When Stravinsky Met Nijinsky: Two Artists, Their Ballet, and One Extraordinary Riot by Lauren Stringer (review)

This picture book account skims the surface of the composer Igor Stravinsky and dancer/choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1913 debut of their ballet, The Rite of Spring. The two artists are introduced with an onomatopoetic description of Stravinsky’s music (“his piano trilled an orchestra with . . . kettledrums that lightly pom-di-di-pommed with the ringling and tingling of cymbals and bells”) and a simile-laden glimpse at Nijinsky’s style (“his feet, like a sparrow, tippy-tip-toed, while his arms curved and swerved like a snake”). Springer then turns to how they mutually influenced each other’s work and proceeded to create an avant-garde piece of art that would raise the hackles of its first Parisian audience. All this is delivered in a presentation straightforward enough to be grasped by a fairly young set of listeners, but such simplification doesn’t quite capture the true extent of the artists’ collaboration, apart from its incendiary outcome. The real meat of the Stravinsky/Nijinsky story is relegated to a dense, double-page spread endnote that not only fills in the history but also guides viewers through the complex content of the illustrations, many of which make “reference to many of [Stringer’s] favorite paintings from that time.” While this visuals-only production merely hints at what all the fuss was about, potential readers may be delighted at the idea of a fracas among starchy music patrons.