Star-crossed: UCLA musicologist unearths drama behind Stravinsky’s failed Perséphone

Composer Igor Stravinsky is revered for his dazzling scores to such ballets as "The Firebird," "Petrushka" and especially, "The Rite of Spring" — a ballet so revolutionary that its 1913 opening famously sparked a riot. The debut of "The Rite" is such a red-letter date in music history that its 2012-13 centennial is being marked with no less than three scholarly conferences and more than 11 performances of either the score — which will be performed in September by the Los Angeles Philharmonic — or the entire ballet. But what most Stravinsky lovers don't realize is that the Russian émigré, who eventually landed in Los Angeles in 1940, also was associated with a far less celebrated debut. UCLA professor of musicology Tamara Levitz, one of the world's preeminent Stravinsky authorities, has spent a decade unearthing the star-crossed story of "Perséphone," a 1934 ballet that played just three nights at the Paris Opéra before closing to negative reviews and the performance's collaborators at odds with one another. In the failed collaboration, Levitz believes she has found a window on a little-known and contradictory time that shares key elements with our own. In her forthcoming book, "Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone," Levitz shows how the folly was largely the result of a tug of war between the first glimmerings of a gay rights movement and the rise of a religious right. In the opulent performance staged in France during the Great Depression, she also finds parallels to extravagances that she has witnessed in America's — and Los Angeles' — art scene since the 2008 downturn.