Part 4

“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 to speak, 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 which M. 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’Armide_ is 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 from _Prince Igor_, accompanied by a chorus, the Russians loosen their restraint to a degree 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 the great 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 buried _tumuli_ stretching 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 contrived the action for _l’Après-midi d’un Faune_, _Jeux_, and _The Sacrifice to the Spring_--were very original and effective.) Until Fokine began to work, the ballet-master had been content to arrange all his _coryphées_ in 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 of _The 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 is possible to see at once the pictorial resemblance between _The Legend of Joseph_ and Veronese’s _The Marriage at Cana_, or between _Midas_ and Mantegna’s _Parnasse_ in 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. In _The Legend of Joseph_ Fokine 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 as _Sheherazade_, during a period extending over many seasons, always seems freshly produced. There are no slovenly details. The wild orgy of the Polovtsian dances of _Prince Igor_ is 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 subject and music, but also treatment in decoration and staging, so that such an ultra-modern work as _The 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 poetic _Sylphides_, 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_, and _Thamar_ all have certain points in common; so have _Les Sylphides_, _Carnaval_, and _Papillons_. There is a resemblance between _Daphnis et Chloë_, _Narcisse_, and _l’Après-midi d’un Faune_. But it is easy to vary these likenesses by not putting them into juxtaposition, by mingling them with the bizarre _Petrouchka_, the barbaric Polovtsian dances from _Prince Igor_, the idealistic _Spectre de la Rose_, with Weber’s _Invitation to the Dance_ as its accompaniment, the gorgeous and pompous _Legend of Joseph_, the frivolous _Midas_, the exotic _Le Dieu Bleu_, or the pageantry of the dances from Rimsky-Korsakow’s _Sadko_.

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 reason lack value. It is essential, however, to see Nijinsky in a variety of parts to get his true measure. As the lover of the sylphs in _Les Sylphides_ he is a pale _efféminé_, a Chopiniac, a charming Aubrey Beardsley drawing, a lovely thing in line, and grace, and sentiment. In _Petrouchka_ he 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 of _Pagliacci_) 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 more poignant expression of grief than most Romeos can give us. _Jeux_ shows 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 the _glissando_ (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. In _l’Après-midi d’un Faune_ he 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. In _Sheherazade_, 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 with wine 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. In _Carnaval_, Nijinsky enacts the Harlequin with great roguishness and impertinence. To the piece called _Reconaissance_ he dances with Karsavina, as Colombine, the most entrancing of polkas. His dancing of the piece called _Paganini_, 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 he _does_ excel 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 like _Carnaval_ and _Les 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 of _The Golden Cock_ she suggests the strange perverted power of a Kundry, an Astarte, or a Loreley. In _The Legend of Joseph_ it 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. In _Petrouchka_ she 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 in Ravel’s ballet and in Florent Schmitt’s _Salome_ she dances _on her toes_ in 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 for _Midas_ are certainly very hard in color; Steinberg’s music for the same ballet, a series of futile brass blares; the story itself (Bakst _should_ confine 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 in _l’Après-midi d’un Faune_. But these are very small insects in the amber of enjoyment.

_November, 1915._

Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer

Strawinsky: A New Composer

In America we are not accustomed to look to performances of the ballet, which, after all, is not an institution with us, for musical manna. There have doubtless been ballets given here with music by composers whose names occur in Grove’s Dictionary, sometimes performed by a fairly good band, but we have not expected, or received, revelations on these occasions. Since the Russian Ballet (the organization directed by Serge de Diaghilew) has travelled to and fro in Europe, Paris, and more especially London, have learned a thing or two in this respect. For much of the most interesting of the modern music has been brought to these cities by the Russians, who include not only ballet but also opera in their répertoire. They are responsible for the productions, outside of Russia, of Moussorgsky’s two operas, _Boris Godunow_ and _La Khovanchina_ (this latter music-drama was not produced by the Imperial Theatres in Russia until over twenty years after its publication in the Rimsky-Korsakow version. Its presentation at Moscow took place after its Paris and London performances, and at Petrograd only a month or so before!); Rimsky-Korsakow’s operas, _Ivan the Terrible_, _A Night in May_, and _The Golden Cock_; and Borodine’s _Prince Igor_. As for ballets, Richard Strauss wrote _The Legend of Joseph_ for these dancers; Maurice Ravel, _Daphnis et Chloë_; Debussy, _Jeux_; Reynaldo Hahn, _Le Dieu Bleu_; Paul Dukas, _La Péri_ (to be sure, this work was finally produced under other auspices; withdrawn by the composer from the Russians a few days before the date set for the first performance, on the ground that insufficient time had been allotted for rehearsals); and Tcherepnine, _Narcisse_ and _Le Pavilion d’Armide_; but most important of all are the three ballets (and the lyric drama) contributed by Igor Strawinsky, who has, in a sense, developed a new medium out of the orchestra by writing a new language for it, although it may be plainly seen that he is the logical descendant of the really Russian composers (brushing aside the Tschaikowsky-Rubinstein interlude; nationalism was, of course, no object with these musicians). There are suggestions of Strawinsky’s style so far back as Glinka, in the Oriental dances of _Russlan and Luidmilla_. You will find the germs of his method in Borodine’s symphonies; from Moussorgsky to Strawinsky is but a step, especially if you refer to the original text of _Boris Godunow_ and not the Rimsky-Korsakow version. In fact, Strawinsky, in spite of his radical departures from academic methods, is the inevitable defender of the faith of the famous “Five” whose slogan was “Nationalism and Truth.” As all real progress in art is dependent, in a measure, on the past, it is necessary to establish this fact.

My personal impressions of this young Russian’s music and its effect on me are very strong. I attended the first performance in Paris of Strawinsky’s anarchistic (against the canons of academic art) ballet, _The Sacrifice to the Spring_, in which primitive emotions are both depicted and aroused by a dependence on barbarous rhythm, in which melody and harmony, as even so late a composer as Richard Strauss understands them, do not enter. A certain part of the audience, thrilled by what it considered a blasphemous attempt to destroy music as an art, and swept away with wrath, began very soon after the rise of the curtain to whistle, to make cat-calls, and to offer audible suggestions as to how the performance should proceed. Others of us, who liked the music and felt that the principles of free speech were at stake, bellowed defiance. It was war over art for the rest of the evening and the orchestra played on unheard, except occasionally when a slight lull occurred. The figures on the stage danced in time to music they had to imagine they heard and beautifully out of rhythm with the uproar in the auditorium. I was sitting in a box in which I had rented one seat. Three ladies sat in front of me and a young man occupied the place behind me. He stood up during the course of the ballet to enable himself to see more clearly. The intense excitement under which he was laboring, thanks to the potent force of the music, betrayed itself presently when he began to beat rhythmically on the top of my head with his fists. My emotion was so great that I did not feel the blows for some time. They were perfectly synchronized with the beat of the music. When I did, I turned around. His apology was sincere. We had both been carried beyond ourselves. Later, when the public’s attitude had assumed a more formal aspect, I had a better opportunity for studying the score of this ballet.