The pupil at the Imperial Ballet School receives in fact a sound secondary education. Four hours a day are devoted to dancing during the eight years he is at school. While still at school the children occasionally appear on the stage in special ballets d’enfants. They also take part in “crowds” in operas where children are needed, as in the first act of Tchaikovsky’s Dame de Pique. At seventeen they begin their career as members of the corps de ballet, from which the most proficient rise upwards, through the various grades of coryphée, second sujet, premier sujet, première danseuse or ballerina, and ballerina assoluta. The dancer retires, after eighteen years’ service, at thirty-five—only artists of exceptional merit are permitted to continue after that age—and receives a pension of from one hundred and twenty pounds to two hundred and sixty pounds a year.
The fine quality of the performances of the Russian ballet is undoubtedly due in the first place to the prolonged and thorough training, not only of the principal dancers but of each individual performer. An average of five or six hours’ dancing a day is the rule rather than the exception; for a ballet that is to be performed at night is always rehearsed during the day, however many times it may have been given before. The counsel of Carlo-Blasis, the eighteenth-century ballet-master is fulfilled to the letter: “Il faut encore étudier,” he wrote, “lors même qu’on sera tout-à-fait formé.... Dans la musique, dans la peinture, etc., l’on n’a pas besoin d’un travail aussi opiniâtre pour conserver ce que l’on sait. L’art du danseur, comme tous ceux d’exercice, ne jouit pas de cet avantage.” In the Russian ballet there is a perfect co-operation between the performers and an all-round technical excellence quite unlike anything that has ever been seen in this country.
Moreover the art of the male dancer, which had almost died out in other countries, has not only been kept alive in Russia but has been developed equally with that of the ballerina. The “principal boy” of the English stage is, as we know, always a girl. A note of character and energy disappeared from the ballet when it became solely the medium of feminine dancing. The strength and breadth of the Russian ballet have gained enormously by the retention and development of male dancing. Indeed its virility is one of the most striking features. The fierceness of the warrior dances in Prince Igor and the adroitness of the dance of buffoons in Le Pavillon d’Armide are among its most memorable achievements. Scheherazade without Nijinsky would be like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. We realise now that without the masculine element the ballet is as incomplete as an orchestra without the bass.
In Russia the music of the ballet has received the same careful consideration as the choregraphy. In some cases, music which was not written specially for the purpose has been adapted to the uses of the ballet. But latterly it has been the custom of the directors to apply to the leading composers of the day for ballet music written expressly for a given subject. In earlier times it was of course the custom for composers to write the music for the ballets that were interpolated in the opera. Tchaikovsky was one of the first to compose a ballet independent of opera and complete in itself. This was The Sleeping Beauty, first presented in 1890, in his own opinion the best thing he ever did, with the exception of his opera, Eugène Onegin. He showed his recognition of the necessity of an absolute co-ordination among the collaborators of the ballet by working in accordance with the suggestions of the choregrapher. The maître de ballet, after composing the design of the dances that were to express the spirit and action of the piece, sent to the musician a detailed schedule of the music required; thus:
No. 1. Musique douce, 64 mesures.
No. 2. L’arbre s’éclaire. Musique pétillant de 8 mesures.
No. 3. L’entrée des enfants. Musique bruyante et joyeuse de 24 mesures, etc.
Casse-Noisette, another ballet by the same composer, appeared in 1892. The original and powerful music of Borodin has been pressed into the service of the ballet, and entire ballets have been written by Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazounov and Arensky. In the execution of the music there is the same specialisation. The leaders of the orchestra qualify specially for the ballet, having no part in the orchestra at any other time.
It is clear, therefore, that in Russia the ballet has long been regarded as a serious art-form. A keen and intelligent criticism and an enthusiastic public interest provide it with that bracing atmosphere without which it is difficult for any composite form of art to thrive. On the nights devoted exclusively to the ballet, the large Marianski Theatre is so crowded that it is difficult to obtain a seat. Most of the stalls and boxes are subscribed for, and the people renew their subscriptions year after year. Mr Rothay Reynolds relates how, when an elderly gentlemen who for a great number of years had had a seat in the front row suddenly died, a friend of his rushed to the theatre and offered the young lady at the box-office twenty guineas if she would secure him the seat. “Alas!” she said, “I have already received over a hundred applications.”
When the Russian ballet was being performed for the first time at Covent Garden, an enthusiast was heard to express his intention of emigrating to Russia in order to see the ballet in its true home. If he had carried out his intention it is to be feared that he would have suffered grievous disappointment. For it is a great misapprehension to suppose that the Russian ballet as it has been seen in Paris and London is typical of the official ballet at St Petersburg and Moscow. When the Diaghilew company first appeared at the Theatre du Châtelet, the republican convictions of Paris received a shock. Could any good thing come out of Tsardom? Had autocracy succeeded where the alliance of liberty, fraternity and equality had failed? Was it then true that venerable tradition, assisted by a bureaucratic regime, was a kinder nursing mother to the arts than the revolutionary spirit? Little by little the truth leaked out. The Russian ballet, which had been welcomed as the most modern manifestation of theatrical art, was not traditional but revolutionary. It was not the child of the official art of St Petersburg but the outcast. Its leaders were dangerous innovators whom the intransigent conservatives had expelled as hastily as if they had been political agitators. Paris was reassured.
The truth is that the excellence of the Imperial School of Ballet of which I have spoken is an excellence of method and technique rather than of spirit and conception. In ideals the Imperial Ballet has not travelled far from those of Milan in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. It has elaborated and refined, but it has not greatly widened them. The visitor at the St Petersburg Opera House would discover that the unmeaning and unbeautiful acrobatics of an earlier day have not yet altogether disappeared. He would find that the ballet in Aida, for example, does not differ in many material points, excepting always the accomplishment of the performers, from what he has been accustomed to see in Milan or Vienna. It was in Russia that the spirit of criticism gave rise to new ideas, but the exponents of these new ideas came into sharp collision with the authorities at the Imperial theatres of St Petersburg and Moscow.
The spectacles which have been seen in London and Paris—some of which have never been produced in Russia—are the production of a group of daring and subversive artists, whom M. Serge de Diaghilew, the organiser of the ballets, has gathered round him—notably M. Fokine, the choregraphic director, MM. Leon Bakst and Benois, the designers of the scenery and costume, M. Tcherepnin, the musical composer and conductor, and of course M. Nijinsky and Mme Karsavina. M. Fokine, it is true, is the assistant ballet-master at the St Petersburg Opera, but he is said to be in command there only at the rarest intervals. M. Bakst has not worked for the Imperial theatres, and M. Tcherepnin comes, not from the St Petersburg Opera, but from the Conservatorium, where he is in charge of the orchestral class. They are able, of course, to avail themselves of the marvellous technical powers of the dancers who have joined them, practically all of whom were trained at the Imperial School of Ballet; but few of these are now regular members of the corps, and Nijinsky, the greatest genius of them all, recently received his formal discharge at the hands of the St Petersburg authorities. Long tradition, careful science and State patronage helped to make of the Imperial Ballet an elaborate, smoothly-working and faultless piece of theatrical mechanism; it only wanted the breath of genius to give it artistic life.
What then are the essential characteristics which differentiate the “revolutionary” Russian ballet from the traditional ballet as
it has hitherto been known both in Russia and elsewhere? The essential difference is to be found, not in technique, but in idea. The ballet has been brought into relation with life. Dancing, which had its origin in the most elemental emotions, gradually strayed further and further from its source, until in the ballet it lost its last remnant of vital significance. The ballet was relegated to a kind of barren limbo of the imagination; it was the mise en scène of the fairy tale; none of the echoes of the real world ever disturbed its enchanted silence; no excitement, no passion, no humour, was permitted to relax the fixity of its unmeaning smile. It was supposed to be structurally incapable of supporting anything more weighty than merely gossamer fancies, eternal variations upon the themes of coquetry—invitation and refusal, pursuit and evasion. Such inconsequential argument as there was served only to introduce a series of independent dances which were quite unrelated to any central inward idea. The ballet’s complete sterility of idea was acquiesced in as a necessary condition of its existence. It was an artificial and somewhat withered paradise from which the river of life was carefully diverted. The work of the revolutionaries was to open the sluice-gates and let in the fertilising flood of vital emotion. The ineffectual rhythms of the dance were suddenly caught up into the masterful rhythms of life itself. What is revolutionary in the new ballet is the power to rouse and trouble the imagination. The innovators have extended the range of the ballet, a range as wide as that of the drama—one is tempted to say wider, for not only does it express a minute grace as choice as the grouping of the petals of a rose, but at times its huge leaping rhythms throb with an unconstrained and elemental violence, all too shattering for the formal mould of speech.
If the aim of the new movement is the strict subjection of the ballet to an artistic idea which shall express a high emotional impulse, the means by which it is attained is no less novel and characteristic. The ballet is a composite form of art, at once plastic, decorative and musical. Its success therefore depends upon an intimate collaboration between its composers, the choregraphic designer, the painter and the musician. An obviously necessary condition?—yes, but one which until the advent of the revolutionary ballet had been considerably neglected. Its neglect had resulted in the production of a mosaic of more or less artistic effects, jarring and warring among themselves. Too often the dance did not concur with the action. The steps were considered not as a means of expression, a language, but only as a brilliant exercise, without more signification than an acrobatic performance. Occasionally, as in the production of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, the musician and the ballet-master worked in accord, but more often independently. The scene-painter produced a finished and usually photographic picture without any thought of the placing of the performers in the scene. The costumier, again, was accorded his own sweet will, and added his private inharmonious notes to the general discord. The new composers worked on the principle that there was not one design of the dance, another of the music and a third of the décor, but one design, one rhythm, one dominating impulse of the whole. In their ballets, the lines, the colours and the movements together interpret the spirit and the action, mutually reinforcing one another and producing a cumulative effect of strength and beauty, which at once grips and delights us.
If one of the collaborators of the revolutionary ballet has impressed upon it his personality more strongly than another it is M. Leon Bakst. He belongs to the new romantic school of painting, though he himself prefers to call it the new classical school, which is in full revolt against the illusion that the realists have set up as the final aim of art. He is a member of the Salon d’Automme, a pioneer and leader of the art movement which seeks to apply the principles of “post-Impressionism” to the decoration of the stage. The importance, not to say the pre-eminence, of the place which he claims in the theatre for the decorator, is best stated in his own words. “I believe,” he says, “the time for the conventional producer to arrange the sunshine and shadow of the ‘scene’ has passed for ever. The peculiar form of ‘mental’ intelligence which has dominated the theatre for so many years is about to be replaced by the plastic intelligence, and the tone of the ensemble will be determined by the painter. The evolution of the
theatre is towards a plastic ideal, and the action of a piece, sometimes full of invention, is weak and ineffective if it has not been conceived according to an artistic vision; just as an exaggerated ‘literary’ picture repels a true connoisseur. So give place to the painter in the theatre—and a leading place. It is the painter who should now (taking the place of the erudite director) create everything, know everything, foresee everything and organise everything. It is the painter who must be master of the situation, understand its finesse and decide the style of the piece. To his plastic judgment and taste must be subordinated the thousand details which compass the imposing ensemble of a fine work of the theatre.”
How thoroughly M. Bakst’s personality enters into the least details of the scene is evident in the two ballets which he has staged most brilliantly—Cléopâtre and Scheherazade. He introduces the “leitmotiv” into the scene and uses it as effectively as the musician. Rimsky-Korsakov’s overture in Scheherazade does not more vividly suggest the sultry, sensual, Oriental atmosphere with its lurking brutalities than do the voluptuous lines and sinister colours of the artist. The feeling is continued in the costumes, which are not only fitly adjusted to the languorous movements of the dancers but also serve to carry out the colour-scheme of the scene. Each dress is a note of colour, chosen as carefully as an artist forms his tone upon the palette, and placed in its proper relation to the whole.
But the keynote of M. Bakst’s art is simplicity and severity. “The painter of the future demands a severe style,” he says, “because the excess of detail has become intolerable to him.” Realism he abhors no less than pedantry of detail. He seeks to suggest the mood and not to photograph the event. His most gorgeous effects are obtained by an economy of material, which in comparison with one of the modern successful, over-propertied Shakespearian productions might seem positively parsimonious. And what he can achieve when he limits himself to the minimum of material may be seen in Le Carnaval, in which the two roguish sofas are probably the most eloquent and expressive properties ever placed upon the stage. Simplicity, suggestion, style—these are the qualities of M. Bakst’s work in the theatre, and, above all, that all-embracing rhythm which, uniting with the rhythm of the music and the dance, helps to create one unity of colour, sound and movement.
Perhaps this is not the place to speak of the wide-reaching effect of the revolutionary ballet upon the general world of art. The colour and design of Leon Bakst’s scenes, the provocative gestures of Nijinsky’s dancing, the strange and startling patterns of the dancers, have suggested to artists a new source of inspiration, which in Paris at all events has already not been without its influence on their work. The ballet is in the van of the artistic movement of the day, and the dance, through the ballet, has attained a position which it has never held since the days of ancient Greece—being once more received into its proper and inseverable fellowship with music and the plastic arts.
THE Russian ballets are based upon an endless variety of themes, but the dancing may be said to draw its inspiration from three sources. First and foremost, of course, is the traditional method of the old Italian masters. This is the mother tongue of the ballet, which is spoken from Copenhagen to Moscow, with only the least perceptible trace of local accent. But this common language the Russians have refined to a purity unknown elsewhere; from being the vehicle of the stiff rhetoric of the conventional ballet, they have transformed it into a flexible speech, in which they have been able to utter such gem-like poems as Le Spectre de la Rose, Le Carnaval and Les Sylphides. Next, they have gone for inspiration to their own national dances. They have refreshed the stage with the bracing air of the steppes. In the Polovtsian dances of Prince Igor they have given to an art that was nurtured in courts and has always moved with courtly grace, the tigerish motions of a full-blooded barbaric life. Finally they have enlarged the scope of the ballet by making use of the classical and Oriental dance. And for the sources of the classical dance they have gone not only to Greece but to Egypt. The theme of Cléopâtre is really the Egyptian attitude, just as the theme of Scheherazade is the Eastern attitude.
The Diaghilew ballet has an extensive repertory, wide enough to display to the full the genius of the composers and the talents of the dancers. Naturally, during the six seasons in which it has appeared in Paris, its large variety has been better exhibited there than in London. The principal pieces which have been given at Covent Garden are Le Pavillon d’Armide, Le Carnaval, Prince Igor, Les Sylphides, Le Spectre de la Rose, Cléopâtre, Scheherazade.
Le Pavillon d’Armide is a link with the old conventional ballet. The fable is full of unreason. The pavilion is a spacious apartment in an old French château, deriving its name from the personage who forms the subject of a piece of Gobelin tapestry on the wall. To this castle comes one night a storm-belated traveller. He is hospitably entertained by the wicked marquis, the owner of the castle, who is an amateur magician of considerable attainments. After admiring the pictured figure of Armide, he falls asleep. As he sleeps the figures on the tapestry come to life, and he is transported in dream to the Court of Armide, where her captive knights dance in a chain of roses. He conceives a grand passion for the princess, and the king, whom he does not recognise to be the wizard marquis, blesses their union. The magic Court vanishes and the traveller wakes to find himself still in the bare, dawn-lit chamber. When the marquis enters to ask how he has slept he recognises with horror that he is none other than the king in the dream. And yet it was not wholly a dream, for at the same time he finds the actual golden scarf which Armide had given to him in plighting her troth. He knows himself to have been the victim of a fatal enchantment, and thereupon somewhat irrelevantly dies.
M. Fokine has made of this irrational fable the framework of a number of dances which display the perfect unity and discipline of the dancers. But Nijinsky, as the servant of the traveller, and Karsavina, as Armide, are scarcely given adequate scope for their originality and faculty of interpretation. The thing is good of its kind—it is the perfection of the traditional ballet d’action—but it has been done before. The most satisfying feature of the performance is a dance of seven buffoons, of whom the premier buffoon is M. Rosai. Incidentally they execute several steps which technically are among the most difficult in the dancer’s repertory. But the chief merit of their display is its grotesque wit, the mimicry of the half-human antics of marionettes, executed with a faultless rhythmical precision.
The decoration was devised by M. Benois and, at all events
as it was presented at Covent Garden, it cannot be said to have been really successful. The pavilion had no other hint of a fatal spell than that which the lowered lights could suggest; the Court of Armide, who was surely twin-sister to “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” might have been made to evoke some vision akin to that which Keats saw of “pale kings and princes too, pale warriors, death-pale were they all.” But, perhaps largely owing to the faulty lighting, it was a rather garish spectacle, a noisy conflict of pure reds, greens and blues. Only for a moment did the scene really live,—when the mists began to wash round the battlements, the colours fused together in a trembling twilight, the tumult of the action died away and the motionless figures gazed after the victim traveller led away by his fatal lover.
But doubtless the composers of the ballet do not claim for it any special seriousness of intention. We are to take it or leave it as a simple ballet d’action of the conventional school, no more than a groundwork for some very brilliant and elaborate dancing. It is only a failure when judged by canons which we should not think of applying to any ballet but that of M. Diaghilew.
The theme of Le Carnaval may be regarded as even more flippant, but it expresses a series of purely musical ideas, and moreover it shows how the ballet can be made as witty as dialogue. It is an adaptation by M. Fokine of Schumann’s well-known pianoforte solo. Hardly a note has been added to Schumann’s music or taken away from it by the four composers who have skilfully provided the instrumentation—Rimsky-Korsakov, Liadov, Glazounov and Tcherepnin. Not only has Schumann’s work lost nothing of its original savour, but rather it has gained in expression and brilliance. In this fantasy, beloved of pianists, Schumann sought to represent various personages whom the ballet presents to us in material form. The composer’s explanation of the work was given to Moscheles, to whom he wrote: “The Carnaval was written mostly for different occasions, and, excepting three or four of the pieces, is all founded on the notes A. S. (A flat), C. H (B natural), which form the name of a little town in Bohemia where I had a musical friend, and which, curiously enough, are also the only musical letters in my name. I wrote the titles later.... As a whole, the work has absolutely no artistic merit; but individually the various states of feeling seem to me interesting.” The pieces are written round a number of imagined characters—Arlequin, Columbine, Estrella, Chiarina, Pierrot, Pantalon, Papillon, Florestan, Eusebius. The Chiarina was supposed to be Madame Schumann, the Estrella, as Schumann told Moscheles, “a name such as one writes under portraits to impress the picture on the mind,” and in Florestan and Eusebius he represented himself.
M. Fokine has been wiser than to impose upon these irresponsible creatures of the musician’s fancy the burden of a formal plot. They merely flit across the stage in a succession of amorous episodes which take place during a masked fête—Pierrot deceived and suffering, Pantalon duped, Eusebius romantic, Florestan impetuous, Chiarina sentimental and Estrella turbulent.
M. Bakst, the decorator, has completed the ballet by making it an exquisitely delicate artistic whole. The tinsel glitter and vast expenditure of means upon which the conventional ballet is usually built up has been utterly discarded. In its place is a simplicity verging on bareness, an economy of material in which every tone and line has an individual value, and bespeaks the guidance of a single directing mind. The curtain rises upon an almost empty scene, the ante-chamber of a ball-room. The backcloth is a broad band of purplish blue uplifting a deep frieze of red tulips. The furniture of the scene consists solely of two droll tiny striped sofas, crouching against the black and gold dado, which instantly put us on the tiptoe of expectation and give the keynote of airy mockery that characterises the piece. Suddenly the tall curtains of this fastidious ante-chamber are parted and Chiarina and Estrella, followed by their distraught lovers, scamper in and out again. Gradually the room fills with crinolined figures, flashing amorous glances through the slits of their silk masks, and comical gentlemen whose quaintly cut green and golden brown jackets seem to travesty their woeful passions. The gaiety of the music dances through the shifting lights and softly flowing lines. And through this happy and heartless crowd moves the tragic
figure of Pierrot, whose unrequited love his fellows make a mock of. His costume and attitude are a masterpiece of design. His sleeves, a world too long, droop far below his finger-tips, forming a scheme of painful angles which most poignantly express his grotesque and lamentable passion.
Of course this foolish, fluttering world of philanderers we never for an instant really believe in. They are the graceful, graceless figures of a Conder fan come to life. They are as hollow as the porcelain amorists our grandmothers were wont to put upon their chimney-pieces. We laugh at their impatient ardours as well as at their harrowing griefs. Even Pierrot we refuse to take seriously. He himself does not expect it—else he would not pretend that Chiarina were a butterfly and attempt to catch her beneath his conical white hat, and then, lifting it cautiously half-an-inch from the ground, make a gesture of farcical despair at finding her escaped. The whole ballet has the effect of transporting us into an unreal world—not a fantastic and fairy world, but a half-familiar world, a Lilliputian world, in which all the serious traffic of our hearts is mocked and parodied. We laugh because we do not recognise the likeness of these parabolic puppets to ourselves, for if we did we should surely weep. If its intention were a shade more serious the ballet would become a sermon, with Vanitas vanitatum for its text; it carefully stops short, however, at that indefinite border-line where trifling passes into satire, but not before it has shown us that the ballet can be made the vehicle of ironic laughter.
If Le Carnaval is gently satiric, Prince Igor, in its suggestion of historic catastrophe, is epic. The Danses Polovtsiennes, of which the ballet chiefly consists, are taken from an opera by Borodin—“a rather tedious opera,” it has been called—founded upon a Russian ballad of doubtful authenticity. It is a case in which the dance is not merely an interlude in the opera, but the very life and soul of it. The story is of no interest; it is effaced by the terrible intensity of the barbaric dancing. The scene takes us to the Russian steppes. The design is by Roehrich—a Tartar camp standing out against a landscape that is sinister with a wrathful, blood-dark glow. “How excellently every means that the theatre offers has been made use of to produce the desired effect!” writes a discriminating critic in an admirable analysis of the qualities that make so resistless an appeal to the imagination; “the menace of the coming cloud of barbarians that is to lie for centuries on the desolate face of Russia—not the loud blustering of a Tamburlaine the Great, but the awful quiet vigour, half melancholy, half playful, of a tribe that is itself but a little unit in the swarm; the infinite horizons of the steppe, with the line of the burial tumuli stretching away to endless times and places, down the centuries, into Siberia; the long-drawn, resigned, ego-less music (Borodin 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.”
The scene is a symbol of that peril of the barbarians which has always lain on the remote frontiers of civilisations. The tremendous rhythm with which the warriors come bounding down the stage communicates a sense of exhilaration not altogether unmixed with terror. The dance quickens to the frenzy of delirium. Its triumphant motions seem to throb with all those volcanic forces which one knows to be slumbering always in the heart of man: all the eternal unrest of his blood, all his sheer delight in life and strife, all that central fire which kindles from age to age the conflagrations of war and revolution. It is probably the most exciting presentment of barbaric frenzy the stage has ever seen. Considered as an artistic achievement it is astounding. For it must be remembered that this effect of surging tumult is only obtained by the most rigid discipline, by unanimity and a perfectly calculated precision of rhythm.
From epic the composers of the ballet turn to lyricism in Le Spectre de la Rose. The music is Weber’s “Invitation à la Valse” as scored by Berlioz; the pantomimic text is suggested by a poem
of Théophile Gautier. It is the story of a young girl who falls asleep in her chair, worn out with the fatigue and excitement of the ball. In her dream the rose which she holds in her hand becomes a genie, who dances with her, kisses her and disappears at break of day.
Here again Leon Bakst has created a scene of grave yet tender simplicity, with the fine, strict lines of a Beardsley drawing. The girl’s bedroom is a scheme of white and blue; on one side an alcove with a bed, on the other a plain white dressing-table. The windows open upon a garden. Moonlight falls upon the floor. It is all very intimate, reposeful and virginal. The girl wears a simple white frock, the spirit of the rose a fantastic costume of crimson and purple petals.
The pas de deux is executed by Nijinsky and Karsavina. Nothing could be more graciously conceived than Mme Karsavina’s representation of the girl dancing in her dream. With half-closed eyes she rises slowly from her chair and sways across the room in a kind of swoon, following the gentle guidance of the flower-spirit. Then as her dream becomes more vivid she recovers a little strength and dances of her own motion, but always with a suggestion of unconsciousness, as though less to the music of the orchestra than to some dimly remembered melody of the brain. As in the manner of episodes in a dream, she darts into swift movements, which pass again into languor. For an instant the kiss awakens her, she looks round upon the familiar aspect of her room, then the tired head sinks again upon her breast. It is a very gentle rendering of the mood of recollection and happy, unperturbed trance.
In this dream-ballet Nijinsky is a being of amazing agility and grace. He is as light upon the air as a rose petal. He contrives to bring into his dancing something of the gentleness of the moonlit night and the fragrance of the dawn. He shows himself as capable of delicate and almost womanly motion as he is of masculine vivacity and vigour. And when he floats out through the open window back to his rose-garden, he almost persuades one for the moment that he has discovered the secret of human flight.
In Les Sylphides the producers have been daring enough to forget to be modern. They have rehabilitated a form of ballet for which a few years ago one would have said there could be no resurrection. The piece has no action, no colour, no idea, almost no sentiment—it is choregraphy pure and simple, as abstract as mathematics. It is described vaguely as a romantic reverie. The romantic note is sounded by the dim backcloth of ruins and moonlight by M. Benois. The score of dancers wear the traditional costume, pure white, the skirt rather long, as Taglioni might have worn it.
The piece, however, has no connection with the ballet of a similar name in which Taglioni made her great success. It is an adaptation of various compositions of Chopin, which have been orchestrated by Glazounov and other composers. The orchestral version is less faithful to the original than that of Schumann’s Carnaval, but the additions are all in the spirit of the whole. Nijinsky and Karsavina each danced a mazurka, and together in the Valse in C sharp minor they executed a pas de deux that was a perfectly finished artistic achievement. For the finale there was the Valse brillante in E flat, in which the grouping of the dancers displayed the skill of M. Fokine at its highest.
Les Sylphides is somewhat in the nature of a challenge, and it must be admitted that it is a successful challenge. In it the producers claim that the purely musical and choregraphic interests are sufficient. Of its kind it is no less than perfect. It is from beginning to end a rhythmic flow of flawless gestures, which make a rounded whole of a chaste and immaculate quality like that of the finest sculpture. More remarkable than the steps is the purity of the lines of the arms, interweaving like the overarching branches of a forest glade or the groining of the aisle of a Gothic cathedral. Yet was there not perhaps a moment when the disconcerting thought intruded itself: Supposing the ballet were always to move in this atmosphere of perfect calm? Without a doubt Les Sylphides gained some of its charm from its place in sequence of the ballets. As an interlude among pieces of more violent action, it had the repose of a statue in the midst of canvases hot with colour and tumultuous with movement.
If it is in such pieces as Les Sylphides, Le Carnaval and Le Spectre de la Rose that the composers of the ballets with their coadjutant mimes most deftly lay the privy net for beauty, they ensnare her, more brutally perhaps, but none the less surely in the Oriental pageants with their closely knit web of line and tone and rhythm. For these many-faceted compositions, ballet is perhaps an incomplete expression, and we should substitute the term, “mimodrama.” Dancing plays a more subordinate part in them than in the ballet proper. It falls into a natural relation to the ensemble, and yet the dance, in the exotic world here represented to us, is the apt, indeed the only conceivable gesture.
Cléopâtre is a name of ominous import and prepares us for voluptuous and sombre passion. We are transported to a temple on the banks of the Nile. This scene is the supreme achievement of M. Bakst’s art. It represents an immense stone forecourt which might be none other than the great Hall of Columns built by the father of Rameses the Great. But the artist is contemptuous of pedantic archæological detail—he seeks only to impress, one might rather say to stun, the senses by a vision of grandiose and sinister masonry. This effect is obtained by simple lines and vast proportions. The towering walls, the procession of squat, colossal columns, the gigantic intimidating statues on either flank, fill the scene with a sense of awe and a premonition of disaster. It is noteworthy that M. Bakst himself has said that the painters of the future will take for their subjects man and stone. In this scene he has given to the dumb and eternal stone a voice of tragedy. He has made of these sexless caryatides a kind of chorus, the immortal and ironic spectators of the comedy of human life.
Broken by the compacted row of columns, we see the flowing waters of the Nile, violet and emerald—fit stream to bear the burnished barge of Cleopatra with its poop of beaten gold and perfumed purple sails. Perhaps it is this visiting river that gives the note of expectancy which is so often present in M. Bakst’s scenes. Satisfying the scene is in itself, but the eternal stone awaits its fugitive inhabitant—man. With all reverence, preceded by maidens strewing rose-leaves, the negro slaves bear in the regal litter. Egypt’s queen is lifted as carefully as a jewel out of its casket and stands immobile as an image while her servants divest her of her silken wrappings. Then, with an attitude of languor unutterable, weary with the deceitful satiety of her desires, supported by her abject crouching slaves, she passes to her couch.
The part of Cleopatra was played in Paris by Ida Rubinstein, at Covent Garden by Seraphima Astafieva. The rôle is one not for a dancer, but for a mime, pure and simple. These artists in their studied and astonishing gestures appear to have created a new art of pantomime. Ida Rubinstein—and perhaps the same may be said of Astafieva—has trained the body to a silent speech outvying in subtlety the subtlest of spoken words. The least of her gestures takes an importance so grave and so surprising that it becomes henceforth impossible to dissociate it from the personage whom she evokes. Her hieratic attitudes, with their meticulous and adorable gaucherie, their touching faults of perspective, derive from the Egyptian bas-relief and the Italian primitives. The unexpected lines of the slowly moving limbs are instinct with the very genius of plastique.
Little wonder that the noble Amoun leaves his love, to whom he has plighted his troth but a moment before, and is drawn by the fatal magnetism of this odalisque of a woman. At his audacity the listless queen leaps into a momentary tigerish passion; and then, moved by the young man’s beauty and willing to amuse her tedium with a new excitement, she promises him the fulfilment of his dreams at the price of his life. As the infatuated youth fondles her upon her couch, the court fills with the retinue of slaves and begins to throb with the luminous coils of their dance.
The lines of the dance repeat the all-embracing lines of the architecture. The attitudes of the dancers are freely modelled upon the poses of the figures depicted on the ancient Egyptian monuments. When M. Bakst sets his figures in motion, he is mindful of their relation to the décor. They are not set against the scene as against a background, but become actually a part of it. He constructs his picture so that the actors shall be the complement of the design and of the colour-scheme. His method has been thus
described: “He places a number of pure, fresh colours on the stage. The colours are first placed in order of their relationship to each other, and thereafter arranged according to a complete gradation of tints. Thus he selects, say, six colours—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. From these he evolves six rows of colours, starting with each colour at full pitch, and gradating it till he reaches the lowest, subtlest, and most Whistler-like key. Then he sets all these reds and yellows and blues and greens revolving. The effect is indescribable. The whole scene begins to pulsate. The walls and the floor clothe themselves with designs of perfectly designed rhythmical lines. Masses move in all directions according to a law of ordered disorder. The air becomes dense with a quivering sheen of colour so violently contrasted, yet so harmonious.”
But the distinguishing characteristic of Cléopâtre is the subordination of the dancing to the décor. In spite of the intensity of the frenzy of madly whirling limbs, the spectator is never allowed to forget the grim stone witnesses of the human tumult. With something malevolent in the gaze of their obliquely set eyes, the erect, abiding figures glance down upon the momentary riot. The men of stone are mightier than the men of flesh. Suddenly, when passion is storming through the veins, we are reminded of the triviality and transience of everything human. Here again is that ironic note which in so many of the Russian ballets forms a menacing undertone to their music.
A hush falls upon the dancers. The night of love is over and Cleopatra is about to take toll of her lover. With an incredibly cruel gesture she passes, or rather insinuates, the cup brimmed with poisons. The youth drinks. Cleopatra, with greedy, curious eyes, watches him stagger and writhe in his death-agony. Then this newest sensation of excitement fails her, her unutterable languor repossesses her, and, leaning upon her bending slaves, she passes slowly beneath the towering portal, along the terrace by the river, and her retinue dumbly follow her.
Then the artist speaks his last unerring word. The priest covers the prostrate body with a black pall. The voided forecourt resumes its immensity of space. A warm flush clothes the broad surfaces of the columns; brightness lies on the river; and the single stain of black sets the seal of tragedy upon the empty scene.
Scheherazade is an illuminated page torn from the book of “The Thousand and One Nights.” The music, the scenery, the dances, the costumes, the appointments, all the circumstances of the ballet are designed to create a heavy perfumed atmosphere of Eastern voluptuousness. The severity and simplicity of the Egyptian temple is exchanged for the semi-barbaric sumptuousness of the harem of an Arabian palace. A massive curtained canopy of an impure green stained with purple hangs in billowy folds over the scene; massy silvern lamps depend from a ceiling splendid with arabesques and floral designs; a latticed window gives upon a garden of tainted verdure; the floor is inlaid with blood-coloured porphyry. The sensuous lines of M. Bakst’s décor are echoed in the throbbing waves of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music. Here again is the complete sympathy between musician and decorator, which fuses these ballets into an organic whole. In spite of the wealth of the accessories, there is not an irrelevant line or tone; there is economy and constraint even in the splendour, so that the spectator receives an impression of singleness and unity like that of Greek drama.
At the very commencement the keynote is given in the dance of three odalisques, in which languor intertwines with the energy of desire. As the ballet proceeds the gust of passion blows more strongly, and the riot begins after the departure of the two sultans, when the Grand Eunuch unlocks first a bronze door, through which enter negroes clothed in copper-coloured costumes, and then a silver door, which gives entry to another band of negroes attired in silver. Zobeide, the favourite faithless wife of the sultan Schahriar, still remains without her consort. She crouches half fearfully against a curtain, which at last is pulled aside and her lover, a gorgeous negro in a golden dress, leaps upon her with one tremendous panther-like bound. Undoubtedly the climax of the ballet is reached in the ecstatic dances of Nijinsky as the slate-coloured negro. He has learnt a whole new grammar of grotesque, savage gestures. Part monkey, part tiger, part human, he fawns, he caresses, he grimaces, he passes from delirium to devotion, from awe to lust, his body elemental fire, motion, passion. At times his swiftness renders him momentarily almost invisible; at times he becomes a living boomerang, and after a marvellous circuit in space returns unerringly to his point of departure; one moment he is an arrow shot through the air, the next a crouching, servile beast worshipping the feet of his mistress. And in the mad final orgy he is the vortex of the swirling throng, the happy, leaping heart which shoots its ecstasy to the outermost limits of the coiling maze of lovers.
With a sound of dismay the music signals the return of the betrayed sultans. The harem becomes a slaughter-house. A flashing scimitar cuts down the golden negro. Zobeide drives the dagger into her breast and falls grasping the feet of her outraged lord.
A discerning critic has pointed out that perhaps the terrifying suggestiveness of Scheherazade lies not so much in the catastrophe of the plot as in the dreadful significance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music. “Passages that may have meant no more, as pure music, than the secrecy of the East and the plaintive mysteriousness of women (like that often-repeated passage on the first violin) get a new colour of tragic passion, of yearning in the shadow of death, from their allotment in the dramatic scheme. There is the sound of fate and murder, mingled with the saddest ironical comedy, in the insistent blast of the hunting horns. The swift huddling of deceitful wives, the tripping and scurrying, the wheedling of the old eunuch, the ravenous mien of the negroes, the magnificent stride and gesture of the fruit-bearing attendants, the complicated frenzy of the dance, the drama of fear and despair in Karsavina’s proud rendering, leave a solemn impression beyond anything in those other fantastic ballets. How much depends upon the music it is hard to gauge—much more than one is disposed to admit at first; for the mind pouring stagewards through the eyes, receives the musical impressions half unconsciously, as a direct emotional influence, scarcely registered in the sensuous ear.”
Of the other ballets which complete the repertory of the Diaghilew company, and which have not yet been seen in London—of Petrouchka, a Russian burlesque taken from an old folk-story, Harlequin in love with the clown’s wife; of Sadko, a strange submarine drama; of Narcisse, an idyll which seeks to recapture the sylvan mood of ancient Greece—I will not attempt to give any description. Enough has been said to show that the revolutionary composers, with the co-operation of Nijinsky, Karsavina and a corps de ballet, every member of which is a tried artist, have given a new significance to the ballet, have indeed given a new art-form to the stage.
COULD the Diaghilew ballet exist without Waslaw Nijinsky—this marvellous youth who is already a supreme master of the technique of dancing, who cannot make a gesture that has not a graceful or a witty significance, who has confounded Newton and demonstrated that the law of gravity is a figment of the scientists?
Nijinsky has danced ever since he was an infant. Both his mother and father were in the ballet at the Imperial theatre in Warsaw, where he sometimes danced with them. His first appearance was as a little Chinese with a pigtail, when he was yet only six years old. The serious study of his art began in 1898, when he entered the Imperial Ballet School at St Petersburg. He passed his final examinations in 1907, and danced at the Imperial theatres for a year and a half before he visited other countries. In 1909 he danced in the Russian Ballet at the Théâtre du Châtelet at Paris, and in the following year at the Opera. Subsequently he has appeared with the Diaghilew company in Berlin, Brussels, Rome, Monte Carlo and London. At Paris he caught typhoid, and when he was convalescent went to Venice, where he danced with Isadora Duncan. It is the place he loves best of all. Already, at the age of only twenty-one, he has received the enthusiastic applause of the most brilliant and exacting audiences of Europe; critics have minutely discussed and lavishly eulogised his dancing; artists have studied and reproduced his gestures; he has been the darling of society in half-a-dozen capitals—and yet the miracle is that he is untouched by conceit. He remains a modest, ingenuous youth, tireless in application, teachable, seeking continually to bring his art to a more precise perfection.
In February 1911 the world of the theatre was astounded to hear that Nijinsky had been asked to withdraw from the Imperial Opera at St Petersburg. Various ungrounded stories have been afloat as to the cause of the rupture, but the truth is that it was merely an incident, perhaps an inevitable one, in the antagonism between the traditional and revolutionary schools of the ballet. For a moment the older school triumphed, and Nijinsky left Russia to undertake the enterprise of the conquest of Europe.
The pretext which the officials seized upon to rid themselves of the young revolutionary was a detail of costume. Madame Kschesinskaya, the fixed star in the Imperial firmament, wished Nijinsky to appear with her in one of the ballets of the stereotyped Italian school. He, on the other hand, preferred to take the part of Loys in Giselle, the ballet by Gautier and d’Adam in which Grisi won her greatest triumph. He carried the day, and the ballet was produced at considerable expense. His costume, a maillot of yellow silk, was designed by Benois. He had some doubts as to whether it would be acceptable to the authorities, and therefore obtained special permission from the “commandant general” of the Imperial ballets to wear it. At the last moment one of the directors objected to the costume, and ordered Nijinsky to change it. The dancer expostulated, and as there was not sufficient time to replace it with another, the director did not insist. The evening on which he appeared for the first and last time in Giselle at the St Petersburg Opera, the Imperial box was full. The dancer was received by the whole house with the greatest enthusiasm. The Dowager Empress and the Grand Dukes were warm in their applause, and at the conclusion of the performance the Empress told one of the directors that she had never seen its equal. The next day, however, on the pretext that the maillot was objectionable, Nijinsky received notice that his services were no longer required. The repentance of the management came speedily, but the dancer declined their request that he should return. What influenced him probably not a little in his determination to leave was the fact that,