The Rite of Spring likeness is too close to be coincidental". Stravinsky himself gave contradictory accounts of the genesis of "The Rite". In a 1920 article he stressed that the musical ideas had come first, that the pagan setting had been suggested by the music rather than the other way round. However, in his 1936 autobiography he described the origin of the work thus: "One day [in 1910], when I was finishing the last pages of "L'Oiseau de Feu" in St Petersburg, I had a fleeting vision ... I saw in my imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watching
The Rite of Spring the disturbances, while deplorable, were merely "a rowdy debate" between two ill-mannered factions. Emile Raudin, of "Les Marges", who had barely heard the music, wrote: "Couldn't we ask M. Astruc ... to set aside one performance for well-intentioned spectators? ... We could at least propose to evict the female element". The composer Alfredo Casella thought that the demonstrations were aimed at Nijinsky's choreography rather than at the music, a view shared by the critic Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, who wrote: "The idea was excellent, but was not successfully carried out". Calvocoressi failed to observe any direct hostility to the composer—unlike, he said,