At the beginning of 1928 I finished composing the music of Apollo. All that now remained was the final orchestration of the score, and, as this did not occupy my whole time, I was able to give some of it to my tour and concerts. From among these I select for mention two at the Salle Pleyel, 'Le Sacre du Printemps' being included in both programs. These concerts were important for me because it was the first time that Paris heard the 'Sacre' under my direction. It is not for me to appraise my own performance, but I may say that, thanks to the experience I had gained with all kinds of orchestras on my numerous concert tours, I had reached a point at which I could obtain exactly what I wanted as I wanted it. / With regard to the 'Sacre', which I was tackling for the first time, I was particularly anxious in some of the parts (Glorification of the Elect, Evocation of Ancestors, Dance of Consecration) to give the bars their true metric value, and to have them played exactly as they were written. I lay stress on this point, which may seem to the reader to be a purely professional detail. But with a few exceptions, such as Monteux and Ansermet, for example, most conductors are inclined to cope with the metric difficulties of these passages in such cavalier fashion as to distort alike my music and my intentions. This is what happens: fearing to make a mistake in a sequence of bars of varying values, some conductors do not hesitate to ease their tasks by treating them as of equal length. By such methods the strong and weak tempi are obviously displaced, and it is left to the musicians to perform the onerous task of readjusting the accents in the new bars as improvised by the conductors, a task so difficult that even if there is no catastrophe the listener expects one at any moment and is immersed in an atmosphere of intolerable strain. / There are other conductors who do not even try to solve the problem confronting them, and simply transcribe such music into undecipherable nonsense, which they try to conceal under violent gesticulations. / In listening to all these “artistic interpretations,” one begins to feel profound respect for the honest skill of the artisan, and it is not without bitterness that I am compelled to say how seldom one finds artists who have it and use it, the rest disdaining it as something hierarchically inferior. << less