When the Diaghilev company premiered Les Noces in 1923, the sorrowful mystery of a Russian peasant wedding became a subject of modern art. Les Noces (Svadebka, or The Wedding) was a collaboration among three of the age's most important Russian avantgarde artists: the composer Igor Stravinsky, the painter Natalia Goncharova, and the choreographer Bronislava Nijinska. Although Stravinsky had initiated the project, it was Nijinska who determined the character of the original mise en scene. Because of Nijinska, Stravinsky's plan to present his work as a masquerade was discarded. Instead, the production reflected the composer's interest in psychology, without ignoring the spirituality of his score, or the pathos inherent in his libretto. Nijinska's vision, austerely spiritual, has been the basis of virtually all subsequent interpretations of Stravinsky's score. Her innovative, abstract approach to the ballet's staging made Les Noces a monument of twentieth-century dance as well as music. The idea for a work about a Russian peasant wedding first came to Igor Stravinsky in 1912.1 At that time, Stravinsky was finishing Le Sacre du printemps, a composition he claimed had