Abstract

Despite the abundant research on Igor Stravinsky’s musical score for the 1913 ballet Le Sacre, there is no specific examination of its exorbitant imaginary, which sprung straight from the tragic pathei mathos of Aeschylus straight into Modernity. (A short version of this chapter first appeared as “Pathei mathos and skandalon in Le Sacre du Printemps” in Special issue: Legacies of medieval dance (Palgrave Springer Nature, August 2023). I am grateful to Palgrave Springer for allowing me to reiterate some ideas developed in that article.) I argue that the pulsatile imaginary of Le Sacre takes us to such a ‘knowledge by ordeal’ to unveil the crucible in art, anticipated in Stravinsky’s own dream of the solemn pagan rite, and revealed in the radicality of its music and choreography. To understand the radicality of this artistic process, we need to understand the image from its process of disimagination as a ritualized process of transformation of image that corresponds to the imaginary of pulsion and pathos. We need to ‘penetrate’ the mechanism of the ‘crucible’ set in motion by Nijinsky’s revolutionary choreography and Stravinsky’s music, exemplarily reflected in the Dance of the Chosen One, and the final Augurs pulsating chord.