|IT is one of those paradoxes, of which the Russian ballet is rich in
examples, that the music of this fragile little poem should be Weber's
"Invitation à la Valse," robustly orchestrated by Berlioz. I can
imagine how sickly and pale specially written music might have been!
The healthy, strong melody, the sound, marked rhythm help to create that
sense of the _impossible_ which is the abiding impression of the phantom
of the rose.
[Illustration: 0056]
How this music pulsates! Its deep expectant breathing increases one's
sensation that we are all dreaming--dancers and audience too. Tamar
Karsavina, who in other roles shows a nervous force, a tragic power, a
strange and luring grace which account even better than her dancing for
her triumphant prominence, is so gentle, so modest, so suppliant in the
"Spectre de la Rose," that she becomes the incarnation of snow-white
youth, dreaming of a heavenly lover. And Nijinsky becomes the spirit of
that dream. I feel sorry for that young girl, who perhaps will wake next
day in that queer Bakst bedroom, and think of the partner who gave her
the rose, not of the Rose itself, who came to her as virginal as the
thought which summoned him. I don't like the idea of the remembrance of
an ordinary flirtation at a ball walking in at the door of that room,
out of whose window the mystical figure of the Rose flew forth into the
night, which was, I am sure, day to him!
|THE Russian dancers may reasonably pride themselves on their
versatility. In their seven-leagued ballet shoes they travel all over
the world, and beyond. They bound easily from ancient Greece to
a Caucasian camp, from the East of a thousand-and-one nights to a
legendary country invented for their playground. It really requires
astonishing mental activity to follow them with pleasure from "Le
Spectre de la Rose" to "Scheherazade." A symphonic poem of Richard
Strauss after a plain-song hymn, or Wagner after Mozart, could not be
a greater shock to the system. Everything in
"Scheherazade" suggests violence and horror.
[Illustration: 0058]
Bakst's palace was built for dreadful deeds; no one, I am sure, could
ever feel safe in it. Its color makes it vibrate on its foundations,
if indeed it has any foundations. There are bad dreams as well as good
ones, and the dream quality, on which I have insisted, so far, as the
special beauty of these Russian ballets and mimed poems, is present
in "Scheherazade." The strange thing is that this nightmare, in which
sensuality and cruelty are the only emotions evoked, has a paradoxical
vein of delicacy running through it. There is something almost childlike
in the wiles by which the Sultan's wives, when their lord's back is
turned, induce the Master Eunuch to liberate the slaves for their
pleasure. The infantile joyousness with which the dark-skinned youths
rush from their silver and gold cages on their loves and on their
impending doom has an element of pity. The whirligig dance which follows
expresses exactly the happiness, which is short, sharp and sudden, but
over which destiny hangs, and for which there is no mercy. And all the
time in this riot of color, this orgy of animation, we never lose sight
of the negro who is the chosen of the Sultan's favorite, the negro who
half an hour ago in another world was the phantom Rose! His arms, which
but now were waving invisible garlands in the serene air, are ready to
coil round their prey in a serpentine embrace.
[Illustration: 0060]
The lips which gave the innocent kiss of naïve youth are now twisted in
the spasms of desire. Nijinsky in "Scheherazade" is not the incarnation
of evil, but its spirit.... His ghastly pallor is terrible.
Really he seems to turn white under his black skin.
[Illustration: 0061]
[Illustration: 0062]