of their pupils, at the Masonic Auditorium, in Detroit, and on
subsequent tours. Prominent professional dancers were added to the pupil
roster.
That summer, with the Fokines and their company, I introduced ballet to
the Lewisohn Stadium Concerts in New York, for three performances, to a
record audience of forty-eight thousand people. I also presented them
for four performances at the Century Theatre in Central Park West. The
Stadium programmes included _Les Elves_, arranged to Mendelssohn’s
_Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream_, with the addition of the same
composer’s Andante and Allegro from the _Violin Concerto_. Also
_Medusa_, a tragedy set to Tchaikowsky’s _Symphonie Pathétique_, a work
for four characters, the title role being danced by Vera Fokina, and the
sea god Poseidon, who fell in love with the beautiful Medusa, danced by
Fokine.
It was during one of the Stadium performances, I remember, I had
occasion to go to the Fokines’ dressing-room on some errand. I knocked,
and believing I heard an invitation to enter, opened the door to
discover the two Fokines dissolved in tears of happiness. So moved was
Michel by Vera’s performance of the title role in _Medusa_, that they
were sobbing in each other’s arms.
“Wonderful, wonderful, my darling!” Fokine was murmuring. “Such a
beautiful performance; and to think you did it all in such a short
period, with so very few rehearsals; and the really amazing thing is
that you portrayed the character of the creature precisely as it is in
my mind!”
In the love, the adoration, the romance of Michel and Vera Fokine, there
was the greatest continuous devotion between man and wife that it has
been my privilege to know.
Fokine’s American ballet creations have been lost. Perhaps it is as
well. For the closing chapter of the life of a truly great artist they
were sadly inferior. Towards the end of his career, however, he staged
some fresh, new works in France for René Blum’s Ballet Russe de Monte
Carlo, including _Les Elements_, _Don Juan_, and _L’Epreuve d’Amour_.
Then, for de Basil’s Original Ballet Russe, _Cinderella_, or since he
used the French, _Cendrillon_, to a commissioned score by Baron Frederic
d’Erlanger, which might have been better. But choreographically
_Cendrillon_ was a return to the triumphant Fokine. There was also his
triumphant re-staging of _Le Coq d’Or_. Perhaps his last really great
triumph was his collaboration with Serge Rachmaninoff on _Paganini_, a
work that takes rank with Fokine’s finest.
Fokine restaged _Les Sylphides_ and _Carnaval_ for Ballet Theatre’s
initial season. When Ballet Theatre was under my management, he created
_Bluebeard_, in 1941, for Anton Dolin. In 1942, I was instrumental in
having German Sevastianov engage Fokine to stage the nostalgic tragedy,
_Russian Soldier_, to the music of Prokofieff.
While in Mexico, in the summer of 1942, working on _Helen of Troy_, for
Ballet Theatre, Fokine contracted pleurisy, which developed into
pneumonia on his return to New York, where he died, on 22nd August. For
a dancer, he was on the youthful side. He was born in Mannheim-am-Rhine,
Germany, 26th April, 1880, the son of Ekaterina Gindt. According to the
official records of the St. Petersburg Imperial School, his father was
unknown. He was adopted by a merchant, Mikhail Feodorovitch Fokine, who
gave him his name. In 1898, he graduated from the St. Petersburg
Imperial School. In 1905, he married Vera Petrovna Antonova, the
daughter of a master of the wig-maker’s Guild, who had graduated from
the School the year before.
At the funeral service at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral, in New York,
were assembled all of the dance world in New York in mid-summer, to do
him honor.
Some of his works will live on, but they suffer with each passing year
because, in most cases, they are not properly done. The Sadler’s Wells
and Royal Danish Ballet productions of the Fokine works are the
exceptions. But all his works suffered continually during his lifetime,
because Fokine had a faulty memory, and his restaging of the works was,
all too often, the product of unhappy afterthoughts. Towards the end of
his life he became more and more embittered. He, the one-time great
revolutionary, resented the new developments in ballet, perhaps because
they had not been developed by Fokine.
This bitterness was quite unnecessary, for Fokine remains the greatest
creator of modern ballet. His works, properly staged, will always
provide a solid base for all ballet programmes. Despite the hue and cry,
despite the lavish praise heaped upon each new experiment by modern
choreographers, and upon the choreographers themselves, in all
contemporary ballet there is no one to take his place.
Other ballet-masters, other choreographers, working with the same basic
materials, in the same spirit, in the same language, often require
detailed synopses and explanations for their works, in spite of which
the meaning of them often remains lost in the murk of darkest obscurity.
I remember once asking Fokine to supply a synopsis of one of his new
works for programme purposes. I shall not forget his reply: “No synopsis
is needed for my ballets. My ballets unfold their stories on the stage.
There is never any doubt as to what they say.”
I have visited Vera Petrovna Fokine in the castle on the Hudson where
she lives in lonely nostalgia. But it is not quite true that she lives
alone; for she lives with the precious memory of a great love, a
tremendous reputation, the memory of a great artist, the artist who
created _Les Sylphides_, _Prince Igor_, and _Petroushka_.
7. Ballet Reborn In America:
W. De Basil and His
Ballets Russes De Monte Carlo
The last of the two American tours of Serge de Diaghileff’s Ballets
Russes was during the season 1916-1917.
The last American tour of Anna Pavlova and her company was during the
season 1925-1926.
Serge Diaghileff died at Venice, on 19th August, 1929.
Anna Pavlova died at The Hague, on 23rd January, 1931.
W. de Basil’s Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo gave their first American
performances at the St. James Theatre, New York, on 21st December, 1933.
Such ballet as America saw between Pavlova’s last performance in 1926
and the first de Basil performance in 1933, may be briefly stated.
From 1924 to 1927, in Chicago, there was the Chicago Allied Arts,
sometimes described as the first “ballet theatre” in the United States,
sparked by Adolph Bolm.
In 1926 and 1927, there were a few sporadic performances by Mikhail
Mordkin and his Russian Ballet Company, which included Xenia Macletzova,
Vera Nemtchinova, Hilda Butsova, and Pierre Vladimiroff.
From 1928 to 1931, Leonide Massine staged weekly ballet productions at
the Roxy Theatre, in New York, including a full-length _Schéhérazade_,
with four performances daily, Massine acting both as choreographer and
leading dancer. In 1930, he staged Stravinsky’s _Le Sacre du Printemps_,
for four performances in Philadelphia and two at the Metropolitan Opera
House, in New York, with the collaboration of Leopold Stokowski and the
Philadelphia Orchestra, and with Martha Graham making one of her rare
appearances in ballet, in the leading role.
That is the story. Hardly a well-tilled ground in which to sow balletic
seed with the hope of a bumper crop. It is not surprising that all my
friends and all my rival colleagues in the field of management
prophesied dire things for me (presumably with different motives) when I
determined on the rebirth of ballet in America in the autumn of 1933.
Their predictions were as mournful as those of Macbeth’s witches.
The ballet situation in the Western World, after the deaths of
Diaghileff and Pavlova, save for the subsidized ballets at the Paris
Opera and La Scala in Milan, was not vastly different. If you will look
through the files of the European newspapers of the period, you will
find an equally depressing note: “The Swan passes, and ballet with her”
... “The puppet-master is gone; the puppets must be returned to their
boxes” ... and a bit later: “Former Diaghileff dancers booked to appear
in revues and cabaret turns.” ...
In England, J. Maynard Keynes, Lydia Lopokova, Ninette de Valois, Marie
Rambert, Constant Lambert, and Arnold L. Haskell had formed the Camargo
Society for Sunday night ballet performances, which organization gave
birth to Marie Rambert’s Ballet Club and the Vic Wells Ballet. In 1933,
the glories of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet were hardly dreams, not yet a
glimmer in Ninette de Valois’ eye.
In Europe there remained only the Diaghileff remains and a vacant
Diaghileff contract at Monte Carlo. This latter deserves a word of
explanation. Diaghileff had acquired the name--the Ballets Russes de
Monte Carlo--thanks to the Prince of Monaco, himself a ballet lover, who
had offered Diaghileff and his company a home and a place to work.
René Blum, an intellectual French gentleman of deep culture and fine
taste, took over the unexpired Diaghileff Monte Carlo contract. Blum was
at hand for, at the time of Diaghileff’s death, he was at the head of
the dramatic theatre at Monte Carlo. In fulfilment of the Diaghileff
contract, for a time Blum booked such itinerant ballet groups as he
could. Then, in 1931, he organized his own Ballets Russes de Monte
Carlo. George Balanchine, who had staged some of the last of the
Diaghileff works, became the first choreographer for the new company.
For the Monte Carlo repertoire, he created three works. To it, from
Paris, he brought two of the soon-to-become-famous “baby ballerinas,”
Irina Baronova and Tamara Toumanova, both from the classroom of Olga
Preobrajenska.
Early in 1932, René Blum joined forces with one of the most curious
personalities that modern ballet has turned up, in the person of a
gentleman who wished to be known as Col. W. de Basil.
De Basil had had a ballet company of sorts for some time. I first ran
into him in Paris, shortly after Diaghileff’s death, where he had allied
himself with Prince Zeretelli’s Russian Opera Company; and again in
London, where the Lionel Powell management, in association with the
Imperial League of Opera, had given them a season of combined opera and
ballet at the old Lyceum Theatre. With ballets by Boris Romanoff and
Bronislava Nijinska, de Basil had toured his little troupe around Europe
in buses, living from hand to mouth; had turned up for a season at Monte
Carlo, at René Blum’s invitation. That did it. De Basil worked out a
deal with Blum, whereby de Basil became a joint managing director of the
combined companies, now under the title of Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.
A season was given in the summer of 1932, in Paris, at the _Théâtre des
Champs Elysées_.
It was there I first saw the new company. It was then I took the plunge.
I negotiated. I signed them for a visit to the American continent. A
book could be devoted to these negotiations alone. It would not be
believable; it would fail to pass every test of credibility ever
devised.
I feel that this is the point at which to digress for a moment, in order
to sketch in a line drawing of de Basil, with some of the shadows and
some of the substance. Unless I do, no reader will be able to understand
why I once contemplated a book to be called _To Hell With Ballet_!
To begin with, de Basil was a Cossack and a Caucasian. Neither term
carries with it any connotation of gentleness or sensitivity. De Basil
was one of the last persons in the world you would expect to find at the
head of an organization devoted to the development of the gentle, lyric
art of the ballet. Two more dissimilar partners in an artistic venture
than de Basil and Blum could not be found.
René Blum, the gentle, cultured intellectual, was a genuine artist:
amiable, courteous, and fully deserving of the often misused phrase--a
man of the world. His alliance with de Basil was foredoomed to failure;
for one of René Blum’s outstanding characteristics was a passion to
avoid arguments, discussions, scandals, troubles of any sort. Blum
commanded the highest respect from his artists and associates; but they
never feared him. To them he was the kind, understanding friend to whom
they might run with their troubles and problems. Blum’s sensitivity was
such that he would run from de Basil as one would try to escape a
plague. René Blum, you would say, was, perhaps, the ivory-tower
dilettante. You would be wrong. René Blum gave the lie to this during
the war by revealing himself a man of heroic stature. On the occupation
of France, he was in grave danger, since he was a Jew, and the brother
of Léon Blum, the Socialist leader, great French patriot and one-time
Premier. René, however, was safely and securely out of the country. But
he, too, was a passionate lover of France. France, he felt, needed him.
Tossing aside his own safety, he returned to his beloved country, to
share its fate. His son, who was the apple of his father’s eye, joined
the Maquis; was killed fighting the Nazis. René Blum was the victim of
Nazi persecution.
Let us look for a moment at the background of Blum’s ballet
collaborator. The “Colonel” was born Vassily Grigorievitch Voskresensky.
In his native _milieu_ he had some sort of police-military career.
Although he insisted on the title “Colonel,” he certainly never attained
that rank in the Tsar’s army. He was a lieutenant in the _Gendarmes_.
After the revolution, in 1918, he turned up as a captain with
Bicherakoff’s Cossacks. Later on he turned naval and operated in the
Black Sea.
There is an interval in de Basil’s life that has never been entirely
filled in with complete accuracy: the period immediately following his
flight and escape from Russia. The most credible of the legends
surrounding this period is that he sold motor-cars in Italy. Eventually,
he turned up in Paris, where my trail picked him up at a concert agency
called _Zerbaseff_, which concerned itself with finding jobs for refugee
artists. It was then he called himself de Basil.
At the time I met him, he had a Caucasian partner, the Prince Zeretelli
whom I have mentioned, and who was a one-time manager of the People’s
Theatre, in St. Petersburg. It was this partnership that brought forth
the _Ballet and Opéra Russe de Paris_, which gave seasons at the
_Théâtre des Champs Elysées_, in Paris, and, as I have mentioned, at the
Lyceum Theatre, in London.
Let me first set down the man’s virtues. De Basil had great charm. By
that I do not necessarily mean he was charming. His charm was something
he could turn on at will, like a tap, usually when he was in a tight
spot. More than once it helped him out of deep holes, and sticky ones.
He had an inexhaustible fount of energy, could drive himself and others;
never seemed to need sleep; and, aiming at a highly desired personal
goal, had unending patience. With true oriental passivity, he could
wait. He had undaunted courage; needless, reckless courage, in my
opinion; a stupid courage compounded often out of equal parts of
stubbornness and sheer bravado. He was a born organizer. He intuitively
possessed a flair for the theatre: a flair without knowledge. He could
be an excellent host; he was a _cordon bleu_ cook. He was generous, he
was simple in his tastes.
Yet, with all these virtues, de Basil was, at the same time, one of the
most difficult human beings I have ever encountered in a lifetime of
management. This tall, gaunt, cadaver of a man had a powerful physique,
a dead-pan face, and a pair of cold, astigmatic eyes, before which
rested thick-lensed spectacles. He had all the makings of a dictator.
Like his countryman, Joseph Stalin, he was completely impossible as a
collaborator. He was a born intriguer, and delighted in surrounding
himself with scheming characters. During my career I have met scheming
characters who, nevertheless, have had certain positive virtues: they
succeeded in getting things done. De Basil’s scheming characters
consisted of lawyers, hacks, amateur managers, brokers, without
exception third-rate people who damaged and destroyed.
It would be an act of great injustice to call de Basil stupid. He was as
shrewd an article as one could expect to meet amongst all the lads who
have tried to sell the unwary stranger the Brooklyn Bridge, the Capitol
at Washington, or the Houses of Parliament.
De Basil deliberately engaged this motley crew of hangers-on, since his
Caucasian Machiavellism was such that he loved to pit them one against
the other, to use them to build up an operetta atmosphere of cheap
intrigue that I felt sure had not hitherto existed save in the Graustark
type of fiction. De Basil used them to irritate and annoy. He would
dispatch them abroad in his company simply to stir up trouble, to form
cliques: for purposes of _chantage_; he would order them into whispered
colloquies in corners, alternately wearing knowing looks and glum
visages. De Basil and his entire entourage lived in a world of intrigue
of their own deliberate making. His fussy, busy little cohorts cost him
money he did not have, and raised such continuous hell that the wonder
is the company held together as long as it did.
De Basil’s unholy joy would come from creating, through these henchmen,
a nasty situation and then stepping in to pull a string here, jerk a
cord there, he would save the situation, thus becoming the hero of the
moment.
I shall have more to say on the subject of the “Colonel” before this
tale is told.
Now, with the contracts signed for the first American visit, we were on
our honeymoon. Meanwhile, however, the picture of what I had agreed to
bring was changing. Leonide Massine, his stint at the Roxy Theatre in
New York completed, had met a former Broadway manager, E. Ray Goetz.
Together they had succeeded in raising some money and planned with it to
buy the entire Diaghileff properties. With this stock in hand, Massine
caught up with de Basil, who was barnstorming through the Low Countries
with his company in trucks and buses; and the two of them pooled
resources. Although Massine’s purchase plan did not go through entirely,
because much of the Diaghileff material had disappeared through lawsuits
and other claims, nevertheless Massine was able to deliver a sizable
portion of it.
As the direct result of Massine’s appointment as artistic director, a
number of things happened. First of all, Balanchine quit, and formed a
short-lived company in France, _Les Ballets 1933_, the history of which
is not germane to this story. Before he left, however, Balanchine had
created three works for the de Basil-Blum Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo:
_La Concurrence_, _Le Cotillon_, and _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_.
Massine, as his first task, staged _Jeux d’Enfants_ and _Les Plages_;
restaged three of his earlier works, _The Three-Cornered Hat_, _Le Beau
Danube_ and _Scuola di Ballo_; and the first of his epoch-making
symphonic ballets, _Les Présages_, to Tchaikowsky’s Fifth Symphony.
These were combined with a number of older works from the Diaghileff
repertoire, including the three Fokine masterpieces: _Les Sylphides_,
_Prince Igor_, and _Petroushka_.
Massine had strengthened the company. There were the former Diaghileff
_régisseur general_, Serge Grigorieff, of long memory, as stage
director; his wife, Lubov Tchernicheva, a leading Diaghileff figure, for
dramatic roles; the last Diaghileff _ballerina_, Alexandra Danilova, to
give stability to the three “baby ballerinas”: Baronova, Toumanova, and
Tatiana Riabouchinska, the last from Kchessinska’s private studio, by
way of Nikita Balieff’s _Chauve Souris_, where she had been dancing.
There was the intriguing Nina Verchinina, a “different” type of dancer.
There were talented lesser ladies: Eugenia Delarova, Lubov Rostova; a
group of English girls masquerading under Russian names. Among the men,
in addition to Massine, there were Leon Woizikovsky, David Lichine,
Roman Jasinsky, Paul Petroff, Yurek Shabalevsky, and André Eglevsky.
A successful breaking-in season was given at the Alhambra Theatre, in
London’s Leicester Square. While this was in progress, we set about at
the most necessary and vastly important business of trying to build a
public for ballet in America, for this is a ballet impresario’s first
job. That original publicity campaign was, in its way, history-making.
It took a considerable bit of organizing. No field was overlooked. In
addition to spreading the gospel of ballet, there was a Sponsors’
Committee, headed by the Grand Duchess Marie and Otto H. Kahn. Prince
Serge Obolensky was an ever-present source of help.
It was a chilly and fairly raw December morning in 1933 when I clambered
aboard the cutter at the Battery, to go down the Bay to board the ship
at Quarantine. It is a morning I shall not soon forget. I was in ballet
up to my neck; and I loved it. There have been days and nights in the
succeeding two decades when I have seriously played with the notion of
what life might have been like if I had not gone aboard (and overboard)
that December morning.
I took with me the traditional Russian welcome: a tray of bread, wrapped
in a white linen serviette, a little bowl of salt, which I offered to de
Basil. I was careful to see that the reporters and camera men were in
place when I did it. De Basil’s poker-face actually smiled as I handed
him the tray, uncovered the bread, poured the salt. But only for a
moment. A Russian word in greeting, and then there was an immediate
demand from him to see the theatre. We were on our way. Driving uptown
to the St. James Theatre, the arguments commenced. There was the matter
of the programme. There was the matter of the size of de Basil’s name;
the question of the relative size of the artists’ names; the type-face;
the order in which they should be listed; what was to become the
everlasting arguments over repertoire and casting. But I was in it, now.
I believed in the “star” system--not because I believe the system to be
a perfect one, by any means, but because the American public, which had
been without any major ballet company for eight years, and which had had
practically no ballet activity, had to be attracted and arrested by
something more than an unknown and heretofore unheard-of company and the
photograph of a not particularly photogenic ex-Cossack.
The pre-Christmas _première_ at the St. James Theatre, on the night of
21st December, marked the beginning of a new epoch in ballet, and in my
career. It was going to be a long pull, an uphill struggle. I knew that.
The opening night audience was brilliant; the house was packed,
enthusiastic. But the advance sale at the box-office was anything but
encouraging. Diaghileff had failed in America. The losses of his two
seasons, paid for by Otto H. Kahn, ran close to a half-million dollars.
I was on my own. Since readers are as human as I am, perhaps they will
forgive my pardonable pride, the pride I felt sixteen years later, on
reading the historian George Amberg’s comment: “If it had not been for
Mr. Hurok’s resourceful management and promotion, de Basil would
certainly not have succeeded where Diaghileff failed.”
But I am anticipating. The opening programme consisted of _La
Concurrence_, _Les Présages_, and _Le Beau Danube_. Toumanova in the
first; Baronova and Lichine in the second; Massine, Danilova, and
Riabouchinska in the third. It was a night. The next day’s press was
excellent. It was John Martin, with what I felt was an anti-Diaghileff
bias, who offered some reservations.