some of today’s most beloved works of classical music weren’t immediate hits when they premiered. Whether they caused a scandal, jeers, or worse—indifference—these six pieces had less-than-ideal first performances.
1. Igor Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring
Probably the most famous example of a premiere gone awry is Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring. It is an oft-repeated story that Stravinsky’s violent musical score, paired with Vaslav Nijinsky’s shocking choreography, incited a riot when the Ballets Russes premiered the work on May 29, 1913, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. However, accounts of that night from audience members, newspapers, and the creatives involved are often contradictory or unreliable, shrouding the actual events in mystery. The earliest reports do not mention any physical altercations; instead, they note that the dancers took five curtain calls after The Rite of Spring before continuing on with another ballet, Carl Maria von Weber’s Le Spectre de la rose, which seems unlikely had a full-blown riot occurred. In fact, the word “riot” was only used to describe that night beginning in the 1920s, deployed as a marketing tactic to attract American audiences. Ever since, the myth of the premiere has distorted the actual story into a version we want to believe: that art can prompt a visceral reaction.
What most likely occurred was more akin to a contentious parliamentary debate than a riot—impassioned but not violent. Much about the ballet was divisive: Stravinsky’s score was unprecedentedly loud, abrasive, and rhythmically complex. The ballet’s violent scenario told of an imagined ancient ritual sacrifice of a young girl to the god of spring. Nijinsky’s choreography featured what musicologist Richard Taruskin called “ugly earthbound lurching and stomping.” Put together, these elements elicited jeering and even laughter from some, while others countered with shouts of support. Concertgoers began hurling insults at one another, more appalled at each other’s behavior than anything on stage. Class differences also likely fanned the flames, as the audience ran the gamut from old-money aristocrats and new-money industrialists to intellectuals and aesthetes. Whatever occurred that fateful night, the scandal surrounding the premiere helped cement the work as an icon of modernism and Stravinsky as its bastion.
2. Georges Bizet: Carmen
Now one of the most popular operas of all time, George Bizet’s Carmen did not have the most auspicious start. In fact, the opera’s poor initial reception may have exacerbated Bizet’s health problems and precipitated his premature death at age 36, just three months after the premiere. The opera faced hurdles from the start. Bizet’s choice of Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella Carmen as the basis of the libretto sparked tension between the two directors of the Opéra-Comique in Paris, causing one of them to resign. The company, once known for its witty, satirical productions, had become a venue for more conservative, family-friendly fare, where productions were expected to be highly sentimental, moralistic, and end happily. So staging an opera where a flirtatious, free-spirited woman ends up murdered by her jealous lover was certainly a risky move. The rehearsal period was also prolonged and tumultuous, stretching over six months. The orchestra complained they could not play the score, and the women of the chorus objected to having to smoke and fight onstage.
When Carmen finally premiered on March 3, 1875, the reception was mixed from colleagues and critics alike. Composer Charles Gounod levied claims of plagiarism against Bizet, while another composer, Fromental Halévy, wrote, “The first act was well received, with applause for the main numbers and numerous curtain calls. The first part of Act 2 also went well, but after the Toreador song there was nothing but coldness… In the final act, Bizet was left only the consolations of a few friends.” Jean-Henri Dupin, a friend of one of the opera’s librettists, wrote, “I won’t mince words. Your Carmen is a flop, a disaster! It will never play more than twenty times.”
Critics for the Parisian newspapers were scandalized by the amorality of the opera’s heroine and the realism with which she was portrayed. And though some conceded that the opera had strong musical ideas, while one reviewer called it “educated noise” and complained that the orchestra overpowered the singers.
Unfortunately, Bizet took these criticisms to the grave. Although the premiere production ran for a respectable 45 performances, he would never know the worldwide acclaim his opera would soon gain (partially spurred by its salacious content and the composer’s sudden death). After a successful Viennese premiere in October 1875, Carmen would see productions in over 20 cities worldwide by its eventual revival at the Opéra-Comique in 1883.
3. Giacomo Puccini: Madama Butterfly
Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly is another beloved staple of the operatic repertoire that had a disastrous opening night. Fresh off the success of Tosca (1900), Puccini began work on a new opera based on John Luther Long’s 1898 short story “Madame Butterfly” in 1901. However, personal struggles prolonged the composition process. He was involved in a devastating car crash, which saddled him with a permanent limp and tested his already fractured relationship with his long-term partner, Elvira. There was also brewing tension between him and his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, who did not approve of the opera’s structure or Puccini’s affair with a young woman. He finally finished the score on December 27, 1903, for a production at La Scala in Milan scheduled for February 17.
Although Puccini had secured highly regarded singers for the premiere, the short leadtime and disputes with Ricordi stymied the rehearsal process. The singers had to learn their parts piecemeal, only receiving a few pages at a time as they were sent over from the printer. Plus, Ricordi forbade scores from leaving the theater and did away with the traditional “open rehearsals” for critics, hoping that shrouding the opera in secrecy would heighten audience expectation. Instead, it just made the critics bitter.
Uncharacteristically, Puccini went into the premiere feeling positive, but the composer’s detractors came out in force. Whether they had “fixed” the premiere by hiring claquers (hecklers), we cannot be sure. Ricordi suspected as much, writing, “The spectacle given in the auditorium seemed as well organized as that on the stage since it began precisely with the beginning of the opera.” The audience nearly drowned out the orchestra by jeering, whistling, laughing, hissing, booing, and even making farmyard noises. Shouts of “Bohème! Bohème!” rang out when a melody recalled a line from Puccini’s 1896 opera. To add insult to injury, an unfortunate gust of wind caused Cio-Cio San’s kimono to billow up, prompting cries of “Butterfly is pregnant!” and “Ah, the little Toscanini!”, referring to soprano Rosina Storchio’s highly publicized affair with the famed conductor.
Puccini was humiliated by the fiasco and immediately withdrew the score, returning his 20,000 lire fee to Ricordi. He went back to the drawing board and made edits. Recognizing he had perhaps overestimated the attention span of his audience, he split the opera into three acts instead of two. Puccini’s fifth and final version of Madama Butterfly in 1907 has since become the standard.
4. Gioachino Rossini: The Barber of Seville
Another mainstay opera! The disastrous premiere of Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville (Il barbiere di Siviglia) at the Teatro Argentina in Rome on February 20, 1816, is another likely example of opening night sabotage. Rossini’s artistic rival, Giovanni Paisiello, had already composed an operatic version of the titular Beaumarchais play in 1782, which was considered his masterpiece. For Rossini to write an opera on the same story (though initially under the title “Almaviva, or the Useless Precaution”) was seen as a massive affront. As a result, Paisiello likely hired a group of claquers to sway the audience into disliking the performance.
But the premiere seemed to be cursed anyway. Don Basilio tripped over a trap door and had to sing his aria, “La calunnia è un venticello,” with a bloody nose to a chorus of laughter from the audience. Plus, during the finale of Act 1, a cat wandered onstage. As is the nature of cats, it would not leave on its own and eventually had to be flung into the wings. By the end of the performance, the audience was chanting Paisiello’s name. Despite this terrible first outing, Rossini remained calm. He believed in the quality of his music and accurately predicted the second night would go much better without the din of the claqueurs drowning it out. That said, for years Paisiello’s version remained more popular by comparison, before Rossini’s opera eventually overtook it to become one of the most frequently performed operas of all time.
5. Sergei Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 1
The world was not ready for Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 1 when it premiered in St. Petersburg on March 28, 1897. Not only was the piece musically daring for the time, but the premiere was hampered by inadequate musical preparation and a conductor who was likely drunk when he walked on stage. The performance was so bad that the 24-year-old composer spent the entire concert in the stairwell with his hands over his ears. Some reviewers realized that most of the fault lay with the conductor, but composer César Cui was particularly harsh in his review, saying the symphony “would have brought ecstasy to the inhabitants of hell.”
Even if the conductor and orchestra had delivered a better performance, the premiere still might have been a flop. In the days leading up to the concert, composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov had said to Rachmaninoff, “Forgive me, but I do not find this music at all agreeable.” The symphony was simply too progressive for the musical establishment, of which Rimsky-Korsakov and Cui were a part as members of “The Mighty Five,” a group of Russian composers who worked to create a distinct national style. Cui continued in his review, “To us this music leaves an evil impression with its broken rhythms, obscurity and vagueness of form, meaningless repetition of the same short tricks, the nasal sound of the orchestra, the strained crash of the brass, and above all its sickly perverse harmonization and quasi-melodic outlines, the complete absence of simplicity and naturalness, the complete absence of themes.”
The fiasco would shatter the young composer’s confidence for years to come. Rachmaninoff fell into a deep depression that sapped him of his creative energy and thrust him into a three-year writing block. Only through hypnosis and therapy with Dr. Nikolai Dahl did he reemerge with ideas for his sumptuously lyrical Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1901.
6. Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 5
Although you might think Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5—with its harrowing opening figure—would have caused a stir when it premiered, it actually did not make much of an impression on its first audience. Again, part of the reason lay in inadequate rehearsal time, poor conditions, and a less-than-stellar performance of the challenging music. The symphony premiered in the middle of a four-hour concert of mostly new works by Beethoven at Theater an der Wien on December 22, 1808. Beethoven produced the concert himself and served as the conductor and piano soloist. Because neither the Vienna Philharmonic nor modern concert halls existed yet, Beethoven had to assemble the orchestra himself and secure the venue to get his music heard. It is no wonder, then, that he fit as much into the concert as possible. Unfortunately, the players he booked were not of the best quality. Many of the theater’s musicians were unavailable due to a conflicting charity concert, forcing him to rely on a smattering of amateurs. Plus, tensions ran hot between the composer and the orchestra, which banned him from rehearsals except for the pieces in which he was the soloist.
The first half of the mammoth concert was enough to fill a whole program, comprising Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony (“Pastoral”), the concert aria “Ah! Perfido,” the Gloria from his Mass in C Major, and his Fourth Piano Concerto. The Fifth Symphony opened the second half, followed by more movements from the Mass, a solo piano improvisation, and the Choral Fantasy. There were plentiful musical mishaps, especially in the Choral Fantasy, which fell apart and had to be restarted. What’s more, the theater was freezing, and the shivering audience was exhausted from the length of the program. It is therefore no wonder that there was not much critical reaction to the Fifth Symphony afterward. One reviewer explained, “To judge all these pieces after only one hearing, especially considering the language of Beethoven’s works, in that so many were performed one after the other, and that most of them are so grand and long, is downright impossible.”
From professional sabotage to unpredictable mishaps, the stories of these six premieres demonstrate that even masterpieces can have inauspicious beginnings. Sometimes, a work just needs to find the right audience, performers, and environment to be appreciated. Composers should therefore take heart if the first outing of a new piece doesn’t go to plan—they are in good company!
