Nijinsky

by Lucy Moore

  Cyril Beaumont was in the audience as well, watching ‘with a pang of disappointment’. Although Nijinsky danced with the same style and elevation, ‘he no longer danced like a god. Something of that mystic fragrance which previously surrounded his dancing in Les Sylphides had vanished.’ Beaumont knew Diaghilev, but he did not notice him at the Palace Theatre that night and nor did Romola; Bronia’s is the only account that puts him there.

  Alfred Butt was pleased with the nine encores Nijinsky received on the first night, the huge audiences he initially drew and the positive critical reception, which he reprinted in the Palace’s advertisements, but Nijinsky was oppressed by having to shoehorn his soul into a vaudeville show. Almost worse was ‘the responsibility and the necessity for constant supervision of details … He became subject to moods of intense irritability and depression, and he flew into a rage over the most trivial incident.’ On one night it was the house lights being turned on while the sets were changed; on another it was a stagehand trying to flirt with Romola.

  One afternoon Bronia and Vaslav walked out of the Savoy together, following a business meeting with Romola’s mother and stepfather, Oskar Padany, who were trying to help plan the future of their son-in-law’s small company. They almost collided with Bakst, who simply looked at them and walked quickly away. Both Bronia and Vaslav were devastated by his behaviour. ‘It was as if our friend had lashed us with a whip.’

  By the start of the second week disaster loomed. Vaslav’s relations with Butt had already been soured by Butt’s businesslike approach to his art, which he considered disrespectful – in Russia, tsars bowed to artists – and when Butt suggested that slowing ticket sales might be improved by adding a Russian number to his programme of Russian ballet he was irrationally furious, squatting down in Butt’s office and angrily lashing out his legs in a few steps of the prisyadka, shouting, ‘Is this what you want to see from Nijinsky?’

  On Saturday, 14 March, Vaslav and his company danced matinee and evening performances, although Bronia had to persuade an enraged Vaslav to go on stage as the Rose because the orchestra had played Tchaikovsky – ‘a wretched choice of music’ – during the pause before Spectre began. This may have been the incident Cyril Beaumont heard about, in which Vaslav became uncontrollably angry, rolling on the floor of his dressing room, refusing to get into his costume, with his dresser and some others wringing their hands and weeping. The theatre’s manager Maurice Volny thought he was about to have a fit. He threw a jug of water over him and shouted at him to get up and get dressed, which Vaslav did. This was by no means Nijinsky’s first backstage tantrum but it was the first without Zuikov to guard him inside his dressing room and Diaghilev to defend him outside it. It did not augur well.

  She could not know it then, but that was the last time Bronia would ever dance with her brother or see him perform onstage. The next morning Romola telephoned Bronia to say that Vaslav was running a high fever. He was unable to dance for three consecutive performances – a breach of contract – and the season was cancelled. The Saison Nijinsky was replaced by (among others) the ballad singer and actress Evie Greene and Hetty King, a comic singer who performed dressed as a man.

  Although she thought it was probably a relief for Vaslav – an end to the practical worries of trying to organise a company and, more importantly, an end to the effort of putting commerce before art – Bronia blamed Romola for not protecting Vaslav better in this, his first formally negotiated engagement. Since she knew so much about money and business, Bronia observed tartly, and spoke perfect English, she might have read the complicated document her inexperienced husband had signed.

  While Vaslav recuperated from flu and what was perhaps his first nervous breakdown, preparations were in course for the first concert performance of Le Sacre du printemps in Paris. It had already been played once in St Petersburg, in February, and on 14 April at the Casino de Paris Pierre Monteux conducted it before an audience for the second time. Camille Saint-Saëns, who sat with Monteux’s mother, was no more convinced by a second hearing – he kept repeating, ‘Mais, il est fou, il est fou!’ – but others were. Stravinsky was carried out of the theatre on the shoulders of cheering fans. He never looked back.

  It was after this triumph that Stravinsky began, as one historian has phrased it, ‘busily revising his past’. His autobiography, ghostwritten in the 1930s by Walter Nouvel, describes Sacre as having been a task too great for Nijinsky’s capabilities. He had apparently had misgivings about working with Nijinsky from the start, Stravinsky wrote, because ‘his ignorance of the most elementary notions of music was flagrant. The poor boy knew nothing of music’.

  Perhaps he hoped that belittling his collaborator would mean he could take all the credit for Sacre’s revolutionary impact: though Nijinsky’s Sacre was not danced again after its nine performances in 1913 until revivals in the 1980s, at the time many believed his work was more radical than Stravinsky’s. Perhaps Diaghilev exerted pressure on him to cut ties with Nijinsky as he had done with Bakst, or persuaded him that the radical choreography had made Sacre unpopular (he told Massine it had failed as a ballet because Nijinsky ‘had attempted to do too much … He had not realised that the eye and the ear cannot absorb simultaneously as much as the ear alone’). Almost certainly Stravinsky hoped that if he could persuade people to think of Sacre as concert music rather than a ballet it would be accepted as great more quickly. He was always, as Bronia put it, ‘very sensitive to applause’. Only many years later, long after Nijinsky’s death, did Stravinsky admit that he had been ‘unjust’ to Nijinsky and that his was ‘by far the best’ version of Sacre.

  In May 1914 Nijinsky went to Spain to perform for King Alfonso at the wedding of Belle, the daughter of the American Ambassador to Spain, to Kermit Roosevelt, son of the former President. On his way back to a heavily pregnant Romola in London, he stopped in Paris to see the premiere of Le Legende de Joseph – the Strauss ballet that was to have been his. He took an unobtrusive seat in the stalls, but during the interval went up to Misia Sert’s usual box. A frozen silence greeted him, and then Cocteau said, ‘This year, your creation is a child. The Spectre de la Rose chooses the part of a father. How utterly disgusting is birth.’ Vaslav replied, ‘The entrance of the Spectre de la Rose’s child will be quite as beautiful as his own, which you always admired’. He bowed and left.

  Following several months’ intensive tuition with Cecchetti, Léonide Massine was dancing the part of Joseph. He was so gorgeous, and he wore such a skimpy sheepskin tunic (designed in part by Diaghilev), that wits called the ballet Les Jambes de Joseph. Vaslav saw straight through him: ‘Massine’s aim is simple. He wants to become rich and learn everything that Diaghilev knows.’ Elsewhere he would write that Diaghilev had given Aleksey Mavrin ‘a taste for objets d’art’ to make him love him, and ‘Massine a taste for fame. I did not take to objects and fame’.

  Harry Kessler had tried and failed to persuade Diaghilev to retain Nijinsky as choreographer for Joseph. He and Strauss thought Nijinsky the only person capable of communicating Joseph’s ‘terrible beauty’, which contained within its perfection a destructive element – Mephisto and God in one; but Diaghilev, still smarting, could not be convinced and had used Fokine. Joseph was one of the least successful of his ballets and would not be performed again after the 1914 season. ‘Everything goes much deeper than I thought,’ Kessler wrote. ‘Diaghilev is mortified in his vanity, in his sentiment, in his pocket, in everything.’

  The critics were divided about Joseph. One congratulated Fokine for bringing back to the Ballets Russes ‘all the graceful attitudes and harmonious gestures which M. Nijinsky, with his grotesque ideas, sought to abolish’. Jacques Rivière remained loyal: without Nijinsky the Ballets Russes were nothing. ‘He alone gave life to the whole company.’

  Lady Ripon also made several unsuccessful attempts to bring Nijinsky and Diaghilev back together. But although she persuaded the Drury Lane Theatre (today the Theatre Royal) to make Nijinsky’s da
ncing with the Ballets Russes for three nights a condition of their appearance there that summer, she could not make the dancers welcome him back. The reception he received was glacial – they simply turned their backs on him when he arrived – and Diaghilev refused to see him at all. He lasted ‘one single excruciating and humiliating rehearsal’ before leaving London and returning to Vienna where Romola and their newborn baby were waiting for him.* ‘Now I am beginning to think that it was Diag. [sic] who suggested to Fokine that he should refuse to return to the Ballet if Nijinsky was there,’ a disappointed Lady Ripon wrote to Misia Sert, ‘or that anyway he has done nothing to make the thing possible.’

  While Lady Ripon continued to consider Nijinsky her friend and had sympathised with his desire to marry, she found Romola ‘avaricious [and] anaemic’. Ottoline Morrell, on the other hand, thought Romola delightful and pitied ‘the little dancer and his pregnant wife. In 1913, everybody had wanted to know him, now nobody did.’ To Lytton Strachey in the summer of 1914 Vaslav was no longer an idol but – perhaps partly because of his marriage, a betrayal of Strachey’s homosexual creed – ‘that cretinous lackey’.

  Vaslav returned to Vienna where Romola and their newborn daughter were waiting for him. When the baby was overdue and Romola and Vaslav were anxious for her arrival, a friend suggested they attend a performance of Richard Strauss’s complex opera, Elektra: Kyra was born later that night. Despite having longed for a boy during Romola’s pregnancy, Vaslav was so happy to be with his wife and baby that all their recent difficulties were forgotten; and when news came of the assassination of an archduke and his wife in far-off Sarajevo it seemed at first a distant and irrelevant tragedy.

  CHAPTER 8

  Mephisto Valse

  1914–1918

  IN LATE JULY 1914 they went to Budapest to introduce Kyra to her grandmother. From there they planned to travel to St Petersburg to see Eleonora and meet Bronia’s little girl, Irina, but Russia declared war on Austria-Hungary on 29 July in response to the Empire’s invasion of Serbia. All trains going east were suspended and it was impossible to find another way out of the city. There was nothing the Russian consul could do to help; he was trying to flee too. After a few days, a shy police officer, dressed in civilian clothes, came to Emilia’s house and told Vaslav and Romola that as enemy subjects they were prisoners of war and would have to remain for the foreseeable future in Budapest under house arrest.

  No one was happy about this turn of events. Emilia Márkus did not want a Russian living in her house and urged her daughter to divorce Vaslav so that she could be Hungarian again. Romola, however, did not want to live with her mother. Nijinsky was miserable because there was nowhere for him to practise; and the war troubled him deeply, as all around them euphoric soldiers with soft cheeks went off singing to the front. ‘All these young men marching off to their death,’ he said, ‘and for what?’

  The servants distrusted their Russian house-guest and Vaslav did not endear himself to anyone by refusing to dance a benefit for the Hungarian soldiers who were going off to kill his countrymen. His consolation for being in Budapest – hot chocolate layered with cream and Dobos torta at the old-fashioned Ruszwurm Patisserie near the Coronation Church – was soon curtailed by wartime rationing. Everything that went wrong was blamed on him: when the boiler broke down or when the unused parts of the house became damp. When Emilia’s cat – a very ordinary sort of cat, Romola commented crossly – went missing, she accused Vaslav of killing it. What Vaslav later remembered of this period was being depressed; he and Emilia ‘quarrelled for eighteen months on end’.

  Thrown together in a hostile atmosphere, Vaslav and Romola learned to lean on one another: their relationship, their young family, was all they had. Though in some places in his diary he wrote of hating Romola, particularly her obsession with money, other memories make clear that they did love each other. ‘I loved her terribly. I gave her everything I could. She loved me.’ Living with the Márkus family (it has to be said, including Romola) was like inhabiting a den of snakes; Sigmund Freud, who published On Narcissism the year war broke out, would have had a field day with them. Romola believed her mother and stepfather were informing on Vaslav to the authorities; her sister, Tessa, charming but too heavy a drinker, tried to seduce Vaslav, inviting him into her room while she was undressed, deliberately lying on the bed in front of him, wearing ‘small silk panties and thin camisoles’; if Emilia thought Oskar was looking at the servants, she would slap their faces.

  When the wet nurse refused to feed Kyra any more because she was Russian, Vaslav took over her care, learning how to sterilise and prepare the bottles, and fed her himself. He painted her little nursery and its furniture in bright colours so that it looked like ‘an enchanted habitation of a Russian fairytale’. Unlike his own father, Vaslav was tenderly devoted to Kyra, determined she would love him as he had not loved Foma. He spent hours with her, playfully childlike once again; she called him Tataka and no one else interested her.

  Vaslav spent much of his time working on a system of dance notation, a concept to which he had been devoted since his time at the Imperial Theatre School; he hoped to ‘invent signs which will enable the gestures [of dance] to be fixed for all time’ – and he was also thinking about future ballets. One was set to Richard Strauss’s tone-poem, Till Eulenspiegel, about a Puck or Robin Hood figure, the irrepressible ‘merry prankster’ of German folklore; another was set to Franz Liszt’s Mephisto Valse. Sometimes for fun he would dance for Romola and her cousin Lily or her sister – wild gypsy dances he remembered from his youth, or imitations of the great ballerinas with whom he had danced (his parody of Kshesinskaya was their favourite). ‘But we loved it most when he showed us how the peasant women flirt whilst dancing. He had an inimitable way of throwing inviting glances, and undulating in such a lascivious manner as to stir up the senses of the spectator almost to frenzy.’

  In 1915 Lady Ripon managed to get word to them that she was trying to obtain their release and then, after a year, help came from an unexpected source. Diaghilev, who needed Nijinsky to star in a Ballets Russes tour of the United States that he hoped would pay off all his debts, had begun to agitate on their behalf.

  As early as the summer of 1914 he had been making noises about one day working with Nijinsky again, whether to pacify Stravinsky and Harry Kessler, who still valued him, or because it was simply his pattern to fall out spectacularly with collaborators who questioned his authority and then readmit them, chastened, to the fold, is not clear. In June 1914 Diaghilev had suggested Kessler write a libretto for a ballet Nijinsky would dance with Karsavina and Massine; that November he had told Stravinsky that despite how stupidly he was behaving, Nijinsky should choreograph Les Noces – though he was not prepared to discuss it with him yet. At this stage, the gravity of Nijinsky’s position in Budapest had not sunk in.

  Throughout 1915 Vaslav’s friends – including Diaghilev, Lady Ripon, the duke of Alba, the king of Spain, Otto Kahn of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and the Comtesse Greffulhe – lobbied the American ambassador in Vienna and the US Secretary of State on his and Romola’s behalf, and by early 1916 the pressure they had exerted on the Hungarian government had secured their release. With Kyra, a nanny, a maid and sixteen trunks that Romola (with the help of Madame Greffulhe) had managed to fill on their twenty-four-hour stop in Paris, they arrived in New York in April. Diaghilev, who had travelled out to New York in January with the rest of the company for a preliminary tour, was waiting for them on the dock with Massine, holding a large bunch of ‘American Beauty’ roses for Romola. But there would be no real reconciliation.

  The deal was that Nijinsky would be the star of the Ballets Russes’s autumn season at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and then their extended tour around the United States in the winter. When they met Otto Kahn a few days after their arrival, Romola told him that Vaslav was only willing to dance if Diaghilev paid him the money he owed him from past seasons. After intense negotiati
ons, it was agreed that Diaghilev would repay Nijinsky part of a total of $24,000 each week along with his salary – dashing Diaghilev’s hopes that the American tour would make him financially independent.

  A few days later, Diaghilev invited them to lunch. He was alone when they arrived at Sherry’s, Massine having remained behind at the Ritz. At first he tried to speak to Vaslav in Russian, reproaching him for his demands for money; Vaslav spoke in French and insisted that Romola should be party to any business discussion they had. Romola recounted the conversation:

  ‘I now have a family to support, but I am willing to do now, as in the past, my utmost for the Russian Ballet. I am the same; I have not changed towards you. I am grateful for your past friendship, and it only depends upon you for us to be united again in our common aim. My wife is part of me, and she understands this, and wants, as much as I do, to further the cause of the Russian Ballet. Please, please understand me.’

  ‘We never had any contract; there was never any question of money between us. What has happened to you, Vaslav?’

  ‘But, Sergey Pavlovich, you take money from the theatres, and you make them pay it in advance, too. Be just,’ interrupted Romola.

  ‘No, it will become impossible for me to run the Russian Ballet. Fokina wants to manage Fokine and dance all the leading roles. You, Madame, are mercenary. How do you expect the Russian Ballet to exist under such conditions?’

  By this time, Diaghilev had been in the US four months, and he was persuaded by Kahn to return to Europe leaving Nijinsky in charge of the company as artistic director. Kahn hoped that Diaghilev’s absence would ease the pressure on Nijinsky; he was prepared for a small loss in return for the glory of having brought the Ballets Russes to the United States. ‘Everyone but Kahn, Nijinsky and Romola realised this was madness,’ wrote Sokolova.