Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (27 page)

Diaghilev was astounded at what Stravinsky produced.
Fireworks
had been promising, but
Firebird
was far more exciting, and the night before the curtain went up, Diaghilev told Stravinsky it would make him famous. He was right. The music for the ballet was strongly Russian, and recognisably by a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, but it was much more original than the impresario had expected, with a dark, almost sinister opening.
²⁴
Debussy, who was there on the opening night, picked out one of its essential qualities: ‘It is not the docile servant of the dance.’
²⁵
Petrushka
came next in 1911. That too was heavily Russian, but at the same time Stravinsky was beginning to explore polytonality.
At one point two unrelated harmonies, in different keys, come together to create an electrifying effect that influenced several other composers such as Paul Hindemith. Not even Diaghilev had anticipated the success that
Petrushka
would bring Stravinsky.

The young composer was not the only Russian to fuel scandal at the Ballets Russes. The year before
Le Sacre du printemps
premiered in Paris, the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky had been the star of Debussy’s
L’Après-midi d’un faune.
No less than Apollinaire, Debussy was a sybarite, a sensualist, and both his music and Nijinsky’s dancing reflected this. Technically brilliant, Nijinsky nonetheless took ninety rehearsals for the ten-minute piece he had choreographed himself. He was attempting his own
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
, a volcanic, iconoclastic work, to create a half-human, half-feral character, as disturbing as it was sensual. His creature, therefore, had not only the cold primitivism of Picasso’s
Demoiselles
but also the expressive order (and disorder) of
Der Blaue Reiter.
Paris was set alight all over again.

Even though those who attended the premier of
Le Sacre
were used to the avant-garde and therefore were not exactly expecting a quiet night,
this
volcano put all others in the shade.
Le Sacre
is not mere folk lore: it is a powerful legend about the sacrifice of virgins in ancient Russia.
²⁶
In the main scene the Chosen Virgin must dance herself to death, propelled by a terrible but irresistible rhythm. It was this that gave the ballet a primitive, archetypal quality. Like Debussy’s
Après-midi,
it related back to the passions aroused by primitivism – blood history, sexuality, and the unconscious. Perhaps that ‘primitive’ quality is what the audience responded to on the opening night (the premiere was held on the anniversary of the opening of
L’Après-midi,
Diaghilev being very superstitious).
²⁷
The trouble in the auditorium began barely three minutes into the performance, as the bassoon ended its opening phrase.
²⁸
People hooted, whistled, and laughed. Soon the noise drowned out the music, though the conductor, Pierre Monteux, manfully kept going. The storm really broke when, in the ‘Dances des adolescents’, the young virgins appeared in braids and red dresses. The composer Camille Saint-Saëns left the theatre, but Maurice Ravel stood up and shouted ‘Genius.’ Stravinsky himself, sitting near the orchestra, also left in a rage, slamming the door behind him. He later said that he had never been so angry. He went backstage, where he found Diaghilev flicking the house lights on and off in an attempt to quell the noise. It didn’t work. Stravinsky then held on to Nijinsky’s coattails while the dancer stood on a chair in the wings shouting out the rhythm to the dancers ‘like a coxswain.’
²⁹
Men in the audience who disagreed as to the merits of the ballet challenged each other to duels.
³⁰

‘Exactly what I wanted,’ said Diaghilev to Stravinsky when they reached the restaurant after the performance. It was the sort of thing an impresario would say. Other people’s reactions were, however, less predictable. ‘Massacre du Printemps’ said one paper the next morning – it became a stock joke.
³¹
For many people,
The Rite of Spring
was lumped in with cubist works as a form of barbarism resulting from the unwelcome presence of ‘degenerate’ foreigners in the French capital. (The cubists were known as
métèques,
damn foreigners, and
foreign artists were often likened in cartoons and jokes to epileptics.)
³²
The critic for
Le Figaro
didn’t like the music, but he was concerned that he might be too old-fashioned and wondered whether, in years to come, the evening might turn out to have been a pivotal event.
³³
He was right to be concerned, for despite the first-night scandal,
Le Sacre
quickly caught on: companies from all over requested permission to perform the ballet, and within months composers across the Western world were imitating or echoing Stravinsky’s rhythms. For it was the rhythms of
Le Sacre
more than anything else that suggested such great barbarity: ‘They entered the musical subconscious of every young composer.’

In August 1913 Albert Einstein was walking in the Swiss Alps with the widowed Marie Curie, the French physicist, and her daughters. Marie was in hiding from a scandal that had blown up after the wife of Paul Langevin, another physicist and friend of Jules-Henri Poincaré, had in a fit of pique published Marie’s love letters to her husband. Einstein, then thirty-four, was a professor at the Federal Institute of Technology, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, or ETH, in Zurich and much in demand for lectures and guest appearances. That summer, however, he was grappling with a problem that had first occurred to him in 1907. At one point in their walks, he turned to Marie Curie, gripped her arm, and said, ‘You understand, what I need to know is exactly what happens to the passengers in an elevator when it falls into emptiness.’
³⁴

Following his special theory of relativity, published in 1905, Einstein had turned his ideas, if not on their head, then on their side. As we have seen, in his special theory of relativity, Einstein had carried out a thought experiment involving a train travelling through a station. (It was called the ‘special’ theory because it related only to bodies moving in relation to one another.) In that experiment, light had been travelling in the same direction as the train. But he had suspected since 1911 that gravity attracted light.
³⁵
Now he imagined himself in an elevator falling down to earth in a vacuum and therefore accelerating, as every schoolchild knows, at 32 feet per second. However, without windows, and if the acceleration were constant, there would be no way of telling that the elevator was not stationary. Nor would the person in the elevator feel his or her own weight. This notion startled Einstein. He conceived of a thought experiment in which a beam of light struck the elevator not in the direction of movement but at right angles. Again he compared the view of the light beam seen by a person inside the elevator and one outside. As in the 1905 thought experiment, the person inside the elevator would see the light beam enter the box or structure at one level and hit the opposite wall at the same level. The observer outside, however, would see the light beam
bend
because, by the time it reached the other side of the elevator, the far wall would have moved on. Einstein concluded that if acceleration could curve the light beam, and since the acceleration was a result of gravity, then gravity must also be able to bend light. Einstein revealed his thinking on this subject in a lecture in Vienna later in the year, where it caused a sensation among physicists. The implications of
Einstein’s
General Theory of Relativity
may be explained by a model, as the special theory was explained using a pencil twisting in the light, casting a longer and shorter shallow. Imagine a thin rubber sheet set out on frame, like a picture canvas, and laid horizontally. Roll a small marble or a ball bearing across the rubber sheet, and the marble will roll in a straight line. However, if you place a heavy ball, say a cannonball, in the centre of the frame, depressing the rubber sheet, the marble would then roll in a curve as it approaches this massive weight. In effect, this is what Einstein argued would happen to light when it approached large bodies like stars. There is a curvature in space-time, and light bends too.
³⁶

General relativity is a theory about gravity and, like special relativity, a theory about nature on the cosmic scale beyond everyday experience. J. J. Thomson was lukewarm about the idea, but Ernest Rutherford liked the theory so much that he said even if it wasn’t true, it was a beautiful work of art.
³⁷
Part of that beauty was that Einstein’s theory could be tested. Certain deductions followed from the equations. One was that light should bend as it approaches large objects. Another was that the universe cannot be a static entity – it has to be either contracting or expanding. Einstein didn’t like this idea – he thought the universe was static – and he invented a correction so he could continue to think so. He later described this correction as ‘the biggest blunder of my career,’ for, as we shall see, both predictions of the general theory were later supported by experimentation – and in the most dramatic circumstances. Rutherford had it right; relativity was a most beautiful theory.
³⁸

The other physicist who produced a major advance in scientific understanding in that summer of 1913 could not have been more different from Einstein.
Niels Henrik
David
Bohr
was a Dane and an exceptional athlete. He played soccer for Copenhagen University; he loved skiing, bicycling, and sailing. He was ‘unbeatable’ at table tennis, and undoubtedly one of the most brilliant men of the century. C. P. Snow described him as tall with ‘an enormous, domed head,’ with a long, heavy jaw and big hands. He had a shock of unruly, combed-back hair and spoke with a soft voice, ‘not much above a whisper.’ All his life, Bohr talked so quietly that people strained to hear him. Snow also found him to be ‘a talker as hard to get to the point as Henry James in his later years.’
³⁹

This extraordinary man came from a civilised, scientific family – his father was a professor of physiology, his brother was a mathematician, and all were widely read in four languages, as well as in the work of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Bohr’s early work was on the surface tension of water, but he then switched to radioactivity, which was the main reason that drew him to Rutherford, and England, in 1911. He studied first in Cambridge but moved to Manchester after he heard Rutherford speak at a dinner at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. At that time, although Rutherford’s theory of the atom was widely accepted by physicists, there were serious problems with it, the most worrying of which was the predicted instability of the atom – no one could see why electrons didn’t just collapse in on the nucleus. Shortly after Bohr arrived to work with Rutherford, he had a series of brilliant intuitions, the most important of which was that although the radioactive properties of
matter originate in the atomic nucleus, chemical properties reflect primarily the number and distribution of electrons. At a stroke he had explained the link between physics and chemistry. The first sign of Bohr’s momentous breakthrough came on 19 June 1912, when he explained in a letter to his brother Harald what he had discovered: ‘It could be that I’ve found out a little bit about the structure of atoms … perhaps a little piece of reality.’ What he meant was that he had an idea how to make more sense of the electrons orbiting Rutherford’s nucleus.
⁴⁰
That summer Bohr returned to Denmark, got married, and taught at the University of Copenhagen throughout the autumn. He struggled on, writing to Rutherford on 4 November that he expected ‘to be able to finish the paper [with his new ideas] in a few weeks.’ He retreated to the country and wrote a very long article, which he finally divided into three shorter ones, since he had so many ideas to convey. He gave the papers a collective title –
On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules.
Part I was mailed to Rutherford on 6 March 1913; parts 2 and 3 were finished before Christmas. Rutherford had judged his man correctly when he allowed Bohr to transfer to Cambridge. As Bohr’s biographer has written, B revolution in understanding had taken place.’
⁴¹

As we have seen, Rutherford’s notion of the atom was inherently unstable. According to ‘classical’ theory, if an electron did not move in a straight line, it lost energy through radiation. But electrons went round the nucleus of the atom in orbits – such atoms should therefore either fly apart in all directions or collapse in on themselves in an explosion of light. Clearly, this did not happen: matter, made of atoms, is by and large very stable. Bohr’s contribution was to put together a proposition and an observation.
⁴²
He proposed ‘stationary’ states in the atom. Rutherford found this difficult to accept at first, but Bohr insisted that there must be certain orbits electrons can occupy without flying off or collapsing into the nucleus and without radiating light.
⁴³
He immeasurably strengthened this idea by adding to it an observation that had been known for years – that when light passes through a substance, each element gives off a characteristic spectrum of color and moreover one that is stable and discontinuous. In other words, it emits light of only particular wavelengths – the process known as spectroscopy. Bohr’s brilliance was to realise that this spectroscopic effect existed because electrons going around the nucleus cannot occupy ‘any old orbit’ but only certain permissible orbits.
⁴⁴
These orbits meant that the atom was stable. But the real importance of Bohr’s breakthrough was in his unification of Rutherford, Planck, and Einstein, confirming the quantum – discrete – nature of reality, the stability of the atom, and the nature of the link between chemistry and physics. When Einstein was told of how the Danish theories matched the spectroscopies so clearly, he remarked, ‘Then this is one of the greatest discoveries.’
⁴⁵