Schoenberg in shorts

For anyone who missed The Sound and the Fury (Tuesday, BBC4) here is a reason — one of many — to catch it on your iPlayer: footage of a fierce, frowning and elderly Stravinsky, sitting in the empty stalls of the Théâtre des Champs Elysées and recalling the ‘near-riot’ which greeted the first performance of The Rite of Spring in 1913. ‘It was full — ’ (he gestured crossly around him) ‘ — of very noisy public. Very ’ostile public. I went up — when I heard all this noise — and I said, “Go to hell! Excuse me, Messieurs et Dames, and goodbye!”’

The Sound and the Fury: A Century of Modern Music is a three-part series which began this week with Wrecking Ball and led us — urged us — from Paris in 1894 (where Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune ‘brought new breath to the art of music’) to New York in 1924 (and the première of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue).