o fall, are stained marvelously deeply by
the music. The score has the colors of crudely dyed, faded bunting. It
has indeed a servant girl grace, a coachman ardor, a barrel-organ,
tintype, popcorn, fortune-teller flavor.

"Le Sacre," on the other hand, is the man-machine viewed not from
without, and unsympathetically, but from within. So far, it is
Strawinsky's masterwork, the completest and purest expression of his
genius. For the elements that make for the originality of style of
"Petruchka" and the other of Strawinsky's representative compositions,
in this work attain a signal largeness and powerfulness. The rhythmic
element, already fresh and free in the scherzo of "L'Oiseau de feu" and
throughout "Petruchka," attains virile and magistral might in it, surges
and thunders with giant vigor. The instrumentation, magical with all
the magic of the Russian masters in the earlier ballets, here is
informed by the sharpness, hardness, nakedness which is originally
Strawinsky's. Besides, the latter work has the thing hitherto lacking
somewhat in the young man's art--grandeur and severity and ironness of
language. In it he stands completely new, completely in possession of
his powers. And in it the machine operates. Ostensibly, the action of
the ballet is laid in prehistoric times. Ostensibly, it figures the
ritual with which a tribe of stone-age Russians consecrated the spring.
Something of the sort was necessary, for an actual representation of
machines, a ballet of machines, would not have been as grimly
significant as the angular, uncouth gestures of men, would by no means
have as nakedly revealed the human engine. Here, in the choreography,
every fluid, supple, curving motion is suppressed. Everything is
angular, cubical, rectilinear. The music pounds with the rhythm of
engines, whirls and spirals like screws and fly-wheels, grinds and
shrieks like laboring metal. The orchestra is transmuted to steel. Each
movement of the ballet correlates the rhythms of machinery with the
human rhythms which they prolong and repeat. A dozen mills pulsate at
once. Steam escapes; exhausts breathe heavily. The weird orchestral
introduction to the second scene has all the oppressive silence of
machines immobile at night. And in the hurtling finale the music and the
dancers create figure that is at once the piston and a sexual action.
For Strawinsky has stripped away from man all that with which
specialization, differentiation, have covered h