Chapter II: Part 2

“On the stage in front of the loggia are set two tables at right angles to each other; the one furthest from the spectator is rather long and runs parallel to the supporting wall of the loggia; the other is only short, and joins the first at right angles on the left. The table to the front is raised on three steps as a dais. On the tables are richly chiselled vessels of gold and silver, high ewers of cut crystal full to the brim with gleaming red and white wines, and dishes in which lie, heaped in profusion, pomegranates, peaches, and grapes of unusual size: golden platters and crystal glasses are before the guests. The guests--men and women by threes, in opulent Venetian costumes--sit at the farthermost side of the table at the back, half concealed behind the vessels of gold, the crystal, and the piled fruit. At the table in front Potiphar and his wife, the latter in a robe of scarlet brocade, cut very low, over which hang long strings of pearls. At her feet on the lowest step of the dais, a young female slave. The tables are served by eight negro slaves in a semi-Oriental garb of pink and gold, and on their heads are nodding plumes of white and pink. Behind the dais, in the angle to the left, under the loggia, Potiphar’s bodyguard--gigantic mulattos, with breast-plates of black inlaid with gold, of Toledo workmanship, with black plumes and halberds of gold. They also carry whips with short golden handles.”

The spaciousness of this picture, the sense of splendor it conveyed, cannot be communicated second-hand. A young Spanish painter, José-Maria Sert, designed the majestic loggia, and Bakst vivified the scene, truly Veronese, with its women in gorgeous brocades, flaring skirts, puffed sleeves, and stilted mules, the officers in waving plumes, two of the slaves holding lank greyhounds in check. One detail was essentially Bakst. In the old Venetian costumes a panel of lace, down the front, covered the opening made by the flaring brocades. This Bakst removed, exposing the legs of his women, in silken hose, tightly trousered above the knee. This undergarmenting, in its inception, is authentic, as anyone may see who visits the Museo Civico Correr in Venice.

I have hesitated this long over _The Legend of Joseph_ because, in reproduction at least, it is one of the least familiar of the Bakst ballets, not because it is more interesting than _Sheherazade_, _Daphnis et Chloë_, or a half-dozen other of this artist’s productions.

In considering the factors which go to make up the perfection of this organization it is necessary to lay considerable stress on the importance of the music. In each of the cities where the Ballet has appeared a large orchestra of picked musicians (in some instances an organized orchestra, such as Thomas Beecham’s in London) has assisted at the performances. The music of the ballets, even when adapted for this use, as in _Cléopâtre_, is of a fine quality, and in the variety of the compositions employed (ordinarily three or four ballets make up a programme) and in the manner of their performance there is the greatest amount of interest for those who are more interested in hearing than in seeing. Particularly is this true as the Russian Ballet has been the means of bringing some of the most radical and anarchistic of modern composers to a hearing before the public. Since Tschaikowsky wrote three ballets, no musician in Russia has considered it less than an honor to write for dancing.

Certain of the works performed have been taken from the concert room, _l’Après-midi d’un Faune_, for example, with the approval, and even the applause, of Monsieur Debussy; and _Sheherazade_, in spite of the protests of Rimsky-Korsakow’s heirs. Balakirew’s _Thamar_, too, was programme music before it became a ballet. But several works have been written for performance by this organization. Among these I may mention Maurice Ravel’s _Daphnis et Chloë_, the music of which exactly illustrates the action of the ballet but is not easily transferable to the concert room, although Ravel made an arrangement which the Colonne Orchestra has played in Paris and the Symphony Society of New York has performed in New York; Debussy’s _Jeux_; Reynaldo Hahn’s _Le Dieu Bleu_; Steinberg’s _Midas_; Tcherepnine’s _Narcisse_; Richard Strauss’s _The Legend of Joseph_, which the composer himself conducted for several performances both in London and in Paris; and the three really extraordinary works of Igor Strawinsky, _The Firebird_, _Petrouchka_, and _The Sacrifice to the Spring_. I have elsewhere expressed my great admiration for the genius of this young man; it is certainly my opinion that more inspiration is made manifest in these three works than in any other recent music I have heard in the theatre or the concert room. Paul Dukas also wrote a ballet for the Russians, _La Péri_, but although it was announced, the production was finally made under other auspices.

Any concert-goer will immediately note the fact that a good deal of the music in the répertoire of the Russian Ballet is familiar to him. Balakirew began his symphonic poem, _Tamara_ (the ballet is called _Thamar_), suggested by a poem by Lermontoff, in 1867; it was concluded in 1882. The composer wrote in 1869 that he had composed parts of it as he “danced along” the street. The Chicago Orchestra performed the work for the first time in America in 1896. The Russian Symphony Society introduced it to New York in 1908. When the Russians adopted the work to use as a ballet the critic of the “Morning Times” in London said that the action did not fit the music very well, and yet the story of the ballet is almost precisely that of the symphonic poem, so that if anyone was at fault in this regard it must have been the composer. Here is the fable to which Balakirew wrote music, in the words of the programme notes (by William Hubbard Harris) of the Chicago Orchestra:

“In the narrow Dariel Pass, where the River Terek roars, covered with heavy mists, there rises an ancient tower, in which there lived Queen Thamar, an angel of beauty, a cruel, wily demon in thoughts, and yet at the same time divine. At her enchanting call the passing traveller entered the tower to take part in the banquet in progress there. Shouts and cries of revelry awakened echoes in the darkness, as if at a great feast a hundred young, pleasure-loving men and women were gathered, or as if, in that great tower, erstwhile forbidding, the celebration of funeral rites were taking place. At the break of day gloomy silence again reigned, broken only by the foaming Terek as it hurried away a corpse. At this moment there appeared at the window a pale shadow. It waved afar a last farewell to the loved one. That farewell breathed such tender ecstasy, the voice which uttered it was so sweet, that its every accent, filled with promise, seemed to tell of near, unspeakable happiness.”

Only in its conclusion does the ballet action vary from this story. The Queen lures the Prince to his doom, dances with him as the centre of a bacchanale, and then gives him the knife-thrust, as her slaves hurl him through an opened door into the river. But as the curtain falls we see her, not waving farewell to her old victim, but waving welcome to a new one.

Perhaps the composer really was at fault, because the music has never made a profound impression in this country. Here is W. J. Henderson’s account of it in “The Sun,” following the performance by the Russian Symphony Society:

“Tamara was a queen, and she dwelt by the River Terek in an ancient tower, where she was wont to indulge in nights _à la Cléopâtre russe_. In the mornings the dead bodies of her lovers went floating down the stream, while she sang exquisite love-songs, just as if her lovers could be lured back. In the music of Balakirew one could hear the river, which sounded much like the Rhine, even to suggestions of the Drachenfels. The riotous nights were perhaps less clearly indicated. They were somewhat repressed, muffled, as it were. Perhaps Tamara, out of consideration for the neighbors, used to shut the windows when she was holding high jinks on the banks of the blue Terek in the Caucasus. But they had long nights up there, for the listener sitting outside the tower (in a hard orchestra chair) and waiting for the exquisite love-song, grew stiff and cold. And, after all, it was a mean little love-song, because it had no tune, and it would not have lured a red-headed boy, let alone a dead man.”

However, Mr. Henderson had not seen Karsavina as the wicked queen when he wrote those lines, nor had he seen Bakst’s gorgeous Georgian costumes--a variant, it is true, of the greens and blues with which he had decorated _Sheherazade_. The fault of the ballet, as a whole, is that it is reminiscent of _Sheherazade_; and yet it is effective and has persisted in the répertoire of the Russians since it was first given in 1912. The overdresses of the women gave rise to one of the fashions in women’s gowns which spread over our world two years ago.

Rimsky-Korsakow’s _Sheherazade_ is another matter. The music was not written to accompany the story used in the ballet, and yet it fits it perfectly. Still, Mme. Rimsky-Korsakow (the composer, of course, is dead) protested violently against what she called a desecration of her husband’s intention, when the ballet was first produced. (A similar protest was lodged against the organization in 1914, when it produced Rimsky-Korsakow’s last opera, _The Golden Cock_, with a double cast, one choreographic and one vocal, although the opera had been written to be _sung_.) No piece of music is better known in the concert hall than this, and any concert-goer will remember the violin theme which portrays the last of the Sultan’s wives, as she relates the four stories from the “Arabian Nights” which the four movements of the Suite describe. The ballet follows the action of the prologue of these stories; the women of the harem steal the keys from the grand eunuch and let loose the black slaves for a drunken revel of lust, which is interrupted by the sudden return of the sultan and death to all concerned. The third movement, that which in the Suite describes the love of the young prince and the young princess, was omitted from Fokine’s original arrangement of the ballet, but in 1914 he added this movement to the action. _Sheherazade_ has been considered since the time it was first produced in Paris some six years ago, the masterpiece of the Russians. It made the designer of its scenery and costumes, Leon Bakst, famous. His color-scheme, mostly of greens, blues, and oranges, has been frequently imitated in later theatrical productions. Karsavina’s Zobeide is a suggestive picture of languorous lust, and Nijinsky, as the principal slave, alternates between surprising leaps into the air and the most lascivious gestures, as, like some animal, he paws the reclining Sultana.

_L’Après-midi d’un Faune_ is as well known as _Sheherazade_ in the concert room. This was the first ballet which Nijinsky staged (he also enacted the principal rôle). The music was written by Debussy as a prelude to Mallarmé’s somewhat obscure poem. An English translation, at least an acceptable one, has hitherto been lacking, but Walter Conrad Arensberg’s very sympathetic and understanding version has just appeared; were it not for its length I should like to transcribe it here. When Debussy’s work is performed Edmund Gosse’s summary of his idea of the meaning of the poem (with which, by the way, the poet expressed himself as entirely pleased) usually appears in the programme notes. But Debussy’s music is called a _prélude_ to the poem and so the action of the ballet is a prelude to the wonderings of Mallarmé’s faun. This is the scenario as it was printed in the programmes given out for the first Paris performances:

“Ce n’est pas _l’Après-midi d’un Faune_ de Stéphane Mallarmé; c’est, sur le prélude musical à cet épisode panique, une courte scène qui la précède:

“Un Faune sommeille;

“Des Nymphes le dupent;

“Une écharpe oubliée satisfait son rêve.

“Le rideau baisse pour que le poème commence dans toutes les mémoires.”

There are, I think, seven nymphs engaged in the performance. Their dresses and their action are suggestive of the figures of Greek vases and bas-reliefs. One after another they flee from the strangely misunderstanding faun, until one, bolder than the others, approaches, almost to remain. The faun still does not understand and she, too, flees, dropping her scarf behind her. This the faun seizes and, as the curtain descends, returning to his rock, he presses this scarf to his lips and breast, at last, apparently, something more than the faun he has been. Nijinsky in this pantomime (it can scarcely be called a ballet) suggests all that the poem and the music call forth in imaginative minds. He has dehumanized the characters and, in a sense, thereby taken away the sting of the too intense voluptuousness of the action. However, in spite of this fact, and the further one that Monsieur Debussy, unlike Mme. Rimsky-Korsakow, not only approved of the use of his music in this form but even applauded it, the first performance in Paris (1912) was roundly hissed. Paul Souday, a well-known critic, led the opposition, and Rodin took up the cudgels for the defence. “Accusé d’avoir ‘offensé la morale,’ Nijinsky s’est empressé de donner satisfaction à M. Paul Souday en supprimant sa ‘mimique indécente’ à la fin du ballet. Et pourtant, son illusoire possession de la nymphe enfuiée, ce corps étendu sur le voile encore parfumé d’elle, c’était beau!” wrote Gauthier-Villars. It is true that Nijinsky altered his original performance for a few evenings; then, however, he returned to his original conception. Meanwhile, the troup moved to London, where _l’Après-midi d’un Faune_ was acclaimed above all the other ballets, and almost invariably _repeated_. Since then it has seldom been given in London and Paris without the audience demanding a repetition.

_Les Sylphides_, _Papillons_, _Carnaval_, and _Le Spectre de la Rose_, are all exquisite studies of a different style from the three ballets I have mentioned. _Carnaval_ is undoubtedly the best of the lot, although Nijinsky as the rose ghost (the fable was suggested by a poem of Théophile Gautier) who comes to a young girl in a dream and bounds out of the window, like a spirit, at dawn, is in his most poetical mood. _Papillons_ is the newest of these four ballets, and for it Bakst designed some charming crinolined dresses. Pierrot, in the garden, after the dance, has set a candle to catch butterflies, and as the dancers flit out, each pretending to be a butterfly, he tries to catch them, until the coming of their parents to take them home teaches him the bitter truth that they are only young girls. The music is by Schumann, orchestrated by Tcherepnine. _Les Sylphides_ is little more than a suite of dances in a charming adaptation by Bakst of the conventional ballet costume. Glazunow and other Russian composers have orchestrated these Chopin waltzes, mazurkas and preludes. In _Carnaval_ (orchestrated by Tcherepnine, Glazunow, Liadow, and Rimsky-Korsakow) the fanciful names by which Schumann designated several movements in these delightful piano pieces are transferred to the characters. Nijinsky is the Harlequin; Karsavina, Colombine, etc., while such pieces as _Dancing Letters_ and _Paganini_ are used as divertissements. The scene, with the two Victorian sofas at the back and Pierrot lying over the footlights, is charming. The principal characters are those of the _Commedia dell’ Arte_, while the other dancers are dressed after the period of about 1830.

_Le Dieu Bleu_ I have not seen, but I transfer the following account of it from the “London Times” of February 28, 1913, in which the critic says that “it introduces us to Mme. Karsavina and M. Nijinsky in two new rôles which suit them well, and it gives good opportunities for the combination of music, dancing, and spectacle for which M. de Diaghilew’s troup is famous--a combination designed this time to suggest what Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World had in mind when he spoke of the ‘furniture, frippery, and fireworks of China.’ The scene is not precisely China in this case, but ‘India of the fables,’ which in the theatre comes to much the same thing, the point only being that it is the Far Orient, where a glamour of riotous colour is thrown over man’s actions, and where gods and monsters are as near to us and as alive as the priests and populace who worship them.

“When the curtain goes up we see M. Bakst’s design of a temple cut into a rock, with a glimpse of the sky seen through a cleft at the back, and in the middle a pool on which is floating (or ought to have been, for it was invisible last night) the sacred lotus. A young man is about to be initiated into the priesthood. He is surrounded by a crowd of worshippers, who bring offerings of fruits, flowers and peacocks to the shrine, and, generally speaking, occupy themselves in providing the requisite amount of furniture and frippery. Suddenly there is a tumult at the back, and a young girl (Mme. Karsavina) pushes her way in past the guards and falls at the feet of her lover, the would-be initiate, imploring him not to desert her for the priesthood. He is at first indifferent, but gradually his religious ecstasy passes off as she recalls their old life together, and eventually, with an abrupt gesture, he throws himself into her arms. The priests, in consternation, hurry him off into the back premises, and after handcuffing the girl, leave her in the darkness, where (like Tamino in the caverns) she is told she will meet her trial and punishment. After long moments of suspense, during which night falls, she pushes open a door through which she sees a chance of escape, and immediately seven obscene monsters crawl out and are about to drag her with them when, in despair, she appeals to the sacred lotus in the pool. The lotus thereupon turns into the goddess, who rises with the blue god from the water. And then the fireworks began, for the blue god was M. Nijinsky, who at once set to work to draw the teeth, so to speak, of the monsters and to make even the trees and flowers ‘bow themselves when he did dance,’ thus proving satisfactorily that M. Salomon Reinach and his friends knew what they were about in maintaining that Orpheus came over the mountains from the East. The miracle accomplished, the priests come in to take note of it, the young lovers fall into each other’s arms, the goddess retires to the lake, and the god goes up a staircase, which is disclosed behind by the removal of a mountain, and remains glued to it, in spite of the stage directions that he is supposed to fly to heaven. Being a god, he presumably thought he could please himself.

“The scenario does not give quite so many opportunities to M. Reynaldo Hahn as to MM. Bakst and Fokine, who are responsible for the pictorial and choreographic sides of the ballet. The theme associated with the god is the most striking. The dance with the peacocks is attractive, there are some beautiful moments when the young girl appeals to her lover, and their duet of joy at the end is spirited, but much of the music is lacking in character and the energy of the dance. It is written with the beautifully clear technique to which M. Hahn has accustomed us, but there is little driving force in it, and not a touch of passion in the scenes where passion is wanted to give contrast to the personal movements of the crowd or the calm atmosphere of the divinities.”

_Le Pavilion d’Armide_ is a graceful combination of two picturesque periods of romantic art, for a French Vicomte, storm-stayed on his travels, is offered hospitality by a Marquis, who lodges him in a pavilion of his castle, where the Gobelin tapestry comes to life during the night. The whole thing is, of course, a dream, in which the Vicomte sees in the Magician of the tapestry the person of his host, and himself plays the part of Rinaldo (the characters are those of Quinault’s play set to music by Lulli and Gluck). When the change comes and Armida and her court come to life, what really comes to life is the court of Versailles; here is the Grand Monarque himself, and there the most enchanting group of knights in pink with feather head-dresses dance with ladies whose costumes combine the grace of Watteau with the conventional dancing-skirt with the happiest results.

In the dances from _Prince Igor_, accompanied by a chorus, the Russians loosen their restraint to a degree which would mean a totally unrestrained performance in the hands of another group of dancers. It is almost impossible to believe, after witnessing these wild Polovtsian dances, that the action has been perfectly ordered by Fokine and can be repeated exactly at any time. The ballet occupies almost all of the fourth act of Borodine’s opera. I believe that the choruses to which these dances are performed were sung at a concert of the MacDowell Chorus in Carnegie Hall, March 3, 1911. The New York Winter Garden once utilized the music for a ballet. The scene used by the Russians, painted by Roerich, is marvelously suggestive of barbarism; the now languorous, now passionate music, pulsing with rhythm, is admirably adapted to dancing. Usually Mme. Fokina and Bolm are seen in these dances, but it is the ballet corps itself which becomes the important feature in their success.

“How excellently,” says one foreign critic, “every means that the theatre offers has been made use of to produce the desired effect; the menace of the coming cloud of barbarians that is to lie for centuries on the desolate face of Russia (for we are in the camp of the Polovtsians, forerunners of the great invasion); not the loud blustering of a Tamburlaine the Great, but the awful, quiet vigor, half melancholy, half playful, of a tribe that is but a little unit in the swarm; the infinite horizons of the steppe, with the line of the buried _tumuli_ stretching away to endless times and places, down the centuries into Siberia; the long-drawn, resigned, egoless music (Borodine drew his themes from real Tartar-Mongol sources); the women that crouch, unconscious of themselves, or rise and stretch lazy limbs, and in the end fling themselves carelessly prone when their dance is over; the savage-joyful panther leaping of the men; the stamping feet and quick, nerve-racking beat of the drum; and more threatening than all, the gambolling of the boys, like kittens unwittingly preparing themselves for the future chase.”

But whose is the guiding hand, the hand that combines the rhythms, the colors, and the human element in these works? It is Fokine’s; without Fokine I do not see very well how these ballets could come into existence. (I am now speaking of Fokine, of course, entirely as a producer. He is also known as a dancer. One must bear in mind, also, that Nijinsky’s three ballets--he contrived the action for _l’Après-midi d’un Faune_, _Jeux_, and _The Sacrifice to the Spring_--were very original and effective.) Until Fokine began to work, the ballet-master had been content to arrange all his _coryphées_ in straight lines across the stage, each dancer making the same simultaneous movement as her neighbor. Fokine divined the ineffectiveness of this false symmetry. He divided his forces into many groups, each group a unit in movement. (The ultimate result of the application of this principle was Nijinsky’s staging of _The Sacrifice to the Spring_, in which each dancer was set a separate simultaneous task.) Nor did Fokine allow any one group of dancers the whole of any movement in the music. He subdivided the movements into phrases. He really divided his ballet into choirs, just as Richard Strauss and Reger subdivided the orchestra, in which, in the time of Bellini and Donizetti, large bodies of the strings used to play in unison. Then each choir was given certain phrases to interpret, some in the background, some in the foreground, until the polyphony of the music was perfectly synchronized with the action of the ballet. Many of the ideas for Fokine’s ballets were derived from pictures. It is possible to see at once the pictorial resemblance between _The Legend of Joseph_ and Veronese’s _The Marriage at Cana_, or between _Midas_ and Mantegna’s _Parnasse_ in the Louvre. But Fokine also learned how to control movement, and how to preserve balance from pictures. In the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice there is a room devoted to large paintings by Gentile Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio, depicting events in Venetian history. In one of them is a procession, and a study of the different groups of marchers and bystanders will give you an excellent idea of the effective and pictorial intricacy of a Fokine ballet. In _The Legend of Joseph_ Fokine attains one of his most thrilling effects in the last scene, where the handmaidens of the refused Potiphar’s wife, clad in black gauze, with bare arms and legs, wave their arms in a frenzy of hysterical disdain at the offending Joseph. Shortly after seeing the ballet, in walking through the Egyptian rooms of the British Museum, I came across an Egyptian fresco which almost seemed to me at first, in the exact spirit in which Fokine had caught its feeling, to be a photograph of the action I had seen on the stage.

Russians are natural dancers. It is said that only Russians and Poles can learn to do the mazurka properly, in which the women engage in that peculiar gliding step which someone characterized as the definite expression of Meredith’s phrase, “gliding women.” So, under the guidance of Fokine, with the inspiration which such music and color as are provided for them can give, the Russians engaged in the carrying out of these ballets easily rise to an unattainable (for other dancers) height of seeming spontaneity. They have that “like-to-do-it” and creative (as opposed to reproductive) air which every stage director knows is almost impossible to instill into a large company with any hope that it will be retained after the first performance. But the Russians never lose it. A ballet, given so often as _Sheherazade_, during a period extending over many seasons, always seems freshly produced. There are no slovenly details. The wild orgy of the Polovtsian dances of _Prince Igor_ is invariably exposed with a feeling on the part of the spectator that he is witnessing the intense enjoyment of the participants.

Another important point is the variety in the ballets, a variety which covers not only subject and music, but also treatment in decoration and staging, so that such an ultra-modern work as _The Sacrifice to the Spring_, staged by Nijinsky in an attempt to emulate the style of the futurists in painting, with music by Strawinsky, who might be called a master of dissonance, and with decorations in hard and primitive colors by Roerich, finds itself naturally side by side with the charming and poetic _Sylphides_, gracefully staged by Fokine, with music by Chopin (orchestrated), and with decorations in pale green and white by Bakst. Of course, some ballets, because of their fables, or the nature of their music, naturally resemble one another. _Sheherazade_, _Cléopâtre_, and _Thamar_ all have certain points in common; so have _Les Sylphides_, _Carnaval_, and _Papillons_. There is a resemblance between _Daphnis et Chloë_, _Narcisse_, and _l’Après-midi d’un Faune_. But it is easy to vary these likenesses by not putting them into juxtaposition, by mingling them with the bizarre _Petrouchka_, the barbaric Polovtsian dances from _Prince Igor_, the idealistic _Spectre de la Rose_, with Weber’s _Invitation to the Dance_ as its accompaniment, the gorgeous and pompous _Legend of Joseph_, the frivolous _Midas_, the exotic _Le Dieu Bleu_, or the pageantry of the dances from Rimsky-Korsakow’s _Sadko_.

It is impossible, of course, to ignore the genius and virtuosity of individual interpretation entirely in a study of the Russian Ballet, minimize as one may its importance. There have been very many pages written in an attempt to capture the charm and genius of Nijinsky on paper. He has been described variously as “half-human, half-god,” as a tongue of flame, and as a jet of water spurting from a fountain. The word “youth” expresses something of the wonder of this marvelous boy. He never seems to be doing anything difficult, and yet his command of technique is incredible. He always seems spontaneous, and yet I have been told that, like Olive Fremstad, he does not make the slightest movement of a finger which has not been carefully thought out. He seems to me to be the greatest of stage artists (and I include all concert musicians as well as opera singers and actors in this sweeping statement). I mean by this that he communicates more of beauty and emotion to me as a spectator than other interpretative artists do. All impressions of this sort are necessarily personal, but they do not for that reason lack value. It is essential, however, to see Nijinsky in a variety of parts to get his true measure. As the lover of the sylphs in _Les Sylphides_ he is a pale _efféminé_, a Chopiniac, a charming Aubrey Beardsley drawing, a lovely thing in line, and grace, and sentiment. In _Petrouchka_ he is a puppet, and--remarkable touch--a puppet with a soul. His performance in this ballet (the characters are marionettes, but the story is something like that of _Pagliacci_) is, perhaps, his most wonderful achievement. He suggests only the puppet in action; his facial expression never changes; yet the pathos is greater, more keenly carried over the footlights, than one would imagine possible under any conditions. I have seen Fokine in the same rôle, and although he gives you all the gestures, the result is not the same. It is genius that Nijinsky puts into his interpretation of the part. Who can ever forget Nijinsky as Petrouchka when thrown by his master into his queer black box, mad with love for the dancer, who, in turn, prefers the Moor puppet, rushing about waving his pathetically stiff arms in the air, and finally beating his way with his clenched fists through the paper window and cursing the stars? It is a more poignant expression of grief than most Romeos can give us. _Jeux_ shows us the love games of a trio (two women and a man) searching for a tennis ball in a garden at twilight. It recalls itself to me chiefly for the _glissando_ (the music is by Debussy) with which the ballet begins as the tennis ball bounces across the stage, followed by Nijinsky, who bounds across the broad stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris in two leaps. These leaps are triumphs of dexterity, grace of motion, and thrill, and he does not waste them. They have given rise to the rumor that Nijinsky’s element is the air. In _l’Après-midi d’un Faune_ he makes only one of these quick movements, but with such astonishing effect that on one occasion (it was the third time I had seen this stage arrangement of Debussy’s prelude to Mallarmé’s poem) my companion, a well-known dramatic critic who sits stolidly through performances by all the great tragedians, burst into tears. In _Sheherazade_, as the black slave of the harem who dominates the story of the ballet, Nijinsky utilizes his leap to dominate the bacchanale, which is the climax of that piece of sensual excitement. As the crowd of women, wives of the sultan, and black slaves, drunk with wine and lust, enter into the wildest dance, the negro in silver trousers in the centre of the stage leaps higher and higher straight into the air above the heads of his companions.... The descent, with the indescribable curve of the legs, is something to be seen. In _Carnaval_, Nijinsky enacts the Harlequin with great roguishness and impertinence. To the piece called _Reconaissance_ he dances with Karsavina, as Colombine, the most entrancing of polkas. His dancing of the piece called _Paganini_, however, is most memorable. At that point where the dominant seventh on E flat emerges through a deft use of the pedal, he represents the effect to perfection by suddenly sitting down, as a writer on the “London Times” once noted. It is not, as a matter of fact, as a mere dancer that Nijinsky excels, although he _does_ excel even there, but it is in the poetic interpretation of his rôle, the genius in his playing, that he expresses so much more than his nearest rival. He is incomparable as a dancer, as you may very well see in works like _Carnaval_ and _Les Sylphides_, in which dancing dominates the action; but even in these ballets he never loses sight of characterization, and the shaded values of ensemble.

Tamara Karsavina is a very beautiful woman, although her beauty has not the subtle quality of the more gifted Anna Pavlowa. She is an artist and a fine dancer, a mime of great talent. She fits more perfectly into an ensemble scheme than Pavlowa, who was once a member of this organization herself. She is delicate and flower-like and she suggests vice with a great degree of verisimilitude. Her Salome, with the painted roses on her nude knees and breasts, is a fragile bit of decadence. As the temptress Queen of _The Golden Cock_ she suggests the strange perverted power of a Kundry, an Astarte, or a Loreley. In _The Legend of Joseph_ it is her duty to sit at a table without changing her expression throughout almost an entire act. It is a difficult task; one must perceive the depths of the woman’s boredom, which does not express itself even in impatience, and she must dominate the scene. She accomplishes her tasks beautifully, as she does also the long walk across the stage in stilted Venetian shoes at the close of the scene. In _Petrouchka_ she is a fitting companion to Nijinsky, and her little dance with the cornet is a delicious and entrancing moment; her Chloë is exquisite, soft, Greek, and girlish, and in Ravel’s ballet and in Florent Schmitt’s _Salome_ she dances _on her toes_ in bare feet (remember that half the so-called “toe-dancers” resort to padded and reinforced slippers for their power). I never lack enthusiasm for Karsavina; but I cannot place her near Nijinsky.

The crescendo of eulogy with which these notes progress seems unavoidable. If one is in sympathy with the aims of this group of artists (Gordon Craig is not, I believe), one must recognize the success with which they have carried them out. Naturally, there are flaws. Doboujinsky’s costumes for _Midas_ are certainly very hard in color; Steinberg’s music for the same ballet, a series of futile brass blares; the story itself (Bakst _should_ confine himself to painting), a bore. Miassine is scarcely the dancer one would have chosen for so important a rôle as Joseph, which, on the other hand, he is suited to physically. Karsavina’s portrayal of the ultimate emotions of Potiphar’s wife is a little unconvincing. I do not even admire Bakst’s setting for his very lovely costumes in _l’Après-midi d’un Faune_. But these are very small insects in the amber of enjoyment.

_November, 1915._

Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer

Strawinsky: A New Composer

In America we are not accustomed to look to performances of the ballet, which, after all, is not an institution with us, for musical manna. There have doubtless been ballets given here with music by composers whose names occur in Grove’s Dictionary, sometimes performed by a fairly good band, but we have not expected, or received, revelations on these occasions. Since the Russian Ballet (the organization directed by Serge de Diaghilew) has travelled to and fro in Europe, Paris, and more especially London, have learned a thing or two in this respect. For much of the most interesting of the modern music has been brought to these cities by the Russians, who include not only ballet but also opera in their répertoire. They are responsible for the productions, outside of Russia, of Moussorgsky’s two operas, _Boris Godunow_ and _La Khovanchina_ (this latter music-drama was not produced by the Imperial Theatres in Russia until over twenty years after its publication in the Rimsky-Korsakow version. Its presentation at Moscow took place after its Paris and London performances, and at Petrograd only a month or so before!); Rimsky-Korsakow’s operas, _Ivan the Terrible_, _A Night in May_, and _The Golden Cock_; and Borodine’s _Prince Igor_. As for ballets, Richard Strauss wrote _The Legend of Joseph_ for these dancers; Maurice Ravel, _Daphnis et Chloë_; Debussy, _Jeux_; Reynaldo Hahn, _Le Dieu Bleu_; Paul Dukas, _La Péri_ (to be sure, this work was finally produced under other auspices; withdrawn by the composer from the Russians a few days before the date set for the first performance, on the ground that insufficient time had been allotted for rehearsals); and Tcherepnine, _Narcisse_ and _Le Pavilion d’Armide_; but most important of all are the three ballets (and the lyric drama) contributed by Igor Strawinsky, who has, in a sense, developed a new medium out of the orchestra by writing a new language for it, although it may be plainly seen that he is the logical descendant of the really Russian composers (brushing aside the Tschaikowsky-Rubinstein interlude; nationalism was, of course, no object with these musicians). There are suggestions of Strawinsky’s style so far back as Glinka, in the Oriental dances of _Russlan and Luidmilla_. You will find the germs of his method in Borodine’s symphonies; from Moussorgsky to Strawinsky is but a step, especially if you refer to the original text of _Boris Godunow_ and not the Rimsky-Korsakow version. In fact, Strawinsky, in spite of his radical departures from academic methods, is the inevitable defender of the faith of the famous “Five” whose slogan was “Nationalism and Truth.” As all real progress in art is dependent, in a measure, on the past, it is necessary to establish this fact.

My personal impressions of this young Russian’s music and its effect on me are very strong. I attended the first performance in Paris of Strawinsky’s anarchistic (against the canons of academic art) ballet, _The Sacrifice to the Spring_, in which primitive emotions are both depicted and aroused by a dependence on barbarous rhythm, in which melody and harmony, as even so late a composer as Richard Strauss understands them, do not enter. A certain part of the audience, thrilled by what it considered a blasphemous attempt to destroy music as an art, and swept away with wrath, began very soon after the rise of the curtain to whistle, to make cat-calls, and to offer audible suggestions as to how the performance should proceed. Others of us, who liked the music and felt that the principles of free speech were at stake, bellowed defiance. It was war over art for the rest of the evening and the orchestra played on unheard, except occasionally when a slight lull occurred. The figures on the stage danced in time to music they had to imagine they heard and beautifully out of rhythm with the uproar in the auditorium. I was sitting in a box in which I had rented one seat. Three ladies sat in front of me and a young man occupied the place behind me. He stood up during the course of the ballet to enable himself to see more clearly. The intense excitement under which he was laboring, thanks to the potent force of the music, betrayed itself presently when he began to beat rhythmically on the top of my head with his fists. My emotion was so great that I did not feel the blows for some time. They were perfectly synchronized with the beat of the music. When I did, I turned around. His apology was sincere. We had both been carried beyond ourselves. Later, when the public’s attitude had assumed a more formal aspect, I had a better opportunity for studying the score of this ballet.

My second personal impression is a memory of an evening a few nights later, when I attended a performance of Strawinsky’s earlier ballet, _Petrouchka_. _Petrouchka_ is another kind of entertainment. It was a success with the public from the beginning, and is still an important feature in the répertoire of the Russian Ballet. It is by _Petrouchka_, in fact, that Strawinsky will be introduced to New York by the Russians during the current season.... The curtains had closed on these pathetic scenes from the Russian carnival. They were drawn back to disclose Karsavina and Nijinsky. Presently a third figure appeared, very thin and short, with a Jewish profile (I do not know, however, that Strawinsky is a Jew). Dragged on the stage by Nijinsky, pale, awkward, and timid, his near-sighted eyes blinded by the footlights, the composer bowed his acknowledgments to the applause, nervously fingering his eyeglasses. This account would be incomplete without a reference to his dress, as irreproachable in fit and texture as that of Arturo Toscanini.

A London experience is also worth the telling. It happened after the first performance there of _The Nightingale_, a lyric drama to set a pace in the race towards the future. There was a long intermission after this short opera before the continuation of the bill, which included a performance of _The Legend of Joseph_, the composer himself conducting, and Steinberg’s _Midas_. In the foyer I met my friend Alfred Hertz. Those who know this conductor are familiar with his moods. Tired, after a rehearsal of _Parsifal_, or excited before the performance of a work which he is about to conduct for the first time, he becomes _distrait_ and unconversational to a degree which would not seem possible in a man who ordinarily is as fond of anecdote as he is of Viennese pastry. I recognized his mood on this occasion. Mopping his brow (it was June), he was good enough to explain.

“I can’t stay here any longer,” he said. “It’s very embarrassing. Strauss asked me to come. I am here as his guest to hear _The Legend of Joseph_, but I can’t listen to it. I’m too tired--I am exhausted. I have never heard such extraordinary music. I have never been so moved, so excited before at the performance of a new opera.... Oh, if I could have the privilege of introducing that work to New York, then I should be happy!”

I am very glad to quote these words to the lasting honor of one who realized at once the pleasure that Strawinsky’s music, quite in a new mode, would give to the coming generation, and to a few in the present.

M. D. Calvocoressi, I believe, had the honor of signing the first article in English about Strawinsky, shortly after the production of _The Firebird_ in Paris. Mr. Calvocoressi is to musicians what Mr. George Moore, who introduced Paul Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, and Arthur Rimbaud to English readers, has been to poets--an appreciator of contemporaries. This is a rare trait, one not possessed by John Runciman of the “Saturday Review” or by several other prominent critics, whose names instantly spring to mind. The initial article in English about the young Russian composer appeared in the London “Musical Times” for August 1, 1911. Since then Mr. Calvocoressi has written much on the subject, and a good deal of his information seems to have been gleaned from headquarters, since he quotes Strawinsky freely. (This critic is, of course, particularly interested in Russian music. He translated Balakirew’s songs into French, and wrote a life of Moussorgsky.) With the words of the composer as a guide, Mr. Calvocoressi has made a most interesting discovery, that in the lyric-drama music of this young man “working-out” plays no part. There is no development in the music of _The Nightingale_; the music simply expresses what the text dictates it shall express as it goes along. (In this respect, of course, Strawinsky is but following an ukase of the “Five” to its logical conclusion; they, in their desire to create a national school, chose as the best means of banishing any suggestion of Wagner, whose theories were generally being blindly accepted and adopted by composers of music-dramas at this epoch, the banning of the use of the _leitmotiv_. However, they repeated themes and melodies, and Moussorgsky in _Boris_ brings back the bells that served to ring in Boris’s coronation, in broken rhythm to ring out his life.)

In regard to this matter Strawinsky has put himself on record as saying, “I want to suggest neither situations nor emotions, but simply to manifest, to express them. I think there is in what are called ‘impressionist’ methods a certain amount of hypocrisy, or at least a tendency towards vagueness and ambiguity. That I shun above all things, and that, perhaps, is the reason why my methods differ as much from those of the impressionists as they differ from academic conventional methods. Though I often find it extremely hard to do so, I always aim at straightforward expression in its simplest form. I have no use for ‘working-out’ in dramatic or lyric music. The one essential thing is to feel and to convey one’s feelings.”

This, of course, is a more elaborate version of what Moussorgsky said, “Plain truth, however unpalatable, and nothing more. No half measures; ornamentation is superfluity.”

In one of Mr. Calvocoressi’s recent articles about Strawinsky that critic says, in lines which illuminate: “According to the modern conception of the lyric drama, the chief quality of dramatic music is terseness--a quality most uncommon in all kinds of music, and which many will, not altogether wrongly, think almost incompatible with the very essence of musical art. The principle of music as generally understood appears to be amplification, repetition.

“At all events, the art of music has always consisted chiefly in that of ‘working-out.’ And it is but of late that a number of music-makers and music-expounders have raised an outcry against prolixity and redundance in music: an outcry, it must be added, that for the present does not find much echo among the majority of art judges nor of the public.

“The first of great musicians to abjure the principle of formal, elaborate ‘working-out’ in dramatic and lyric music was Moussorgsky. A striking peculiarity of his best songs and of his masterpiece, _Boris Godunow_, is the absolute lack, not only of anything resembling tautology or amplification, per se, but of all that is not absolutely essential to direct expression (including many devices which no other musician of the time would have dreamt of leaving out), even if the omission be in defiance of tonal construction and balance.

“For instance, the song, _The Orphan_, ends very dramatically on the suspensive harmony of the dominant. _Death’s Lullaby_, which depicts a dialogue between a horror-stricken mother and Death, who comes to take away a child, ends abruptly on the burden of Death’s last utterance, with which the composer’s intention is fulfilled. He never gives a thought to the practice of bringing back the main key which would have led him either to an inappropriate modulation or to a superfluous addition. Similarly, _Boris Godunow_, in the authentic version, ends, without even a cadence, on a chord that hardly leaves the impression of the tonic.”

Mr. Calvocoressi points out the fact that there are few passages for orchestra alone in _Boris_ outside of the _polonaise_ and the very brief preludes to the acts, and he asks us to observe the working of the same principle in _Pelléas et Mélisande_, in which it is evident that Debussy was influenced by Moussorgsky. Schoenberg was the first to apply this principle to orchestral music. However, if an opera-goer finds much to enjoy in the dramas of Moussorgsky and Strawinsky, it does not necessarily follow that all the value of a work like _Die Walküre_ disappears, to his ears. The two principles of art are different; each, perhaps, is equally valid.

“But the fact is that a new factor has appeared in the domain of dramatic music, which is now entering a new path; and consequently a new order of artistic pleasure may be the outcome of this stage of evolution. The first consequence, of course, is a greater differentiation between the style of dramatic music and the style of instrumental music; unquestionably a progress, since it widens the range of methods and gives greater freedom to the composer’s imagination.”

All of this is very stimulating, and very true; still, it cannot be said that audiences as a whole grasp Strawinsky’s intention, as it is exploited in _The Nightingale_, so readily as they do Moussorgsky’s as manifested in _Boris Godunow_. Rimsky-Korsakow’s emendations of the latter work, which one critic has labeled as mutilations, may be responsible for the greater public reaction. But the success of _Boris_ was by no means immediate. Produced in Petrograd in 1874, it was not heard in Paris until nearly thirty years later, nor in New York until 1913. Musicians, in the meantime, had had access to the score, and had adopted some of the Moussorgsky idiom as their own. When _Boris_ was at last produced here it was not, therefore, the utter novelty that _The Nightingale_ now seems. The very principle of the new music demands a greater effort at concentration than can be expected of most audiences when they are listening to music, as many ears catch the meaning of a phrase only after it has been repeated a convenient number of times. This is one of the chief reasons for the popular success of _The Ring_ dramas. It seems incredible, and impertinent, to the average audience that a composer should have had the idea of expressing himself without repeating himself. A catalogue of representative themes would be of no use to a prospective auditor of _The Nightingale_. Now, there are two advantages to this method, aside from the implied advantage of an improvement in effect: First, it makes for a very short opera (_The Nightingale_, in three acts, is so short that at its early performances it was given in a bill with two ballets, one of which, _The Legend of Joseph_, runs for over an hour); second, the audience is not called upon to listen intellectually (nor should it be, at the performance of an opera). The only intention of the composer is to make his listeners _feel_ each situation he illustrates with his music. It may be said that Wagner’s intention was the same, and thereby lies the difficulty in training listeners to understand the new principle. Wagner’s way is easier for them because they can get the emotional feeling _through the intellect_. The repetition of themes would not in itself assure an effect, but the labeling of these themes does just that, so that whenever the Sword _motif_ or the Siegfried _motif_ occurs, the _mind_ of the listener, knowing the name of the theme, is perfectly prepared to create the emotional reaction demanded by the composer. Strawinsky appeals directly to the emotions. On the listener who expects a theme to reappear again and again he makes only the impression of being a noise-maker (in the sense of a worker in dissonance; _The Nightingale_ is most continent in sound). But on the open-minded auditor his effect is usually astounding.

The story of the music-drama closely follows the Hans Andersen tale. In the first act a deputation from the Chinese Emperor’s court, headed by the kitchen-maid, seeks the nightingale in its grove. The Imperial Chancellor, the Bonze, and a number of courtiers are included in this strange procession, which follows the kitchen-maid, as she alone knows the bird’s song, to request the nightingale to come to the court to cheer up the melancholy ruler. Although loath to leave its quiet groves, the bird agrees to go.

In the second act the nightingale’s arrival has stirred the Emperor’s jaded senses. However, the present of a mechanical bird which comes from Japan diverts his attention. In the meantime, the real nightingale has disappeared. The Emperor orders the little brown songster banished from all China, while he places the mechanical toy by his bedside.

Death stands in the Emperor’s bedchamber in the third act. Torn by his aching conscience, the dying ruler calls in vain for his musicians to make him forget. But the nightingale returns and so charms Death with its songs that he agrees to allow the Emperor his life. The Emperor revives and offers his saviour a place at court, but the bird refuses and returns to its woodland haunts with the promise that it will sing each evening. Now the courtiers enter, prepared to find the Emperor dead. They are astounded when he sits up in bed and bids them “Good-morning!”

All the symbolism, all the undercurrents of suggestion contained in the text are never explicitly referred to except in the brief utterances of a minor character, the fisherman, who sings a prophecy or an explanation at the beginning and end of each act, foretelling the delight that will be caused by the songs of the bird, the distress that will follow its departure, and its final victory over Death.