Nijinsky

by Lucy Moore

  Although shouting, crying, gesticulating wildly and occasionally throwing furniture were accepted facts of Ballets Russes rehearsals (Michel Calvocoressi, finding that a group of Russian choristers was not responding to his direction, asked Walter Nouvel why; ‘he replied that it was probably because I spoke to them politely’), Nijinsky was particularly bad at successfully communicating his ideas to the dancers. As ever with him, while the movements looked simple, they were difficult to execute and unlike the persuasive Fokine, Nijinsky never learned how to sweep dancers along with him in his conception of a ballet.

  All her subtlety and intelligence could not help Karsavina understand what Nijinsky was trying to achieve if he could not explain it to her. She and Schollar were reluctant collaborators and Vaslav and Karsavina, ‘the best of friends both onstage and off’, argued frequently during rehearsals. ‘Once I asked “What’s next?” and Nijinsky said to me, “You should have known yourself a long time ago! I will not tell you!”’

  Marie Rambert, a young teacher from the Dalcroze Institute with a dance background (she had studied with Isadora Duncan and, briefly, with the Paris Opéra’s Madame Rat), was employed by Diaghilev in late 1912 to help Nijinsky work with the dancers, principally on Le Sacre du printemps but also on Jeux, her communication skills (she was Polish and Nijinsky’s first language was Polish, and she spoke excellent Russian and French) as important as her Dalcrozian training. She described an argument in which, when Karsavina asked Nijinsky to explain something to her, he exploded at her for having a ‘ballerina mentality’.

  ‘How dare you insult that great artist?’ Diaghilev said to him. ‘You are nothing but a guttersnipe to her, go at once and beg her to forgive you.’ Vaslav appeared with a huge bunch of flowers and peace was restored – but the subtext may have been more complicated than this. In a confused passage in his diary,* Nijinsky confessed that he had always admired Karsavina (and her beautiful body) but never dared approach her, because he ‘felt that one could not court her’ – for her honesty, as he put it, and because she was married. Even though it was a loveless marriage, her virtue was well known to be unassailable – another reason I suspect the idealistic Nijinsky would have been attracted to her.

  When they quarrelled, Vaslav was unhappy because he sensed Diaghilev trying to influence Karsavina against him, having noticed that secretly he ‘was courting her … I wept bitterly because I loved Karsavina as a woman’. By this stage Nijinsky and Karsavina had worked closely together for five years. In a rare group photograph taken in Monte Carlo in April 1911 after a lunch party with Stravinsky, Diaghilev and some others at the Riviera Palace Hotel, they are standing so close together that his head is under her wide-brimmed hat. They look relaxed and happy, at ease with one another, almost flirtatious. Although Karsavina did not dance in Faune, I see her as the Nymph the Faun desires but doesn’t – can’t – pursue. When he remembered working on Jeux, Vaslav described longing – perhaps for Karsavina – making him so weak he ‘could not compose’ it. ‘In that ballet you can see three young people feeling lust.’

  He was also feeling harried: racing to complete Le Sacre du printemps at the same time meant that he ‘never finished’ Jeux. Sacre was the great focus of 1913 and Jeux was just one of its victims. The ballet was still incomplete three days before its premiere and Nijinsky was exhausted and ‘blank’ in the rehearsal rooms until Grigoriev suggested a run-through, ‘in the hope of stimulating his invention. This luckily produced the desired effect,’ remembered Grigoriev. Typically, he thought Nijinsky was ‘baffled by Debussy’s score’.

  For all the strains on their relationship and the distance between them, Diaghilev was still in thrall to Nijinsky’s magic. Marie Rambert described sitting next to Diaghilev as they watched Nijinsky rehearse that spring. Diaghilev was mesmerised, almost unaware of her presence. Under his breath she heard him exclaim, ‘What beauty!’ and ‘Isn’t he at his most perfect in this?’ as Vaslav went through each of his roles.

  Jeux premiered in Paris in May at the grand opening of Gabriel Astruc’s modern new theatre, the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. The set was a large grey-green garden, an open space – not intimate enough, Bronia thought, for Nijinsky’s subtle pas de trois in which so much is implied or implicit. Bakst’s costume designs were rejected at the last minute – for some reason he had planned to have Vaslav in a red wig and unflattering long shorts – so instead he wore a white version of his practice clothes while Jeanne Paquin designed the girls’ white tennis dresses. Again, the dancers barely touched; again the theme of male innocence and female knowledge was repeated. This ‘second instalment of Nijinsky’s erotic autobiography [revealed] no less urgently than Faune, the power of desire, the ambiguity of sexual identity, and his aversion to intercourse itself’.

  Debussy walked out during thin applause (and some snide laughter), later raging against ‘Monsieur Dalcroze … one of music’s worst enemies’ and the ‘young savage’ Nijinsky. Although he was willing to admit the ballet ‘had some good choreographic ideas in it’, and that ‘if he had had more time in which to work on it, Nijinsky might well have made something of it’, Grigoriev found Jeux ‘helpless and immature’. Pierre Monteux was even more brutal; he thought Jeux asinine.

  The reviewers were underwhelmed too, criticising Jeux’s slightness, the contemporary dress and the strange quality of the movements. ‘Everything in the choreography was new – free movements and positions of the body applied to classical ballet technique’ – but it was not especially successful. Audiences were so accustomed to seeing Nijinsky as something otherworldly, unreal – an animal, a puppet, a bird, an Indian deity, a flower, even a slave; roles that may have dehumanised and emasculated him but somehow lifted him out of the sphere of ordinary life – that perhaps they could not get used to seeing him as something close to themselves, simply a young man of their own time; or perhaps without taking a leap into another world he could not achieve the transformation they had come to expect of him.

  Nijinsky was conscious of its weaknesses and touchingly grateful for any support he received. One night, soon after Jeux’s opening, the artist Valentine Gross encountered Nijinsky backstage after performing Spectre. ‘He was like a crumpled rose in pain, and there was no one near him. I was so touched that I left him alone and said nothing. Then he saw me and sprang up like a child taken by surprise and came smiling toward me. As he stood beside me in his leotard sewn with damp purplish petals, he seemed a kind of St Sebastian, flayed alive and bleeding from innumerable wounds. In a halting but quite accurate French he began to tell me how pleased he was with some pastels I had made of Jeux and to thank me for the article I had written to go with them.’

  In fairness to Nijinsky, as Richard Buckle would put it, watching the first performances of Jeux must have been as strange a sensation as tasting ‘Japanese food for the first time’. Though its choreography has been seen as Nijinsky’s least effective work, Jeux’s importance lies in its place as the first contemporary ballet and the forerunner of neoclassicism, associating Nijinsky irredeemably with modernism. The choreographer John Neumeier saw Jeux as a visual version of Gertrude Stein’s ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’ – with Nijinsky saying ‘I am here, I am here, I am here’.

  Jeux’s modernist style was in line with other interests they were pursuing at the time. Vaslav and Diaghilev had met Marinetti and the Futurists in Italy two years earlier, when they were rehearsing Petrushka, and in the first plan for Jeux, sent to Debussy, a Futurist-inspired dirigible crashed in the background to bring the games of love to a close. They were also fascinated by the ultra-modern, atonal music of the iconoclastic composer Arnold Schoenberg, hoping in early 1913 that he would provide a score for them.

  In December 1912, the poet and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote to Richard Strauss about an idea they had discussed with Diaghilev and Nijinsky for a new ballet based on the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife (yet another tale of an experienced femme fatale trying to entrap
an innocent youth). ‘I must make myself the spokesman of Nijinsky, who implores you to write the most unrestrained, least dance-like music in the world, to put down pure Strauss for this leaping toward God which is a struggle for God. To be taken by you beyond all bounds of convention is exactly what he longs for; he is, after all, a true genius and just where the track is uncharted, there he desires to show what he can do.’

  Finally, looking back from a post-war vantage point, Jeux also contains within it a powerful sense of impending doom: some kind of premonition that flirtations in a moonlit pleasure garden were more precious than anyone in 1913 could imagine.

  CHAPTER 6

  Le Sacre du printemps

  1910–1913

  FAUNE AND JEUX were not the only ballets with which Diaghilev was preparing to entrust his young friend. In Vienna in 1912 they met Hugo von Hofmannsthal to discuss a ballet Richard Strauss might write for them (which became La Légende de Joseph) and Hofmannsthal was ‘entranced’ by their all-night conversations, writing to his friend Harry Kessler that ‘since the evening of this Saturday I have actually only existed with no one else but Diaghilev and Nijinsky’. A few months later, in Paris (about the time of Faune’s premiere), they sat up together again, this time accompanied by Kessler, Reynaldo Hahn and Marcel Proust, debating which biblical story should accompany Strauss’s composition and Bakst’s Veronese-inspired setting. The backdrop of Larue’s was almost exotic enough to inspire a ballet of its own, to read Kessler’s description: ‘Bowls of monstrous strawberries stood on the table, glasses of champagne and liquors glittered in all colours; the Aga Khan, the richest Muslim prince of India, sat, arriving from a masked ball, at the corner in an oriental costume completely covered with fabulous genuine pearls, and even larger rubies and emeralds … A belated pair danced the tango.’

  As early as 1910, Nicholas Roerich and Igor Stravinsky had been talking about a ballet that would show the ancient spring rites of pre-historic Russia, a great sacrifice as enacted by a Slavonic tribe. Both claimed to have been the originator of the initial concept for Le Sacre du printemps, and quite possibly they came up with similar ideas simultaneously; Stravinsky said a vision of Sacre came to him in a dream. What is clear is that during the spring of 1910, when both were in Paris, they had discussed their shared passions for Russia and for the primitive and embarked on the development of a ballet that at this early stage they called the ‘Great Sacrifice’.

  Diaghilev was irritated that they had come up with the idea without his involvement and though he insisted that he was interested in it, he pressed for Petrushka to be produced first, partly because he wanted to tempt Benois back to work with him again and partly because prioritising a ballet of his choice would bind Stravinsky closer to him. Roerich could wait. For the time being, the Great Sacrifice was put aside and it was not until the following September that Stravinsky settled down in a pensione in Clarens to begin composing it in earnest.

  In the meantime he, Roerich and Diaghilev corresponded about their aims for the piece. Nicholas Roerich, whom Nijinsky called the Professor and whom Karsavina described as a prophet, was one of the most interesting of Diaghilev’s collaborators. Diaghilev had known him since their college days in the early 1890s and he had been one of the miriskusniki. A distinguished painter and occasional set designer (he had staged the opera Prince Igor for Diaghilev), he was also a respected scholar, a writer, philosopher, mystic and anthropologist whose earliest passion had been excavating shamanic burial mounds. His paintings were almost exclusively concerned with ancient landscapes and their primitive inhabitants, hunting, fishing and participating in rituals.

  In 1910 Roerich had written an essay setting out his thoughts on ancient Slavonic fertility festivities, when the people would go into the woods and array themselves in fresh greenery before dancing and singing to celebrate the coming of spring. He believed that enduring folk customs such as ritualistic dancing when the crops were sown, or in some places stripping a girl naked and leading her on horseback through the newly planted fields before burning her effigy, were literal remnants of Russia’s original pagan culture. What he wanted, writes the historian Nicoletta Misler, was ‘to present the power of images as the survival of memory’.

  The following year he painted a study for a mosaic for the church at Princess Tenisheva’s Talashkino estate called The Forefathers, which showed a man sitting on a sacred hill playing a wood or bone pipe to a group of bears hypnotised by his music – a reflection of the Slavonic tradition that men were descended from bears. Stravinsky came to work with Roerich at Talashkino where he met the singer and gusli player S. P. Golosov, who was also studying there. While Stravinsky composed, Roerich studied the Princess’s large collection of folk art, embroidery and clothing for inspiration for the costumes for the tribal dancers who would enact their ancient mysteries. Although Stravinsky would later claim he had tapped into ‘some unconscious folk memory’ for the traditional melodies that he abstracted for use in Sacre, it is likely that Roerich and Golosov pointed Stravinsky in the direction of folk songs that were ethnologically appropriate for the piece, right for the season and the ceremony they planned to portray.

  Though the overall impression the piece would create was more important to both composer and designer than strict academic ‘correctness’ – they did not want Sacre to be dry or museum-like – each relied heavily on what was then seen as authentic source material. Roerich studied a three-volume history of Russian dress and the folk way of life and the folklorist Alexander Afanasyev’s monumental The Poetic Views of the Slavs on Nature, as well as a twelfth-century chronicle of pagan customs and Herodotus’s description of the Scythians during the Persian Wars. Stravinsky used Rimsky-Korsakov’s collection of 100 Russian Folk Songs and an extensive anthology of Lithuanian folk tunes.

  Both men were inspired by the poetry of Sergey Gorodetsky. A few years earlier Stravinsky had composed music to accompany some of his poems. The 1907 poem ‘Yarila’ described an ancient wise man attended by two young girls, one of whom he kills with a flint axe by a pale lime tree in the spring as a sacrifice to the sun god, Yarilo: ‘a white bride’ who springs out of her bloodstains to become ‘a new god’. This imagery is repeated in a letter from Roerich to Diaghilev describing a tribe gathered at ‘the foot of a sacred hill, in a lush plain … to celebrate the spring rites … there is an old witch … a marriage by capture, round dances … the wisest ancient [imprints] his sacred kiss on the new-flowering earth’. Then the young virgins dance before choosing one of their number to be ‘the victim they intend to honour’.

  The titles of the sections Stravinsky used as he began composing echoed these visions: ‘Divination with Twigs’ (he told Roerich that ‘the picture of an old woman in a squirrel fur … is constantly before my eyes as I compose’); ‘Khorovod – Round Dance’; ‘The Kiss of the Earth; ‘Game of Abduction’; ‘Round Dances’; ‘Secret Night-games’ (which would become ‘Mystic Circles of the Young Girls’); and ‘Holy Dance’. By January 1912 he had finished Part One, and on 17 March he wrote to tell his mother that when he had played the completed sections to Diaghilev and Nijinsky in Monte Carlo, ‘they were wild about it’.

  Two days later he told Roerich triumphantly that he thought he had ‘penetrated the secret of the rhythm of spring’. The mood and sounds of the Russian spring were vitally important to the piece, as essential to its émigré creators as Roerich’s shamanic studies or Stravinsky’s complex modernism. Serge Lifar described spring in Kiev, where he grew up, being marked by the ‘dull, rumbling explosions’ of the dislodged floes of the thawing Dnieper crashing against one another in a torrent of melt-water. Later, an exiled Stravinsky would speak of ‘the violent Russian spring that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking. That was the most wonderful event of every year of my childhood.’

  Diaghilev raved so enthusiastically to Pierre Monteux about Stravinsky’s ‘extraordinary new work’ that he was desperate to hear it when Stravinsky p
layed it to them in Monte Carlo in the spring of 1912, but he was totally unprepared for the sadistic novelty of what he heard. As Stravinsky, drenched in sweat, pounded away on a quivering, shaking upright piano, the sound dwarfed everything. Monteux listened ‘in utter amazement’, worried his friend might burst. ‘I must admit I did not understand one note of Le Sacre du printemps. My one desire was to find a quiet corner in which to rest my aching head.* Then my director turned to me with a smile and said, “This is a masterpiece, Monteux, which will completely revolutionise music and make you famous, because you are going to conduct it.”’

  In June, Stravinsky and Debussy played Stravinsky’s four-hand arrangement of Sacre at the Paris home of Louis Laloy, editor of La Grande Revue. ‘When they finished, there was no question of embracing, nor even of compliments,’ wrote Laloy. ‘We were dumbfounded, overwhelmed by this hurricane which had come from the depths of the ages, and which had taken life at the roots.’ Five months later, Debussy was still in thrall to what he had heard, writing to Stravinsky that he was haunted as if ‘by a beautiful nightmare’, trying ‘in vain to recall the terrifying impression that it made. That’s why I wait for the performance like a greedy child who’s been promised some jam.’

  When they first began discussing Sacre, Roerich and Stravinsky had assumed that they would use Fokine as choreographer. In 1910–11 he was still the Ballets Russes’s directeur choreographique and although Nijinsky had begun work on Faune, no one apart from Diaghilev, Bakst and Bronia knew about it. But by early 1912, as he was finishing Sacre, Stravinsky was having doubts, writing to his mother from Monte Carlo in March to complain that Fokine was not up to the job. Each of his successive works was immeasurably weaker than the one before, Stravinsky said, and for Sacre ‘new forms must be created and the evil, the greedy and the gifted Fokine has not even dreamed of them … Genius is needed, not habileté.’ It could only be Nijinsky.