Nijinsky (14 page)

Benois described Diaghilev in top hat and tails,
‘looking very pompous
and solemn as he always did on first nights, [standing] by, giving directions with growing anxiety' as silk rose petals were sewn onto a squirming Nijinsky's pink and mauve tricot body stocking beneath Bakst's watchful eye. Bronia thought this process of transformation into the Rose was like watching the creation of a work of art. Vaslav had made up his face to look like
‘a celestial insect
, his eyebrows suggesting some beautiful beetle … his mouth was like rose petals' and he wore a close-fitting cap of silk petals. It was probably just Diaghilev creating a story, but Nijinsky was even said to have sprinkled himself with attar of roses before he went on stage.

As the Rose, Nijinsky
‘suggested a cluster of leaves
wafted by a slight breeze', his hands and arms unfolding around his head like petals or tendrils.
‘When he danced
Spectre
he was the very perfume of the rose, because in everything he extracted the essence,' recalled Marie Rambert. It was, said the critic Cyril Beaumont,
‘the most perfect
choreographic conception I have ever seen … It seemed too beautiful, too flawless, too intangible to be real; and when it was over you had a feeling as though the warm theatre had caused you to doze and you had suddenly awakened from an entrancing dream.'

The most demanding of teachers, Enrico Cecchetti loved this piece. For him Karsavina embodied
‘grace, freshness
and trembling thoughts', while Nijinsky exuded ‘all the luscious beauty and sensuous perfume of the Rose'. But Fokine – whose attitude to Nijinsky would become so begrudging that he mentioned him in his memoirs only when exclusion
would have been unthinkable – laced his praise with plenty of vinegar. ‘
The fact that
Nijinsky was not masculine gave a special charm to this role, making him all the more suitable for it,' he wrote, before conceding that Nijinsky ‘never displayed any effeminacy on the stage, no matter how effeminate he may have been in his personal life'.

In truth, despite the sensuality of the piece, Nijinsky seems to have been an ethereally genderless presence as the Rose – a creature removed from humanity, as otherworldly as his Blue Bird or the Firebird he had hoped to be able to dance. But for an audience of 1911 it was challenging to see a girl dancing with a man pretending to be a flower: yet another reason for Nijinsky, however well he danced, to be suspect.
*

The
pièce de résistance
was Nijinsky's final leap offstage, recalling that triumphant jump as Armida's slave during their first night in Paris in 1909. Considering that he had just danced what was effectively a nine-minute solo – Karsavina's part was minimal;
Spectre
was really the first solo ballet created for a man – this
grand jeté
was an extraordinary feat of strength and control. What watchers were astonished by was ‘
the artistry by which
he contrived to give the impression that having once taken off with an infinite continuity of grace, he was never going to come down'.

There was more than mere artistry at work, though. The conductor, Pierre Monteux, ‘
played the chord
before last with a slight
point d'orgue
, thereby creating an illusion of a prolonged elevation of the dancer. When I played the final chord, you may be sure, the Spectre was already reclining on the mattress placed there to receive him. Ha, ha!' In the wings, Nijinsky was caught almost upright by Zuikov and then lay panting on his mattress as Zuikov mopped his brow and let him have small sips of warm water while Diaghilev watched on, ‘
all solicitude as
if Nijinsky was in serious danger'.

Jean Cocteau said seeing
Spectre
from backstage was like watching a boxer between bouts. ‘
What grace coupled
with what brutality! I can still hear the thunder of that applause, still see that young man smeared with greasepaint, sweating, panting, one hand pressed to his heart and the other clutching a stage brace. He collapsed on a chair, and in a few seconds, slapped, drenched, pummelled, he walked back out onstage, bowing, smiling.'

If
Schéhérazade
had made Nijinsky into a sex symbol,
Spectre
sealed his status as an unlikely romantic hero. Audiences adored it. Unmasculine he may have seemed, and his life with Diaghilev was hardly secret, but that did not stop women as well as men fantasising about him leaping through their bedroom windows. Zuikov was said to have built himself a house on the proceeds of the rose petals shed nightly by Nijinsky and he was no longer able to keep admirers out of his charge's dressing room: they were a part of the tyranny of success to which Nijinsky knew he had to submit. Vaslav's recourse was silence. With Zuikov anticipating his habits, he learned to dress and make up in a room crowded with well-wishers before, during and after a performance without saying a word to anyone.

The other success of the 1911 season, possibly Nijinsky's greatest role, was
Petrushka
, the unhappy clown: a Russian version of a folk hero common to all European cultures – Punch, Pierrot, Pulcinella – part fairy tale, part
commedia dell'arte
, well-harvested sources of ballet inspiration. Benois and Stravinsky drew on their shared memories of the frosty Shrovetide fairs of St Petersburg and added a sinister dash of the absinthe-soaked world of Paul Verlaine, whose first Pierrot poem was published in 1868 (‘no longer the lunar dreamer of the old song … his spectre haunts us today, thin and luminous') and his second – in which Pierrot is explicitly associated with his lover Arthur Rimbaud – in 1886 (‘A pale face lit by cunning grins … Accustomed, one might say, to contemplating every outcome').

The germ of the ballet was Stravinsky's creation in the summer of 1910 of what would become ‘Petrushka's cry'. He, Diaghilev, Benois – and Nijinsky, silent but watchful – worked on the scenario through the autumn and winter, in person and by letter, while Stravinsky continued to compose the music (it was not finished until mere weeks before the premiere). Fokine joined them in Rome in May to begin blocking out the ballet in earnest.

Again, a mood of excited optimism infused them all during the creative process. Stravinsky wrote to one friend during this period, vigorously denying that ballet was ‘
the “lowest sort”
of scenic art', but instead the only form of theatre ‘
that sets itself
, as its cornerstone, the tasks of beauty, and nothing else', and asked another to send him the tunes of two popular songs that he would insert into the fairground scenes.

Bronia remembered visiting Vaslav in his hotel room and finding him surrounded by spring flowers – radiant; and Benois also used the same word to describe this period. Vaslav and Karsavina practised daily with Cecchetti, unless Arturo Toscanini needed the theatre for rehearsals. Occasionally, to Cecchetti's irritation, they were swept off by Diaghilev to see an arch, a view or a monument.

As yet, Fokine's dissatisfaction with his place at the Ballets Russes had not been directed towards Nijinsky, and in his memoirs he recalled working together ‘
in perfect
harmony' on
Petrushka
. Unaware that Diaghilev had promised Nijinsky
Faune
(on which Nijinsky had been working for months) and that Diaghilev was already telling people he considered Fokine a spent force, he put their happy working relationship down to the fact that ‘Diaghilev had not yet persuaded Nijinsky that he was a choreographer, and therefore he strove only for perfection of execution'.

But the fact that Fokine came to the proceedings late pleased Stravinsky, who later said Fokine was the most disagreeable person he ever worked with (though this was probably partly because, for his part, Fokine found Stravinsky's music – especially
Petrushka
, the last piece on which they worked together – undanceable). It also allowed him and the
others to form a good idea of the ballet before Fokine began the final choreographic process.

As ever with one of Diaghilev's premieres, the first night, in Paris in June 1911, was plagued by hitches. On their arrival in Paris it was discovered that the set for the second scene of the ballet, which takes place in Petrushka's cell, had been damaged in transit. A key part of Benois's decoration was the malevolent portrait of the Magician that watched over everything poor Petrushka did. This had been destroyed. Because Benois had an abscessed elbow, Bakst offered to repaint it. On dress rehearsal night, when Benois saw the new portrait for the first time, he was furious because Bakst had painted the Magician in profile, ruining his effect. Though the artist Valentin Serov repainted it again according to Benois's instructions in time for the opening night, and Diaghilev and Bakst apologised, the hysterical Benois launched into an unforgivable anti-Semitic attack on Bakst. Benois and Diaghilev eventually patched up their friendship but never again would Benois be at the heart of Diaghilev's group of trusted advisers.

On the night itself, a befeathered and bejewelled Misia Sert was sitting in her box, waiting for the ritual three knocks of the call boy that signalled the curtain was about to rise, when Diaghilev burst through the door, drenched in sweat and with his coat-tails flying out behind him. ‘
The costumier
refuses to leave the clothes without being paid. It's ghastly. He says he won't be duped again and he'll take all the stuff away if he isn't paid at once!' Sert raced downstairs, ordered her driver to go home and collect the requisite 4,000 francs, and ‘the show went on, impeccable and glamorous'.

This first performance of
Petrushka
was conducted by Pierre Monteux, who had met Stravinsky in the months leading up to the premiere and become fascinated by the dynamic, dragonfly-like figure of the young composer, as well as by ballet which he had previously considered a lower art form. After a few rehearsals, Stravinsky declared, ‘
Only Monteux
will direct my work.' For his part, Monteux came to regard
Petrushka
with a proprietary air, saying that he never liked seeing anyone else conduct it.

Nijinsky, who claimed not to get stage-fright, was so nervous before the premiere that he asked Fokine to stay in the wings to prompt him if he went wrong, something he had never done before. He needn't have worried. Benois – the most critical of audiences – was ‘
enchanted
' by his performance. He was particularly impressed by the way Nijinsky, who had hitherto played only
jeune premier
parts, had bravely embraced the grotesque half-human, half-puppet, resisting any temptation to make himself attractive to the audience. Even Fokine said he never saw a better Petrushka.

The set was a vivid picture of an entirely Russian world: a jostling crowd of coachmen dancing in the snow to keep warm, of trained bears, troupes of gypsies, wet-nurses in their distinctive headdresses, staggering drunken soldiers, fur-capped
muzhiks
and organ-grinders; where stalls sold caramels, sunflower seeds and doughnuts, tea from steaming samovars, and vodka; and where the sound of silver bells tied to sleigh reins hung in the cold air. Children rode on the painted horses of a wooden carousel. Over a hundred people were on stage in the crowd scenes, almost all of them in costumes designed for their specific role and each acting an individual part rather than dancing in sync like a traditional
corps de ballet
, their apparent spontaneity echoing Stravinsky's complex multiplicity of musical themes. There was even space for in-jokes: Bronia, as one of the street dancers, parodied Kshesinskaya's acrobatic demonstrations of virtuosity in
Le Talisman
, a ballet by Marius Petipa loathed by the Diaghilevtsy-Fokinisty.

Petrushka is one of three puppets who belong to the fair's showman, the Magician. He loves the empty-headed ballerina (Karsavina), who flirts with him but then abandons him for the vain and brutish Moor. The Moor challenges him to a fight and kills him; the last scene showed Nijinsky as Petrushka's ghost, blowing a final, futile kiss to the world that had destroyed him.

Each of them had steps that corresponded to their characters: pretty
pizzicato
steps for the ballerina; florid gestures and clumsy movements for the Moor, whose body language is
en dehors
, turned out; and stiff, restricted motion for the tormented Petrushka, who is all turned in,
en dedans
. When Petrushka danced, his heavy wooden head hung awkwardly from his shoulders, his feet in their blue boots dangled loosely at the end of shabby stuffed legs, his hands in black mittens were as stiff as wooden paddles. ‘
Only the swinging
, mechanical, soul-less motions jerk the sawdust-filled arms or legs upwards in extravagant motions to indicate transports of joy or despair.' Given what we know of Nijinsky's later choreographic style (and Fokine's own tendency to lyricism), the dislocated, fragmentary quality of Petrushka's movement is likely to have been Nijinsky's contribution.