Ballet (music) of Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" after the composer's death. In many cases ballets were still short scenes within operas, to enable scenery or costume changes. Perhaps the best-known example of ballet music that is part of an opera is the "Dance of the Hours" from Amilcare Ponchielli's opera "La Gioconda" (1876). There was a violent change in mood when Igor Stravinsky's ballet "The Rite of Spring" (1913) was performed. The music was modernist and dissonant, and the movements were highly stylized. In 1924 George Antheil wrote "Ballet Mécanique," which was actually for a film of moving objects, not for dancers, but
The Rite of Spring opening Paris run and the London performances, events conspired to prevent further stagings of the ballet. Nijinsky's choreography, which Kelly describes as "so striking, so outrageous, so frail as to its preservation", did not appear again until attempts were made to reconstruct it in the 1980s. On 19 September 1913 Nijinsky married Romola de Pulszky while the Ballets Russes was on tour without Diaghilev in South America. When Diaghilev found out he was distraught and furious that his lover had married, and dismissed Nijinsky. Diaghilev was then obliged to re-hire Fokine, who had resigned in 1912 because Nijinsky had been