“When Wagner was born in 1813,” George Bernard Shaw explained in The Perfect Wagnerite (1898–1923), “music had newly become the most astonishing, the most fascinating, the most miraculous art in the world. Mozart’s Don Giovanni had made all musical Europe conscious of the enchantments of the modern orchestra, and of the perfect adaptability of music to the subtlest needs of the dramatist. Beethoven had shown how those inarticulate mood-poems which surge through men who have, like himself, no exceptional command of words, can be written in music as symphonies.… After the symphonies of Beethoven it was certain that the poetry that lies too deep for words does not lie too deep for music.” Wagner, “the literary musician par excellence,” united in himself the arts of word and music. “A Beethoven symphony … expresses feeling, but not thought: it has moods but no ideas. Wagner added thought and produced the music drama.”
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The Ephemeral Art of the Dance
To bring dance into Wagner’s universal art, his widow, Cosima, invited the dynamic Isadora Duncan (1878–1927) and gave her “free rein over the dance in Bayreuth.” After her performance of the dance of the Three Graces of the Bacchanal in Tannhäuser in 1904, Isadora appalled her patron by announcing that the idea of music drama was pure nonsense. “Man must speak, then dance,” she explained to the stunned Cosima, “but the speaking is the brain, the thinking man. The singing is the emotion. The dancing is the Dionysian ecstasy which carries all away. It is impossible to mix in any way, one with the other. Musik-Drama kann nie sein.” Cosima was properly shocked, for the performances of the Ring in Bayreuth were the living legacy of Richard Wagner’s passion to combine the arts.
Dance, sometimes called the original art, is also the universal art, for man always carries it with him. The earliest Egyptian tomb paintings show people dancing. And, as we have seen, Greek drama, on which Western drama is formed, begins with the community joining in the orchestra (dancing place). Western dance as an art shows us the movement from a dancing community to dancers on a stage. Yet despite its antiquity the dance, unlike architecture, sculpture, and literature, has left us a meager record. Not effectively documented and perpetuated, ancient dance—“the Dionysian ecstasy”—did not become part of our usable heritage. We must seek clues to its character in vase painting and other visual arts. And dance was the last of the art forms to acquire a separate identity.
It was the late-coming ballet that transformed the convivial delights of bodily movements—of folk dancing and social dancing—into a controlled dramatic art. “Ballet, as a form,” observes dance historian Lincoln Kirstein, “is as important as the invention of perspective in painting or the symphony in music; that is, a major contribution of Western culture.” The rise of ballet reveals an effort to create an art to outlive the transient grace of bodily movement. “Ballet” (from Italian balletto, diminutive of balla, dance) first enters English about 1667 to describe a theatrical representation. And its history reveals ingenious efforts to give rigor and definition to these movements. Ballet arose out of the lavish efforts of members of the Italian Renaissance court to entertain themselves. And the first authentic ballet de cour was organized by Catherine de’ Medici (1519–1589) in 1581 to celebrate the marriage of her sister. When Catherine came to France as the wife of King Henry II, she brought her Italian musicians with her. It was said that she had planned a comic entertainment because she believed that performing a tragedy might bring bad luck. This was a significant occasion, too, as the first important festivity since the bloody Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (August 23–24, 1572) that she had ordered. For this spectacular icebreaker Catherine brought Italian and French talents in music, verse, dance, and drama all together in unprecedented splendor to tell the familiar Homeric story of Ulysses escaping from Circe. The costly production was described by its director as “a geometrical arrangement of many persons dancing together under a diverse harmony of instruments.”
Catherine had also imported from Florence her respect for academies and an enthusiasm for court spectacles. Out of these interests grew a new literature of ballet as a self-conscious art of the dance. A pioneer was Jean-Antoine de Baïf (1532–1589), wealthy member of the celebrated Pléiade, who aimed to enrich French language and literature while reviving the Greek theater. Baïf invented a system of vers mesures “to unite music with dance, song and measure as in the ancient days of Greece.” Insisting on “music” as the art of all the Muses, it made dance an equal of all the other arts, and seventeenth-century France produced a philosophy and a vocabulary for the ballet.
Louis XIV (1638–1715; reigned 1643–1715) himself gave the ballet a royal dignity. “The dance,” Voltaire reported in his Age of Louis XIV, “which may still be reckoned one of the arts since it is subject to rules and gives grace to the body, was one of the favourite amusements of the court. Louis XIII had only once danced in a ballet, in 1625; and that ballet was of an undignified character which gave no promise of what the arts would become in France thirty years later. Louis XIV excelled in stately measures, which suited the majesty of his figure without injuring that of his position.” Louis XIV acquired the sobriquet “le roi soleil” from his role wearing a headgear of sun’s rays in Le Ballet de la nuit (1653), under the influence of the imported Italian violinist-composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687). With a taste for the grand and the melodramatic, Lully collaborated with Molière in a series of comédies-ballets of which Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670) was the most famous.
The French Academy (L’Académie Française), founded by Louis XIII in 1635 to be guardian of the French language, was the first of several academies designed to enrich the national culture. The manifesto of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture (1648), created by Colbert, minister to Louis XIV, declared that the purpose of art was to deal only with grand and important subjects, never with the common or the familiar (in which “nature” was included). The painter was to rely on the ancients, because “observation” was degrading. And painting was to be judged not by artists or the public but only by the “infallible king.” An Academy of Science was Colbert’s creation in 1660, followed by the Académie Royale de Danse in 1661 to reform abuses and raise standards in the art of dance. It employed thirteen dancing masters “to re-establish the art in its perfection.” Then the Académie Royale de Musique (1669) added a school of dancing in 1672, from which the professional dancer developed. “Colbert, the Maecenas of all the arts,” Voltaire reported, “founded an Academy of Architecture in 1671. A Vitruvius is not enough, one must have an Augustus to employ him.” For Colbert, Louis XIV would play the role of Augustus.
Until 1670, when he was thirty-two, the king himself made a practice of dancing in the ballet. Then, at a performance of Corneille’s tragedy Britannicus, he was struck by the following lines:
His chief desert in trifling feats to place,
To drive the chariot foremost in the race,
In low pursuits to win th’ ignoble prize,
Himself expos’d a show to vulgar eyes.
(Translated by Martyn P. Pollack)
From that time he danced no more in public; the poet had reformed the monarch.
This era produced the ballet d’action, not a mere bouquet of dances, but a new form that told a story without words spoken or sung. This put new pressure on the dancer to be expressive. Yet Vitruviuses of the dance, offering treatises which purported only to summarize “the great masters,” actually prescribed rigid rules. One of the most influential was The Dancing Master (Maître à Danser) (Paris, 1725), by the French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764). Following earlier textbooks, he prescribed that the feet must always be turned outward, and then he precisely described the five basic “positions” that bear the modern names.
This dogmatic “perfection” of prescribed forms invited a liberator. He came in the person of Jean-Georges Noverre (1727–1810), sometimes called “the Shakespeare of the dance.” While he created some 150 ballets in Paris, Vienna, and Stuttgart, his inf
luence was mainly as a reformer. He aimed to free the expressive body of the dancer from stereotyped positions, to liberate the face from heavy masks, and remove the cumbersome armor in battle dances and other costumes that concealed the body. In that age of “rococo” (from French rocaille, for elaborately carved rockwork), which concealed beautiful forms with extravagant decoration, Noverre’s Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets (1760; 1807) marked a new era. His theories of ballet d’action and expressive movement reached across Europe even to St. Petersburg and still speak to modern ballet.
Noverre’s first successful creation in ballet, Les Fêtes Chinoises (1754) had caught the attention of the famous actor David Garrick (a member of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Literary Club), who produced it in London the next year. Then Garrick’s copious library provided Noverre with the materials for his epoch-making Letters. He was said to have done for ballet what Gluck (1714–1787) did for the opera. He knew Gluck and collaborated with him, choreographing an opera about ancient Greek games. Just as Gluck gave up the set patterns of Neapolitan recitative and aria for a coherent opera drama, so Noverre abandoned the fragmentary divertissement and the technical performance of the several prescribed positions for a coherent ballet d’action, a connected story.
The growing popular interest was fed by controversy between the “high dance” (danse haute) and the low dance (danse basse) or close-to-earth (danse terre à terre). The Renaissance ballet of aristocrats and amateurs in a ballroom was seen on a horizontal plane. But with the movement onto the opera stage, the old “noble” dance along the floor acquired a new vertical dimension, tempting dancers to spring into the air. “Once there were dances,” some complained, “now only jumps,” which Addison at the turn of the century had forecast in The Tatler:
I was this morning awakened by a sudden shake of the house, and as soon as I had got a little out of my consternation I felt another, which was followed by two or three repetitions of the same convulsion.… I looked in at the keyhole, and there I saw a well-made man look with great attention on a book, and on a sudden jump into the air so high that his head almost touched the ceiling. He came down safe on his right foot, and again flew up, alighting on his left; then looked again at his book, and holding out his right leg, put it into such a quivering motion, that I thought he would have shaked it off.
Public interest was also piqued by rivalry between two famous ballerinas, Marie-Anne Camargo (1710–1770), who scandalized spectators by shortening her skirts above the ankle to reveal her new footwork, and her rival Marie Salle, (1707–1756), who shocked them by displacing the heavy panniered skirts with simple drapes and allowing her hair to hang loose instead of being covered with a wig.
Noverre, whom Voltaire christened “a Prometheus,” had come from the provinces, and so was not quite a Parisian. But he spoke up in a voice that would reach dancers across Europe: “Children of Terpsichore, renounce cabrioles, entrechats and over-complicated steps; abandon grimaces to study sentiments, artless graces and expression; study how to make your gestures noble, never forget that is the life-blood of dancing; put judgment and sense into your pas de deux; let will-power order their course and good taste preside over all situations; away with those lifeless masks, but feeble copies of nature.…” When, at the time of the French Revolution, Noverre found refuge (1782–89) in London, he also finally returned to the stale conventions of professional ballet, contradicting his lifelong message against stilted rules. He now decreed that the dancer’s two feet must be no more than eighteen inches apart, that no stage could hold more than thirty-two dancers, and that no previously composed music could be used by a choreographer. But Noverre’s earlier ideas could not be put back in the bottle. He had already liberated the dance and made possible the “Romantic” ballet with its emphasis on lightness and grace. This was the ballet that dominated the stages of European capitals in the nineteenth century.
“Romantic” ballet was still another move toward the vertical. To keep the dancer in the air, Charles Didelot (1767–1837) in his Zephyre and Flore (1796) in London introduced the pointes, dancing on the tips of the toes. He was said to have originated flesh-colored tights for women. Aerial dancing was made easier by the English mechanics’ flying machine, which lifted dancers around the stage and held them momentarily on their toes before they took flight. Summoned to Russia in 1801, Didelot was principal dancer and ballet master in the Imperial St. Petersburg School, which had been founded by Empress Anne in 1738, and where dance was languishing. Didelot added other signal innovations, making the pas de deux a conversation between two dancers. His choreography, and especially his reform of the training of dancers in the Imperial School, brought a new expressiveness to the dance in Russia, and created the grand spectacles of Russian ballet. Reinforced shoes made toe dancing easier and facilitated brilliant pirouettes.
Meanwhile in Paris, too, La Sylphide (1832) signaled the Romantic spirit, with dancers on their toes, and newly defined the difference between the male and female dancers. The poet Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) became the prophet of the movement. After the epoch-making production of La Sylphide, with the sensational Italian ballerina Marie Taglioni (1804–1884), he rejoiced that “the Opera was given over to gnomes, undines, salamanders, nixes, willis, peris—to all that strange and mysterious folk who lend themselves so marvellously to the fantasies of the ballet master.” It was said that Taglioni gave a new spirituality to ballet by her astonishing ability to remain suspended in the air. Her lightness was the more phenomenal because her shoes were not blocked and her support came simply from the darning of the toe.
If ballet was at first a French creation, modern ballet was very much a Russian re-creation—the curious product of foreigners like Didelot who came to Russia, and of Russians abroad. A new classical ballet developed. In several senses it was an expatriate renaissance. A French dancer, Marius Petipa (1819–1910), went to the Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in 1847 where, in the next sixty years, he choreographed and produced more than sixty ballets, which became there the foundation of modern classical ballet. He collaborated with Tchaikovsky on The Nutcracker, and Sleeping Beauty. He choreographed his own version of Swan Lake. Tchaikovsky’s first ballet for the Imperial Theater (Swan Lake, 1877) had initially not been enthusiastically received. And when Tchaikovsky was asked to write the music for Sleeping Beauty, he accepted the commission only after he had received a libretto from Petipa. Petipa’s new classical ballet style combined the ballet of grand spectacles with close attention to the brilliant performance of the traditional positions.
The ephemeral character of the art of dance was dramatized in the remarkable man who refurbished the modern ballet. Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929), though he had the greatest shaping influence on modern ballet, was not himself a dancer or choreographer, nor a creator of music or poetry or painting. He was simply a creator of occasions. But he was more than an impresario—a mere promoter or manager—for he created unique balletic spectacles that retained a Russian character while co-opting the great choreographers, dancers, composers, and painters of his day. Diaghilev was born to an old Russian family in Perm in the Urals. His father was a major general and his mother a noblewoman, who died in childbirth. When he arrived in St. Petersburg to attend law school at the university, he was decidedly a provincial Russian. While a student he fell in with painters and musicians, and developed a lively interest in all the arts. He enjoyed the operas at the Maryinsky Theater, and his first ambition was to be a composer, but when Rimsky-Korsakov heard him play one of his own compositions, he persuaded the young Diaghilev to look in some other direction. On his first trip abroad in 1893 he met the great figures of the day, including Zola, Gounod, and Verdi.
Diaghilev’s broad enthusiasm for the arts led him to aspire to be a patron even though he lacked the wealth. And his homosexuality made many wary of collaborating with him. Still very early he found ways to focus interest on the artists he admired. He organized an exhibit of German and British watercol
ors in 1897, and other art exhibits soon thereafter. His International Exhibition of painting in 1899 included works by Degas, Monet, and Renoir. In the first issue in November 1898 of his magazine, Mir Isskustva (The World of Art), Diaghilev took for his motto a quotation from Michelangelo, “He who follows another will never overtake him.” And then from Dostoyevsky, tying literature to the fine arts, “Ideas fly through the air, but they are conditioned by laws which we cannot understand. Ideas are infectious, and an idea which might be thought the prerogative of a highly cultured person can suddenly alight in the mind of a simple, carefree being and take possession of him.” His regular visits to Bayreuth introduced him to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk—unified work of art—which he would try to realize in his own way.
After a brief stint on the staff of the Imperial Theater in St. Petersburg, Diaghilev organized exhibits of portraits and concerts and produced his first opera, Boris Godunov, to Moussorgsky’s music at the Paris Opéra in 1908, with Fyodor Chaliapin singing the title role. In 1909 Les Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev opened its first season at the Théâtre Chatelet in Paris. From the beginning the brilliant renaissance of modern ballet drew on Russian sources. His collaborator in this beginning was the young Michel Fokine (1880–1942), who choreographed The Firebird (1910), based on Russian folktales to the music of Igor Stravinsky, who would make his reputation composing for Diaghilev. The next season he produced another Stravinsky ballet, Petrouchka (1911), with scenery painted by Aleksandr Benois, which developed the Russian folk theme of puppets coming to life in scenes at the fair on the frozen Neva River. For this, Fokine created memorable choreography for the great dancer Vaslav Nijinsky (1888–1950), proving that in ballet “it should be the whole body that dances. Everything down to the last muscle must be expressive, be eloquent.”
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 69