Secret of the Russian Ballet
Secret of the Russian Ballet
IRONY certainly directed the workings of fate when it was decreed, in this age of individualism, that the group-spirit should dominate the movements of the theatre, an institution in which, not so many years ago, the individual reigned, his head crowned with bays. Democracy has two effects: it strengthens the individual and it gives him the power to join with other individuals in fostering the growth of his ideals. Thus Max Reinhardt, distinctly individual though he may be, has made his impression through his artists, his actors, and his musicians. So has Stanislawsky of Moscow, who in one instance solicited the services of Gordon Craig. The Irish Theatre movement, which developed so great a genius as Synge and many lesser, but still important, writers, such as T. C. Murray and St. John Ervine, was essentially conceived in the group-spirit. But more than any of these, the most brilliant movement in the theatre of our time, the Russian Ballet (I am referring specifically to the organization under the direction of Serge de Diaghilew) has relied to an extraordinary degree on the group forits effect—one which, on modern art, music, dancing, stage decorations, and women’s fashions, can scarcely be overestimated. I have heard it said, not altogether as a jest, that the Russian Ballet has had an influence on European politics.
There are still many people, however, who have never seen the performances of the Russian Ballet, who think of it only as an aggregation of virtuosi, much after the manner of one of Mr. Grau’s all-star casts inLes Huguenots. It is true that the names of Nijinsky, Karsavina, Fokine, Miassine, Bolm, and Fokina have inevitably awakened the same sort of magic sympathy that the names of Nordica, Melba, Calvé and the de Rezskes once evoked. The misunderstanding has followed in natural sequence. Nevertheless—and this is said without any desire to depreciate the value of the Russian stars—it is fortunate that the ideal of the producers of these mimed dramas is aimed higher than at the exploitation of individual talent. Their ultimate goals are cohesiveness and general pictorial effect. And this fact makes it possible for the Ballet to give representative performances with or without the aid of any particular dancer. In the summer of 1914,for example, in the absence of the superlative Nijinsky, the Russians made very lovely productions of Rimsky-Korsakow’sThe Golden Cockand Richard Strauss’sThe Legend of Joseph.
For any comprehensive view of the achievements of the organization, it is essential to remember that Mr. de Diaghilew’s Russian Ballet began in Paris as an art exhibition; that is the secret. For two seasons Bakst and other Russian painters hung their pictures in the French capital. These two picture-shows are now included in the official lists of the Russian Ballet seasons, and by no means accidentally, or for purposes of misrepresentation. For the Ballet has, in a large sense, continued to be a picture-exhibition, and in spite of the fact that some of the novelty has been worn off by multiplied imitations, the thing itself still retains a good deal of the original impulse. The Russian Ballet, on its decorative side, is entirely responsible for the riot of color which has spread over the Western world in clothes and house furnishings. Without the Russian Ballet as an inspiration there could have been no Paul Poiret, no Paul Iribe, no George Barbier, no Jean Cocteau, no George Lepape, no Marcel Lejeune. There surely wouldhave been no “Gazette de Bon-Ton” and no department-shop sales of striped and spotted fabrics of every shade under the sun. George Bernard Shaw did not stretch the truth when he said that for the past five years the Russian Ballet has furnished the sole inspiration for fashions in women’s dress.... One does not need to remember any further back than the summer of 1914, whenPapillonsandThe Legend of Josephwere produced, to follow him. The crinolined ruffled skirts of the former ballet and the prim Veronese gowns of the latter (recall Lillah McCarthy’s dresses inThe Doctor’s Dilemma) have been repeated in a thousand forms. And so we might go back, year by year, to the season when Bakst’sSheherazadelaunched the Oriental craze which is still making itself felt in hamlets on the Great Lakes.
These decorations, and the costumes which accompany them, designed by such artists—many of them well-known painters in Russia—as Roerich, Bakst, Fedorowsky, Soudeikine, Golovine, Doboujinsky, Alexander Benois, and Nathalie Gontcharova, are the basis of the beauty of the Russian Ballet, and they are so perfect in their many manifestationsthat no amount of imitation can entirely spoil them. When Roerich’s scene for the Polovtsian camp inPrince Igor, a composition in dull greys and reds, with low, round-topped tents and rising columns of smoke, was disclosed in Paris, Jacques Blanche, the French painter, was moved to write an article in which he hailed the designer as the inventor of a new type of stage scenery, and even called upon the easel painters to learn a lesson in truth from this rugged Russian. Roerich subsequently designed the very beautiful green landscape of the first scene for Strawinsky’sThe Sacrifice to the Spring, and the grewsome setting, between somewhere and nowhere, of the second. To Fedorowsky are due the barbaric decorations and costumes for Moussorgsky’s opera,La Khovanchina. The dresses of the Persian ballet in this opera, orange riots, speckled with patches of deep green and blue, have been plentifully imitated. Soudeikine devised the extravagant ostrich-plumed gauds worn by the six negroes who accompanied Florent Schmitt’s Salome on her decadent way. And Nathalie Gontcharova, with exquisite fantasy, designed the scenes and costumes forThe Golden Cock, a production in which theRussians showed that they were willing to go yet further in the realms of color-combination than they had before ventured. Bakst, of course, is as well known to us as Aubrey Beardsley or Longfellow. There have been books of his work on sale; the magazines and newspapers have reprinted many of his best designs; there has been an exhibition of his original drawings at the Berlin Photographic Galleries in New York. However, in spite of the reproductions and imitations, I think those who have not yet seen a Bakst production, such asSheherazade,Daphnis et Chloë, or the extraordinaryLegend of Joseph, on the stage may prepare for a thrill.
The scene exposed on the very large Drury Lane stage as the curtain rose on Richard Strauss’s ballet was certainly very splendid in its majestic beauty. The stage directions give some conception of the picture:
“The scene, the stage furniture, and the costumes are throughout in the manner of Paolo Veronese, and thus follow, in style and fashion, those of the period of about 1530. The Egyptian characters wear Venetian costumes; Joseph and the dealers who bring him to Potiphar, Oriental dressof the sixteenth century. The scene represents a huge pillared hall in the Palladian style. The pillars and ceiling are of bright gold with a greenish sheen. The floor is inlaid with blocks of colored marble. The background is traversed by a raised loggia, also of gold, which is open to the air on the farther side, and gives a view over gardens with playing fountains, and distant wings of the palace; the openings on the further side are, however, curtained during the banquet by a vast carpet of Flemish work representing the Earthly Paradise—stretches of verdure, alive with exotic beasts of every kind. The loggia has no balustrade, but is open between the pillars from floor to ceiling, so that the personages traversing it are entirely visible from head to foot. On the right a flight of steps leads up to the loggia. Over the floor of the loggia an Oriental carpet is hung, reaching down to the hall.
“On the stage in front of the loggia are set two tables at right angles to each other; the one furthest from the spectator is rather long and runs parallel to the supporting wall of the loggia; the other is only short, and joins the first at right angles on the left. The table to the front is raisedon three steps as a dais. On the tables are richly chiselled vessels of gold and silver, high ewers of cut crystal full to the brim with gleaming red and white wines, and dishes in which lie, heaped in profusion, pomegranates, peaches, and grapes of unusual size: golden platters and crystal glasses are before the guests. The guests—men and women by threes, in opulent Venetian costumes—sit at the farthermost side of the table at the back, half concealed behind the vessels of gold, the crystal, and the piled fruit. At the table in front Potiphar and his wife, the latter in a robe of scarlet brocade, cut very low, over which hang long strings of pearls. At her feet on the lowest step of the dais, a young female slave. The tables are served by eight negro slaves in a semi-Oriental garb of pink and gold, and on their heads are nodding plumes of white and pink. Behind the dais, in the angle to the left, under the loggia, Potiphar’s bodyguard—gigantic mulattos, with breast-plates of black inlaid with gold, of Toledo workmanship, with black plumes and halberds of gold. They also carry whips with short golden handles.”
The spaciousness of this picture, the sense of splendor it conveyed, cannot be communicatedsecond-hand. A young Spanish painter, José-Maria Sert, designed the majestic loggia, and Bakst vivified the scene, truly Veronese, with its women in gorgeous brocades, flaring skirts, puffed sleeves, and stilted mules, the officers in waving plumes, two of the slaves holding lank greyhounds in check. One detail was essentially Bakst. In the old Venetian costumes a panel of lace, down the front, covered the opening made by the flaring brocades. This Bakst removed, exposing the legs of his women, in silken hose, tightly trousered above the knee. This undergarmenting, in its inception, is authentic, as anyone may see who visits the Museo Civico Correr in Venice.
I have hesitated this long overThe Legend of Josephbecause, in reproduction at least, it is one of the least familiar of the Bakst ballets, not because it is more interesting thanSheherazade,Daphnis et Chloë, or a half-dozen other of this artist’s productions.
In considering the factors which go to make up the perfection of this organization it is necessary to lay considerable stress on the importance of the music. In each of the cities where the Ballet has appeared a large orchestra of picked musicians(in some instances an organized orchestra, such as Thomas Beecham’s in London) has assisted at the performances. The music of the ballets, even when adapted for this use, as inCléopâtre, is of a fine quality, and in the variety of the compositions employed (ordinarily three or four ballets make up a programme) and in the manner of their performance there is the greatest amount of interest for those who are more interested in hearing than in seeing. Particularly is this true as the Russian Ballet has been the means of bringing some of the most radical and anarchistic of modern composers to a hearing before the public. Since Tschaikowsky wrote three ballets, no musician in Russia has considered it less than an honor to write for dancing.
Certain of the works performed have been taken from the concert room,l’Après-midi d’un Faune, for example, with the approval, and even the applause, of Monsieur Debussy; andSheherazade, in spite of the protests of Rimsky-Korsakow’s heirs. Balakirew’sThamar, too, was programme music before it became a ballet. But several works have been written for performance by this organization. Among these I may mention Maurice Ravel’sDaphnis et Chloë, the music of which exactly illustrates the action of the ballet but is not easily transferable to the concert room, although Ravel made an arrangement which the Colonne Orchestra has played in Paris and the Symphony Society of New York has performed in New York; Debussy’sJeux; Reynaldo Hahn’sLe Dieu Bleu; Steinberg’sMidas; Tcherepnine’sNarcisse; Richard Strauss’sThe Legend of Joseph, which the composer himself conducted for several performances both in London and in Paris; and the three really extraordinary works of Igor Strawinsky,The Firebird,Petrouchka, andThe Sacrifice to the Spring. I have elsewhere expressed my great admiration for the genius of this young man; it is certainly my opinion that more inspiration is made manifest in these three works than in any other recent music I have heard in the theatre or the concert room. Paul Dukas also wrote a ballet for the Russians,La Péri, but although it was announced, the production was finally made under other auspices.
Any concert-goer will immediately note the fact that a good deal of the music in the répertoire of the Russian Ballet is familiar to him.Balakirew began his symphonic poem,Tamara(the ballet is calledThamar), suggested by a poem by Lermontoff, in 1867; it was concluded in 1882. The composer wrote in 1869 that he had composed parts of it as he “danced along” the street. The Chicago Orchestra performed the work for the first time in America in 1896. The Russian Symphony Society introduced it to New York in 1908. When the Russians adopted the work to use as a ballet the critic of the “Morning Times” in London said that the action did not fit the music very well, and yet the story of the ballet is almost precisely that of the symphonic poem, so that if anyone was at fault in this regard it must have been the composer. Here is the fable to which Balakirew wrote music, in the words of the programme notes (by William Hubbard Harris) of the Chicago Orchestra:
“In the narrow Dariel Pass, where the River Terek roars, covered with heavy mists, there rises an ancient tower, in which there lived Queen Thamar, an angel of beauty, a cruel, wily demon in thoughts, and yet at the same time divine. At her enchanting call the passing traveller entered the tower to take part in the banquet in progressthere. Shouts and cries of revelry awakened echoes in the darkness, as if at a great feast a hundred young, pleasure-loving men and women were gathered, or as if, in that great tower, erstwhile forbidding, the celebration of funeral rites were taking place. At the break of day gloomy silence again reigned, broken only by the foaming Terek as it hurried away a corpse. At this moment there appeared at the window a pale shadow. It waved afar a last farewell to the loved one. That farewell breathed such tender ecstasy, the voice which uttered it was so sweet, that its every accent, filled with promise, seemed to tell of near, unspeakable happiness.”
Only in its conclusion does the ballet action vary from this story. The Queen lures the Prince to his doom, dances with him as the centre of a bacchanale, and then gives him the knife-thrust, as her slaves hurl him through an opened door into the river. But as the curtain falls we see her, not waving farewell to her old victim, but waving welcome to a new one.
Perhaps the composer really was at fault, because the music has never made a profound impression in this country. Here is W. J. Henderson’saccount of it in “The Sun,” following the performance by the Russian Symphony Society:
“Tamara was a queen, and she dwelt by the River Terek in an ancient tower, where she was wont to indulge in nightsà la Cléopâtre russe. In the mornings the dead bodies of her lovers went floating down the stream, while she sang exquisite love-songs, just as if her lovers could be lured back. In the music of Balakirew one could hear the river, which sounded much like the Rhine, even to suggestions of the Drachenfels. The riotous nights were perhaps less clearly indicated. They were somewhat repressed, muffled, as it were. Perhaps Tamara, out of consideration for the neighbors, used to shut the windows when she was holding high jinks on the banks of the blue Terek in the Caucasus. But they had long nights up there, for the listener sitting outside the tower (in a hard orchestra chair) and waiting for the exquisite love-song, grew stiff and cold. And, after all, it was a mean little love-song, because it had no tune, and it would not have lured a red-headed boy, let alone a dead man.”
However, Mr. Henderson had not seen Karsavina as the wicked queen when he wrote those lines,nor had he seen Bakst’s gorgeous Georgian costumes—a variant, it is true, of the greens and blues with which he had decoratedSheherazade. The fault of the ballet, as a whole, is that it is reminiscent ofSheherazade; and yet it is effective and has persisted in the répertoire of the Russians since it was first given in 1912. The overdresses of the women gave rise to one of the fashions in women’s gowns which spread over our world two years ago.
Rimsky-Korsakow’sSheherazadeis another matter. The music was not written to accompany the story used in the ballet, and yet it fits it perfectly. Still, Mme. Rimsky-Korsakow (the composer, of course, is dead) protested violently against what she called a desecration of her husband’s intention, when the ballet was first produced. (A similar protest was lodged against the organization in 1914, when it produced Rimsky-Korsakow’s last opera,The Golden Cock, with a double cast, one choreographic and one vocal, although the opera had been written to besung.) No piece of music is better known in the concert hall than this, and any concert-goer will remember the violin theme which portrays the last of the Sultan’s wives, asshe relates the four stories from the “Arabian Nights” which the four movements of the Suite describe. The ballet follows the action of the prologue of these stories; the women of the harem steal the keys from the grand eunuch and let loose the black slaves for a drunken revel of lust, which is interrupted by the sudden return of the sultan and death to all concerned. The third movement, that which in the Suite describes the love of the young prince and the young princess, was omitted from Fokine’s original arrangement of the ballet, but in 1914 he added this movement to the action.Sheherazadehas been considered since the time it was first produced in Paris some six years ago, the masterpiece of the Russians. It made the designer of its scenery and costumes, Leon Bakst, famous. His color-scheme, mostly of greens, blues, and oranges, has been frequently imitated in later theatrical productions. Karsavina’s Zobeide is a suggestive picture of languorous lust, and Nijinsky, as the principal slave, alternates between surprising leaps into the air and the most lascivious gestures, as, like some animal, he paws the reclining Sultana.
L’Après-midi d’un Fauneis as well known asSheherazadein the concert room. This was the first ballet which Nijinsky staged (he also enacted the principal rôle). The music was written by Debussy as a prelude to Mallarmé’s somewhat obscure poem. An English translation, at least an acceptable one, has hitherto been lacking, but Walter Conrad Arensberg’s very sympathetic and understanding version has just appeared; were it not for its length I should like to transcribe it here. When Debussy’s work is performed Edmund Gosse’s summary of his idea of the meaning of the poem (with which, by the way, the poet expressed himself as entirely pleased) usually appears in the programme notes. But Debussy’s music is called apréludeto the poem and so the action of the ballet is a prelude to the wonderings of Mallarmé’s faun. This is the scenario as it was printed in the programmes given out for the first Paris performances:
“Ce n’est pasl’Après-midi d’un Faunede Stéphane Mallarmé; c’est, sur le prélude musical à cet épisode panique, une courte scène qui la précède:
“Un Faune sommeille;
“Des Nymphes le dupent;
“Une écharpe oubliée satisfait son rêve.
“Le rideau baisse pour que le poème commence dans toutes les mémoires.”
There are, I think, seven nymphs engaged in the performance. Their dresses and their action are suggestive of the figures of Greek vases and bas-reliefs. One after another they flee from the strangely misunderstanding faun, until one, bolder than the others, approaches, almost to remain. The faun still does not understand and she, too, flees, dropping her scarf behind her. This the faun seizes and, as the curtain descends, returning to his rock, he presses this scarf to his lips and breast, at last, apparently, something more than the faun he has been. Nijinsky in this pantomime (it can scarcely be called a ballet) suggests all that the poem and the music call forth in imaginative minds. He has dehumanized the characters and, in a sense, thereby taken away the sting of the too intense voluptuousness of the action. However, in spite of this fact, and the further one that Monsieur Debussy, unlike Mme. Rimsky-Korsakow, not only approved of the use of his music in this form but even applauded it, the first performance in Paris (1912) was roundly hissed. Paul Souday, a well-known critic, led the opposition, andRodin took up the cudgels for the defence. “Accusé d’avoir ‘offensé la morale,’ Nijinsky s’est empressé de donner satisfaction à M. Paul Souday en supprimant sa ‘mimique indécente’ à la fin du ballet. Et pourtant, son illusoire possession de la nymphe enfuiée, ce corps étendu sur le voile encore parfumé d’elle, c’était beau!” wrote Gauthier-Villars. It is true that Nijinsky altered his original performance for a few evenings; then, however, he returned to his original conception. Meanwhile, the troup moved to London, wherel’Après-midi d’un Faunewas acclaimed above all the other ballets, and almost invariablyrepeated. Since then it has seldom been given in London and Paris without the audience demanding a repetition.
Les Sylphides,Papillons,Carnaval, andLe Spectre de la Rose, are all exquisite studies of a different style from the three ballets I have mentioned.Carnavalis undoubtedly the best of the lot, although Nijinsky as the rose ghost (the fable was suggested by a poem of Théophile Gautier) who comes to a young girl in a dream and bounds out of the window, like a spirit, at dawn, is in his most poetical mood.Papillonsis the newest of these four ballets, and for it Bakst designed somecharming crinolined dresses. Pierrot, in the garden, after the dance, has set a candle to catch butterflies, and as the dancers flit out, each pretending to be a butterfly, he tries to catch them, until the coming of their parents to take them home teaches him the bitter truth that they are only young girls. The music is by Schumann, orchestrated by Tcherepnine.Les Sylphidesis little more than a suite of dances in a charming adaptation by Bakst of the conventional ballet costume. Glazunow and other Russian composers have orchestrated these Chopin waltzes, mazurkas and preludes. InCarnaval(orchestrated by Tcherepnine, Glazunow, Liadow, and Rimsky-Korsakow) the fanciful names by which Schumann designated several movements in these delightful piano pieces are transferred to the characters. Nijinsky is the Harlequin; Karsavina, Colombine, etc., while such pieces asDancing LettersandPaganiniare used as divertissements. The scene, with the two Victorian sofas at the back and Pierrot lying over the footlights, is charming. The principal characters are those of theCommedia dell’ Arte, while the other dancers are dressed after the period of about 1830.
Le Dieu BleuI have not seen, but I transfer thefollowing account of it from the “London Times” of February 28, 1913, in which the critic says that “it introduces us to Mme. Karsavina and M. Nijinsky in two new rôles which suit them well, and it gives good opportunities for the combination of music, dancing, and spectacle for which M. de Diaghilew’s troup is famous—a combination designed this time to suggest what Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World had in mind when he spoke of the ‘furniture, frippery, and fireworks of China.’ The scene is not precisely China in this case, but ‘India of the fables,’ which in the theatre comes to much the same thing, the point only being that it is the Far Orient, where a glamour of riotous colour is thrown over man’s actions, and where gods and monsters are as near to us and as alive as the priests and populace who worship them.
“When the curtain goes up we see M. Bakst’s design of a temple cut into a rock, with a glimpse of the sky seen through a cleft at the back, and in the middle a pool on which is floating (or ought to have been, for it was invisible last night) the sacred lotus. A young man is about to be initiated into the priesthood. He is surrounded by a crowd of worshippers, who bring offerings of fruits,flowers and peacocks to the shrine, and, generally speaking, occupy themselves in providing the requisite amount of furniture and frippery. Suddenly there is a tumult at the back, and a young girl (Mme. Karsavina) pushes her way in past the guards and falls at the feet of her lover, the would-be initiate, imploring him not to desert her for the priesthood. He is at first indifferent, but gradually his religious ecstasy passes off as she recalls their old life together, and eventually, with an abrupt gesture, he throws himself into her arms. The priests, in consternation, hurry him off into the back premises, and after handcuffing the girl, leave her in the darkness, where (like Tamino in the caverns) she is told she will meet her trial and punishment. After long moments of suspense, during which night falls, she pushes open a door through which she sees a chance of escape, and immediately seven obscene monsters crawl out and are about to drag her with them when, in despair, she appeals to the sacred lotus in the pool. The lotus thereupon turns into the goddess, who rises with the blue god from the water. And then the fireworks began, for the blue god was M. Nijinsky, who at once set to work to draw the teeth, so tospeak, of the monsters and to make even the trees and flowers ‘bow themselves when he did dance,’ thus proving satisfactorily that M. Salomon Reinach and his friends knew what they were about in maintaining that Orpheus came over the mountains from the East. The miracle accomplished, the priests come in to take note of it, the young lovers fall into each other’s arms, the goddess retires to the lake, and the god goes up a staircase, which is disclosed behind by the removal of a mountain, and remains glued to it, in spite of the stage directions that he is supposed to fly to heaven. Being a god, he presumably thought he could please himself.
“The scenario does not give quite so many opportunities to M. Reynaldo Hahn as to MM. Bakst and Fokine, who are responsible for the pictorial and choreographic sides of the ballet. The theme associated with the god is the most striking. The dance with the peacocks is attractive, there are some beautiful moments when the young girl appeals to her lover, and their duet of joy at the end is spirited, but much of the music is lacking in character and the energy of the dance. It is written with the beautifully clear technique to whichM. Hahn has accustomed us, but there is little driving force in it, and not a touch of passion in the scenes where passion is wanted to give contrast to the personal movements of the crowd or the calm atmosphere of the divinities.”
Le Pavilion d’Armideis a graceful combination of two picturesque periods of romantic art, for a French Vicomte, storm-stayed on his travels, is offered hospitality by a Marquis, who lodges him in a pavilion of his castle, where the Gobelin tapestry comes to life during the night. The whole thing is, of course, a dream, in which the Vicomte sees in the Magician of the tapestry the person of his host, and himself plays the part of Rinaldo (the characters are those of Quinault’s play set to music by Lulli and Gluck). When the change comes and Armida and her court come to life, what really comes to life is the court of Versailles; here is the Grand Monarque himself, and there the most enchanting group of knights in pink with feather head-dresses dance with ladies whose costumes combine the grace of Watteau with the conventional dancing-skirt with the happiest results.
In the dances fromPrince Igor, accompanied by a chorus, the Russians loosen their restraint to adegree which would mean a totally unrestrained performance in the hands of another group of dancers. It is almost impossible to believe, after witnessing these wild Polovtsian dances, that the action has been perfectly ordered by Fokine and can be repeated exactly at any time. The ballet occupies almost all of the fourth act of Borodine’s opera. I believe that the choruses to which these dances are performed were sung at a concert of the MacDowell Chorus in Carnegie Hall, March 3, 1911. The New York Winter Garden once utilized the music for a ballet. The scene used by the Russians, painted by Roerich, is marvelously suggestive of barbarism; the now languorous, now passionate music, pulsing with rhythm, is admirably adapted to dancing. Usually Mme. Fokina and Bolm are seen in these dances, but it is the ballet corps itself which becomes the important feature in their success.
“How excellently,” says one foreign critic, “every means that the theatre offers has been made use of to produce the desired effect; the menace of the coming cloud of barbarians that is to lie for centuries on the desolate face of Russia (for we are in the camp of the Polovtsians, forerunners of thegreat invasion); not the loud blustering of a Tamburlaine the Great, but the awful, quiet vigor, half melancholy, half playful, of a tribe that is but a little unit in the swarm; the infinite horizons of the steppe, with the line of the buriedtumulistretching away to endless times and places, down the centuries into Siberia; the long-drawn, resigned, egoless music (Borodine drew his themes from real Tartar-Mongol sources); the women that crouch, unconscious of themselves, or rise and stretch lazy limbs, and in the end fling themselves carelessly prone when their dance is over; the savage-joyful panther leaping of the men; the stamping feet and quick, nerve-racking beat of the drum; and more threatening than all, the gambolling of the boys, like kittens unwittingly preparing themselves for the future chase.”
But whose is the guiding hand, the hand that combines the rhythms, the colors, and the human element in these works? It is Fokine’s; without Fokine I do not see very well how these ballets could come into existence. (I am now speaking of Fokine, of course, entirely as a producer. He is also known as a dancer. One must bear in mind, also, that Nijinsky’s three ballets—he contrivedthe action forl’Après-midi d’un Faune,Jeux, andThe Sacrifice to the Spring—were very original and effective.) Until Fokine began to work, the ballet-master had been content to arrange all hiscoryphéesin straight lines across the stage, each dancer making the same simultaneous movement as her neighbor. Fokine divined the ineffectiveness of this false symmetry. He divided his forces into many groups, each group a unit in movement. (The ultimate result of the application of this principle was Nijinsky’s staging ofThe Sacrifice to the Spring, in which each dancer was set a separate simultaneous task.) Nor did Fokine allow any one group of dancers the whole of any movement in the music. He subdivided the movements into phrases. He really divided his ballet into choirs, just as Richard Strauss and Reger subdivided the orchestra, in which, in the time of Bellini and Donizetti, large bodies of the strings used to play in unison. Then each choir was given certain phrases to interpret, some in the background, some in the foreground, until the polyphony of the music was perfectly synchronized with the action of the ballet. Many of the ideas for Fokine’s ballets were derived from pictures. It ispossible to see at once the pictorial resemblance betweenThe Legend of Josephand Veronese’sThe Marriage at Cana, or betweenMidasand Mantegna’sParnassein the Louvre. But Fokine also learned how to control movement, and how to preserve balance from pictures. In the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice there is a room devoted to large paintings by Gentile Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio, depicting events in Venetian history. In one of them is a procession, and a study of the different groups of marchers and bystanders will give you an excellent idea of the effective and pictorial intricacy of a Fokine ballet. InThe Legend of JosephFokine attains one of his most thrilling effects in the last scene, where the handmaidens of the refused Potiphar’s wife, clad in black gauze, with bare arms and legs, wave their arms in a frenzy of hysterical disdain at the offending Joseph. Shortly after seeing the ballet, in walking through the Egyptian rooms of the British Museum, I came across an Egyptian fresco which almost seemed to me at first, in the exact spirit in which Fokine had caught its feeling, to be a photograph of the action I had seen on the stage.
Russians are natural dancers. It is said that only Russians and Poles can learn to do the mazurka properly, in which the women engage in that peculiar gliding step which someone characterized as the definite expression of Meredith’s phrase, “gliding women.” So, under the guidance of Fokine, with the inspiration which such music and color as are provided for them can give, the Russians engaged in the carrying out of these ballets easily rise to an unattainable (for other dancers) height of seeming spontaneity. They have that “like-to-do-it” and creative (as opposed to reproductive) air which every stage director knows is almost impossible to instill into a large company with any hope that it will be retained after the first performance. But the Russians never lose it. A ballet, given so often asSheherazade, during a period extending over many seasons, always seems freshly produced. There are no slovenly details. The wild orgy of the Polovtsian dances ofPrince Igoris invariably exposed with a feeling on the part of the spectator that he is witnessing the intense enjoyment of the participants.
Another important point is the variety in the ballets, a variety which covers not only subjectand music, but also treatment in decoration and staging, so that such an ultra-modern work asThe Sacrifice to the Spring, staged by Nijinsky in an attempt to emulate the style of the futurists in painting, with music by Strawinsky, who might be called a master of dissonance, and with decorations in hard and primitive colors by Roerich, finds itself naturally side by side with the charming and poeticSylphides, gracefully staged by Fokine, with music by Chopin (orchestrated), and with decorations in pale green and white by Bakst. Of course, some ballets, because of their fables, or the nature of their music, naturally resemble one another.Sheherazade,Cléopâtre, andThamarall have certain points in common; so haveLes Sylphides,Carnaval, andPapillons. There is a resemblance betweenDaphnis et Chloë,Narcisse, andl’Après-midi d’un Faune. But it is easy to vary these likenesses by not putting them into juxtaposition, by mingling them with the bizarrePetrouchka, the barbaric Polovtsian dances fromPrince Igor, the idealisticSpectre de la Rose, with Weber’sInvitation to the Danceas its accompaniment, the gorgeous and pompousLegend of Joseph, the frivolousMidas, the exoticLe DieuBleu, or the pageantry of the dances from Rimsky-Korsakow’sSadko.
It is impossible, of course, to ignore the genius and virtuosity of individual interpretation entirely in a study of the Russian Ballet, minimize as one may its importance. There have been very many pages written in an attempt to capture the charm and genius of Nijinsky on paper. He has been described variously as “half-human, half-god,” as a tongue of flame, and as a jet of water spurting from a fountain. The word “youth” expresses something of the wonder of this marvelous boy. He never seems to be doing anything difficult, and yet his command of technique is incredible. He always seems spontaneous, and yet I have been told that, like Olive Fremstad, he does not make the slightest movement of a finger which has not been carefully thought out. He seems to me to be the greatest of stage artists (and I include all concert musicians as well as opera singers and actors in this sweeping statement). I mean by this that he communicates more of beauty and emotion to me as a spectator than other interpretative artists do. All impressions of this sort are necessarily personal, but they do not for that reasonlack value. It is essential, however, to see Nijinsky in a variety of parts to get his true measure. As the lover of the sylphs inLes Sylphideshe is a paleefféminé, a Chopiniac, a charming Aubrey Beardsley drawing, a lovely thing in line, and grace, and sentiment. InPetrouchkahe is a puppet, and—remarkable touch—a puppet with a soul. His performance in this ballet (the characters are marionettes, but the story is something like that ofPagliacci) is, perhaps, his most wonderful achievement. He suggests only the puppet in action; his facial expression never changes; yet the pathos is greater, more keenly carried over the footlights, than one would imagine possible under any conditions. I have seen Fokine in the same rôle, and although he gives you all the gestures, the result is not the same. It is genius that Nijinsky puts into his interpretation of the part. Who can ever forget Nijinsky as Petrouchka when thrown by his master into his queer black box, mad with love for the dancer, who, in turn, prefers the Moor puppet, rushing about waving his pathetically stiff arms in the air, and finally beating his way with his clenched fists through the paper window and cursing the stars? It is a morepoignant expression of grief than most Romeos can give us.Jeuxshows us the love games of a trio (two women and a man) searching for a tennis ball in a garden at twilight. It recalls itself to me chiefly for theglissando(the music is by Debussy) with which the ballet begins as the tennis ball bounces across the stage, followed by Nijinsky, who bounds across the broad stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris in two leaps. These leaps are triumphs of dexterity, grace of motion, and thrill, and he does not waste them. They have given rise to the rumor that Nijinsky’s element is the air. Inl’Après-midi d’un Faunehe makes only one of these quick movements, but with such astonishing effect that on one occasion (it was the third time I had seen this stage arrangement of Debussy’s prelude to Mallarmé’s poem) my companion, a well-known dramatic critic who sits stolidly through performances by all the great tragedians, burst into tears. InSheherazade, as the black slave of the harem who dominates the story of the ballet, Nijinsky utilizes his leap to dominate the bacchanale, which is the climax of that piece of sensual excitement. As the crowd of women, wives of the sultan, and black slaves, drunk withwine and lust, enter into the wildest dance, the negro in silver trousers in the centre of the stage leaps higher and higher straight into the air above the heads of his companions.... The descent, with the indescribable curve of the legs, is something to be seen. InCarnaval, Nijinsky enacts the Harlequin with great roguishness and impertinence. To the piece calledReconaissancehe dances with Karsavina, as Colombine, the most entrancing of polkas. His dancing of the piece calledPaganini, however, is most memorable. At that point where the dominant seventh on E flat emerges through a deft use of the pedal, he represents the effect to perfection by suddenly sitting down, as a writer on the “London Times” once noted. It is not, as a matter of fact, as a mere dancer that Nijinsky excels, although hedoesexcel even there, but it is in the poetic interpretation of his rôle, the genius in his playing, that he expresses so much more than his nearest rival. He is incomparable as a dancer, as you may very well see in works likeCarnavalandLes Sylphides, in which dancing dominates the action; but even in these ballets he never loses sight of characterization, and the shaded values of ensemble.
Tamara Karsavina is a very beautiful woman, although her beauty has not the subtle quality of the more gifted Anna Pavlowa. She is an artist and a fine dancer, a mime of great talent. She fits more perfectly into an ensemble scheme than Pavlowa, who was once a member of this organization herself. She is delicate and flower-like and she suggests vice with a great degree of verisimilitude. Her Salome, with the painted roses on her nude knees and breasts, is a fragile bit of decadence. As the temptress Queen ofThe Golden Cockshe suggests the strange perverted power of a Kundry, an Astarte, or a Loreley. InThe Legend of Josephit is her duty to sit at a table without changing her expression throughout almost an entire act. It is a difficult task; one must perceive the depths of the woman’s boredom, which does not express itself even in impatience, and she must dominate the scene. She accomplishes her tasks beautifully, as she does also the long walk across the stage in stilted Venetian shoes at the close of the scene. InPetrouchkashe is a fitting companion to Nijinsky, and her little dance with the cornet is a delicious and entrancing moment; her Chloë is exquisite, soft, Greek, and girlish, and inRavel’s ballet and in Florent Schmitt’sSalomeshe danceson her toesin bare feet (remember that half the so-called “toe-dancers” resort to padded and reinforced slippers for their power). I never lack enthusiasm for Karsavina; but I cannot place her near Nijinsky.
The crescendo of eulogy with which these notes progress seems unavoidable. If one is in sympathy with the aims of this group of artists (Gordon Craig is not, I believe), one must recognize the success with which they have carried them out. Naturally, there are flaws. Doboujinsky’s costumes forMidasare certainly very hard in color; Steinberg’s music for the same ballet, a series of futile brass blares; the story itself (Bakstshouldconfine himself to painting), a bore. Miassine is scarcely the dancer one would have chosen for so important a rôle as Joseph, which, on the other hand, he is suited to physically. Karsavina’s portrayal of the ultimate emotions of Potiphar’s wife is a little unconvincing. I do not even admire Bakst’s setting for his very lovely costumes inl’Après-midi d’un Faune. But these are very small insects in the amber of enjoyment.
November, 1915.
November, 1915.