is essential to remember that Mr. de Diaghilew’s Russian Ballet began
in Paris as an art exhibition; that is the secret. For two seasons
Bakst and other Russian painters hung their pictures in the French
capital. These two picture-shows are now included in the official lists
of the Russian Ballet seasons, and by no means accidentally, or for
purposes of misrepresentation. For the Ballet has, in a large sense,
continued to be a picture-exhibition, and in spite of the fact that
some of the novelty has been worn off by multiplied imitations, the
thing itself still retains a good deal of the original impulse. The
Russian Ballet, on its decorative side, is entirely responsible for
the riot of color which has spread over the Western world in clothes
and house furnishings. Without the Russian Ballet as an inspiration
there could have been no Paul Poiret, no Paul Iribe, no George Barbier,
no Jean Cocteau, no George Lepape, no Marcel Lejeune. There surely
would have been no “Gazette de Bon-Ton” and no department-shop sales
of striped and spotted fabrics of every shade under the sun. George
Bernard Shaw did not stretch the truth when he said that for the past
five years the Russian Ballet has furnished the sole inspiration for
fashions in women’s dress.... One does not need to remember any further
back than the summer of 1914, when _Papillons_ and _The Legend of
Joseph_ were produced, to follow him. The crinolined ruffled skirts of
the former ballet and the prim Veronese gowns of the latter (recall
Lillah McCarthy’s dresses in _The Doctor’s Dilemma_) have been repeated
in a thousand forms. And so we might go back, year by year, to the
season when Bakst’s _Sheherazade_ launched the Oriental craze which is
still making itself felt in hamlets on the Great Lakes.
These decorations, and the costumes which accompany them, designed by
such artists--many of them well-known painters in Russia--as Roerich,
Bakst, Fedorowsky, Soudeikine, Golovine, Doboujinsky, Alexander
Benois, and Nathalie Gontcharova, are the basis of the beauty of the
Russian Ballet, and they are so perfect in their many manifestations
that no amount of imitation can entirely spoil them. When Roerich’s
scene for the Polovtsian camp in _Prince Igor_, a composition in dull
greys and reds, with low, round-topped tents and rising columns of
smoke, was disclosed in Paris, Jacques Blanche, the French painter,
was moved to write an article in which he hailed the designer as the
inventor of a new type of stage scenery, and even called upon the easel
painters to learn a lesson in truth from this rugged Russian. Roerich
subsequently designed the very beautiful green landscape of the first
scene for Strawinsky’s _The Sacrifice to the Spring_, and the grewsome
setting, between somewhere and nowhere, of the second. To Fedorowsky
are due the barbaric decorations and costumes for Moussorgsky’s opera,
_La Khovanchina_. The dresses of the Persian ballet in this opera,
orange riots, speckled with patches of deep green and blue, have been
plentifully imitated. Soudeikine devised the extravagant ostrich-plumed
gauds worn by the six negroes who accompanied Florent Schmitt’s Salome
on her decadent way. And Nathalie Gontcharova, with exquisite fantasy,
designed the scenes and costumes for _The Golden Cock_, a production in
which the Russians showed that they were willing to go yet further in
the realms of color-combination than they had before ventured. Bakst,
of course, is as well known to us as Aubrey Beardsley or Longfellow.
There have been books of his work on sale; the magazines and newspapers
have reprinted many of his best designs; there has been an exhibition
of his original drawings at the Berlin Photographic Galleries in New
York. However, in spite of the reproductions and imitations, I think
those who have not yet seen a Bakst production, such as _Sheherazade_,
_Daphnis et Chloë_, or the extraordinary _Legend of Joseph_, on the
stage may prepare for a thrill.
The scene exposed on the very large Drury Lane stage as the curtain
rose on Richard Strauss’s ballet was certainly very splendid in its
majestic beauty. The stage directions give some conception of the
picture:
“The scene, the stage furniture, and the costumes are throughout in
the manner of Paolo Veronese, and thus follow, in style and fashion,
those of the period of about 1530. The Egyptian characters wear
Venetian costumes; Joseph and the dealers who bring him to Potiphar,
Oriental dress of the sixteenth century. The scene represents a huge
pillared hall in the Palladian style. The pillars and ceiling are of
bright gold with a greenish sheen. The floor is inlaid with blocks of
colored marble. The background is traversed by a raised loggia, also
of gold, which is open to the air on the farther side, and gives a
view over gardens with playing fountains, and distant wings of the
palace; the openings on the further side are, however, curtained during
the banquet by a vast carpet of Flemish work representing the Earthly
Paradise--stretches of verdure, alive with exotic beasts of every kind.
The loggia has no balustrade, but is open between the pillars from
floor to ceiling, so that the personages traversing it are entirely
visible from head to foot. On the right a flight of steps leads up to
the loggia. Over the floor of the loggia an Oriental carpet is hung,
reaching down to the hall.
“On the stage in front of the loggia are set two tables at right angles
to each other; the one furthest from the spectator is rather long and
runs parallel to the supporting wall of the loggia; the other is only
short, and joins the first at right angles on the left. The table to
the front is raised on three steps as a dais. On the tables are richly
chiselled vessels of gold and silver, high ewers of cut crystal full
to the brim with gleaming red and white wines, and dishes in which
lie, heaped in profusion, pomegranates, peaches, and grapes of unusual
size: golden platters and crystal glasses are before the guests. The
guests--men and women by threes, in opulent Venetian costumes--sit
at the farthermost side of the table at the back, half concealed
behind the vessels of gold, the crystal, and the piled fruit. At the
table in front Potiphar and his wife, the latter in a robe of scarlet
brocade, cut very low, over which hang long strings of pearls. At her
feet on the lowest step of the dais, a young female slave. The tables
are served by eight negro slaves in a semi-Oriental garb of pink and
gold, and on their heads are nodding plumes of white and pink. Behind
the dais, in the angle to the left, under the loggia, Potiphar’s
bodyguard--gigantic mulattos, with breast-plates of black inlaid with
gold, of Toledo workmanship, with black plumes and halberds of gold.
They also carry whips with short golden handles.”
The spaciousness of this picture, the sense of splendor it conveyed,
cannot be communicated second-hand. A young Spanish painter,
José-Maria Sert, designed the majestic loggia, and Bakst vivified the
scene, truly Veronese, with its women in gorgeous brocades, flaring
skirts, puffed sleeves, and stilted mules, the officers in waving
plumes, two of the slaves holding lank greyhounds in check. One detail
was essentially Bakst. In the old Venetian costumes a panel of lace,
down the front, covered the opening made by the flaring brocades. This
Bakst removed, exposing the legs of his women, in silken hose, tightly
trousered above the knee. This undergarmenting, in its inception, is
authentic, as anyone may see who visits the Museo Civico Correr in
Venice.
I have hesitated this long over _The Legend of Joseph_ because, in
reproduction at least, it is one of the least familiar of the Bakst
ballets, not because it is more interesting than _Sheherazade_,
_Daphnis et Chloë_, or a half-dozen other of this artist’s productions.
In considering the factors which go to make up the perfection of
this organization it is necessary to lay considerable stress on the
importance of the music. In each of the cities where the Ballet has
appeared a large orchestra of picked musicians (in some instances an
organized orchestra, such as Thomas Beecham’s in London) has assisted
at the performances. The music of the ballets, even when adapted for
this use, as in _Cléopâtre_, is of a fine quality, and in the variety
of the compositions employed (ordinarily three or four ballets make
up a programme) and in the manner of their performance there is the
greatest amount of interest for those who are more interested in
hearing than in seeing. Particularly is this true as the Russian Ballet
has been the means of bringing some of the most radical and anarchistic
of modern composers to a hearing before the public. Since Tschaikowsky
wrote three ballets, no musician in Russia has considered it less than
an honor to write for dancing.
Certain of the works performed have been taken from the concert room,
_l’Après-midi d’un Faune_, for example, with the approval, and even
the applause, of Monsieur Debussy; and _Sheherazade_, in spite of the
protests of Rimsky-Korsakow’s heirs. Balakirew’s _Thamar_, too, was
programme music before it became a ballet. But several works have
been written for performance by this organization. Among these I may
mention Maurice Ravel’s _Daphnis et Chloë_, the music of which exactly
illustrates the action of the ballet but is not easily transferable to
the concert room, although Ravel made an arrangement which the Colonne
Orchestra has played in Paris and the Symphony Society of New York
has performed in New York; Debussy’s _Jeux_; Reynaldo Hahn’s _Le Dieu
Bleu_; Steinberg’s _Midas_; Tcherepnine’s _Narcisse_; Richard Strauss’s
_The Legend of Joseph_, which the composer himself conducted for
several performances both in London and in Paris; and the three really
extraordinary works of Igor Strawinsky, _The Firebird_, _Petrouchka_,
and _The Sacrifice to the Spring_. I have elsewhere expressed my great
admiration for the genius of this young man; it is certainly my opinion
that more inspiration is made manifest in these three works than in
any other recent music I have heard in the theatre or the concert
room. Paul Dukas also wrote a ballet for the Russians, _La Péri_, but
although it was announced, the production was finally made under other
auspices.
Any concert-goer will immediately note the fact that a good deal of
the music in the répertoire of the Russian Ballet is familiar to him.
Balakirew began his symphonic poem, _Tamara_ (the ballet is called
_Thamar_), suggested by a poem by Lermontoff, in 1867; it was concluded
in 1882. The composer wrote in 1869 that he had composed parts of it as
he “danced along” the street. The Chicago Orchestra performed the work
for the first time in America in 1896. The Russian Symphony Society
introduced it to New York in 1908. When the Russians adopted the work
to use as a ballet the critic of the “Morning Times” in London said
that the action did not fit the music very well, and yet the story of
the ballet is almost precisely that of the symphonic poem, so that if
anyone was at fault in this regard it must have been the composer.
Here is the fable to which Balakirew wrote music, in the words of the
programme notes (by William Hubbard Harris) of the Chicago Orchestra:
“In the narrow Dariel Pass, where the River Terek roars, covered with
heavy mists, there rises an ancient tower, in which there lived Queen
Thamar, an angel of beauty, a cruel, wily demon in thoughts, and yet
at the same time divine. At her enchanting call the passing traveller
entered the tower to take part in the banquet in progress there.
Shouts and cries of revelry awakened echoes in the darkness, as if
at a great feast a hundred young, pleasure-loving men and women were
gathered, or as if, in that great tower, erstwhile forbidding, the
celebration of funeral rites were taking place. At the break of day
gloomy silence again reigned, broken only by the foaming Terek as it
hurried away a corpse. At this moment there appeared at the window
a pale shadow. It waved afar a last farewell to the loved one. That
farewell breathed such tender ecstasy, the voice which uttered it was
so sweet, that its every accent, filled with promise, seemed to tell of
near, unspeakable happiness.”
Only in its conclusion does the ballet action vary from this story. The
Queen lures the Prince to his doom, dances with him as the centre of a
bacchanale, and then gives him the knife-thrust, as her slaves hurl him
through an opened door into the river. But as the curtain falls we see
her, not waving farewell to her old victim, but waving welcome to a new
one.
Perhaps the composer really was at fault, because the music has never
made a profound impression in this country. Here is W. J. Henderson’s
account of it in “The Sun,” following the performance by the Russian
Symphony Society:
“Tamara was a queen, and she dwelt by the River Terek in an ancient
tower, where she was wont to indulge in nights _à la Cléopâtre russe_.
In the mornings the dead bodies of her lovers went floating down the
stream, while she sang exquisite love-songs, just as if her lovers
could be lured back. In the music of Balakirew one could hear the
river, which sounded much like the Rhine, even to suggestions of the
Drachenfels. The riotous nights were perhaps less clearly indicated.
They were somewhat repressed, muffled, as it were. Perhaps Tamara, out
of consideration for the neighbors, used to shut the windows when she
was holding high jinks on the banks of the blue Terek in the Caucasus.
But they had long nights up there, for the listener sitting outside
the tower (in a hard orchestra chair) and waiting for the exquisite
love-song, grew stiff and cold. And, after all, it was a mean little
love-song, because it had no tune, and it would not have lured a
red-headed boy, let alone a dead man.”
However, Mr. Henderson had not seen Karsavina as the wicked queen
when he wrote those lines, nor had he seen Bakst’s gorgeous Georgian
costumes--a variant, it is true, of the greens and blues with which
he had decorated _Sheherazade_. The fault of the ballet, as a whole,
is that it is reminiscent of _Sheherazade_; and yet it is effective
and has persisted in the répertoire of the Russians since it was first
given in 1912. The overdresses of the women gave rise to one of the
fashions in women’s gowns which spread over our world two years ago.
Rimsky-Korsakow’s _Sheherazade_ is another matter. The music was not
written to accompany the story used in the ballet, and yet it fits
it perfectly. Still, Mme. Rimsky-Korsakow (the composer, of course,
is dead) protested violently against what she called a desecration
of her husband’s intention, when the ballet was first produced. (A
similar protest was lodged against the organization in 1914, when
it produced Rimsky-Korsakow’s last opera, _The Golden Cock_, with a
double cast, one choreographic and one vocal, although the opera had
been written to be _sung_.) No piece of music is better known in the
concert hall than this, and any concert-goer will remember the violin
theme which portrays the last of the Sultan’s wives, as she relates
the four stories from the “Arabian Nights” which the four movements of
the Suite describe. The ballet follows the action of the prologue of
these stories; the women of the harem steal the keys from the grand
eunuch and let loose the black slaves for a drunken revel of lust,
which is interrupted by the sudden return of the sultan and death to
all concerned. The third movement, that which in the Suite describes
the love of the young prince and the young princess, was omitted from
Fokine’s original arrangement of the ballet, but in 1914 he added this
movement to the action. _Sheherazade_ has been considered since the
time it was first produced in Paris some six years ago, the masterpiece
of the Russians. It made the designer of its scenery and costumes,
Leon Bakst, famous. His color-scheme, mostly of greens, blues, and
oranges, has been frequently imitated in later theatrical productions.
Karsavina’s Zobeide is a suggestive picture of languorous lust, and
Nijinsky, as the principal slave, alternates between surprising leaps
into the air and the most lascivious gestures, as, like some animal, he
paws the reclining Sultana.
_L’Après-midi d’un Faune_ is as well known as _Sheherazade_ in the
concert room. This was the first ballet which Nijinsky staged (he also
enacted the principal rôle). The music was written by Debussy as a
prelude to Mallarmé’s somewhat obscure poem. An English translation,
at least an acceptable one, has hitherto been lacking, but Walter
Conrad Arensberg’s very sympathetic and understanding version has
just appeared; were it not for its length I should like to transcribe
it here. When Debussy’s work is performed Edmund Gosse’s summary of
his idea of the meaning of the poem (with which, by the way, the poet
expressed himself as entirely pleased) usually appears in the programme
notes. But Debussy’s music is called a _prélude_ to the poem and so the
action of the ballet is a prelude to the wonderings of Mallarmé’s faun.
This is the scenario as it was printed in the programmes given out for
the first Paris performances:
“Ce n’est pas _l’Après-midi d’un Faune_ de Stéphane Mallarmé; c’est,
sur le prélude musical à cet épisode panique, une courte scène qui la
précède:
“Un Faune sommeille;
“Des Nymphes le dupent;
“Une écharpe oubliée satisfait son rêve.
“Le rideau baisse pour que le poème commence dans toutes les mémoires.”
There are, I think, seven nymphs engaged in the performance. Their
dresses and their action are suggestive of the figures of Greek vases
and bas-reliefs. One after another they flee from the strangely
misunderstanding faun, until one, bolder than the others, approaches,
almost to remain. The faun still does not understand and she, too,
flees, dropping her scarf behind her. This the faun seizes and, as
the curtain descends, returning to his rock, he presses this scarf
to his lips and breast, at last, apparently, something more than the
faun he has been. Nijinsky in this pantomime (it can scarcely be
called a ballet) suggests all that the poem and the music call forth
in imaginative minds. He has dehumanized the characters and, in a
sense, thereby taken away the sting of the too intense voluptuousness
of the action. However, in spite of this fact, and the further one
that Monsieur Debussy, unlike Mme. Rimsky-Korsakow, not only approved
of the use of his music in this form but even applauded it, the
first performance in Paris (1912) was roundly hissed. Paul Souday, a
well-known critic, led the opposition, and Rodin took up the cudgels
for the defence. “Accusé d’avoir ‘offensé la morale,’ Nijinsky s’est
empressé de donner satisfaction à M. Paul Souday en supprimant sa
‘mimique indécente’ à la fin du ballet. Et pourtant, son illusoire
possession de la nymphe enfuiée, ce corps étendu sur le voile encore
parfumé d’elle, c’était beau!” wrote Gauthier-Villars. It is true that
Nijinsky altered his original performance for a few evenings; then,
however, he returned to his original conception. Meanwhile, the troup
moved to London, where _l’Après-midi d’un Faune_ was acclaimed above
all the other ballets, and almost invariably _repeated_. Since then
it has seldom been given in London and Paris without the audience
demanding a repetition.
_Les Sylphides_, _Papillons_, _Carnaval_, and _Le Spectre de la
Rose_, are all exquisite studies of a different style from the three
ballets I have mentioned. _Carnaval_ is undoubtedly the best of the
lot, although Nijinsky as the rose ghost (the fable was suggested by
a poem of Théophile Gautier) who comes to a young girl in a dream
and bounds out of the window, like a spirit, at dawn, is in his most
poetical mood. _Papillons_ is the newest of these four ballets, and for
it Bakst designed some charming crinolined dresses. Pierrot, in the
garden, after the dance, has set a candle to catch butterflies, and
as the dancers flit out, each pretending to be a butterfly, he tries
to catch them, until the coming of their parents to take them home
teaches him the bitter truth that they are only young girls. The music
is by Schumann, orchestrated by Tcherepnine. _Les Sylphides_ is little
more than a suite of dances in a charming adaptation by Bakst of the
conventional ballet costume. Glazunow and other Russian composers have
orchestrated these Chopin waltzes, mazurkas and preludes. In _Carnaval_
(orchestrated by Tcherepnine, Glazunow, Liadow, and Rimsky-Korsakow)
the fanciful names by which Schumann designated several movements
in these delightful piano pieces are transferred to the characters.
Nijinsky is the Harlequin; Karsavina, Colombine, etc., while such
pieces as _Dancing Letters_ and _Paganini_ are used as divertissements.
The scene, with the two Victorian sofas at the back and Pierrot lying
over the footlights, is charming. The principal characters are those of
the _Commedia dell’ Arte_, while the other dancers are dressed after
the period of about 1830.
_Le Dieu Bleu_ I have not seen, but I transfer the following account
of it from the “London Times” of February 28, 1913, in which the
critic says that “it introduces us to Mme. Karsavina and M. Nijinsky
in two new rôles which suit them well, and it gives good opportunities
for the combination of music, dancing, and spectacle for which M.
de Diaghilew’s troup is famous--a combination designed this time to
suggest what Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World had in mind when he spoke
of the ‘furniture, frippery, and fireworks of China.’ The scene is not
precisely China in this case, but ‘India of the fables,’ which in the
theatre comes to much the same thing, the point only being that it is
the Far Orient, where a glamour of riotous colour is thrown over man’s
actions, and where gods and monsters are as near to us and as alive as
the priests and populace who worship them.
“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.”