The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  Europe’s bookshops were already selling sentimental trash, self-help books and science fiction, and for the more discerning or more socially ambitious they stocked the decadents of the late nineteenth century (Wilde, Baudelaire, Maeterlinck) as well as the more recent, avowedly realist social fiction of Emile Zola and the German Gerhart Hauptmann, of George Bernard Shaw and the ageing Thomas Hardy, or the self-consciously outrageous Italian Gabriele d’Annunzio. In a gallery or a museum of modern art, one could see canvases painted by the popular Russian portraitist Ilya Repin, by the German late Impressionist and wit Max Liebermann (asked how he would paint the then chancellor of Germany he answered: ‘Bismarck? I’ll pee him into the snow!’), the expressionist fantasies of Edvard Munch, the cloying sumptuousness of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Frederic Leighton - Britain was still recovering from the exquisite artistic sins of the Pre-Raphelites.

  This is the background against which we have to see the artistic revolution Virginia Woolf described. Often these experiments were focused on groups like the Bloomsbury circle. Imagining the new is easier when ideas bounce back and forth. In Paris, the American Gertrude Stein became a focal point for artists who came to her house to have a hot meal, to talk about art, or to sell her their work in order to pay the rent for another month; in Germany, Munich’s Schwabing circle and groups in Darmstadt or the north-German village of Worpswede or the group Die Brücke (the bridge) fulfilled this function; in St Petersburg, the ecstatic goings-on in Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Tower were a focus for artists and philosophers alike (as well as for the usual colourful band of hangers-on); Milan was the headquarters of the Italian Futurist movement; the Secession and the salons of Eugenie Schwarzwald and Bertha Zuckerkandl the focus for Vienna’s new generation of artists; and countless smaller and often short-lived communities. It is interesting to notice how distinct from one another these groups were. There were no Cubists in Vienna, no Futurists in Berlin or Munich, and twelve-tone music was not composed in St Petersburg or Paris. Despite the availability of art magazines and photographic reproduction, it appears that there was simply no great interest among the individual artistic movements, among journalists or among the reading public to widen the scope of artistic appreciation beyond national, or even city borders.

  Immediately, one exception springs to mind: 1909 was the year of the publication of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro. We have already encountered this text in the previous chapter, but in the light of Woolf’s claim it is important to recall his demand for ‘the complete renewal of human sensibility brought about by the great discoveries of science. Those people who today make use of the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the train, the bicycle, the motorcycle, the automobile, the ocean liner, the dirigible, the aeroplane, the cinema, the great newspaper (synthesis of a day in the world’s life) do not realize that the various means of communication, transportation and information have a decisive influence on the psyche.’ Most did not, perhaps, but there were some who were acutely attuned to this change.

  Conservative circles were alarmed by such talk and what they considered its disastrous consequences for public morals. In 1910 Pope Pius X even went so far as to introduce a compulsory oath for all priests, forswearing modernism and its values. The wave of change that had been on the rise since the late 1890s had finally reached its high point, and art became a central battlefield in the age-old but newly embittered war between the ancients and the moderns.

  1910 was a year during which the whiff of change and of intellectual experiment was particularly pungent. You could smell it, and while some felt in their nostrils an aroma of freedom and discovery, others thought they detected the stench of decadent Europe’s rotting corpse. The generation born and educated during the prosperous and relatively peaceful 1880s and 1890s was now reaching maturity and began to articulate its own vision of life, its own rebellion against its fathers, coloured by a childhood that had been, for the first time in history, increasingly determined by a culture of professionalized administration, standardized education and mass consumption. Not for them the perfumed decadence of l’art pour l’art, the sensualist literalness of the Impressionists. Not for them the confident naturalism of Thomas Hardy, Theodor Fontane and Gustave Flaubert or the earnest campaigning of Emile Zola. Their view of things was shaped by reading about races in fast machines and in children’s magazines, by overhearing adult whispers about nervous breakdowns and fast women, by a daily life increasingly dominated by cities, newspapers and an intense relation to the future, whatever it might bring. Their imagination was alert to the fact that an age had ended and a new one - by turns a promise and a menace - was bursting onto the scene, visible as yet only in flashes and fragmented visions. Their work was jagged, shot through with undigested rushes of information pushing their way into art as noise, collage or quotation; by splintered faces, swirling shapes and imploded personalities whose very essence turned out to be nothing but a wild conflagration of geometrical shapes, an exploding supernova of raw verbiage, a screech hurled from the stage.

  Had human character changed? Could it ever change? These were the main questions asked by the artistic avant-garde. In view of the revolutionary execution of the works used to ask questions and give answers to them, the artists’ response is perplexing, but only at first: No! they stated firmly, it has not, there is nothing new under the sun. Artists did not deny that something radically novel had occurred, that society had been transformed, or that their own lives had changed; their argument was at once more subtle and more forceful. Nietzsche had taught this generation that Christianity had been nothing but a perversion, making free people into slaves and bowing them under the yoke of theology and self-abnegation. It was this yoke the young artists were eager to throw off, the ties of a civilization whose galloping pace seemed to them nothing but a technologized continuation of the slave life of old. Human character had always been different: savage, primeval, mythological. The bourgeois individual was nothing but an ape dressed up in Manchester twill. Take away his suit and you discover the underlying nature of all things - take it away or go directly where no suits have ever been worn, and you will see that the human mind exists in its ancient, primordial form. Look for the deepest patterns, and you find yourself on a journey into the interior of humankind, a return to the sources, a search for the primitive, for ritual and myth.

  Ritual, Myths and Masks

  Even in an art world still capable of being scandalized, no outcry was so great as that erupting in 1913 during the first Paris performance of a ballet by a young Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), who had already made a name for himself with two innovative virtuoso scores, The Firebird and Petrushka.

  The ballet had been commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929), who had created the Ballets Russes company by an act of sheer will. Without any money himself, the young Russian had secured the financial backing of one of France’s richest men, the banker Comte Greffulhe, whom he had persuaded to invite a whole ballet company, including all stage sets and costumes, to Paris. He reasoned that the project might be costly and might even make a loss, but that French banks had huge investments in Russia and that after the disastrous Russo-Japanese War and the subsequent revolution with its bloody suppression, French investors needed to be reassured that Russia was a civilized nation; a nation of great culture, a safe bet. Greffulhe was convinced and went to other bankers. Diaghilev got his money and threw himself into commissioning scores and stage decorations and generally spending huge amounts of his backers’ funds on anything that took his fancy.

  The first season of the Ballets Russes in 1909 was a success not least due to the brilliantly innovative and daring choreography by Michel Fokine, who had already made a name for himself in St Petersburg. From then on Diaghilev took his dancers on a European tour every year. The company was known for its innovative dance styles and sets, even though most of the ballets performed were traditional and were danced to music by established compo
sers such as Alexander Borodin, Anton Arensky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Stravinsky’s first two ballets had been well received, but soon the composer and the impresario decided that something more daring was needed, something that would really capture the imagination.

  Stravinsky had an idea: an ‘old Russian’ spring ritual, a sacrificial dance around a virgin who was to dance herself to death in a pagan welcome of the new season, with old men and women in ancient costumes, and with bands of young people erupting into ecstatic movement. He threw himself into the composition, working hard on the score while following the ballet company to oversee the performance of his other pieces. In 1912 the young Russian received fair warning of the Paris public’s reaction to music it deemed scandalous. Diaghilev had allowed Nijinsky to perform an original choreography on the poem by the French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918), L’Après-midi d’un faune, a superbly impressionistic scene evoking a lazy afternoon spent by a Greek faun in pursuit of an adored nymph of whom he can capture no more than a veil left behind. The decoration by the company designer Léon Bakst took its cues from Greek vase painting, and the faun was danced by the company’s star male lead, Vaslav Nijinsky. ‘Nijinsky as the faun was thrilling,’ recalled Lydia Sokolova, the only English member of the troupe.

  Although his movements were absolutely restrained, they were virile and powerful and the manner in which he caressed and carried the nymph’s veil was so animal that one expected to see him run up the side of the hill with it in his mouth. There was an unforgettable moment just before his final amorous descent upon the scarf when he knelt on one leg on top of the hill; with his other leg stretched out behind him. Suddenly he threw back his head, opened his mouth and silently laughed. It was superb acting.

  The public, however, was less concerned about the quality of the acting, than about that ‘final amorous descent’, during which Nijinsky draped himself over the scarf and mimed a very public, explicit act of masturbation in front of the Paris audience.

  Outrage! Even during the performance people left the hall, and the reviews were overwhelmingly hostile. ‘We have had a faun, incontinent, with vile movements of erotic bestiality and gestures of heavy shamelessness,’ wrote Gaston Calmette, the powerful editor of Le Figaro, who described the mythical creature as ‘an ill-made beast, hideous from the front, and even more hideous in profile’, a description piqued by the fact that, to emphasize his character’s intent and nature Nijinsky had chosen not to wear anything underneath his speckled costume tights, making the performance all the more explicitly virile and obscene. The ‘too-expressive pantomime of the body’ he had performed on stage really left very little to the imagination. ‘These animal realities will never be accepted by the true public,’ Calmette opined, no doubt identifying true taste with that of the Paris set.

  Stravinsky, meanwhile, was working like a man possessed. He completed his own highly intricate score by the end of the year. ‘Today 4/14.IX.1912 Sunday with an unbearable toothache I finished the music of the Sacre. I. Strav. Clarens, Chatelard Hotel,’ he had scrawled in his notebook. If he himself was convinced that this was great music, music that had never been written before, not everyone else was equally enthusiastic. The designated conductor, Pierre Monteux, was more than sceptical when the composer demonstrated the piece to him:

  Stravinsky sat down to play a piano reduction of the entire score. Before he got very far, I was convinced he was raving mad. Heard this way, without the colour of the orchestra, which is one of its greatest distinctions, the crudity of the rhythm was emphasized, its stark primitiveness underlined. The very walls resounded as Stravinsky pounded away, occasionally stamping his feet and jumping up and down to accentuate the force of the music. Not that it needed much emphasis…My only comment at the end was that such music would surely cause a scandal.

  The conductor’s scepticism was echoed by the orchestra’s. The incessant time changes, discordant keys played concurrently and dissonant motifs clashing in all instrumental groups made them unsure whether their parts were correct. During the rehearsals, some of the musicians simply laughed. Seated at the piano, Stravinsky furiously defended his music, playing, counting, shouting instructions to the dancers, and insisting on every detail, every rhythmic complexity.

  Then came the performance. The art nouveau auditorium of the newly built Théâtre des Champs-Elysées was filled to capacity, and the public was in a good mood, comfortably settled in for an evening’s worth of beautiful dancing after a pleasant first piece, danced on point and in classic white tutus. When the music of the Sacre started, however, it was clear from the very first bars that this was something unheard of. A high-pitched melody floated through the air, played on a bassoon, an instrument designed for a much lower range. In the audience, the composer Camille Saint-Saëns, a superb craftsman but never known as an avant-gardist, jumped up and left his seat. ‘If that’s a bassoon I’m a baboon!’ he hissed to his neighbour as he got up. Shortly afterwards all hell broke loose. ‘During the first two minutes the public remained quiet,’ Monteux later recalled, ‘then there were boos and hissing from the upper circle, soon after from the stalls. People sitting next to one another began to hit one another on the head with fists and walking sticks, or whatever else they had to hand. Soon, their anger was turned against the dancers and especially against the orchestra ... Everything to hand was thrown at them, but we continued playing.’ The chaos was complete when members of the audience turned on one another, on anyone supporting the other side. A heavily bejewelled lady was seen slapping her neighbour before storming off, while another one spat in her detractor’s face. Fights broke out everywhere and challenges to duels were issued.

  Monteux had been firmly instructed to keep on playing, no matter what was happening behind him, but soon the ruckus was so loud that the dancers could no longer hear the orchestra. A panicked Stravinsky left his seat in the stalls and ran backstage, where he found the work’s choreographer, Nijinsky, hanging precariously from one of the wings and yelling instructions to the dancers in Russian. To keep Nijinsky from falling onto the stage, the delicately built and myopic composer held on to his coat tails while the music unfolded, almost drowned out by the rioting audience. Meanwhile Monteux and the musicians were concentrating desperately on the complexities of the score, playing as if their lives depended on it.

  The Sacre du printemps was a revolutionary piece, not only in its orchestration and its use of instruments, but in its entire conception. Traditional structure had been abandoned. Instead, different motifs and passages assailed the listener with unexpected force. There were drumming, stomping rhythms for which percussion and strings formed a block of terrifying sounds; woodwinds that were by turns discordant, plangent and archaically stern; aggressive and often brutal interruptions from the brass, then sudden total silence. Meandering flutes and shimmering shoals of trills led to insistent, almost ecstatic sections during which the entire orchestra was strained to the limits of its capacity: a heaving mass of precisely calculated cross-rhythms, moments of strange beauty and eerie calm followed by eruptions of tremendous force, folk motifs and pilgrims’ choirs hard on the heels of feverish syncopations, a pitiless ritual during which the visceral force of the dance was as audible as were birdsong and the victim’s shrieks. Music would never be as it had been before. Gaston Calmette, who had already criticized Debussy’s faun, now railed against ‘the strange spectacle of a laborious and puerile barbarism’, another critic called the piece le massacre du printemps. Even the most progressive journalists were politely shocked: the artsy journal Excelsior commented daintily: ‘the most interesting guests do not always lead to happy finds: this seems to be the case for the new pantomime created at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées by the troupe of M. Serge de Diaghilev. One has to pay homage to his inventive audacity: one can go no further.’ One young listener, Jean Cocteau, noted with genuine enthusiasm that he felt ‘uprooted’ by the piece. ‘Beauty speaks to the guts. Genius cannot be analysed any better than ele
ctricity. One has it, or one does not. Stravinsky does ... The Russian troupe has taught me that one must burn oneself up alive in order to be reborn ...’ To Cocteau’s perceptive mind, the genius which uprooted him from his thoroughly bourgeois identity was an electric phenomenon, a shock to the nerves that burned up everything old in order to make a new culture rise from the ashes.

  Stravinsky’s fascination with archaic ritual was shared by other artists, particularly in his native Russia, and while the composer himself had been content to crib folk motifs for his music from an anthology of songs edited by his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, others went further in their search for authentic folk art and for a mythological way of thinking. In 1889, the legal scholar Vassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) had joined scientists on a journey to the Urals in order to study the customs of the Komi people. There he had developed a fascination for their shamanic rites and the abstract religious symbols used to decorate ritual items and objects of daily use. When Kandinsky decided to abandon law and to turn to painting in 1896, the symbolic language of the Komi shamans became the driving force of his work. He moved to Munich, where he met another gifted painter, Gabriele Münter (1877-1962), who not only became his lover, but also moved in with the Russian, who was still married at the time.