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.
My second personal impression is a memory of an evening a few nights
later, when I attended a performance of Strawinsky’s earlier ballet,
_Petrouchka_. _Petrouchka_ is another kind of entertainment. It was a
success with the public from the beginning, and is still an important
feature in the répertoire of the Russian Ballet. It is by _Petrouchka_,
in fact, that Strawinsky will be introduced to New York by the Russians
during the current season.... The curtains had closed on these pathetic
scenes from the Russian carnival. They were drawn back to disclose
Karsavina and Nijinsky. Presently a third figure appeared, very
thin and short, with a Jewish profile (I do not know, however, that
Strawinsky is a Jew). Dragged on the stage by Nijinsky, pale, awkward,
and timid, his near-sighted eyes blinded by the footlights, the
composer bowed his acknowledgments to the applause, nervously fingering
his eyeglasses. This account would be incomplete without a reference
to his dress, as irreproachable in fit and texture as that of Arturo
Toscanini.
A London experience is also worth the telling. It happened after the
first performance there of _The Nightingale_, a lyric drama to set a
pace in the race towards the future. There was a long intermission
after this short opera before the continuation of the bill, which
included a performance of _The Legend of Joseph_, the composer himself
conducting, and Steinberg’s _Midas_. In the foyer I met my friend
Alfred Hertz. Those who know this conductor are familiar with his
moods. Tired, after a rehearsal of _Parsifal_, or excited before the
performance of a work which he is about to conduct for the first time,
he becomes _distrait_ and unconversational to a degree which would not
seem possible in a man who ordinarily is as fond of anecdote as he is
of Viennese pastry. I recognized his mood on this occasion. Mopping his
brow (it was June), he was good enough to explain.
“I can’t stay here any longer,” he said. “It’s very embarrassing.
Strauss asked me to come. I am here as his guest to hear _The Legend
of Joseph_, but I can’t listen to it. I’m too tired--I am exhausted. I
have never heard such extraordinary music. I have never been so moved,
so excited before at the performance of a new opera.... Oh, if I could
have the privilege of introducing that work to New York, then I should
be happy!”
I am very glad to quote these words to the lasting honor of one who
realized at once the pleasure that Strawinsky’s music, quite in a new
mode, would give to the coming generation, and to a few in the present.