The Rite of Spring responsible for introducing "The Rite" to Australia on 23 August 1946 at the Sydney Town Hall, as guest conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Stravinsky first conducted the work in 1926, in a concert given by the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam; two years later he brought it to the Salle Pleyel in Paris for two performances under his baton. Of these occasions he later wrote that "thanks to the experience I had gained with all kinds of orchestras ... I had reached a point where I could obtain exactly what I wanted, as I wanted it". Commentators have broadly agreed
The Rite of Spring that the work's opening bassoon melody was derived from an anthology of Lithuanian folk songs, but maintained that this was his only borrowing from such sources; if other elements sounded like aboriginal folk music, he said, it was due to "some unconscious 'folk' memory". However, Morton has identified several more melodies in Part I as having their origins in the Lithuanian collection. More recently Richard Taruskin has discovered in the score an adapted tune from one of Rimsky-Korsakov's "One Hundred Russian National Songs". Taruskin notes the paradox whereby "The Rite", generally acknowledged as the most revolutionary of the composer's early