Natasha's Dance (47 page)

    The importance of the ballet as a source of artistic innovation in the twentieth century is something that no one would have predicted before its rediscovery by Diaghilev. The ballet had become an ossified art form; in much of Europe it was disregarded as an old-fashioned entertainment of the court. But in Russia it lived on in St Petersburg, where the culture was still dominated by the court. At the Marinsky Theatre, where Stravinsky spent much of his childhood, there were regular Wednesday and Sunday ballet matinees - ‘the half-empty auditorium’ being made up, in the words of Prince Lieven, of ‘a mixture of children accompanied by their mothers or governesses, and old men with binoculars’.
¹²⁷
Among serious intellectuals the ballet was considered ‘an entertainment for snobs and tired businessmen’,
¹²⁸
and with the exception of Tchaikovsky, whose reputation suffered as a consequence of his involvement with the form, the composers for the ballet (such as Pugni, Minkus and Drigo) were mostly foreign hacks.* Rimsky-Korsakov, the ultimate authority on musical taste when Stravinsky studied with him in the early 1900s, was famous for his remark that the ballet was ‘not really an art form’.
¹²⁹

    Benois was the real ballet lover in the World of Art group. It appealed

    * Cesare Pugni (1802-70), in Russia from 1851; Ludwig Minkus (1826-1907), in Russia from 1850 to 1890; Riccardo Drigo (1846-1930), in Russia from 1879 to

    to his aristocratic outlook, and to his nostalgia for the classical culture of eighteenth-century Petersburg. This retrospective aesthetic was shared by all the founders of the Ballets Russes: Benois, Dobuzhinsky, the critic Filosofov and Diaghilev. The ballets of Tchaikovsky were the incarnation of the classical ideal and, even though they never featured in the
saison russe
in Paris, where Tchaikovsky was the least appreciated of the Russian composers, they were an inspiration to the founders of the Ballets Russes. Tchaikovsky was the last of the great European court composers (he lived in the last of the great European eighteenth-century states). Staunchly monarchist, he was among the intimates of Tsar Alexander III. His music, which embodied the ‘Imperial style’, was preferred by the court to the ‘Russian’ harmonies of Musorgsky, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov.

    The Imperial style was virtually defined by the polonaise. Imported into Russia by the Polish composer Jozek Kozlowski towards the end of the eighteenth century, the polonaise became the supreme courtly form and the most brilliant of all the ballroom genres. It came to symbolize the European brilliance of eighteenth-century Petersburg itself. In
Eugene Onegin
Pushkin (like Tchaikovsky) used the polonaise for the climactic entry of Tatiana at the ball in Petersburg. Tolstoy used the polonaise at the climax of the ball in
War and Peace,
where the Emperor makes his entrance and Natasha dances with Andrei. In
The Sleeping Beauty
(1889) and in his opera
The Queen of Spades
(1890) Tchaikovsky reconstructed the imperial grandeur of the eighteenth-century world. Set in the reign of Louis XIV,
The Sleeping Beauty
was a nostalgic tribute to the French influence on eighteenth-century Russian music and culture.
The Queen of Spades,
based on the story by Pushkin, evoked the bygone Petersburg of Catherine the Great, an era when the capital was fully integrated, and played a major role, in the culture of Europe. Tchaikovsky infused the opera with rococo elements (he himself described the ballroom scenes as a ‘slavish imitation’ of the eighteenth-century style).
¹³⁰
He used the story’s layers of ghostly fantasy to conjure up a dream world of the past. The myth of Petersburg as an unreal city was thus used to travel back in time and recover its lost beauty and classical ideals.

    On the evening of the premiere of
The Queen of Spades
Tchaikovsky left the Marinsky Theatre and wandered on his own through the streets

    of Petersburg, convinced that his opera was a dismal failure. Suddenly he heard a group of people walking towards him singing one of the opera’s best duets. He stopped them and asked them how they were acquainted with the music. Three young men introduced themselves: they were Benois, Filosofov and Diaghilev, the co-founders of the World of Art. From that moment on, according to Benois, the group was united by their love of Tchaikovsky and his classical ideal of Petersburg. ‘Tchaikovsky’s music’, Benois wrote in his old age, ‘was what I seemed to be waiting for since my earliest childhood.’
¹³¹

    In 1907 Benois staged a production of Nikolai Cherepnin’s ballet
Le Pavilion d’Armide
(based on Gauthier’s
Omphale)
at the Marinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. Like
The Sleeping Beauty,
it was set in the period of Louis XIV and was classical in style. The production made a deep impression on Diaghilev. Benois’ own sumptuous designs, Fokine’s modern choreography, the dazzling virtuosity of Nijinsky’s dancing - all this, declared Diaghilev, ‘must be shown to Europe’.
¹³²
Le Pavilion
became the curtain-raiser to the 1909 season in Paris, alongside the Polovtsian dances from Borodin’s
Prince Igor
(also choreographed by Fokine), in a mixed programme of Russian classical and nationalist works. The exotic ‘otherness’ of these
mises-en-scene
caused a sensation. The French loved ‘our primitive wildness’, Benois later wrote, ‘our freshness and our spontaneity’.
¹³³
Diaghilev could see that there was money to be made from the export of more Russian ballets in this vein. And so it was, as he wrote to tell Lyadov, that they cooked up the libretto of
The Firebird.
Diaghilev and Benois and Fokine, with the fabulist Remizov, the painter Golovine, the poet Potemkin and the composer Cherepnin (of
Le Pavilion
fame) dreamt up the whole thing around the kitchen table in the true collective spirit of the Russian tradition. But in the end Lyadov did not want to write

    the score. It was offered to Glazunov, and then Cherepnin, who turned

    it down, and then, in a state of utter desperation, Diaghilev resorted to the young, and at that time still little known composer, Igor Stravinsky.

    Benois called the ballet a ‘fairy tale for grown-ups’. Patched together from various folk tales, its aim was to create what Benois called a ‘mysterium of Russia’ for ‘export to the West’.
¹³⁴
The real export was the myth of peasant innocence and youthful energy. Each ingredient of the ballet was a stylized abstraction of folklore. Stravinsky’s score

    was littered with borrowings from folk music, especially the peasant wedding songs
(devichniki
and
khorovody)
in the
Ronde des princesses
and the finale. The scenario was a patchwork compilation of two entirely separate peasant tales (for there was no single tale of the Firebird) as retold by Afanasiev and various
lubok
prints from the nineteenth century: the tale of Ivan Tsarevich and the Firebird, and the tale of Kashchei the Immortal. These two stories were rewritten to shift their emphasis from a tale of pagan magic (by the grey wolf of the peasant stories) into one of divine rescue (by the Firebird) consistent with Russia’s Christian mission in the world.
¹³⁵

    In the ballet the Tsarevich is lured into the garden of the monster Kashchey by the beauty of the maiden princess. Ivan is saved from the monster and his retinue by the Firebird, whose airborne powers compel Kashchey and his followers to dance wildly until they fall asleep. Ivan then discovers the enormous egg which contains Kashchey’s soul, the monster is destroyed, and Ivan is united with the princess. Reinvented for the stage, the Firebird herself was made to carry far more than she had done in the Russian fairy tales. She was transformed into the symbol of a phoenix-like resurgent peasant Russia, the embodiment of an elemental freedom and beauty, in the pseudo-Slavic mythology of the Symbolists which came to dominate the ballet’s conception (as immortalized by Blok’s ‘mythic bird’, which adorned the cover of the
Mir iskusstva
journal in the form of a woodcut by Leon Bakst). The production for the Paris season was a self-conscious package of exotic Russian props - from Golovine’s colourful peasant costumes to those weird mythic beasts, the
‘kikimora’, ‘boliboshki’
and ‘two-headed monsters’, invented by Remizov for the
Suite de Kashchei
- all of them designed to cater to the
fin-de-siecle
Western fascination with ‘primitive’ Russia.

    But the real innovation of
The Firebird
was Stravinsky’s use of folk music. Previous composers of the Russian national school had thought of folklore as purely thematic material. They would frequently cite folk songs but would always subject them to the conventional (and essentially Western) musical language canonized by Rimsky-Korsakov. To their trained ears, the heterophonic harmonies of Russian folk music were ugly and barbaric, and not really ‘music’ in the proper sense at all, so that it would be highly inappropriate to adopt them as a part of their

    17. Gusli
player. The
gusli
was an ancient type of Russian zither, usually five-stringed, and widely used in folk music

    art form. Stravinsky was the first composer to assimilate folk music as an element of style - using not just its melodies but its harmonies and rhythms as the basis of his own distinctive ‘modern’ style.*

The Firebird
was the great breakthrough. But it was only made possible by the pioneering work of two ethnographers, whose musical discoveries were yet another product of the ‘going to the people’ in the 1870s. The first was by Yury Melgunov, a pianist and philologist who carried out a series of field trips to Kaluga province in the 1870s. On these trips he discovered the polyphonic harmonies of Russian peasant song, and worked out a scientific method of transcribing them. The other was by Evgenia Linyova, who confirmed Melgunov’s findings by recording peasant singing with a phonograph on field trips to the provinces. These recordings were the basis of her
Peasant Songs of Great Russia as They Are in the Folk’s Harmonization,
published in St Petersburg in 1904-9,
¹³⁶
which directly influenced the music of Stravinsky in
The Firebird, Petrushka
and
The Rite of Spring.
The most important aspect of Linyova’s work was her discovery that the voice of the peasant chorus singer was not inflected with individual characteristics, as previously believed by the
kuchkist
composers, but rather strived for a kind of impersonality. In the preface to her
Peasant Songs
she described this last quality:

    [A peasant woman called Mitrevna] started singing my favourite song, ‘Little Torch’, which I had been looking for everywhere but had not yet succeeded in recording. Mitrevna took the main melody. She sang in a deep sonorous voice, surprisingly fresh for a woman so old. In her singing there were absolutely no sentimental emphases or howlings. What struck me was its simplicity. The song flowed evenly and clearly, not a single word was lost. Despite the length of the melody and the slowness of the tempo, the spirit with which she invested the words of the song was so powerful that she seemed at once to be singing and speaking the song. I was amazed at this pure, classical strictness of style, which went so well with her serious face.
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    * Because he had found, in Russian peasant music, his own alternative to the German symphonism of the nineteenth century, Stravinsky did not share the interest of other modernists such as Schoenberg, Berg and Webern in serial (twelve-tone) music. It was only after 1945 that Stravinsky began to develop his own form of serialism.

    It was precisely this ‘classical’ quality that became so central, not just to the music of Stravinsky, but to the whole theory of primitivist art. As Bakst put it, the ‘austere forms of savage art are a new way forward from European art’.
¹³⁸

    In
Petrushka
(1911) Stravinsky used the sounds of Russian life to overturn the entire musical establishment with its European rules of beauty and technique. Here was another Russian revolution - a musical uprising by the lowlife of St Petersburg. Everything about the ballet was conceived in ethnographic terms. Benois’ scenario conjured up in detail the vanished fairground world of the Shrovetide carnival of his beloved childhood in St Petersburg. Fokine’s mechanistic choreography echoed the jerky ostinato rhythms which Stravinsky heard in vendors’ cries and chants, organ-grinder tunes, accordion melodies, factory songs, coarse peasant speech and the syncopated music of village bands.
¹³⁹
It was a kind of musical
lubok
- a symphonic tableau of the noises of the street.

    But of all Stravinsky’s Russian ballets, by far the most subversive was
The Rite of Spring
(1913). The idea of the ballet was originally conceived by the painter Nikolai Roerich, although Stravinsky, who was quite notorious for such distortions, later claimed it as his own. Roerich was a painter of the prehistoric Slavs and an accomplished archaeologist in his own right. He was absorbed in the rituals of neolithic Russia, which he idealized as a pantheistic realm of spiritual beauty where life and art were one, and man and nature lived in harmony. Stravinsky approached Roerich for a theme and he came to visit him at the artists’ colony of Talashkino, where the two men worked together on the scenario of ‘The Great Sacrifice’, as
The Rite of Spring
was originally called. The ballet was conceived as a re-creation of the ancient pagan rite of human sacrifice. It was meant to
be
that rite - not to tell the story of the ritual but (short of actual murder) to re-create that ritual on the stage and thus communicate in the most immediate way the ecstasy and terror of the human sacrifice. The ballet’s scenario was nothing like those of the romantic story ballets of the nineteenth century. It was simply put together as a succession of ritual acts: the tribal dance in adoration of the earth and sun; the choosing of the maiden for the sacrifice; the evocation of the ancestors by the elders of
the tribe which forms the central rite of the