Nijinsky

by Lucy Moore

  It is to this period of their time together that Vaslav’s most eviscerating memories in his diary about Diaghilev belong: his false smiles, the black hair-dye that stained his pillowcase, his two false front teeth which moved when he touched them nervously with his tongue, and which reminded Vaslav of a wicked old woman. ‘I realised that Diaghilev was deceiving me. I trusted him in nothing and began to develop by myself, pretending that I was his pupil … I began to hate him quite openly, and once I pushed him on a street in Paris … because I wanted to show him that I was not afraid of him. Diaghilev hit me with his cane because I wanted to leave him.’

  Misia Sert’s letters to Stravinsky in the late spring of 1913 confirm the misery and unpleasantness between them. Diaghilev was ‘going through a dreadful period’ in which creditors were threatening to sue him and an insufferably rude Nijinsky was chafing against their relationship, recalling the deliberately provocative way the young Vaslav had behaved towards his father before he left Eleonora.

  Bronia hoped a romance might blossom between Vaslav and Maria Piltz, whom they had known since schooldays and who was replacing her as the Chosen Maiden; she thought Piltz was ‘a little in love with him’. Piltz told an interviewer in 1968 that Vaslav had asked her to come with him for a ride through Paris fifty-five years earlier, but as she got into the carriage someone pulled her from behind. It was Diaghilev: ‘Get out. You’re not going anywhere with him.’ She remembered Vatsa fondly. ‘He was so nice! But he was strange … He used to joke around with me. Once I asked him, “What do you love best in the world?” He laughed and replied, “Insects and parrots.”’

  Vasily Zuikov was still shadowing Nijinsky on Diaghilev’s instructions. When he and Rambert were working together, Zuikov would interrupt every few minutes to open or close the window, although Rambert recorded that ‘Nijinsky didn’t take the slightest interest in me as a woman. It never occurred to him, it never occurred to me. We were only discussing the work in hand.’ Afterwards they would go to Pasquier’s and drink hot chocolate and eat cakes. Rambert didn’t realise then that she was falling in love with Vaslav, but Eleonora noticed. Ever watchful for women trying to ensnare her son, she warned Vaslav that Rambert admired him; he assured her there was ‘no danger’. Something else would be needed to help him break free of Diaghilev’s hold.

  Whatever his feelings for her, Rambert was enthralled by Nijinsky, as a man as well as an artist. He possessed a great feeling for literature and she found him observant, with a gift for summing people up with a choice phrase, and was drily funny. One of the most fundamental things Nijinsky’s life seems to me to have lacked was humour. Everyone around him took themselves so painfully seriously – unless the sources just conceal it (which is of course very possible) – perhaps easy laughter was yet another of the sacrifices they offered up on the altar of artistic immortality.

  Many years later, Rambert remembered watching Vaslav’s ecstatic performances when he taught the Chosen Maiden’s solo to Piltz as ‘the greatest tragic dance I have ever seen’. ‘His movements were epic. They had an incredible power and force, and Piltz’s repetition of them – which seemed to satisfy Nijinsky – seemed to me only a pale reflection of Nijinsky’s intensity.’ For Rambert, Piltz could be no more than a ‘picture-postcard of a great painting’.

  Others were less convinced. At one of the last rehearsals, Diaghilev asked Enrico Cecchetti, venerable maître de ballet and guardian of the old style of dance, what he thought of Sacre. ‘I think the whole thing has been done by four idiots,’ Cecchetti replied. ‘First, Monsieur Stravinsky, who wrote the music. Second, Monsieur Roerich, who designed the scenery and costumes. Third, Monsieur Nijinsky, who composed the dances. Fourth, Monsieur Diaghilev, who wasted money on it.’ Diaghilev just laughed.

  The people who crowded into the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on the unseasonably warm evening of 29 May 1913 (the anniversary of Faune’s premiere) were a mixture of types – as Cocteau would put it, ‘the thousand varieties of snobbism, super-snobbism, anti-snobbism’. Many were bejewelled ladies from the highest ranks of society, accompanied by men in white tie, the grand music-lovers who had been Diaghilev’s earliest supporters in Paris. Others were younger, intellectual and rebellious – refusing to wear stiff collars and tailcoats (which anyway they could not afford) as a mark of their rejection of the traditional and outdated. Although the seats had all been sold, at double the normal price, Diaghilev, seeking support for his radical programme, had given these artists, critics and poets free standing passes, so that inside the theatre they were mingling on foot amidst the boxes occupied by the gratin.

  Stravinsky had given an interview (which he later disowned) which came out that morning, explaining the inspirations behind Sacre and what he, Nijinsky and Roerich hoped to achieve with it. He concluded, ‘I am happy to have found in Monsieur Nijinsky the ideal collaborator, and in Monsieur Roerich, the creator of the decorative atmosphere for this work of faith.’ This public show of confidence does not tally with descriptions of the final orchestral rehearsals (during which Nijinsky tried to throw a chair at a workman who interrupted them) and the dress rehearsal the previous day, which Rambert described as pandemonium, and during which the dancers heard the orchestra play the score for the first time.

  ‘Whatever happens,’ Diaghilev told Pierre Monteux and the dancers, ‘the ballet must be performed to the end.’ To calm everyone’s nerves, the first piece was Les Sylphides: graceful, poised and beautiful. Then, after an interval, Monteux gave the signal for the orchestra to begin playing Le Sacre du printemps. Stravinsky said later that his conductor had been ‘impervious and nerveless as a crocodile’ but Monteux remembered keeping his eyes glued to the score in front of him, not daring even to glance at the stage. ‘You may think this strange, cherie,’ he told his wife, ‘but I have never seen the ballet.’

  Like Monteux, the dancers waiting on stage were nervous, sweating heavily in their thick costumes.* This is the Sotheby’s description, from a 1968 sale, of a costume for one of the Maidens: ‘Exceptionally long-sleeved robe [of cream-coloured flannel] stencilled all over in barbaric patterns of oxblood, scarlet, lemon-yellow, turquoise-blue, peacock-blue, ochre and bottle-green, the predominant effect being tawny; and an attached vermillion petticoat stencilled with an oxblood and white stripe and dashes of white and yellow.’ The glowing, gem-like colours Roerich used recalled traditional Russian ikons. On their legs both men and women wore loose white leggings over which the ribbons of their soft shoes criss-crossed. The men wore false beards and strange, pointed, fur-trimmed caps, the women headbands and long false plaits. Behind them the set portrayed a lush green landscape dotted with the mystical symbols or ‘memory signs’ so important to Roerich: animal skulls, sacred rivers, hills and trees, magical stones and ominously gathering storm clouds.

  The first strains of Sacre, a technically intimidating bassoon solo in an unusually high register, are hauntingly delicate, but the body of the score is wild, violent, powerful and provocative: complex rhythms layered over one another, pounding away in a remorseless, dissonant frenzy of primitive abandon. For an audience of 1913, even an audience as sophisticated as this one, hearing this kind of noise for the first time was overwhelmingly disconcerting, ‘as irritating to the nervous system,’ said one early listener, ‘as the continuous thudding of a savage’s tom-tom’. Hisses, whistles, boos and disbelieving laughter broke out: was this some kind of joke? The composer Camille Saint-Saëns leapt out of his seat to leave, hissing to his neighbour, ‘If that’s a bassoon, I’m a baboon!’ Debussy, who had so longed to hear an orchestra playing Sacre, was sitting in Misia Sert’s box. After a few moments he turned to her ‘with a sad, anxious face’ and whispered, ‘It’s terrifying – I don’t understand it’.

  Onstage, as the audience reaction grew less inhibited, the frightened dancers struggled to hear the music over the noise of the crowd and forced themselves to keep moving. Trembling with fury, dripping with sweat beneath the stage lights, his
face ashen, Nijinsky stood on a chair in the wings, frantically shouting out the time for them. Stravinsky, who had rushed backstage when the tumult began, was by his side. Astruc leant forward out of his box, his fist clenched, and screamed, ‘First listen! Then hiss!’ Desperately Diaghilev switched the house lights on and off several times, appealing for calm.

  Nijinsky’s willingness ‘to exclude the audience’, partly by denying them the lightness and sensuality they had come to expect from the Ballets Russes, partly by having his dancers apparently more absorbed in the ritual of their dance than the performance, caused fury. When the maidens held their cheeks as if in pain, hecklers shouted out, ‘Un docteur! Un dentiste!’ One countess took their heavily rouged cheeks as a deliberate dig at her own make-up, and stood up, cheeks flaming, tiara askew, to shout indignantly, ‘I am sixty years old, but this is the first time anyone has dared to make a fool of me!’

  Defenders of the piece were equally vehement, believing like Harry Kessler that they were witnessing ‘an utterly new vision, something never before seen … art and anti-art at once’. They recognised that what they were seeing and hearing was as revolutionary as the writings of Nietszche, Proust and Freud, the scientific discoveries of Einstein or the art of Cezanne, Picasso and Brancusi. Fisticuffs broke out between opposing factions: one man hit another over the head with his cane; Monteux saw a man pull someone else’s hat down over his face. Some witnessed gendarmes arriving to quell the riot. The music critic Florent Schmitt cried, ‘Down with the whores of the Seizième!’ Finding herself in the midst of a battleground, Eleonora fainted.

  At times, reading the accounts of the rowdy, roiling mob, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they had all come spoiling for a fight. The succès de scandale was an established part of cultural life, particularly in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century – the first Impressionist painters made a virtue of being rejected by the establishment with the Salons des refusés, while both Oscar Wilde’s 1894 Salomé and Richard Strauss’s 1906 opera of Wilde’s play caused their audiences to return again and again in delighted horror. Premieres of pieces by Wagner and Schoenberg had provoked riots. Diaghilev himself was hardly a stranger to courting commercial success by leading his audiences to the outer bounds of what they considered acceptable.

  The audience at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées was apparently restless from the start, whispering and giggling even before Sacre began. Roerich later observed that the real savages that night were not the dancers portraying on stage ‘the refined primitivism of our ancestors, for whom rhythm, the sacred symbol, and subtlety of movement were great and sacred concepts’, but the brawling mass watching them. ‘What an idiot the public is,’ Rambert heard Nijinsky muttering. ‘Dura publika, dura publika.’

  The theatre did not quieten until Maria Piltz calmly faced the hooting, bellowing audience for her solo.* ‘She seemed to dream, her knees turned inwards, the heels pointing out – inert. A sudden spasm shook her body out of its corpse-like rigour. At the fierce onward thrust of the rhythm, she trembled in ecstatic, irregular jerks.’ Finally the Maiden collapsed, having danced herself to death, and six of the men lifted her limp body to the skies and bore it off with ‘no cathartic outpouring of despair, sadness, or anger, only a chilling resignation’.

  The pitiless quality of Sacre, the impossibility of catharsis, is perhaps the main reason no one there that night quite knew what to make of it. As Prince Volkonsky, Diaghilev’s friend and former colleague at the Imperial Theatres, said, ‘Nothing could be less appropriate to prepare one for this spectacle than the word “ballet” and all the associations it carries with it.’ Not only was there no demonstrable grace, virtuosity or eroticism, but there was also no narrative and none of the conventional devices that steered an audience towards a sense of unity and completion. ‘This is not the usual spring sung by poets, with its breezes, its birdsong, its pale skies and tender greens. Here there is nothing but the harsh struggle of growth, the panic terror from the rising of the sap, the fearful regrouping of the cells,’ wrote Jacques Rivière, hailing Sacre a masterpiece. ‘Spring seen from inside, with its violence, its spasms and its fissions. We seem to be watching a drama through a microscope.’

  The music and the choreography combined to create something simply breathtakingly new. If Le Sacre du printemps was for Roerich an attempt at reconstruction of an ancient ceremonial rite, for Stravinsky and Nijinsky the distant past was a metaphor for the tragedy of modern existence. Their Sacre – the music and the movement – was ‘a bleak and intense celebration of the collective will’ and its triumph over the individual. If audiences found it frightening, remorseless, inhuman, at times absurd – well, that was the point.

  Grigoriev kept the curtain down for longer than usual before the next piece, Le Spectre de la Rose, in an attempt to restore order. Think of Vaslav in the crowded changing room while the wardrobe mistress stitched him into his pink body stocking, preparing himself after that tumult to dance a role which merely irritated him – one that he saw as cloyingly sentimental and outdated and by which he resented being defined.

  After the final curtain, said Stravinsky, they were ‘excited, angry, disgusted, and … happy’. He, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Bakst, Cocteau and Kessler went off to dine. Diaghilev’s only comment on the evening was, ‘Exactly what I wanted.’ After dinner, during which they agreed that it might take people years to understand what they had just shown them, they drove through the dark and empty city in a cab, Cocteau and Kessler perched on the roof, Bakst waving a handkerchief tied to his cane like a flag. Diaghilev was muffled up against the night air in his opossum coat; Vaslav sat in his ‘dress coat and top hat, quietly contented, smiling to himself’.

  Cocteau remembered their midnight ride taking them on to the Bois de Boulogne – where by coincidence Rambert and the rest of the company were also having a late supper, too excited to think of going to bed. The scent of acacia blossom hung in the air. When the coachman lit his lantern, Cocteau saw tears glistening on Diaghilev’s face. He was reciting Pushkin under his breath, with Stravinsky and Nijinsky listening intently. Whatever happened later, Cocteau wrote, ‘You cannot imagine the sweetness and nostalgia of those men.’

  In June Nijinsky went on to London with Diaghilev and Walter Nouvel, his usual travelling companions. Also on their train was Romola de Pulszky, who had in Vienna some months earlier managed to persuade Diaghilev to allow her to follow the Ballet with the plan that if she carried on her training with Cecchetti she might one day dance with them. Nijinsky had been against the idea – what else could she be but a dilettante? – but Diaghilev, always aware of who people were, was happy to be able to please her mother, the great Emilia Márkus. Romola had managed to convince Diaghilev that it was Bolm, not Nijinsky, with whom she was in love; and so she had been accepted.

  Since then, Romola had been tailing le petit (as she and her maid had codenamed Vaslav) with all the focus and guile of an international spy. The dresser at the Viennese Opera House, Mr Schweiner, fed her titbits of information; once a girlfriend entered Nijinsky’s room at the Hotel Bristol while he was dressing ‘as if she was making a mistake’; in Monaco Romola lay on a bench under a blossoming magnolia tree as Nijinsky, Diaghilev and their party had dinner on the terrace at the Hotel de Paris, ‘and watched them for hours and hours’. Having exhausted Bolm and Cecchetti, she had moved on to Baron de Günzburg, one of Diaghilev’s most important backers, and by his side had complete access to the Ballets. It was with Günzburg that she had watched the first night of Sacre, squashed in among the mob of dancers and friends watching from the wings, looking out for Nijinsky’s pale, tense face in the crowd.

  Nijinsky in evening clothes by Valentin Sverov, head back and eyes half-closed, wearing the distant expression that fascinated Romola de Pulszky.

  She was delighted to find herself on the same train as Vaslav – she always instructed her maid Anna to find out when he and Diaghilev were travelling, but this was the first time Anna’
s information had been accurate – and, hanging out smoking (at this time a very racy activity for a woman, especially an unmarried woman) in the corridor near his compartment, was overjoyed when he asked her in his broken French if she was looking forward to being in London. It was their first conversation. On the sea crossing to Dover they spoke again and Romola triumphantly told Anna, who took a dim view of her crush on Nijinsky, that flirting was a great cure for sea-sickness.

  In London she tried as much as she could to be where Nijinsky and Diaghilev were, badgering her English relations to take her to dine at the Savoy, where they were staying. Nijinsky ‘seemed now almost to take it for granted that I was here, there, and everywhere he appeared in public. He must have wondered how I managed it. I was really glad now that I had spent so much on my clothes in Paris,’ Romola wrote. ‘As I always went with some friends, it must have seemed natural to Diaghilev that I was present. He realised that I moved in the same society as he himself.’ Nijinsky was unfazed by this pursuit; indeed, sometimes when he looked at her she noticed the shadow of a smile on his face.

  One morning Nijinsky and Karsavina arrived early for their class with Cecchetti, before Romola’s class had been dismissed. She took a long time to change so that she could watch them. Every day Cecchetti began with a little speech: ‘Tamara Platonova, Vaslav Fomich. You may be celebrated, great artists, but here in my class you are my pupils. Please forget here all your crazy modern movements, all that Fokine, Nijinsky nonsense. Please, ras, dva, tri, chetyre …’ They obeyed without question, helping sprinkle water on the floor, executing whatever he asked of them with the precision of clocks, listening to his criticism of the performances of the night before and his inexhaustible complaints about the terrible modern music they had to dance to. A few days earlier, for his birthday, Nijinsky had given Cecchetti a cane with a heavy gold top; Romola said she and the girls in her class wished there was less gold in it, because Cecchetti rapped them with it when they made mistakes.