Dear Doc:
I must correct the wildly incorrect notion about the sequence of theatrical events:
All patrons are seated; the curtain is down; the house lights go down; the introduction begins ~ at the end of which the curtain goes up (as indicated in the score.)
In that sequence of events, especially if it is unfamiliar to an audience, that introduction casts a magic spell and announces the general timbre of both music and action to come. We are taken in, and the curtain then opens to reveal:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjX3oAwv_Fs
(The Joffrey Ballet’s accurate re-creation of the original production ~ set, costume, choreography)
Imagine being a member of that audience at the premiere, expecting all the in-place conventions of ballet in 1900: pretty costumes, lyric dancing, etc. Then this “Announcement” in the darkened house by this strangely beautiful and intensely polyphonic introduction before the curtain goes up, only then to be confronted with a radical "in your face," defiance of all previous conventions ~ the reason for the famous riotous audience reaction.
Stravinsky grew up going to the theater, hearing and seeing many a ballet and opera, executed to the highest of professional standards. (His father was a bass singer at the Marinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg: his first exposure to orchestral music as a child of nine years was a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty.) A great part of his work is for and in these media: many ballets, cantatas, one grand opera (The Rake's Progress), a one act opera (Mavra) and several other sung stage works with action (L'histoire du soldat, Renard, Les Noces.) Most of these are extremely succesful as theater.
Working in collaboration with one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the dance (Sergei Diaghilev), it is hard to imagine a better call on the timing and placement of this introduction in the darkened theater.
The choreography most accounts for the ballet's failure on stage. Nijinsky, who had little experience as choreographer, made a highly contrived and stylized choreography, still 'hard to take' other than as a mannered piece of dance of period interest. Too, the score is so overwhelming powerful as an independent piece of music nothing in the way of staging can come close to meeting it half-way.
Alberich's reaction to the Joffery re-creation of Petrushka is on the money. I saw it, and though perhaps too familiar with the score (‘way!’) I was nonetheless overwhelmed. The entire production is a married and welded whole with nothing off point down to the smallest detail. Music, story, choreography, costumes, sets; all are in perfect marriage. The work is known as ”the ballet” which embodies the ideal wedding of stage action and music.
P.s. All one has to do is misremember Le Sacre as ‘Les Sacres’ and that accounts for the plural mistake of "Rites." (Take Del's word for it; the dude knows Russian.)
Best regards.