The Rite of Spring dancers in "Augurs of Spring". But music historian Richard Taruskin asserts, "it was not Stravinsky's music that did the shocking. It was the ugly earthbound lurching and stomping devised by Vaslav Nijinsky." Marie Rambert, who was working as an assistant to Nijinsky, recalled later that it was soon impossible to hear the music on the stage. In his autobiography, Stravinsky writes that the derisive laughter that greeted the first bars of the Introduction disgusted him, and that he left the auditorium to watch the rest of the performance from the stage wings. The demonstrations, he says, grew into "a terrific
The Key to the Golden Firebird in with its quietly complex story." "This story is told in the third person, more and more unusual in YA novels, but the despair of May and her sisters is clear, even if not related in the confessional first-person narrative", Kiatt said. "Kirkus Reviews" complemented Johnson on her "literate, sophisticated style". "Kirkus Reviews" also mentioned that "her expert character development taps into the real emotions of three fully realized adolescents". The Key to the Golden Firebird The Key to the Golden Firebird is the debut novel by noted young adult author Maureen Johnson. It was first published in 2004, and