Nijinsky

by Lucy Moore

  Bakst was encouraging him in other creative endeavours, too. Vaslav attended his painting classes where his easel was next to that of the young Marc Chagall. He smiled at Chagall, ‘as if to encourage me in my boldness, of which I was not yet aware’, but his own drawings, wrote Chagall, were childlike in their simplicity.

  Nijinsky danced Giselle for the first time at the Mariinsky in January 1911 to thundering applause and rave reviews. He performed opposite Karsavina, his partner in the Ballets Russes’s Paris version of the ballet, and he wore the costume Benois had designed for him earlier that year. The next morning, according to Bronia’s account, he was awakened by a telephone call summoning him to the offices of the Imperial Theatres. Bronia and Eleonora waited for him at home, hoping that he would return promoted to the coveted rank of premier danseur; Karsavina had told them she had just been made prima ballerina with a corresponding rise in salary to 6,000 roubles.

  Instead he reappeared pale but with an excited determination in his eyes and told them that he had been dismissed for wearing ‘an indecent and improper costume’ in the presence of her Imperial Majesty Maria Fyodorovna, the Tsar’s mother. When Vaslav did not respond, he was told that if he issued an apology to the Minister of the Imperial Court and requested a reinstatement he would be taken on again. As Vaslav turned to leave, still without saying anything, the official panicked and offered him a contract for 9,000 roubles for twenty performances a year, leaving him ample time to perform abroad. Still Vaslav said nothing. The offer was raised to 12,000 roubles. Finally he bowed and said haughtily that he did not wish to remain at ‘the Imperial Ballet from which I was thrown out as if I was useless’. If they wanted him to return, he said, he would expect an apology and a petition requesting his return. ‘I am no longer an Artist of the Imperial Theatres. I am now only an artist of the Diaghilev Ballet,’ he told Eleonora and Bronia when he got home. ‘I will telephone Seryozha and tell him … I can imagine how happy he will be.’

  The Mariinsky’s official costume for Albrecht was a long tunic worn over a pair of tights, with short trunks worn over the tights so that nothing untoward could be glimpsed beneath the tunic. Benois’s costume, intended to be a more accurate approximation of medieval clothing (Giselle is set in Germany in the Middle Ages), had a shorter, belted tunic and no trunks. In Paris, Diaghilev had ordered Benois to shorten the tunic a further two inches from his original design to show off Nijinsky’s bottom. But, as Telyakovsky, the Director of the Imperial Theatres, would observe in his diary, ‘Paris is tolerant of things that would be out of the question in St Petersburg, especially on the Imperial stage.’

  Nijinsky, though, would have seen the Mariinsky’s costume as out of date. He and the other dancers of the Diaghilevtsy-Fokinisty set were passionately attached to the idea of ballet being authentic, rather than pandering to the audience’s tastes or prejudices: he simply would not have worn a costume he considered wrong. When Grand Duke Sergey, one of Mathilde Kshesinskaya’s lovers, had come backstage between the first and second acts to demand that Nijinsky change the offending outfit, Nijinsky, furious at this interference in his artistic domain, had rudely refused. Benois had a different perspective. Even though he had designed the disputed costume, he called Nijinsky that ‘conceited artist’ for taking offence over the issue and resigning.

  There has been much speculation since about whether Diaghilev persuaded Nijinsky to appear in an improper costume in order to provoke a crisis between the dancer he considered his property and the theatre which still effectively owned him. Diaghilev may well have encouraged Vaslav to wear the costume they both considered appropriate for Albrecht; it is hard to imagine they hadn’t discussed it, given the importance of this Russian debut of what was effectively their production of Giselle. Probably, too, without the knowledge that Diaghilev was waiting to offer him a position in his new company, Nijinsky would not have dared to reject the Imperial Theatres’ offer to take him back. In reality, though, all this incident did was clarify the fact that Nijinsky’s fate was inextricably tied to Diaghilev’s: from the moment in the Hotel Daunou two summers earlier this confrontation had been inevitable, in one form or another. ‘Vaslav,’ said Benois, ‘was now entirely at his [Diaghilev’s] disposal and under his control.’

  Whether or not he had a hand in Nijinsky’s dismissal from the Imperial Theatres, Diaghilev was quick to capitalise on it. He telegraphed Gabriel Astruc in Paris days later, detailing the intrigue: ‘Appalling scandal. Use publicity.’ When Telyakovsky called repeatedly to try and persuade Vaslav to change his mind, Diaghilev reminded him how he had been insulted and urged him to leave behind the petty jealousies and tedious administrative demands of the Imperial Theatres, to live instead with him in a world of art ‘where ballets would be created by great musicians and great painters under [his] personal guidance and direction’, and where Vaslav would be a central figure in all their works.

  In a matter of weeks Bronia had tendered her resignation on the grounds that she no longer had confidence in the artistic direction of the Imperial Theatres. Adolph Bolm followed and others, including Karsavina, promised to dance for Diaghilev when they were not required to be at the Mariinsky.* Enrico Cecchetti was engaged as maître de ballet – though his tastes were more traditional than Diaghilev’s he would become the company’s ‘dance-conscience’ – and the volatile Benois and Fokine were given grandiloquent titles, directeur artistique and directeur choreographique respectively. Diaghilev had headed writing paper printed with the words ‘Les Ballets Russes de Serge de Diaghilew’. ‘A completely new path was opening in front of us … the future uncertain but so exciting.’

  There was one unhappy footnote to this episode, a kiss from Carabosse. Vaslav was due to be called up for military service, but no one close to him foresaw that outside the influence of the Imperial Theatres, and bearing in mind Diaghilev’s unpopularity at court and the manner of Vaslav’s dismissal from the Theatres, it would be almost impossible for him to procure an exemption. Once he left Russia he would not be permitted to return without performing this service. From 1910 onwards he was effectively stateless, belonging nowhere but the stage.

  Nijinsky and Diaghilev left St Petersburg in March for Paris and then Monte Carlo, where the new company would be based for the spring. Having left behind the tensions surrounding their departure from Russia – Vaslav’s proud refusal to compromise and his mother’s anguish over his decision – this was, like their first season in Paris, a time of excited hopefulness.

  It was decided while they were in Monte Carlo that Petrushka would be put on hold while they prepared for the premiere of the new season, Le Spectre de la rose, which was first performed in late April at the Monte Carlo Opera, a last flourish of art nouveau style. Its premise, based on two lines from a poem of Théophile Gautier’s, was wonderfully simple: a young girl, returning home from her first ball, falls asleep on a chair in her bedroom, dreaming of the boy who has given her the rose she still holds.* The spirit of the Rose comes through her window and dances with her as she sleeps; the music is Carl Maria von Weber’s swirlingly romantic 1819 ‘Invitation to the Waltz’. The Rose flies out of the window when the girl wakes, wondering whether it had all been a dream.

  Léon Bakst designed the set, a pretty blue and white bedroom in the style of the 1830s, and Tamara Karsavina as the girl wore a ruffled ivory satin gown trimmed with lace. On the first night Bakst was rushing around trying to find a spot for a canary in a cage that he was determined would provide the final touch to the scenery, but he couldn’t hang it in the window through which Nijinsky would jump and there was nowhere else for it to go. It recalled the exquisite yellow drawing room in the house belonging to his glamorous but irascible French grandfather, which had canaries in four gilded cages – one of those Proustian details at which the designers of the Ballets Russes so excelled. Impatiently Diaghilev told him to do without it: ‘You don’t understand, Seryozha; we must create the atmosphere.’ The cage was lost in transit before they
reached Paris.

  Benois described Diaghilev in top hat and tails, ‘looking very pompous and solemn as he always did on first nights, [standing] by, giving directions with growing anxiety’ as silk rose petals were sewn onto a squirming Nijinsky’s pink and mauve tricot body stocking beneath Bakst’s watchful eye. Bronia thought this process of transformation into the Rose was like watching the creation of a work of art. Vaslav had made up his face to look like ‘a celestial insect, his eyebrows suggesting some beautiful beetle … his mouth was like rose petals’ and he wore a close-fitting cap of silk petals. It was probably just Diaghilev creating a story, but Nijinsky was even said to have sprinkled himself with attar of roses before he went on stage.

  As the Rose, Nijinsky ‘suggested a cluster of leaves wafted by a slight breeze’, his hands and arms unfolding around his head like petals or tendrils. ‘When he danced Spectre he was the very perfume of the rose, because in everything he extracted the essence,’ recalled Marie Rambert. It was, said the critic Cyril Beaumont, ‘the most perfect choreographic conception I have ever seen … It seemed too beautiful, too flawless, too intangible to be real; and when it was over you had a feeling as though the warm theatre had caused you to doze and you had suddenly awakened from an entrancing dream.’

  The most demanding of teachers, Enrico Cecchetti loved this piece. For him Karsavina embodied ‘grace, freshness and trembling thoughts’, while Nijinsky exuded ‘all the luscious beauty and sensuous perfume of the Rose’. But Fokine – whose attitude to Nijinsky would become so begrudging that he mentioned him in his memoirs only when exclusion would have been unthinkable – laced his praise with plenty of vinegar. ‘The fact that Nijinsky was not masculine gave a special charm to this role, making him all the more suitable for it,’ he wrote, before conceding that Nijinsky ‘never displayed any effeminacy on the stage, no matter how effeminate he may have been in his personal life’.

  In truth, despite the sensuality of the piece, Nijinsky seems to have been an ethereally genderless presence as the Rose – a creature removed from humanity, as otherworldly as his Blue Bird or the Firebird he had hoped to be able to dance. But for an audience of 1911 it was challenging to see a girl dancing with a man pretending to be a flower: yet another reason for Nijinsky, however well he danced, to be suspect.*

  The pièce de résistance was Nijinsky’s final leap offstage, recalling that triumphant jump as Armida’s slave during their first night in Paris in 1909. Considering that he had just danced what was effectively a nine-minute solo – Karsavina’s part was minimal; Spectre was really the first solo ballet created for a man – this grand jeté was an extraordinary feat of strength and control. What watchers were astonished by was ‘the artistry by which he contrived to give the impression that having once taken off with an infinite continuity of grace, he was never going to come down’.

  There was more than mere artistry at work, though. The conductor, Pierre Monteux, ‘played the chord before last with a slight point d’orgue, thereby creating an illusion of a prolonged elevation of the dancer. When I played the final chord, you may be sure, the Spectre was already reclining on the mattress placed there to receive him. Ha, ha!’ In the wings, Nijinsky was caught almost upright by Zuikov and then lay panting on his mattress as Zuikov mopped his brow and let him have small sips of warm water while Diaghilev watched on, ‘all solicitude as if Nijinsky was in serious danger’.

  Nijinsky as the Rose, backstage, by Jean Cocteau, c. 1911. Zuikov is tending to his panting charge while a monocled Diaghilev, Stravinsky and Misia Sert, her aigrette waving above her head, are clearly recognisable in the group surrounding him.

  Jean Cocteau said seeing Spectre from backstage was like watching a boxer between bouts. ‘What grace coupled with what brutality! I can still hear the thunder of that applause, still see that young man smeared with greasepaint, sweating, panting, one hand pressed to his heart and the other clutching a stage brace. He collapsed on a chair, and in a few seconds, slapped, drenched, pummelled, he walked back out onstage, bowing, smiling.’

  If Schéhérazade had made Nijinsky into a sex symbol, Spectre sealed his status as an unlikely romantic hero. Audiences adored it. Unmasculine he may have seemed, and his life with Diaghilev was hardly secret, but that did not stop women as well as men fantasising about him leaping through their bedroom windows. Zuikov was said to have built himself a house on the proceeds of the rose petals shed nightly by Nijinsky and he was no longer able to keep admirers out of his charge’s dressing room: they were a part of the tyranny of success to which Nijinsky knew he had to submit. Vaslav’s recourse was silence. With Zuikov anticipating his habits, he learned to dress and make up in a room crowded with well-wishers before, during and after a performance without saying a word to anyone.

  The other success of the 1911 season, possibly Nijinsky’s greatest role, was Petrushka, the unhappy clown: a Russian version of a folk hero common to all European cultures – Punch, Pierrot, Pulcinella – part fairy tale, part commedia dell’arte, well-harvested sources of ballet inspiration. Benois and Stravinsky drew on their shared memories of the frosty Shrovetide fairs of St Petersburg and added a sinister dash of the absinthe-soaked world of Paul Verlaine, whose first Pierrot poem was published in 1868 (‘no longer the lunar dreamer of the old song … his spectre haunts us today, thin and luminous’) and his second – in which Pierrot is explicitly associated with his lover Arthur Rimbaud – in 1886 (‘A pale face lit by cunning grins … Accustomed, one might say, to contemplating every outcome’).

  The germ of the ballet was Stravinsky’s creation in the summer of 1910 of what would become ‘Petrushka’s cry’. He, Diaghilev, Benois – and Nijinsky, silent but watchful – worked on the scenario through the autumn and winter, in person and by letter, while Stravinsky continued to compose the music (it was not finished until mere weeks before the premiere). Fokine joined them in Rome in May to begin blocking out the ballet in earnest.

  Again, a mood of excited optimism infused them all during the creative process. Stravinsky wrote to one friend during this period, vigorously denying that ballet was ‘the “lowest sort” of scenic art’, but instead the only form of theatre ‘that sets itself, as its cornerstone, the tasks of beauty, and nothing else’, and asked another to send him the tunes of two popular songs that he would insert into the fairground scenes.

  Bronia remembered visiting Vaslav in his hotel room and finding him surrounded by spring flowers – radiant; and Benois also used the same word to describe this period. Vaslav and Karsavina practised daily with Cecchetti, unless Arturo Toscanini needed the theatre for rehearsals. Occasionally, to Cecchetti’s irritation, they were swept off by Diaghilev to see an arch, a view or a monument.

  As yet, Fokine’s dissatisfaction with his place at the Ballets Russes had not been directed towards Nijinsky, and in his memoirs he recalled working together ‘in perfect harmony’ on Petrushka. Unaware that Diaghilev had promised Nijinsky Faune (on which Nijinsky had been working for months) and that Diaghilev was already telling people he considered Fokine a spent force, he put their happy working relationship down to the fact that ‘Diaghilev had not yet persuaded Nijinsky that he was a choreographer, and therefore he strove only for perfection of execution’.

  But the fact that Fokine came to the proceedings late pleased Stravinsky, who later said Fokine was the most disagreeable person he ever worked with (though this was probably partly because, for his part, Fokine found Stravinsky’s music – especially Petrushka, the last piece on which they worked together – undanceable). It also allowed him and the others to form a good idea of the ballet before Fokine began the final choreographic process.

  As ever with one of Diaghilev’s premieres, the first night, in Paris in June 1911, was plagued by hitches. On their arrival in Paris it was discovered that the set for the second scene of the ballet, which takes place in Petrushka’s cell, had been damaged in transit. A key part of Benois’s decoration was the malevolent portrait of the Magician that wat
ched over everything poor Petrushka did. This had been destroyed. Because Benois had an abscessed elbow, Bakst offered to repaint it. On dress rehearsal night, when Benois saw the new portrait for the first time, he was furious because Bakst had painted the Magician in profile, ruining his effect. Though the artist Valentin Serov repainted it again according to Benois’s instructions in time for the opening night, and Diaghilev and Bakst apologised, the hysterical Benois launched into an unforgivable anti-Semitic attack on Bakst. Benois and Diaghilev eventually patched up their friendship but never again would Benois be at the heart of Diaghilev’s group of trusted advisers.

  On the night itself, a befeathered and bejewelled Misia Sert was sitting in her box, waiting for the ritual three knocks of the call boy that signalled the curtain was about to rise, when Diaghilev burst through the door, drenched in sweat and with his coat-tails flying out behind him. ‘The costumier refuses to leave the clothes without being paid. It’s ghastly. He says he won’t be duped again and he’ll take all the stuff away if he isn’t paid at once!’ Sert raced downstairs, ordered her driver to go home and collect the requisite 4,000 francs, and ‘the show went on, impeccable and glamorous’.

  This first performance of Petrushka was conducted by Pierre Monteux, who had met Stravinsky in the months leading up to the premiere and become fascinated by the dynamic, dragonfly-like figure of the young composer, as well as by ballet which he had previously considered a lower art form. After a few rehearsals, Stravinsky declared, ‘Only Monteux will direct my work.’ For his part, Monteux came to regard Petrushka with a proprietary air, saying that he never liked seeing anyone else conduct it.