FIGHT FOR YOUR RITE

Chris Maume recalls events from this week in history

29 MAY 1913

Igor Stravinsky (above) had started to compose for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes with The Firebird and Petrushka, then by The Rite of Spring, which premiered in Paris on 29 May 1913. Disturbances, that began during the Introduction, rapidly worsened but the music historian Richard Taruskin said “it was not Stravinsky’s music that did the shocking. It was the ugly earthbound lurching and stomping devised by Nijinsky”. The next day, Le Figaro called the ballet “a puerile barbarity”.

1 JUNE 1857

Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal - “The Flowers of Evil” - was published in an edition of 1,300 copies. The public prosecutor had them seized, and Baudelaire was fined 300 francs for “an insult to public decency”. Six of the poems were banned, and remained so in France until 1949, though they were published in Brussels in a slim volume. The poverty-stricken Baudelaire suffered increasingly poor health,

mostly due to syphilis, and died 10 years later, aged 46.

3 JUNE 1968

In 1967, Valerie Solanas, the sole member of the Society for Cutting up Men, had published the SCUM Manifesto. She'd had a small part in one of Andy Warhol's films, I, A Man, but resentment built up when he lost a manuscript she'd given him to read. On 3 June 1968, she went to The Factory in Union Square and shot him and two of his assistants. Warhol's life was saved by a five-and-a-half-hour operation. She gave herself up a few hours later. “I just wanted him to pay attention to me,” she said. “Talking to him was like talking to a chair.”