Chapter 10

Angus McBeanSadler’s Wells Ballet: Frederick Ashton, Ninette de Valois, Leonide Massine

Angus McBean

Sadler’s Wells Ballet: Frederick Ashton, Ninette de Valois, Leonide Massine

Sadler’s Wells Ballet: Beryl Grey as the Princess Aurora

BaronSadler’s Wells Ballet: Nadia Nerina inFaçade

Baron

Sadler’s Wells Ballet: Nadia Nerina inFaçade

Roland PetitGermaine Kanova

Roland Petit

Germaine Kanova

Roger WoodSadler’s Wells Ballet: Margot Fonteyn and Alexander Grant inTiresias

Roger Wood

Sadler’s Wells Ballet: Margot Fonteyn and Alexander Grant inTiresias

MagnumSadler’s Wells Ballet: John Field and Violetta Elvin

Magnum

Sadler’s Wells Ballet: John Field and Violetta Elvin

BaronSadler’s Wells Ballet:Le Lac des Cygnes—John Field and Beryl Grey

Baron

Sadler’s Wells Ballet:Le Lac des Cygnes—John Field and Beryl Grey

Sadler’s Wells Ballet: Last Act ofLe Lac des CygnesBaron

Sadler’s Wells Ballet: Last Act ofLe Lac des Cygnes

Baron

MagnumSadler’s Wells Ballet:Giselle—Robert Helpmann and Margot Fonteyn

Magnum

Sadler’s Wells Ballet:Giselle—Robert Helpmann and Margot Fonteyn

BaronSadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet: Elaine Fifield as Swanilda inCoppélia

Baron

Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet: Elaine Fifield as Swanilda inCoppélia

Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet: David Blair and Svetlana Beriosova inCoppéliaRoger Wood

Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet: David Blair and Svetlana Beriosova inCoppélia

Roger Wood

BaronSadler’s Wells Ballet:A Wedding Bouquet

Baron

Sadler’s Wells Ballet:A Wedding Bouquet

Sadler’s Wells Ballet: Act I.The Sleeping Beauty—The Princess falls beneath the spell of CarabosseBaron

Sadler’s Wells Ballet: Act I.The Sleeping Beauty—The Princess falls beneath the spell of Carabosse

Baron

Agnes de Mille

John Lanchbery, Conductor, Sadler’s Wells Theatre BalletDenis de Marney

John Lanchbery, Conductor, Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet

Denis de Marney

John Hollingsworth, Conductor, Sadler’s Wells BalletMaurice Seymour

John Hollingsworth, Conductor, Sadler’s Wells Ballet

Maurice Seymour

Robert Irving, Musical Director, Sadler’s Wells BalletBaron

Robert Irving, Musical Director, Sadler’s Wells Ballet

Baron

The Sadler’s Wells production ofThe Sleeping Beauty: Puss-in-Boots

Robert Helpmann as the Rake inThe Rake’s ProgressBaron

Robert Helpmann as the Rake inThe Rake’s Progress

Baron

Sadler’s Wells Ballet: Rowena Jackson as Odile inLe Lac des CygnesDerek Allen

Sadler’s Wells Ballet: Rowena Jackson as Odile inLe Lac des Cygnes

Derek Allen

Colette MarchandLido

Colette Marchand

Lido

BaronMoira Shearer

Baron

Moira Shearer

Moira Shearer and DaughterCentral Press Photo

Moira Shearer and Daughter

Central Press Photo

BaronSadler’s Wells Ballet:Symphonic Variations—Moira Shearer, Margot Fonteyn, Michael Somes, Pamela May

Baron

Sadler’s Wells Ballet:Symphonic Variations—Moira Shearer, Margot Fonteyn, Michael Somes, Pamela May

Sadler’s Wells Ballet: America is closer: loading at Port of London

Sadler’s Wells Ballet: Scenery and costumes start the trek for AmericaAcme-PA

Sadler’s Wells Ballet: Scenery and costumes start the trek for America

Acme-PA

GyenesAntonio Spanish Ballet: Antonio

Gyenes

Antonio Spanish Ballet: Antonio

Antonio Spanish Ballet:SerenadaGyenes

Antonio Spanish Ballet:Serenada

Gyenes

doing her something less than justice if I failed to call attention to a supreme quality in her work, viz., that quality of implied ease in all she does, bringing unstrained pleasure to the onlooker; coupled as it is with a spiritual quality with which her performances seem to shimmer. All these things, so far as I am concerned, add up to aballerinaabsolutely unique in my experience.

Margot Fonteyn is, to me, the true artist, because a great dancer must be a human being before she is an artist; her art must, in the last resort, be the expression of her personal attitude to life. She is many-sided; and the wonder is that she is able to have this breadth of cultural outlook when so much of her time has had to be spent in acquiring technique, dealing with its problems and the means of expression.

No amount of technique, no amount of technical brilliance or recondite knowledge will hide the paucity of emotion or intellect in an artist’s make-up. Technique, after all, is no more than the alphabet and the words of an art, and it is only the difficulty of acquiring a superlative technique that has led so many astray. But along what a fatal path they have been led! How often are we told that the true artist must devote her whole energies to her art, without the realization that art is the highest expression of mankind and has value only in so far as it is enriched with the blood of life.

As for Fonteyn, the person, whom I love and admire, I have no gossip to offer, few anecdotes, no whisperings. About her there is not the slightest trace of pose, pretentiousness, or pettiness. While she is conscious she is a greatballerina, one of the top-ranking artists in any art in the world today, she is equally conscious she is a human being. Basically, she is shy and quite humble. Splendidly poised, immaculately and impeccably groomed, chic in an international rather than in a Parisian sense, she is definitely an elegant person. The elegance of her private appearance she carries over into her appearance as aballerina. Anna Pavlova, of all other dancers I have known, had this same quality.

Usually Margot dresses in colors that are on the dark side, like her own personal coloring. Small-featured, small-boned, her clothes, exquisite in cut, are strikingly simple. She is not given to jewelry, save for earrings without which I cannot remember ever having seen her. She is remarkably beautiful, but not in the G.I. pin-up type sense. Again there is the similarity to Anna Pavlova, who would look elegant andchictoday in anysalonor drawing-room, becauseher elegance was timeless. By all this, I do not mean to suggest that Fonteyn’s Christian Dior evening frocks and day dresses are not modish, but nothing she wears suggests the “latest word.”

One more word about her actions. I have mentioned her complete lack of pretentiousness. I should like to emphasize her equal lack of apparent awareness of her exalted position in her chosen calling. With the company, she makes no demands, puts on no airs. There is no false grandeur and none of the so-called “temperament” that many lesserballerinasfeel called upon to display upon the slightest provocation, and often upon no provocation at all. She is one who submits to the discipline of a great and continuous and uninterrupted and secure company. Fonteyn works as hard, with daily classes and rehearsals, mayhap harder, as any other of the large personnel. Her relations with the company are on the same plane. When the company travels in buses, Margot piles into the buses with them, joins in with the company at all times, is a member of it and an inspiration to it. The company, individually and collectively, love her and have the highest respect for her.

Margot’s warning to me not to try to disturb her before a performance had nothing to do with pose or “temperament.” It is simply that in order to live up to her reputation she has a duty, exactly as she has a duty to the role she is to enact, and because of these things, she has the artist’s natural nervousness increased before the rise of the curtain. She must be alone and silent with her thoughts in order to have herself under complete control and be at her best.

In all ballet I have never known a finer colleague, or one possessed of a greater amount of genuine good-heartedness. The examples of this sort of thing are endless, but one incident pointing it up stands out in my mind.

A certain Americanballerinawas on a visit to London. Margot invited this American girl to go to Paris with her. “Freddy” Ashton was also coming along, she said, and it would be fun.

“I can’t go,” replied the Americanballerina. “I’ve nothing to wear that’s fit to be seen in Paris.”

“Come, come, don’t be silly,” replied Margot. “Here, take this suit of mine. I’ve never worn it.”

And she handed over a new Christian Dior creation.

Now Margot at that time was by no means too blessed with the world’s goods, and could not afford a new Dior outfit too often.

On their arrival in Paris, the group telephoned me at the Meurice and came to see me. Turning to the Americanballerina, a long-time friend of mine, I could not help admiring her appearance.

“Wheredidyou get that beautiful suit?” I enquired.

“Margot gave it to me, isn’t she sweet?” she replied, quite simply.

This is Margot Fonteyn: always ready to share with others; always thinking of others, least of all, of herself.

The following incident sums up the Margot Fonteyn I know and love. On the final night of the second American tour, after the last performance, I gave a farewell supper for the entire company at the Chateau Frontenac, in Quebec City. There were speeches, of which more later. When they were over, acorps de balletmember spontaneously rose to propose a toast to Margot Fonteyn, on her great personal triumph in North America. The rounds of applause that followed the toast reminded me of the opening night at the Metropolitan in New York. That applause had come from an audience of paying customers, who had just witnessed a new dancer scoring a triumph in an exciting performance. The applause that went on for minutes and minutes, came from her own colleagues, many of whom had grown up with her from the School. My eyes were moist. After a long time, Fonteyn rose to thank them. In doing so, she reminded them that aballerinawas only as good as her surroundings and that it was impossible for aballerinato exist without the perfect setting, which they provided.

Here was a great artist, the greatest livingballerinawe of the western world know, with all her triumphs, all her successes about her, at the apex of her career; very much of the present, here was the true artist, the loyal comrade, the humble, grateful human being.

From Chicago, a long journey to Winnipeg for a four-day engagement to be filled at the request of the British Council and David Webster, following a suggestion from H. M. the King. Winnipeg had suffered shocking damage from floods, and His Majesty had promised Winnipeg a visit from the Ballet while it was in America as a gala to lift the spirits of the people.

Here the company had its first taste of real cold, for the thermometer dropped to thirty-two degrees below zero. The result was that when it came time to entrain for the journey half-way across the continent to Boston, the next point on the itinerary, the baggage car doors were so frozen that they had to be opened with blowtorches and charges of explosives.

It was a four-day and three-night journey from Winnipeg to Boston, in sub-zero, stormy weather. The intense cold slowed the locomotives and froze the storage batteries, with the result that save for the lounge-bar car, the cars were in complete darkness and were dimly lighted at bed-time by a few spluttering candles. The severe cold had also caused the steam lines in the train to freeze, so that the temperature inside the cars was such that all made the journey wrapped in overcoats and blankets, wearing the heterogeneous collection of ear-lapped caps which they had purchased, even to North-west Canadian wool and fur shakos that blossomed in Winnipeg. Somewhere east of Chicago the “Sadler’s Wells Special” got itself behind the wreck of a freight train which had blocked the tracks, necessitating a long detour over the tracks of another railway, causing still further delays. Nine hours late, the ice-covered train bearing a company that had gone through the most gruelling train adventure of the tour, limped into Boston’s South Station.

There followed a tense period, for the minimum time required to set and lightThe Sleeping Beautyis twelve hours. It was another case of “touch and go.” Two hours were required to get the train broken up and all the scenery cars placed for unloading; then the procession of great trucks from the cars to the Opera House commenced; there followed the unloading, the taking-in, the hanging, the setting, the installation of all the heavy and complicated lighting equipment, for the theatres of America, for the most part, are either poorly equipped or not at all, and the Boston Opera House is in the latter category. Hundreds of costumes had to be unpacked, pressed, and distributed. But such is the efficiency of the Sadler’s Wells organization, its general stage director, the late Louis Yudkin, and our own American staff, together with the valued assistance of the Boston local manager, Aaron Richmond, that the curtain rose at the appointed minute.

I had gone to Boston for the duration of the engagement there. Bearing in mind the extensive travelling the company had had, climaxed by the harrowing journey from Winnipeg, I was concerned about their fatigue and also how it might affect the quality of the performance. My memory of the BostonpremièreofThe Sleeping Beautyis that it was one of the very best I had seen anywhere. Sir Oliver Franks, the British Ambassador, and Lady Franks, together with Lord Wakehurst, head of the English-Speaking Union, one ofthe Governors of the Covent Garden Opera Trust, and now Governor-General of Northern Ireland, came to Boston for the opening, and greeted the company at a delightful supper and reception following the performance. Lord Wakehurst has been a veritable tower of strength in the development of international cultural relations during the Sadler’s Wells tours; together with Lady Wakehurst, he is a charming host whose hospitality I have enjoyed in their London home.

The interest of Sir Oliver Franks, Lord Wakehurst, and the British Council as evidenced throughout the entire tour, together with the splendid cooperation of the English-Speaking Union, all helped in one of the main reasons for the tour, quite apart from any dollars the company might be able to garner. That was the extension of cultural relations between the two great English-speaking nations.

Cultural relations are basically a matter of links between individuals rather than links between governments, and such a tour as Sadler’s Wells made, bringing the richness of British ballet to hundreds of thousands of individuals, helps develop those private relationships; and the sum of them presents a comprehensive picture of Britain to the world. In our struggle for peace in the world, nothing is more essential than cultural understanding. It should be pointed out that the British Council does not send overseas companies primarily for financial gain, and its policy in these matters is not dictated by financial considerations.

The charter of UNESCO states that since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed. Personally, I am inclined to doubt if wars ever begin in the minds of men, but I should be the last to dispute that it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.

It was on the 28th January, 1951, that the greatest ballet tour in North American history came to an end in Quebec City. It was a night of mixed feelings. The company was, of course, eager to get home to London, and also had a longing to continue here. There were the tugs of parting on the part of our American staff. Our American Sadler’s Wells Orchestra, forty-odd strong, the largest orchestra to tour with a ballet company in America, adored the company and the curtain had to be held on the last ballet on the programme, for the entire orchestra lined up to collect autographed photographs of their favorites, and refused to heed the orchestra personnel manager’s frantic pleas to enter the pit before each musician had his treasured picture. It was quite unusual, I assure you, for musicians are not noted for their interest in aballerina. A sentimental, romantic interest between a musician and a dancer is something quite different, and is not at all unusual.

Although it was Sunday night, when the “blue laws” of Quebec frown upon music, gaiety, and alcohol, we managed, nevertheless, to have a genuine farewell celebration, which took the form of an after-performance dinner at the Chateau Frontenac. The company got into their evening-clothes for the last time on this side of the Atlantic, piled into buses at the theatre and returned to the hotel, while the “Sadler’s Wells Special” that was to take them back to Montreal, waited at the station. It waited a long time, for the night’s celebration at the Chateau lasted until four-thirty in the morning. It was a festive affair, with as fine a dinner as could be prepared, and the wines and champagne were both excellent and ample. We had set up a pre-dinner cocktail room in one of the Chateau’s private rooms, and had taken the main restaurant, the great hall of the Chateau, for the dinner. Before the dancing commenced—yes, despite the long tour, despite the two days the company had spent skiing and tobogganing in Quebec, with three performances in an inadequate theatre, they danced—the dessert was served. I should like to list the entire menu, but the dessert will give an indication of its nature. The lights in the great dining room were extinguished, the orchestra struck a chord, and a long line of waiters entered each bearing flaming platters ofOmelette Norvegienne Flambée des Mignardires.

The guests included the Premier of Quebec and officials of the Quebec Government. The only note that dimmed the gaiety of the occasion was the absence of Dame Ninette de Valois and David Webster, both in London preparing for the new season. It was not an occasion for long speeches; our hearts and our stomachs were too full. However, I expressed my sincere thanks to the entire organization and, in the absence of “Madame” and Webster, Herbert Hughes, the general manager of the Ballet, replied, and announced to the company the figures for the tour, amidst cheers. Then followed the touching incident of the toast to Fonteyn I have mentioned.

Before the dancing began, a sudden mania for autographs started, with everybody collecting every other person’s autograph on the large, specially printed menus, which I had previously autographed. Apparently all wanted a menu as a souvenir of a venture that had gone down in the annals of ballet and entertainment as the greatest success of all time.

From then on the dancing was general, the gaiety waxed higher. I was doing aschottischewith the two-hundred-fifty pound Cockney Chief Carpenter, Horace Fox, when one of my staff who was responsible for transportation slid up to the orchestra leader and whispered “The King!” We all stood silently at attention for the last time. It was well past four in the morning, and it was to be yet another case of “touch and go” if the “Sadler’s Wells Special” could make Montreal in time for the departure of the special BOAC planes which were to take the company back to London.

The company changed into traveling clothes as quickly as possible, and buses slithered down the steep slopes of Quebec to the Station, where harried railroad officials were holding the train. There was yet another delay for one person who was left behind on urgent business, finally to be seen coming, with two porters carrying his open bags and yet another bellboy with unpacked clothes and toilet articles. As the last of the retinue was pushed aboard, the train started. But it was long before sleep came, and for another two hours the party continued up and down the length of the train, in compartments, bedrooms, washrooms, as staff, orchestra, stage-hands broke all unwritten laws of fraternization.

All were asleep, however, when the train swayed violently and with groaning and bumping came to a sudden stop. It was the last journey and it, of course, simply had to happen. The flanges on the wheels of two of the baggage cars that had made the 21,000-mile journey gave way just as the train started the long crossing of the Three Rivers Bridge between Quebec and Montreal. Fortunately, we were moving slowly at the approach to the bridge, slowing down for the crossing, or else—I shudder to think what might have occurred if we had been trying to make up time—the greatest tour of history would have ended in a ghastly tragedy.

As a result of the derailment taking place on the bridge, we were hours late arriving in Montreal. But the tour was over!

Here was a tour where every record of every sort had been broken. It had reached the point where, if there was a pair of unoccupied seats in any auditorium from coast to coast and back again, we were all likely to feel as if the end of the world was at hand. I have mentioned the mundane matter of the financial returns. From a critical point of view, I cannot attempt to summarize the spate of eulogy that greeted the company in every city. Cynics may have something to say about this, to the effect that the critics had beenoverpowered by size and glamor. But a careful consideration of it all, a sober analysis, disproves any suggestion that this was the result of any uncritical rush of blood to the head. On the contrary, it reveals that the critical faculty was carefully exercised and that the collective testimony to the excellence of Sadler’s Wells was based on sound appreciation.

It is impossible for me to bring to a close this phase of the concise history of the association in ballet of which I am the proudest in my life without sketching an outline of the quartet that makes Sadler’s Wells the great institution it is, together with a few of the outstanding personalities that give it color and are such an important part of it.

The list is long, and lack of space limits my consideration to a few. First of all, let me pay tribute to that directorial triumvirate to whom, collectively and individually, Sadler’s Wells owes its existence and its superior place in the world of ballet in our time: Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton, and Constant Lambert. Lamentably, the triumvirate is now a duo, owing to the recent untimely passing of the third member.

NINETTE DE VALOIS

I have more than once indicated my own deep admiration for Ninette de Valois and have sketched, as best I can, her tremendous contribution. In all my experience of artists, I have never known a harder worker, a more single-purposed practical idealist, a more concentrated and devoted human being. In addition to being the chief executive of Sadler’s Wells, burdened with the responsibility for two ballet companies and a school, she is a striking creator.

Living with her husband-physician down in Surrey, she does her marketing before she leaves home in the morning for the Garden; travels up on the suburban train; spends long hours at her work; goes back to Surrey, often late at night, sometimes to prepare dinner, since the servant problem in Britain is acute; and has been known to tidy up her husband’s surgery for the next morning, before herself calling it a day. All this, day in and day out, is done with zest and vigor.

An idealist she is and yet, at the same time, completely realistic. Without wishing to cast the remotest reflection on the feminine sex, I would say that Ninette de Valois has a masculine mind in her approach to problems artistic or business, and to life itself. She feelsthings passionately, and these qualities are apparent in everything she does. When her mind is made up, there is no budging her. In a less intelligent person this might be labelled stubbornness.

Like the majority of English dancers, prior to her establishment of a British national ballet, she was brought up in the traditions of Russian ballet. But it should be remembered that she was the first one to break up the foundation of the Russian tradition, utilizing its richness to create an English national school. At Sadler’s Wells, in collaboration with Constant Lambert, she has devoted a great deal of attention to the music of our time, although this has never taken the form of any denial or repudiation of the tradition of the old Russian school—on the contrary, her work at Sadler’s Wells has been a continuation and development of that school, using the new to enrich the old.

As a person with whom to work, I find her completely fascinating. I have never known any one even faintly like her. Her magnificent sense of organization is but one aspect of what I have called her “masculinity” of mind. Figures as well asfouettésare a part of her life. She is adept at handling both situations and individuals. Her dancers obey the slightest lifting of her eyebrows, for she is a masterful person, although quite impersonal in her mastery. She possesses the art of the single withering sentence. Her superb organizing ability has enabled her to surround herself with a highly able staff; but the sycophantic “yes-man” is something for which she has no time. Hers is a rapid-working mind, often being several leaps ahead of all others in a conference. Sincere, honest criticism she welcomes; anything other, she detests. I remember an occasion when a certain critic made a comment based on nothing more than personal bias and a twisted, highly personal approach. Her response was acid, biting, withering, and I was glad I was not on the receiving end.

I am sure that Ninette de Valois was convinced of her mission early in her career. That mission—to found a truly national British ballet—she has richly fulfilled. Much of the work involved in this fulfilment has been the exercise of great organizing and executive ability: in the formulation of policy and plans as well as carrying them out; in the employment of a large number of talented and efficient people; in determining the scale on which the venture should be conducted.

I have spoken of “Madame’s” ability to handle people. This has earned her, in some quarters, an undeserved reputation for being aforbidding and austere person. The fact that she is, as she must be, a strict disciplinarian with her company, does not mean that she cannot be a genuinely gay and amusing person. In certain respects, despite her Irish birth as Edris Stannus, she is a veritable English lady, in the best sense of the term, with an English lady’s virtues (and they are numerous). These virtues include, among others, a very definite, forceful, but quiet efficiency; more than average common sense; a passion for being fair; the inbred necessity for being economical. Against all this is set that quality of idealism that turned a dancing school into a great national ballet. Idealism dreamed it, practicality brought it to fruition.

In those far-off days before the second world war, when I used to visit the ballet in Russia, it was one of my delights to go to the classes of the late Agrippina Vaganova, one of the greatest of ballet teachers of all time, and to watch this wise and highly talented ballet-mistress at work.

I noted that it was Vaganova’s invariable custom to open her classes with a two or three minute talk, in which she would compliment the company, and individuals in particular, on their work in the ballet performance the night before, closing with:

“I am proud of you. Thank you very much.”

Then they would go to work in the class, subjected to the strictest discipline, and, sometimes, to the sharpest and most caustic sort of criticism imaginable. Then, at the end of the class, again came individual approbation and encouragement.

This is the sort of little thing I have never observed at Sadler’s Wells. It may, of course, be there; and again, it may not.

The Sadler’s Wells personnel love “Madame”; regard it as a high privilege to be a part of the Wells organization; do not look on their association merely as a “job.”

It might be that “Madame” could advantageously employ Vaganova’s method in this regard, use her example in her own relations with her company. Certainly, it could do no harm, as I see it. It may well be that she does. The point is that I have never seen it in practice.

In the better part of a lifetime spent in the midst of the dance, I can remember no one with a greater devotion to ballet, or one willing to make more sacrifices for it, and for the spreading of its gospel.

Let me cite just one example of this devotion. It was duringthe second North American tour of the Sadler’s Wells company that, despite all the demands made upon her time and energy, she was impelled to undertake a long lecture tour of Canada and the Northwest to spread the gospel of ballet and the British Council.

Herbert Hughes, the general manager, came to me to point out that since “Madame” had to do this, he felt we should send some one to accompany her, because she was unfamiliar with the country, and with the train and air schedules.

I fully concurred, in view of all he had said, and the possibility of inclement weather at that time of the year.

Together we approached “Madame” with the idea. It did not meet with her approval. It was quite unnecessary. She was quite able to take care of herself. She did not want any one “making a fuss” over her.

Of course, she would require funds for her expenses. Hughes prevailed upon her to accept $300 as petty cash. “Madame” stuffed the money into her capacious reticule.

When “Madame” rejoined the company, she brought back $137 of the $300. “This is the balance,” she said to Hughes, “I didn’t spend it.”

This entire lecture tour, in which she covered thousands of miles, was but another example of her tirelessness and Ninette de Valois’ single-track mind.

She was due to rejoin the company at the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles, on the morning of the Los Angelespremièreof the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, at which time we had arranged a large breakfast press-conference, over which “Madame” was to preside.

“Madame” was due by airplane from Vancouver early the previous evening. Hughes suggested that he should go to the airport to greet her, or that some one should be sent; but I vetoed the idea, remembering that “Madame” did not want a “fuss” made over her. Although the plane was due round about nine o’clock in the evening, midnight had produced no “Madame.” A telephonic check with the Terminal assured us the plane had arrived safely and on time. Hughes and I sat up until three-thirty in the morning waiting, but in vain.

I was greatly disturbed and exercised when, at nine the next morning, she had not put in an appearance. The press-conference was set for ten o’clock, and “Madame” was its most important feature. Moreover, I was concerned for her safety.

A few minutes before the start of the breakfast conference, unperturbed, unruffled, neat and calm as always, “Madame” entered the Ambassador foyer with her customary spirit and swift, sure gait.

We gathered round her. What had happened? Was she all right? Had anything gone wrong?

“Don’t be silly. Whatcouldgo wrong?”

But what had happened? We pressed for an explanation.

“The strangest thing, my dears,” she said. “When I arrived last night, I looked in my bag for the piece of paper on which I had noted the name of this hotel. I couldn’t find it; nor could I, for the life of me, remember it.”

“What did you do?”

“Do? I went to sleep at the airport.”

“And—?”

“And this morning I said to myself, ‘Come, pull yourself together.’ I tried an old law of association of ideas. I managed to remember the name of this hotel had something to do with diplomacy. ‘Diplomacy—Diplomacy,’ I said to myself.... ‘Embassy?... No, that’s not it.’ I tried again.... ‘Ambassador?’ ... There, you have it. And here I am.... Let us go, or we shall be late. Where is this press conference?”

That is Ninette de Valois.

Ninette de Valois’ work as a choreographer speaks for itself. Her approach to any work is always professional, always intellectual, never amateur, never sentimental. Some of her works may be more successful than others, whether they are academic or highly original, but each bears the imprint of one of the most distinctive, able, and agile minds in the history of ballet.

So far as I have been able to observe, Ninette de ValoisisSadler’s Wells. Sadler’s Wellsisthe national ballet of Britain. In looking objectively at the organization, with its two fine companies, its splendid school, I pray that Ninette de Valois may long be spared, for, with all its splendid organization, Sadler’s Wells and British national ballet are synonyms, and unless the dear lady has someone up her sleeve, I cannot, for the life of me, see a successor in the offing.

FREDERICK ASHTON

Frederick Ashton, the chief choreographer of the company, is the complete antithesis of his colleague. Where de Valois is realistic,“Freddy” is sentimental. Where “Madame” may sometimes be rigid, Ashton is adaptable. Some of his work is “slick” and smooth. He is a romantic, but by that I do not necessarily mean a “neo-romantic.”

Ashton was born in Ecuador, in 1909, which does not make him Ecuadorian, any more than the fact that he spent his childhood in Peru, makes him Peruvian. His British parents happened to be living there at the time. It is said that his interest in dance was first aroused upon seeing Anna Pavlova dance in far-off Peru.

Moving to London with his parents, “Freddy” had the privilege of being exposed to performances of the Diaghileff Company, and he had his first ballet lessons from Leonide Massine. Massine turned him over to Marie Rambert when he left London. It was for Rambert that he staged his first work,The Tragedy of Fashion, for the Nigel Playfair revue,Hammersmith Nights, in 1926. An interim in Paris with Ida Rubenstein, Nijinska, and Massine, was followed by a long time with Marie Rambert and her Ballet Club. The Paris interlude with Nijinska and Massine affected him profoundly. He was a moving figure in the life of the Camargo Society, and in 1935 he joined the Vic-Wells (later to be known as the Sadler’s Wells Ballet), as resident choreographer.

During the years between, Ashton has become England’s great creator. He is also a character dancer of wide variety, as witness his Carabosse inThe Sleeping Beauty, his shy and wistful Ugly Sister inCinderella. His contribution to ballet in England is tremendous. Nigh on to a dozen ballets for the Ballet Rambert; something between twenty-five and thirty for the Sadler’s Wells organization;Devil’s Holidayfor the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, a work which, because of the outbreak of the war, he was unable to complete, and which was never seen in this country with its creator’s full intentions; two works in New York for the New York City Ballet; and the original production of the Gertrude Stein-Virgil ThomsonFour Saints in Three Acts, in New York.

It is interesting to note the wide variety of his creative work by listing some of his many works, which, in addition to those mentioned above, include, among others, the following: For the Ballet Club of Marie Rambert:Les Petits Riens,Leda and the Swan,Capriol Suite,The Lady of Shalott,La Peri,Foyer de Danse,Les Masques,Mephisto Valse, and several others.

For that founding society of contemporary British ballet, which I have mentioned before, the Camargo Society:Pomona,Façade,The Lord of Burleigh,Rio Grande(originally known asA Day In a Southern Port), and other works.

I have already mentioned some of his outstanding works for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. Others includeNocturne, to Delius’sParis;Apparitions, to a Liszt-Lambert score;Les Rendez-vous, to a Constant Lambert score based on melodies by Auber, seen in America in the repertoire of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet; the deliciousA Wedding Bouquet, to an original score by Lord Berners and a Gertrude Stein text;Les Patineurs, to melodies by Meyerbeer; Constant Lambert’sHoroscope;Dante Sonata, to Liszt works arranged by Lambert;The Wise Virgins, to Bach arranged by Sir William Walton;The Wanderer, to Schubert; Walton’sThe Quest;Les Sirènes, by Lord Berners; the César FranckSymphonic Variations; the Coronation ballet of 1953—Homage to the Queen; and, in a sense, most importantly, the full lengthCinderella, utilizing the Prokofieff score; and the full length production of Delibes’Sylvia.

Actually, I like to think of Ashton as a dance-composer, moving freely with dramatic or symbolic characters.

In all my experience of ballet and of choreographers, I do not believe there is any one more conscientious, more hard-working, more painstaking at rehearsals. While his eye misses nothing, he never raises his voice, never loses his temper. Corrections are made firmly, but quietly, almost in seeming confidence. Always he has a good word for something well done. On occasion, I have noticed something to be adjusted and have mentioned it to him.

“Yes, yes, I know,” he would say.

“Aren’t you going to tell them?”

“You tell them,” Ashton would smile. “I can’t tell them. Go on, you tell them.”

This was in connection with a musical matter. The conductor in question was taking a portion of the work at a too rapid tempo. It involved “Freddy” telling the conductor the passage was being played too fast.

“No,” repeated “Freddy,” “it will work out. He will see it and feel it for himself. I don’t want to upset him.”

An extraordinarily conscientious worker, he is equally self-deprecating. Some of this self-deprecation can be found in his work, for there is almost always a high degree of subtlety about all of it. Among all the choreographers I know, there is none his superior or his equal in designing sheer poetry of movement. Ashton is able, inmy opinion, to bring to ballet some of that quality of enchantment that, in the old days, we found only with the Russians.

This self-deprecating quality of “Freddy’s” is at its strongest on opening nights of his works. It is very real and sincere.

“Everything I do is always a flop here in England, you know,” he will say. “They don’t like me.... I’ve done the best I can.... There you are.”

Despite this self-deprecation, Ashton, once his imagination is stirred, his inspiration stimulated, throws off a certain indolence that is one of his characteristics, knows exactly what he wants, how to get it, and goes about it. Like all creative artists, during the actual period of creation, he can be alternately confident and despairing, determined and resigned. Despite the reluctance to exercise his authority, he can, if occasion demands, put his foot down firmly, and does.

Yet, in doing so, I am certain that never in his life has he hurt any one, for “Freddy” Ashton is essentially a kind person.

Three Britishballerinasowe Ashton an immense debt: Margot Fonteyn, Moira Shearer, and Alicia Markova. It is due in large measure to Ashton’s tuition, his help, his sound advice, and his plastic sense that these fine artists have matured.

Every choreographer worthy of the name stamps his works with his own personality. Ashton’s signature is always apparent in his work. No matter how characteristic of him his works may be choreographically, they are equally dissimilar and varied in mood.

One of my great pleasures is to watch him at rehearsal, giving, giving, giving of himself to dancers. Before the curtain rises, that final expectant moment before the screen between dancer and audience is withdrawn, Ashton is always on the stage, moving from dancer to dancer: “Cheer up”.... “Back straight, duckie”.... “Present yourself”.... “Chin up, always chin up, darling.” ...

Personally, “Freddy” is an unending delight. Shy, shy, always shy, shy like the shy sister he plays inCinderella, he is always the good colleague, evincing the same painstaking interest in the ballets of others as he does in his own, something which I assure the reader is rare. I have yet to see “Freddy” ruffled, yet to see him outwardly upset. In his personal appearance he is always neat, carefully dressed. Even in the midst of hectic dress-rehearsals and their attendant excitements and alarums, I have never seen him anything but cool, neat, and well-groomed. There is never a fantastic “rehearsal costume” with “Freddy.”

The picture of “Freddy” that is uppermost in my mind is of him standing in the “Crush Bar” at Covent Garden, relaxed, at ease, listening more than talking, laughing in his self-deprecatory way, always alert, always amusing.

Ashton lives in London in a house in a little street quaintly called Yeoman’s Row, on the edge of Knightsbridge and Kensington. Here he often does his own cooking and here he works out his ideas. It is a tiny house, the work-center being a second-floor study, crowded with gramophone records, books, photographs and statuettes, all of which nearly obscure the red wall-paper. The statuettes are three in number: Anna Pavlova, Fanny Ellsler, and Marie Taglioni. The photographs range from good Queen Alexandra, through bull-fighters, to dancers.

The Sadler’s Wells hierarchy seems to travel in groups. One such group that seemed inseparable included Ashton, “Bobby” Helpmann, Margot Fonteyn, and Pamela May. Occasionally Constant Lambert would join in, to eat, to drink, to have fun. For “Freddy” is by no means averse to the good things of life.

“Freddy” Ashton is another of those figures of the dance who should never regard the calendar as a measure for determining his age. I believe the youthful spirit of Ashton is such that he will live to be a hundred-and-fifty; that, in 2075, he will be the last survivor of the founding of Sadler’s Wells, and will then be the recipient of a grand gala benefit at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where, that night, he will share the Royal Box with the then reigning monarch.

CONSTANT LAMBERT

It is difficult for me to write without emotion of the third of the trio, Constant Lambert, whose loss is deeply mourned by all who knew him, and by many who did not.

A picturesque figure, Lambert was a great conductor, a great musician, a composer of superior talents, a critic of perception, a writer of brilliance and incisiveness, a life-long student of the ballet. Lambert’s contribution to the making of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet has, I suspect, been given less credit than it deserves. I have said that, in my three decades-and-more of ballet management, I have never known a ballet company with such high musical standards. These standards were imposed by Constant Lambert. Not only didhe compose ballets for the company, but when music of other composers was used, it was Lambert who provided the strikingly brilliant orchestral arrangements—witness, as a few examples:Les Patineurs,Dante Sonata,The Faery Queen,Comus,Apparitions,Les Rendez-vous,Balabile, in which he made alive for ballet purposes the assorted music of Meyerbeer, Liszt, Purcell, Auber, Chabrier, respectively.

Born in London, in 1905, the son of a painter, brother of a well-known sculptor, he spent a substantial part of his childhood in Russia, where his grandfather supplied the Trans-Siberian Railway with its locomotives. He was a living proof of the fact that it was possible for an Englishman to be a musician without being suspected of not being a gentleman. His was an incisive mind, capable of quick reactions, with a widely ranging emotional experience.

With the Camargo Society, Constant Lambert established himself not only as a conductor, but as the musical mind behind British ballet. However, it was not an Englishman who discovered him as a composer. That honor goes to a Russian, Serge Diaghileff, who, when Lambert was bordering on twenty-one, commissioned him to write a ballet for his company. No other English composer shared that honor before Diaghileff died, although Diaghileff did produce, but did not commission, Lord Berners’The Triumph of Neptune. And so Lambert stands isolated, with hisRomeo and Juliet, which was first produced at Monte Carlo, in 1926, with Lifar and Karsavina as the protagonists; and his second ballet,Pomona, which Bronislava Nijinska staged at the Colon Theatre, Buenos Aires, in 1927.

Constant Lambert’s English education was at Christ’s Hospital. Early in his school days he underwent a leg operation that compelled him always to walk with a stick. All his life he was never entirely free from pain. At the Royal College of Music he was a pupil of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Ballet came into his life at an early date, and remained there until his untimely passing. To it he gave the best years of his life in acting as a sort of hair-spring to Ninette de Valois’ mainspring in the development of Sadler’s Wells. On his sound musical foundation Sadler’s Wells rests.

It is not within my province to discuss Lambert as a composer; but his accomplishments and achievements in this field were considerable. It is, of course, as a musician he will be remembered. But I could not regard Lambert as a musician pure and simple. He had a wide variety of interests, not the least of which was painting. Bothpainting and sculpture were in his family, and, from conversations with him I frequently got the notion that, had his technical accomplishments been other than they were, he would have preferred to have been a painter to a musician. Much of his music had a pictorial quality, witness his ballets,Romeo and Juliet,Pomona,Horoscope, andTiresias; observe hisPiano Concerto,Rio Grande(“By the Rio Grande, they dance no Sarabande”),Music for the Orchestra,Elegiac Blues(a tribute to the American Florence Mills), theMerchant Navy Suite,Summer’s Last Will and Testament, Hogarthian in color and treatment; and the work I shall always remember him conducting as a musical interlude in the first season in New York, theAubade Heroique, the reproduction in sound of a Dutch landscape, a remembrance of that dawn in Holland when Lambert, a visiting conductor with Sadler’s Wells, witnessed the invasion of The Hague by Nazi paratroopers.

It was as a conductor of Tchaikowsky that I feel he excelled. He was a masterly Tchaikowsky interpreter. I should have loved to hear him play the symphonies. I content myself, however, with hisSwan LakeandThe Sleeping Beauty, and the realization of how much these two Sadler’s Wells productions owe to him. Never was the music for an instant dull, for Lambert always conducted it with a fine ear for contrasts of brisk with languid, happiness withtoska.

Composer that he was, he devoted a large part of his life to conducting. His recordings are to be treasured. Conducting to him was not merely a source of livelihood, but a very definite form of self-expression, an important part of him. In my experience, I have found that composers are, as a rule, bad conductors, and conductors bad composers. Two exceptions I can name. Both British. Lambert was well nigh unique in his superlative capacity in both directions, as is Benjamin Britten today. Lambert, I feel, was not only one of the most gifted composers of his time, but also one of its finest interpretative artists. He had the unique quality of being able to enter wholeheartedly into the innermost essence of forms of art diametrically opposed to his own, even positively unsympathetic to him personally, and giving superlative performances of them.

Lambert was no calm liver, no philosophic hermit; a good deal of a hedonist, he met life considerably more than half way, and went out to explore life’s possibilities to the fullest. Moreover, he richly succeeded in doing so. He was a brilliant wit, both in writing and in conversation. His book,Music, Ho!, remains one of the moststimulating books of musical commentary and criticism of our time. He was the collector and creator of an innumerable number of magnificent but unprintable limericks, in the creation of which he was a distinct poet. He had composed a series of fifty on one subject—double bishops, i.e., bishops having more than one diocese, like Bath and Wells. A friend of mine who has heard Lambert recite them with that gusto of which only he was capable, tells me that they are, without doubt, one of the most brilliant achievements in this popular form.

Wit is one thing; stout-hearted, robust humor is another. Lambert had both. There was also a shyness of an odd kind, when a roaring laugh would give way to a fit of wanting to be by himself, wrapped in melancholy. His was a delicately poised combination of the introvert and the extravert, the latter expressing itself in the love of male company over pots of ale and even headier beverages. He had a keen appreciation of the good things of life.

This duality of personality was apparent in his physical make-up. There was something about his appearance that, in a sense, fitted in with the conventional portrait of John Bull. A figure of a good deal of masculine strength, he was big, inclined to be burly; his complexion was pink. He exhibited in himself a disconcerting blend of the most opposite extremes imaginable. On the one hand, a certain morbidity; on the other, a bluff and hearty roast-beef-and-Yorkshire Britishness. I have said that he resembled, physically, the typical drawing of John Bull. As a matter of fact, he bore an uncanny physical resemblance to Winston Churchill, and had elements in common with G. K. Chesterton. And a Hollywood casting director might have engaged him to play the role of the Emperor Nero, on strict type casting. He had an alert face on which humor often played good tunes, but on which, now and then, there used to settle a kind of stern gloom, not to be dispersed by any insensitive back-slapping.

He was as much at home in France as he was in England. His late adolescence and early manhood were spent in the hectic, feverish, restless ’twenties, with the Diaghileff Ballet and the French school of musical composition as the preponderant influences. As he grew older, his Englishness, if I may call it that, grew as well. The amazing thing to me was his ability to maintain such an even balance between the two.

Lambert had a passion for enigmas. He adored cats, and had a strange attraction to aquariums, zoos, and their fascinatingly enigmatic inhabitants. He was President of the Kensington Kittens’ and Neuter Cats’ Club, Incorporated. An important club, a club with a President who knew quite a lot about cats. There is a story to the effect that there was once a most handsome cat at London’s Albert Hall who was a close friend of Lambert’s, a cat called Tiddleywinks, a discriminating cat, and a cat with a certain amount of musical taste. Lambert, the President, would never proceed with the job he had to do at the Albert Hall without a preliminary chat with Tiddleywinks. And all would be well.

Constant Lambert was working on, among other things, an autobiography, concerning which he one day inquired about completely inaccessible places left in our shrinking world, particularly since the last war and James Norman Hall have pretty well exposed the South Pacific islands. What he actually wanted to know was an inaccessible place to which to hie after its publication, “because,” he said, “I’m telling the truth about everyone I know, including myself, and I shall have to flee the wrath of my ‘friends,’ and find a safe place where the laws of libel cannot reach me. You know, in my country at least, ‘the greater the truth, the greater the libel.’”

There was an infinite variety in his “drive.” He conducted ballet at Covent Garden; radio concerts at the British Broadcasting Corporation; symphony concerts, with special emphasis on Liszt and Sibelius, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra; made magnificent, definitive recordings; recited the Sitwell poems inFaçadeat every opportunity; composed fresh, vital works; made striking musical arrangements. He was at once composer, conductor, critic, journalist, an authority on railroad systems, trains, and locomotives, a student of the atom bomb, and a talker. There are those who insist he was not easy to get to know. It could be. He was, as I have said, shy. He was a highly concentrated individual, living a lot on his nerves. Despite this, to those who knew him, he was the friendliest of good companions, a perpetual stimulus to those who delighted in knowing him.

One had to be prepared, to be sure, to discover, in the middle of one of one’s own sentences (and, frequently, one of his own) that he was—gone. He would tilt his chin in the air, stare suddenly into far distant spaces, turn on his heel with the help of his stick, as swiftly as a ballet-dancer in apirouette, and silently vanish. He was a good listener—if one had anything to say. He did not suffer fools gladly, and to bores—that increasing affliction of our times—he presented aninflexible deafness akin to the switching-off of a hearing-aid, and a truly magnificent cast-iron rigidity of inattention. The bore fled. So did Lambert.

I have given some indication of the width of his interests. It was amazing. His gusto for life was unquenchable, and with it was a wise, shrewd appraisement of the human comedy—and tragedy. He was able to get through an enormous amount of work without ever seeming to do anything. Best of all, perhaps, he was able to enjoy a joke against himself. In this world of the arts and artists, where morbid egotisms and too exposed nerves victimize and vitiate the artist, it was a boon to him and an extraordinarily attractive characteristic.

Above all, he had an undying belief in British Ballet.

The last performance I saw Lambert conduct was the first performance of his last ballet,Tiresias, which was the occasion of a Gala in aid of the Ballet Benevolent Fund in the presence of H.M. the Queen and Princess Elizabeth, on the 9th July, 1951.Tiresiaswas a work on which Lambert had gone back to his collaboration with Frederick Ashton. The story he had made himself; it was a sort of composite of the myths about Tiresias; reduced to as much of a capsule as I can, it deals with the duality of Tiresias—as man and woman—and how he was struck blind by Hera, when Tiresias proves her wrong when she argues with Zeus that man’s lot is happier than woman’s. It was, this ballet, a sort of family affair in a sense; for Lambert’s wife, Isabel, designed scenery and costumes, setting the three-scened work on the Island of Crete.

After the first performance, we met at a large party to which I had gone with David Webster. Lambert and his wife, along with Ninette de Valois and Lady Keynes (Lydia Lopokova), joined us at supper. The ballet had been a long one, running quite a bit more than an hour, and there was general agreement among us that the work would benefit from judicious cutting. Lambert thoughtfully considered all the suggestions that were proffered; agreed that, conceivably, a cut or two might improve it, but the question was where and how, without damaging what he felt was the basic structure of the whole.

Not long after this, Lambert and I met at the door of Covent Garden, having arrived simultaneously. We had a brief chat, and he was his usual vastly courteous and amusing self.

A few days later, at the Savoy, my telephone rang quite early inthe morning. “Madame’s” secretary, Jane Edgeworth, at the other end, informed me Constant Lambert had just died. I was stunned.

It appeared that Lambert had been taken ill while at a party and had been rushed to London Clinic, one of London’s most exclusive and finest nursing-homes, on Sunday evening, the 19th August. It was on Tuesday morning, the 21st August, that I received the news of his death. The funeral was quite private, since the entire Sadler’s Wells company was away from London performing at the Edinburgh Festival. Lambert was buried from the Church of St. Bartholomew the Great, at Smithfield, in the City of London. So private was the service that almost no one was there, and there were no Pallbearers.

I was present at the Memorial Service, held at the famous Church of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, at Charing Cross, overlooking the National Gallery. There were gathered his sorrowing company, now returned from Edinburgh, headed by Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton, and David Webster. The address was given by the Reverend C. B. Mortlock. Robert Helpmann, an old colleague, read the Lesson. The chorus of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, sang Bach’sJesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. At the close, John Churchill, one of Britain’s greatest organists and an old friend of Lambert’s, played on the organ that elegiac work Lambert had composed at the rape of Holland, and which he had conducted so magnificently at the Metropolitan Opera House—hisAubade Heroique.

Here at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields his colleagues paid him honor. I was deeply moved. At the little funeral, I had been equally stirred. Here before me was all that remained of the great man who never took his greatness seriously; the man who would go to any trouble on behalf of those who tried, but who, for those who were lazy, or cynical, or thought themselves superior, and without justification, he had no use whatever. Here was a man about whom there was nothing of the academic recluse, but a man who loved life as he loved music, ballet, fully, strongly, with ever-growing zest and with ever-deepening understanding; the man who had done so much for ballet, its music, its standards; who had been of such vital importance in the fashioning of Sadler’s Wells. My thoughts went back to his creations, his arrangements. I was actually conscious of his imprint on all ballet. Memories of his wit, his brilliance, crowded into my mind.

I expected, I think, that with the sudden passing of a man of such fame, there would be an outpouring of thousands for his funeral, to pay their last, grateful respects. I was surprised. This was not the case, as I have explained. A few close distinguished friends and colleagues gathered beside the coffin in the Church of St. Bartholomew the Great, in the City: Sir William Walton, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Sir Arthur Bliss, Edmund Rubbra, Alan Rawsthorne, Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton, and Robert Helpmann who had hurried down from Edinburgh.

The service was brief and hushed. I was indeed very sad, and my thoughts traveled out to the little chapel in Golder’s Green, not so far as an angel flies, where lay all that was mortal of another genius of the dance and another friend, in the urn marked: “East Wall—No. 3711—Anna Pavlova.”

As Lambert’s body was borne from St. Bartholomew the Great’s gothic pile, I bowed my head low as a great man passed, a very lovable man.

DAVID WEBSTER

I have dwelt at some length on my impressions of the artistic directorate of Sadler’s Wells. Beyond and apart from the artistic direction of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, but very much responsible for its financial well-being, is David Lumsden Webster, the General Administrator of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

David Webster is not a head-line hunter. He is certainly not the press-agent’s delight. He does not court publicity. He permits his work to speak for itself.

On more than one occasion I have been appropriately chilled by a reading of the impersonal factual coldness of the entries in that otherwise useful volume,Who’s Who. The following quotation from it is no exception:

Back to Index Next