Stravinsky had reached into the feral sources of Russian civilisation, far into the unforgiving tundra where life is raucous, brutal and cheap. His sub-titles describe abduction, human sacrifice, tribal wars, worship. A lone bassoon heralds a pagan ceremony, followed by a pounding of war drums. This was not an augury of human progress. It was a glorification of primitivism that challenged the values of modern society. Its response was reciprocal violence.

Much the same anxieties were aroused when Schoenberg exposed Vienna to the idea that a tonal scale which defined the notes C and E as harmony and B and D as discord was not the only option open to a composer. When Schoenberg veered off the octave in the middle of his second string quartet, he was embracing not a bold, new atonality of unfettered freedoms but a forgotten pre-tonality — the open mode that existed before the establishment of Western classical music. Schoenberg, like Stravinsky, was turning the clock back, not forward.

Both men acknowledged this ambivalence by their subsequent decisions. Stravinsky, uprooted from Russia by war and Bolshevism, went on to invent a neo-classical style that, reactionary by definition, pampered audiences with comfort sounds. Schoenberg, "a conservative who was forced to become a revolutionary", grew quickly out of anything-goes atonality and replaced it with a synthetic, serial scale of 12 notes in a preordained order that would reinvent music rather than revert it to chaos. Stravinsky, late in life, embraced Schoenberg's serialism as his badge of modernity. The Rite had been, in this respect, a regressive aberration.

He twice revised its score, in 1921 and again in 1943, for the purpose of making it "more manageable for conductor and orchestra". It had never been his intention to disrupt public order, or to renounce the unspoken entente cordiale between composers and audiences that each will kindly tolerate the other. In the spring of 1913, two composers tested that alliance to its limits. None has ever breached it again.