The Proud Tower (63 page)

Every year for the next six years the Ballet returned with new and exuberant productions which revolutionized choreography and stage design. Music was dignified by a full orchestra, with Pierre Monteux engaged as conductor. Additional operas—Moussorgsky’s
Khovantschina
, Rimsky’s
Sadko
and
Ivan the Terrible
—besides
Prince Igor
and
Boris Godunov
, were added to the repertoire. Pavlova later left the company, but in 1909 in
Les Sylphides
she seemed to dancing “what Racine is to poetry,” while Karsavina was “the exquisite union of classic tradition and revolutionary artistry.” For the music of this ballet two of Chopin’s piano compositions,
Nocturne
and
Valse Brillante
, were orchestrated by a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, Igor Stravinsky, then twenty-six, whom Diaghilev had commissioned after hearing his first performed orchestral work in St. Petersburg in 1908. In contrast to the classical delicacy of
Sylphides
, Fokine staged the savage Polovtsian dances from
Prince Igor
with Tartar-Mongol themes echoing in the music and a wild Asiatic horde of dancers against a scene in dull grays and reds, of low round-topped tents and rising columns of smoke stretching toward the infinite horizon of the steppe.

Emotion long absent from the ballet was infused by the voluptuous physical spectacles and intoxicating colors of Bakst. Houris of the Sultan’s harem from the
Arabian Nights
, bacchantes from a Greek vase, Russian boyars in boots, harlequins and colombines of the Commedia dell’Arte, forest creatures in maroon, green and gold suggesting “the sparkling beauty of spotted pythons,” tennis-players in modern dress took over the stage. Bakst inspired Paul Poiret and five years of women’s fashions. When planning Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Schéhérazade
with his associates, the red-haired Bakst in his elegant and scented clothes jumped on a chair and explained, in his guttural accent with explicit gestures, how the Sultan’s bodyguard should cut everyone to pieces: “
everyone
, his wives and all their Negro lovers!” For
Schéhérazade
he designed a setting to suggest “dreadful deeds of lust and cruelty” which Fokine interpreted enthusiastically in a dance of Negro slaves whom the Sultan’s wives persuade the eunuchs to liberate from their golden cages and who fling themselves upon the willing harem in an orgiastic dance of “spasms of desire.” The sexual theme was a favorite of the Ballet. For
Thamar
, the Caucasian queen, a Cleopatra
à la russe
, Bakst designed a medieval castle above a river into whose waters rejected lovers fell to their doom. In her various roles as temptress the delicate and flower-like Karsavina conveyed vice, as the critics said, “with a great deal of verisimilitude.”

When Rimsky died in 1908 Stravinsky composed a
Chant Funèbre
for a memorial concert in St. Petersburg. More than ever impressed, Diaghilev asked him to write the music for a ballet based on the Russian fairy tale of Prince Ivan and the Firebird. Set in a wood with a wicked wizard and twelve princesses under a spell, it evoked from the composer an imaginative score of mixed rhythms, graceful melody and a weird electric dance of demons. With Bolm as the Prince and Karsavina as the Firebird, it was performed in June, 1910, the first work of Stravinsky in his own right to be heard outside of Russia. Debussy rushed backstage to embrace him. The audience was delighted to appreciate music that was contemporary without being uncomfortable and Diaghilev was congratulated on every hand. He at once commissioned another ballet for the following season. When Stravinsky played for him a piece for piano and orchestra which he had already written on the adventures of Petrouchka, “the immortal and unhappy puppet, hero of every fair in every country,” Diaghilev was enchanted. Together they worked out the scenes of the ballet, the carnival in the public square, the crowds and booths, the magician with his tricks, the gypsies and trained bear, the puppet show whose dolls come to life, the vain love of Petrouchka for the Dancer and his death at the hands of his rival, the Moor.

Petrouchka
was music of power and vitality, close to the Russian people, with folk tunes and echoes of the hurdy-gurdy, humor and satire and poignant grief. Like Strauss, Stravinsky scorned development of themes but in a tradition he had inherited from the Russian “Five” rather than from Germany. Almost contrary to the nature of music, which traditionally depended on development and repetition, Stravinsky was terse and direct, aiming, as he said, “at straightforward expression in its simplest form. I have no use for ‘working-out’ in dramatic music. The one essential thing is to feel and convey one’s feelings.”

In this
Petrouchka
succeeded and Paris acknowledged what Debussy’s embrace had already recognized: the appearance of an original and major composer. Nijinsky as the puppet broke the audience’s heart. Thrown by his master into a black box, rushing about waving his stiff arms in the air, pathetic in love and frantic in jealousy, his performance was a triumph just in time for the London season.

England greeted the Russian Ballet with a fervor equal to France. In the brilliant Coronation summer of 1911 “it was exciting to be alive.” The heat broke records, festivities were at a peak, airplanes landed on country lawns, everybody was stimulated by the thrill of flight but the Russian Ballet “crowned all.” It restored the dance to its “primal nobility,” wrote Ellen Terry. It was a revelation in the harmony of the arts. Society, intellectuals, everyone with any pretensions to taste, flocked to Covent Garden “night after night, entranced.” Nijinsky enraptured all who came: as the uncouth puppet, as the Negro slave in silver trousers of
Schéhérazade
, as Pierrot in a candle-lit garden chasing dancers dressed as butterflies to music by Schumann, as the Blue God rising from a lotus in a Chinese pool to music by Proust’s friend Reynaldo Hahn, as the ghost of a rose in a costume of petals, flying out of a window in a famous leap that made people say his element was the air. Speaking no English and hardly any French, he became the darling of the dinner parties, speechless but smiling.

Impelled by triumph, like Strauss, to try for new sensation, Diaghilev in the season of 1912 succeeded in shocking Paris. He produced two new ballets by French composers. Maurice Ravel’s
Daphnis et Chloé
, written for the occasion, was acknowledged by Stravinsky “one of the finest things by a French composer.” Debussy’s
L’Après-midi d’un Faune
, whose music was already known, was a scandal for non-musical reasons. Nijinsky was the Faun in skin-fitting tights painted in animal spots, with a tiny tail, a wig of tight curls made of gold cord, and two little curling horns. In a ballet lasting twelve minutes he chased nymphs in Greek gowns and, as the last escaped him, leaving behind her veil, fell upon it in a movement of sexual consummation. The choreography in this case was Nijinsky’s own. The curtain fell upon hoots, whistles, and insults mixed with cries of
“épatant!”
and
“Bis, bis!”
Obliging, the company danced the ballet over again to “indescribable chaos.” Next morning Gaston Calmette, the editor of
Figaro
, published a signed editorial on his front page under the title “Un Faux Pas” denouncing “the extraordinary exhibition of erotic bestiality and shameless gesture” and demanding its suppression in subsequent performances. Agreeing, if less excitedly,
Le Gaulois
found the final gesture “
de trop
,” while
Le Temps
with customary dignity expressed the “justified discontent” of the French people at this “regrettable adventure.” A report quickly circulated that the Prefect of Police at Calmette’s request had issued an injunction against further performance. In clubs, salons, cafés and lobbies of the Chamber no one talked of anything else; Paris momentarily was again in two camps. The excitable Russian Ambassador, M. Izvolsky, wanted to know if
Figaro
was attacking the Franco-Russian Alliance. Next day
Le Matin
published a letter from Rodin defending Nijinsky for restoring “freedom of instinct and human emotion” to the dance. The controversy transferred itself to Rodin, whose supporters issued a manifesto in which Jules Lemaître and Maurice Barrès were now on the same side as Anatole France and Octave Mirbeau along with ex-President Loubet, former premiers Clemenceau, Léon Bourgeois and Briand, Ambassador Izvolsky and Baron d’Estournelles. Forain, unreconstructed, published in
Figaro
an anti-Rodin cartoon. With every ticket for the second performance sold at a premium, the offending gesture was suppressed, leaving the Faun merely gazing on the veil with doleful regret.

In Vienna that season, where owing to a current Balkan War the mood was anti-Slav, a fiasco was barely averted. At rehearsals the orchestra of the Viennese Royal Opera, which could play anything put before it with accomplished ease, played the Russian music with ostentatious disapproval and deliberate mistakes. Monteux was helpless and when the enraged Diaghilev commented out loud on the behavior of these “pigs,” the musicians downed their instruments and left the stage. Only by extracting an apology from Diaghilev next day was the crisis resolved. In Berlin the Kaiser attended a performance of
Cleopatra
and
Firebird.
Preferring the former, he summoned Diaghilev and told him he would send his Egyptologists to see it, apparently under the impression that Bakst’s fantastic decor was authentic and the Russian potpourri a revelation of the real music of Ptolemaic Egypt.

Strauss too came to the performance and afterward complimented Stravinsky, adding a characteristic piece of advice. Referring to the muted mysterious opening of
Firebird
, where the Prince rides into the enchanted wood, he said, “You make a mistake in beginning your piece pianissimo; the public will not listen. You should astonish them by a sudden crash at the start. After that they will follow you and you can do what you like.”

To capture Strauss for the Ballet was an obvious next task, and the Ballet’s prestige in turn had already interested von Hofmannsthal, who opened negotiations. After obtaining Diaghilev’s financial terms, he suggested to Strauss a ballet on Orestes and the Furies with Nijinsky portraying the hero’s “terrible deed and terrible suffering” and the Furies “bursting forth horribly and triumphantly” in a dance of destruction at the end. It was hardly a fresh idea but Hofmannsthal wrote temptingly that it would provide the occasion for “wonderful, somber, grandiose music.… Think it over and please don’t refuse.” He enclosed a note of the terms which Diaghilev “takes the liberty of submitting to you.” When Strauss promptly rejected the idea, Hofmannsthal hurriedly offered instead a libretto for a ballet based on Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife which he had already written in collaboration with Count Harry Kessler, a German litterateur, amateur in politics and patron of the arts who like other Germans of liberal ideas had no place in official life. Applying pressure to Strauss, Hofmannsthal wrote that if he refused, Diaghilev—who liked the libretto—would commission a Russian or French composer. This worked. “Joseph is excellent,” Strauss replied. “I’ll bite. Have already started sketching it out.”

Trouble soon developed. The libretto as conceived by its two sophisticated authors was a metaphysical version of the story of the Baptist and Salome, with Joseph as a God-seeker “whose secret is that of growth and transmutation, whose holiness is that of creating and begetting, whose perfection is that of things which have not yet been.” He is confronted by a sensual woman who is ruined “by perception of the divine which she cannot conquer.” These were not the most suitable ideas to express in music, much less the dance. Squirming, Strauss complained, “The chaste Joseph isn’t at all up my street and if a thing bores me I find it difficult to set to music.” He complained that Joseph in the ballet did nothing but resist the Queen’s advances; “this God-seeker is going to be a hell of an effort.” Hofmannsthal explained carefully that Joseph’s resistance was “the struggle of man’s intensified intellectuality” against woman’s urge to drag him down, a clarification which did little to relieve Strauss’s boredom with his task. His first sketches, which he played for Hofmannsthal in December, 1912, left his collaborator “disturbed” and conscious that “there is something wrong between the two of us which in the end will have to be brought into the open.” For the time being he implored Strauss not to feel constrained by the demands of the dance but to write “unrestrained pure Strauss” expressing his own personality “with every conceivable freedom in polyphony and modernism in a manner as bold and bizarre as you may wish.” Joseph remained chaste, however, and Strauss uninspired. In the meantime Diaghilev had another premiere ready for the season of 1913.

It was
Le Sacre du Printemps
(The Rite of Spring) by Stravinsky. Its theme was elemental, the rejuvenation of earth in spring. The form was a celebration of pagan rites in which a sacrificial maiden dances herself to death to renew the life of the soil. In contrast to the tired sophistry of
Joseph
, Stravinsky’s scenario was simply a framework for dancers and music. He opened not with a bang, as Strauss had advised, but with a slow trembling of woodwinds as if to suggest the physical mystery of budding. As the curtain rose on tribal games and dances, the music became vibrant and frenetic with primeval rhythms, the chant of trumpets, the driving beat of machinery, jazz metres and pitiless drums never before used with such power and abandon. It rose in intensity and excitement to a blazing climax and all the promise of a new age. It was the Twentieth Century incarnate. It reached at one stride a peak of modern music that was to dominate later generations. It was to the Twentieth Century what Beethoven’s
Eroica
was to the Nineteenth, and like it, never surpassed.

The premiere conducted by Monteux on May 28, 1913, created almost a riot in the theatre. The abandonment of understood harmony, melody and structure seemed musical anarchy. People felt they were hearing a blasphemous attempt to destroy music as an art and responded with howls and catcalls and derisive laughter. Counter-demonstrators bellowed defiance. One young man became so excited he began to beat rhythmically with his fists on the head of an American in the audience whose own emotion was so great that “I did not feel the blows for some time.” A beautifully gowned lady in a box stood up and slapped the face of a man hissing in an adjoining box. Saint-Saëns indignantly rose and left the hall; Ravel shouted, “Genius!” The dancers could not hear the music above the uproar and Nijinsky, who had choreographed the ballet, stood in the wings pounding out the rhythm with his fists and shouting in despair, “
Ras, Dwa, Tri!
” Monteux threw desperate glances to Diaghilev who signed to him to keep on playing and shouted to the audience to let the piece be heard. “Listen first, hiss afterwards!” screamed Gabriel Astruc, the French manager, in a rage. When it was over the audience streamed out to continue their battle in the cafés and the critics to carry it to the press, but as the music had hardly been heard, opinion was largely emotion. Not until a year later when the music was played again in Paris as a concert in April, 1914, was it recognized for what it was. With the performance of the
Sacre
, filling out a decade of innovation in the arts, all the major tendencies of the next half-century had been stated.