CHAPTER X
THE REPERTORY OF THE RUSSIAN BALLET
The Russian ballets are based upon an endless variety of themes, but the dancing may be said to draw its inspiration from three sources. First and foremost, of course, is the traditional method of the old Italian masters. This is the mother tongue of the ballet, which is spoken from Copenhagen to Moscow, with only the least perceptible trace of local accent. But this common language the Russians have refined to a purity unknown elsewhere; from being the vehicle of the stiff rhetoric of the conventional ballet, they have transformed it into a flexible speech, in which they have been able to utter such gem-like poems as _Le Spectre de la Rose_, _Le Carnaval_ and _Les Sylphides_. Next, they have gone for inspiration to their own national dances. They have refreshed the stage with the bracing air of the steppes. In the Polovtsian dances of _Prince Igor_ they have given to an art that was nurtured in courts and has always moved with courtly grace, the tigerish motions of a full-blooded barbaric life. Finally they have enlarged the scope of the ballet by making use of the classical and Oriental dance. And for the sources of the classical dance they have gone not only to Greece but to Egypt. The theme of _Cléopâtre_ is really the Egyptian attitude, just as the theme of _Scheherazade_ is the Eastern attitude.
The Diaghilew ballet has an extensive repertory, wide enough to display to the full the genius of the composers and the talents of the dancers. Naturally, during the six seasons in which it has appeared in Paris, its large variety has been better exhibited there than in London. The principal pieces which have been given at Covent Garden are _Le Pavillon d’Armide_, _Le Carnaval_, _Prince Igor_, _Les Sylphides_, _Le Spectre de la Rose_, _Cléopâtre_, _Scheherazade_.
_Le Pavillon d’Armide_ is a link with the old conventional ballet. The fable is full of unreason. The pavilion is a spacious apartment in an old French château, deriving its name from the personage who forms the subject of a piece of Gobelin tapestry on the wall. To this castle comes one night a storm-belated traveller. He is hospitably entertained by the wicked marquis, the owner of the castle, who is an amateur magician of considerable attainments. After admiring the pictured figure of Armide, he falls asleep. As he sleeps the figures on the tapestry come to life, and he is transported in dream to the Court of Armide, where her captive knights dance in a chain of roses. He conceives a grand passion for the princess, and the king, whom he does not recognise to be the wizard marquis, blesses their union. The magic Court vanishes and the traveller wakes to find himself still in the bare, dawn-lit chamber. When the marquis enters to ask how he has slept he recognises with horror that he is none other than the king in the dream. And yet it was not wholly a dream, for at the same time he finds the actual golden scarf which Armide had given to him in plighting her troth. He knows himself to have been the victim of a fatal enchantment, and thereupon somewhat irrelevantly dies.
M. Fokine has made of this irrational fable the framework of a number of dances which display the perfect unity and discipline of the dancers. But Nijinsky, as the servant of the traveller, and Karsavina, as Armide, are scarcely given adequate scope for their originality and faculty of interpretation. The thing is good of its kind--it is the perfection of the traditional _ballet d’action_--but it has been done before. The most satisfying feature of the performance is a dance of seven buffoons, of whom the premier buffoon is M. Rosai. Incidentally they execute several steps which technically are among the most difficult in the dancer’s repertory. But the chief merit of their display is its grotesque wit, the mimicry of the half-human antics of marionettes, executed with a faultless rhythmical precision.
The decoration was devised by M. Benois and, at all events
[Illustration: WASLAW NIJINSKY
IN _Le Pavillon d’Armide_
_Photograph: Gerschel_]
as it was presented at Covent Garden, it cannot be said to have been really successful. The pavilion had no other hint of a fatal spell than that which the lowered lights could suggest; the Court of Armide, who was surely twin-sister to “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” might have been made to evoke some vision akin to that which Keats saw of “pale kings and princes too, pale warriors, death-pale were they all.” But, perhaps largely owing to the faulty lighting, it was a rather garish spectacle, a noisy conflict of pure reds, greens and blues. Only for a moment did the scene really live,--when the mists began to wash round the battlements, the colours fused together in a trembling twilight, the tumult of the action died away and the motionless figures gazed after the victim traveller led away by his fatal lover.
But doubtless the composers of the ballet do not claim for it any special seriousness of intention. We are to take it or leave it as a simple _ballet d’action_ of the conventional school, no more than a groundwork for some very brilliant and elaborate dancing. It is only a failure when judged by canons which we should not think of applying to any ballet but that of M. Diaghilew.
The theme of _Le Carnaval_ may be regarded as even more flippant, but it expresses a series of purely musical ideas, and moreover it shows how the ballet can be made as witty as dialogue. It is an adaptation by M. Fokine of Schumann’s well-known pianoforte solo. Hardly a note has been added to Schumann’s music or taken away from it by the four composers who have skilfully provided the instrumentation--Rimsky-Korsakov, Liadov, Glazounov and Tcherepnin. Not only has Schumann’s work lost nothing of its original savour, but rather it has gained in expression and brilliance. In this fantasy, beloved of pianists, Schumann sought to represent various personages whom the ballet presents to us in material form. The composer’s explanation of the work was given to Moscheles, to whom he wrote: “The _Carnaval_ was written mostly for different occasions, and, excepting three or four of the pieces, is all founded on the notes A. S. (A flat), C. H (B natural), which form the name of a little town in Bohemia where I had a musical friend, and which, curiously enough, are also the only musical letters in my name. I wrote the titles later.... As a whole, the work has absolutely no artistic merit; but individually the various states of feeling seem to me interesting.” The pieces are written round a number of imagined characters--Arlequin, Columbine, Estrella, Chiarina, Pierrot, Pantalon, Papillon, Florestan, Eusebius. The Chiarina was supposed to be Madame Schumann, the Estrella, as Schumann told Moscheles, “a name such as one writes under portraits to impress the picture on the mind,” and in Florestan and Eusebius he represented himself.
M. Fokine has been wiser than to impose upon these irresponsible creatures of the musician’s fancy the burden of a formal plot. They merely flit across the stage in a succession of amorous episodes which take place during a masked fête--Pierrot deceived and suffering, Pantalon duped, Eusebius romantic, Florestan impetuous, Chiarina sentimental and Estrella turbulent.
M. Bakst, the decorator, has completed the ballet by making it an exquisitely delicate artistic whole. The tinsel glitter and vast expenditure of means upon which the conventional ballet is usually built up has been utterly discarded. In its place is a simplicity verging on bareness, an economy of material in which every tone and line has an individual value, and bespeaks the guidance of a single directing mind. The curtain rises upon an almost empty scene, the ante-chamber of a ball-room. The backcloth is a broad band of purplish blue uplifting a deep frieze of red tulips. The furniture of the scene consists solely of two droll tiny striped sofas, crouching against the black and gold dado, which instantly put us on the tiptoe of expectation and give the keynote of airy mockery that characterises the piece. Suddenly the tall curtains of this fastidious ante-chamber are parted and Chiarina and Estrella, followed by their distraught lovers, scamper in and out again. Gradually the room fills with crinolined figures, flashing amorous glances through the slits of their silk masks, and comical gentlemen whose quaintly cut green and golden brown jackets seem to travesty their woeful passions. The gaiety of the music dances through the shifting lights and softly flowing lines. And through this happy and heartless crowd moves the tragic
[Illustration: LEONTIEV AND LEPOUKHAVA
IN _Le Carnaval_
_Photograph: Bert, Paris_]
figure of Pierrot, whose unrequited love his fellows make a mock of. His costume and attitude are a masterpiece of design. His sleeves, a world too long, droop far below his finger-tips, forming a scheme of painful angles which most poignantly express his grotesque and lamentable passion.
Of course this foolish, fluttering world of philanderers we never for an instant really believe in. They are the graceful, graceless figures of a Conder fan come to life. They are as hollow as the porcelain amorists our grandmothers were wont to put upon their chimney-pieces. We laugh at their impatient ardours as well as at their harrowing griefs. Even Pierrot we refuse to take seriously. He himself does not expect it--else he would not pretend that Chiarina were a butterfly and attempt to catch her beneath his conical white hat, and then, lifting it cautiously half-an-inch from the ground, make a gesture of farcical despair at finding her escaped. The whole ballet has the effect of transporting us into an unreal world--not a fantastic and fairy world, but a half-familiar world, a Lilliputian world, in which all the serious traffic of our hearts is mocked and parodied. We laugh because we do not recognise the likeness of these parabolic puppets to ourselves, for if we did we should surely weep. If its intention were a shade more serious the ballet would become a sermon, with _Vanitas vanitatum_ for its text; it carefully stops short, however, at that indefinite border-line where trifling passes into satire, but not before it has shown us that the ballet can be made the vehicle of ironic laughter.
If _Le Carnaval_ is gently satiric, _Prince Igor_, in its suggestion of historic catastrophe, is epic. The _Danses Polovtsiennes_, of which the ballet chiefly consists, are taken from an opera by Borodin--“a rather tedious opera,” it has been called--founded upon a Russian ballad of doubtful authenticity. It is a case in which the dance is not merely an interlude in the opera, but the very life and soul of it. The story is of no interest; it is effaced by the terrible intensity of the barbaric dancing. The scene takes us to the Russian steppes. The design is by Roehrich--a Tartar camp standing out against a landscape that is sinister with a wrathful, blood-dark glow. “How excellently every means that the theatre offers has been made use of to produce the desired effect!” writes a discriminating critic in an admirable analysis of the qualities that make so resistless an appeal to the imagination; “the menace of the coming cloud of barbarians that is to lie for centuries on the desolate face of Russia--not the loud blustering of a Tamburlaine the Great, but the awful quiet vigour, half melancholy, half playful, of a tribe that is itself but a little unit in the swarm; the infinite horizons of the steppe, with the line of the burial tumuli stretching away to endless times and places, down the centuries, into Siberia; the long-drawn, resigned, ego-less music (Borodin 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.”
The scene is a symbol of that peril of the barbarians which has always lain on the remote frontiers of civilisations. The tremendous rhythm with which the warriors come bounding down the stage communicates a sense of exhilaration not altogether unmixed with terror. The dance quickens to the frenzy of delirium. Its triumphant motions seem to throb with all those volcanic forces which one knows to be slumbering always in the heart of man: all the eternal unrest of his blood, all his sheer delight in life and strife, all that central fire which kindles from age to age the conflagrations of war and revolution. It is probably the most exciting presentment of barbaric frenzy the stage has ever seen. Considered as an artistic achievement it is astounding. For it must be remembered that this effect of surging tumult is only obtained by the most rigid discipline, by unanimity and a perfectly calculated precision of rhythm.
From epic the composers of the ballet turn to lyricism in _Le Spectre de la Rose_. The music is Weber’s “Invitation à la Valse” as scored by Berlioz; the pantomimic text is suggested by a poem
[Illustration: KARSAVINA AND NIJINSKY
IN _Le Spectre de la Rose_
_Photograph: Bert, Paris_]
of Théophile Gautier. It is the story of a young girl who falls asleep in her chair, worn out with the fatigue and excitement of the ball. In her dream the rose which she holds in her hand becomes a genie, who dances with her, kisses her and disappears at break of day.
Here again Leon Bakst has created a scene of grave yet tender simplicity, with the fine, strict lines of a Beardsley drawing. The girl’s bedroom is a scheme of white and blue; on one side an alcove with a bed, on the other a plain white dressing-table. The windows open upon a garden. Moonlight falls upon the floor. It is all very intimate, reposeful and virginal. The girl wears a simple white frock, the spirit of the rose a fantastic costume of crimson and purple petals.
The _pas de deux_ is executed by Nijinsky and Karsavina. Nothing could be more graciously conceived than Mme Karsavina’s representation of the girl dancing in her dream. With half-closed eyes she rises slowly from her chair and sways across the room in a kind of swoon, following the gentle guidance of the flower-spirit. Then as her dream becomes more vivid she recovers a little strength and dances of her own motion, but always with a suggestion of unconsciousness, as though less to the music of the orchestra than to some dimly remembered melody of the brain. As in the manner of episodes in a dream, she darts into swift movements, which pass again into languor. For an instant the kiss awakens her, she looks round upon the familiar aspect of her room, then the tired head sinks again upon her breast. It is a very gentle rendering of the mood of recollection and happy, unperturbed trance.
In this dream-ballet Nijinsky is a being of amazing agility and grace. He is as light upon the air as a rose petal. He contrives to bring into his dancing something of the gentleness of the moonlit night and the fragrance of the dawn. He shows himself as capable of delicate and almost womanly motion as he is of masculine vivacity and vigour. And when he floats out through the open window back to his rose-garden, he almost persuades one for the moment that he has discovered the secret of human flight.
In _Les Sylphides_ the producers have been daring enough to forget to be modern. They have rehabilitated a form of ballet for which a few years ago one would have said there could be no resurrection. The piece has no action, no colour, no idea, almost no sentiment--it is choregraphy pure and simple, as abstract as mathematics. It is described vaguely as a romantic reverie. The romantic note is sounded by the dim backcloth of ruins and moonlight by M. Benois. The score of dancers wear the traditional costume, pure white, the skirt rather long, as Taglioni might have worn it.
The piece, however, has no connection with the ballet of a similar name in which Taglioni made her great success. It is an adaptation of various compositions of Chopin, which have been orchestrated by Glazounov and other composers. The orchestral version is less faithful to the original than that of Schumann’s _Carnaval_, but the additions are all in the spirit of the whole. Nijinsky and Karsavina each danced a mazurka, and together in the Valse in C sharp minor they executed a _pas de deux_ that was a perfectly finished artistic achievement. For the finale there was the Valse brillante in E flat, in which the grouping of the dancers displayed the skill of M. Fokine at its highest.
_Les Sylphides_ is somewhat in the nature of a challenge, and it must be admitted that it is a successful challenge. In it the producers claim that the purely musical and choregraphic interests are sufficient. Of its kind it is no less than perfect. It is from beginning to end a rhythmic flow of flawless gestures, which make a rounded whole of a chaste and immaculate quality like that of the finest sculpture. More remarkable than the steps is the purity of the lines of the arms, interweaving like the overarching branches of a forest glade or the groining of the aisle of a Gothic cathedral. Yet was there not perhaps a moment when the disconcerting thought intruded itself: Supposing the ballet were always to move in this atmosphere of perfect calm? Without a doubt _Les Sylphides_ gained some of its charm from its place in sequence of the ballets. As an interlude among pieces of more violent action, it had the repose of a statue in the midst of canvases hot with colour and tumultuous with movement.
[Illustration: LES SYLPHIDES
_Photograph: Bert, Paris._]
If it is in such pieces as _Les Sylphides_, _Le Carnaval_ and _Le Spectre de la Rose_ that the composers of the ballets with their coadjutant mimes most deftly lay the privy net for beauty, they ensnare her, more brutally perhaps, but none the less surely in the Oriental pageants with their closely knit web of line and tone and rhythm. For these many-faceted compositions, ballet is perhaps an incomplete expression, and we should substitute the term, “mimodrama.” Dancing plays a more subordinate part in them than in the ballet proper. It falls into a natural relation to the ensemble, and yet the dance, in the exotic world here represented to us, is the apt, indeed the only conceivable gesture.
_Cléopâtre_ is a name of ominous import and prepares us for voluptuous and sombre passion. We are transported to a temple on the banks of the Nile. This scene is the supreme achievement of M. Bakst’s art. It represents an immense stone forecourt which might be none other than the great Hall of Columns built by the father of Rameses the Great. But the artist is contemptuous of pedantic archæological detail--he seeks only to impress, one might rather say to stun, the senses by a vision of grandiose and sinister masonry. This effect is obtained by simple lines and vast proportions. The towering walls, the procession of squat, colossal columns, the gigantic intimidating statues on either flank, fill the scene with a sense of awe and a premonition of disaster. It is noteworthy that M. Bakst himself has said that the painters of the future will take for their subjects man and stone. In this scene he has given to the dumb and eternal stone a voice of tragedy. He has made of these sexless caryatides a kind of chorus, the immortal and ironic spectators of the comedy of human life.
Broken by the compacted row of columns, we see the flowing waters of the Nile, violet and emerald--fit stream to bear the burnished barge of Cleopatra with its poop of beaten gold and perfumed purple sails. Perhaps it is this visiting river that gives the note of expectancy which is so often present in M. Bakst’s scenes. Satisfying the scene is in itself, but the eternal stone awaits its fugitive inhabitant--man. With all reverence, preceded by maidens strewing rose-leaves, the negro slaves bear in the regal litter. Egypt’s queen is lifted as carefully as a jewel out of its casket and stands immobile as an image while her servants divest her of her silken wrappings. Then, with an attitude of languor unutterable, weary with the deceitful satiety of her desires, supported by her abject crouching slaves, she passes to her couch.
The part of Cleopatra was played in Paris by Ida Rubinstein, at Covent Garden by Seraphima Astafieva. The rôle is one not for a dancer, but for a mime, pure and simple. These artists in their studied and astonishing gestures appear to have created a new art of pantomime. Ida Rubinstein--and perhaps the same may be said of Astafieva--has trained the body to a silent speech outvying in subtlety the subtlest of spoken words. The least of her gestures takes an importance so grave and so surprising that it becomes henceforth impossible to dissociate it from the personage whom she evokes. Her hieratic attitudes, with their meticulous and adorable gaucherie, their touching faults of perspective, derive from the Egyptian bas-relief and the Italian primitives. The unexpected lines of the slowly moving limbs are instinct with the very genius of _plastique_.
Little wonder that the noble Amoun leaves his love, to whom he has plighted his troth but a moment before, and is drawn by the fatal magnetism of this odalisque of a woman. At his audacity the listless queen leaps into a momentary tigerish passion; and then, moved by the young man’s beauty and willing to amuse her tedium with a new excitement, she promises him the fulfilment of his dreams at the price of his life. As the infatuated youth fondles her upon her couch, the court fills with the retinue of slaves and begins to throb with the luminous coils of their dance.
The lines of the dance repeat the all-embracing lines of the architecture. The attitudes of the dancers are freely modelled upon the poses of the figures depicted on the ancient Egyptian monuments. When M. Bakst sets his figures in motion, he is mindful of their relation to the _décor_. They are not set against the scene as against a background, but become actually a part of it. He constructs his picture so that the actors shall be the complement of the design and of the colour-scheme. His method has been thus
[Illustration: SERAPHIMA ASTAFIEVA
AS _Cleopatra_
_Photograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd._]
described: “He places a number of pure, fresh colours on the stage. The colours are first placed in order of their relationship to each other, and thereafter arranged according to a complete gradation of tints. Thus he selects, say, six colours--red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. From these he evolves six rows of colours, starting with each colour at full pitch, and gradating it till he reaches the lowest, subtlest, and most Whistler-like key. Then he sets all these reds and yellows and blues and greens revolving. The effect is indescribable. The whole scene begins to pulsate. The walls and the floor clothe themselves with designs of perfectly designed rhythmical lines. Masses move in all directions according to a law of ordered disorder. The air becomes dense with a quivering sheen of colour so violently contrasted, yet so harmonious.”
But the distinguishing characteristic of _Cléopâtre_ is the subordination of the dancing to the _décor_. In spite of the intensity of the frenzy of madly whirling limbs, the spectator is never allowed to forget the grim stone witnesses of the human tumult. With something malevolent in the gaze of their obliquely set eyes, the erect, abiding figures glance down upon the momentary riot. The men of stone are mightier than the men of flesh. Suddenly, when passion is storming through the veins, we are reminded of the triviality and transience of everything human. Here again is that ironic note which in so many of the Russian ballets forms a menacing undertone to their music.
A hush falls upon the dancers. The night of love is over and Cleopatra is about to take toll of her lover. With an incredibly cruel gesture she passes, or rather insinuates, the cup brimmed with poisons. The youth drinks. Cleopatra, with greedy, curious eyes, watches him stagger and writhe in his death-agony. Then this newest sensation of excitement fails her, her unutterable languor repossesses her, and, leaning upon her bending slaves, she passes slowly beneath the towering portal, along the terrace by the river, and her retinue dumbly follow her.
Then the artist speaks his last unerring word. The priest covers the prostrate body with a black pall. The voided forecourt resumes its immensity of space. A warm flush clothes the broad surfaces of the columns; brightness lies on the river; and the single stain of black sets the seal of tragedy upon the empty scene.
_Scheherazade_ is an illuminated page torn from the book of “The Thousand and One Nights.” The music, the scenery, the dances, the costumes, the appointments, all the circumstances of the ballet are designed to create a heavy perfumed atmosphere of Eastern voluptuousness. The severity and simplicity of the Egyptian temple is exchanged for the semi-barbaric sumptuousness of the harem of an Arabian palace. A massive curtained canopy of an impure green stained with purple hangs in billowy folds over the scene; massy silvern lamps depend from a ceiling splendid with arabesques and floral designs; a latticed window gives upon a garden of tainted verdure; the floor is inlaid with blood-coloured porphyry. The sensuous lines of M. Bakst’s _décor_ are echoed in the throbbing waves of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music. Here again is the complete sympathy between musician and decorator, which fuses these ballets into an organic whole. In spite of the wealth of the accessories, there is not an irrelevant line or tone; there is economy and constraint even in the splendour, so that the spectator receives an impression of singleness and unity like that of Greek drama.
At the very commencement the keynote is given in the dance of three odalisques, in which languor intertwines with the energy of desire. As the ballet proceeds the gust of passion blows more strongly, and the riot begins after the departure of the two sultans, when the Grand Eunuch unlocks first a bronze door, through which enter negroes clothed in copper-coloured costumes, and then a silver door, which gives entry to another band of negroes attired in silver. Zobeide, the favourite faithless wife of the sultan Schahriar, still remains without her consort. She crouches half fearfully against a curtain, which at last is pulled aside and her lover, a gorgeous negro in a golden dress, leaps upon her with one tremendous panther-like bound. Undoubtedly the climax of the ballet is reached in the ecstatic dances of Nijinsky as the slate-coloured negro. He has learnt a whole new grammar of grotesque, savage gestures. Part monkey, part tiger, part human, he fawns, he caresses, he grimaces, he passes from delirium to devotion, from awe to lust, his body elemental fire, motion, passion. At times his swiftness renders him momentarily almost invisible; at times he becomes a living boomerang, and after a marvellous circuit in space returns unerringly to his point of departure; one moment he is an arrow shot through the air, the next a crouching, servile beast worshipping the feet of his mistress. And in the mad final orgy he is the vortex of the swirling throng, the happy, leaping heart which shoots its ecstasy to the outermost limits of the coiling maze of lovers.
With a sound of dismay the music signals the return of the betrayed sultans. The harem becomes a slaughter-house. A flashing scimitar cuts down the golden negro. Zobeide drives the dagger into her breast and falls grasping the feet of her outraged lord.
A discerning critic has pointed out that perhaps the terrifying suggestiveness of _Scheherazade_ lies not so much in the catastrophe of the plot as in the dreadful significance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music. “Passages that may have meant no more, as pure music, than the secrecy of the East and the plaintive mysteriousness of women (like that often-repeated passage on the first violin) get a new colour of tragic passion, of yearning in the shadow of death, from their allotment in the dramatic scheme. There is the sound of fate and murder, mingled with the saddest ironical comedy, in the insistent blast of the hunting horns. The swift huddling of deceitful wives, the tripping and scurrying, the wheedling of the old eunuch, the ravenous mien of the negroes, the magnificent stride and gesture of the fruit-bearing attendants, the complicated frenzy of the dance, the drama of fear and despair in Karsavina’s proud rendering, leave a solemn impression beyond anything in those other fantastic ballets. How much depends upon the music it is hard to gauge--much more than one is disposed to admit at first; for the mind pouring stagewards through the eyes, receives the musical impressions half unconsciously, as a direct emotional influence, scarcely registered in the sensuous ear.”
Of the other ballets which complete the repertory of the Diaghilew company, and which have not yet been seen in London--of _Petrouchka_, a Russian burlesque taken from an old folk-story, Harlequin in love with the clown’s wife; of _Sadko_, a strange submarine drama; of _Narcisse_, an idyll which seeks to recapture the sylvan mood of ancient Greece--I will not attempt to give any description. Enough has been said to show that the revolutionary composers, with the co-operation of Nijinsky, Karsavina and a _corps de ballet_, every member of which is a tried artist, have given a new significance to the ballet, have indeed given a new art-form to the stage.