Ok, my friend insists that Stravinsky’s famous ballet, “Rite of Spring,” was composed when the artist was hallucinating as a consequence of some drug. I, on the other hand, have always heard that he dreamed the idea (as in, sleep-induced hallucination 
). Which is it?
If it was drug-induced, what drug? This was pre-LSD, mushrooms and peyote seem to be a New World thing...In Rites of Spring (1989; Black Swan, 1990), Modris Eksteins quotes Stravinsky as follows:
But he doesn’t give a reference for the quote.
There’s a cheerful tradition, among folks of a certain chemical content, to attribute fine works of art to the artist’s drug use. Sometimes it’s true, and sometimes, it’s just in the eye of the beholder. Maybe Stravinski was tripping, maybe he was just brilliant. Retro-diagnosis of Ludvig Van Beethoven has recently suggested that he suffered from lead poisoning. There are things we’ll never know. The more we know, the more we realize just how ignorant we are.