It should be noted that young Igor Stravinsky’s first contributions to the Ballets Russes were a couple of Chopin orchestrations for the 1909 production of Les Sylphides. It was after hearing complaints about the conservatism of the program’s music in an otherwise brilliant evening (the critic Louis Laloy, for example, panned the score for Le Pavillon d’Armide as “insignificant music,” whose “only extenuating circumstance . . . is that after five minutes one no longer hears it”),28 Diaghilev set about commissioning several new ballet scores, including one from this young composer—a work titled The Firebird.
Yet that still lay in the future. Opening night in May 1909, featuring three of the ballets, justified everything that Diaghilev had risked and dared. Dazzled audience members endlessly enthused about the Ballets Russes as “a sudden glory” and a “phenomenon.”29 Proust, who had made it from his sickbed to the theater, was enchanted by the Russians’ “charming invasion.”30 As it turned out, Pavlova’s temporary absence31 boosted the careers not only of her substitute, Tamara Karsavina, but also that of young Vaslav Nijinsky, on whom the spotlight shone especially brightly. On subsequent nights the spotlight would also gravitate toward the star of Cléopâtre, Ida Rubinstein, an expressive dancer with great grace although fewer classical skills, who had already drawn attention for her scandalous St. Petersburg performance of the Dance of the Seven Veils from Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. During the dance’s climax, she had dared to cast aside even the last of her veils to appear completely naked before her stunned audience. News of this event traveled rapidly (possibly alienating the czar en route), and by the time she reached Paris, Rubinstein was a celebrity, if not an outright star.
Despite Diaghilev’s huge expenses (250 dancers, singers, and technicians, plus an 80-piece orchestra), he had undertaken the complete renovation of the Théâtre du Châtelet, including recarpeting, technical improvements, and the construction of a new stage. He even had pipes installed beneath the stage to carry water from the Seine to spout from the fountains in the final act of Le Pavillon d’Armide. Leaving nothing to chance, Diaghilev and his dancer/choreographer, Michel Fokine, along with his set and costume designers, Léon Bakst and Alexandre Benois, undertook to create a sense of total theater. Their Parisian audiences, aware that they were in the presence of something exciting and even revolutionary, were ecstatic.
Offstage, Diaghilev had even more reason for happiness. Nijinsky, who previously was under the protection of a wealthy Russian prince, had gravitated into Diaghilev’s orbit, and the two now embarked on a passionate affair. That summer, following the Ballets Russes season, they traveled to Venice, where Isadora Duncan was staying. Seated next to Nijinsky at one of Diaghilev’s parties, Isadora (according to the recollection of Nijinsky’s sister, Bronya) proposed that he and she should marry. “Think what wonderful children we would have. . . . They would be prodigies. . . . Our children would dance like Duncan and Nijinsky.” According to Bronya’s recollection, Nijinsky replied “that he didn’t want his children to dance like Duncan—and that, besides, he was too young to get married.”32
Misia and her second husband, Alfred Edwards, were divorced in February 1909, allowing Edwards and his volatile mistress, Lantelme, to marry several months later. By this time Misia had become Sert’s mistress and was like a sister to Diaghilev. Although she and Winnaretta would both become great patrons of Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, it would be Misia who would be Diaghilev’s closest friend, in an often stormy—and totally platonic—relationship.
It was now that Jean Cocteau began to enter this world across the footlights, through Misia’s salon. There he charmed everyone. According to one frequent observer, Cocteau “was the most entertaining talker conceivable. . . . In a word, he was irresistible.”33 Using charm and brilliant conversation, the twenty-year-old propelled himself into the world of ballet—Diaghilev’s world and the world of Nijinsky. Cocteau courted Diaghilev, all the while hovering yearningly near Nijinsky. He marveled at the dichotomy between the onstage airborne performer and the backstage athlete, on the verge of collapse. He did not see (or did not choose to see) the muscular oaf whom Misia called “an idiot of genius.”34 Although Cocteau’s persistent backstage hovering did not lead him to Nijinsky, it soon led him into work as a painter and draughtsman for the company, under the tutelage of Léon Bakst. It even led him into writing publicity for the impresario Gabriel Astruc. Not a bad beginning for what would become a brilliantly diverse and unconventional career.
While Jean Cocteau was making his way into the sparkling world of high society and the theater, in a quieter corner of Paris two prodigiously talented young sisters had dreams of taking the musical world by storm. Born into a musical Parisian family in 1887 and 1893, respectively, Nadia and Lili Boulanger were raised in a home filled with fine music and prominent musicians. Nadia studied piano with one of the leading teachers in Paris and entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of nine, having audited classes from the age of seven. Deciding to mop up as many prizes possible in the shortest amount of time, she soon embarked on an impressive collection of awards. In 1904, she began studying composition with Gabriel Fauré—indicating her serious interest in original composition—and won first prizes in organ, fugue, and piano accompaniment, having won first prize in harmony the year before.
At the same time, Nadia’s younger sister, Lili, was (if possible) even more precocious, making her public debut on the violin at a tender age, after having already becoming accomplished at the piano, voice, and harp. Unfortunately Lili had been severely ill as a youngster and remained sickly. Unable to follow a regular course of study, she accompanied Nadia to classes and learned from her older sister, who felt responsible for the fragile younger one.
While Lili battled chronic weakness and illness, Nadia forged ahead. After leaving the Conservatoire while still in her teens, she began to teach privately at her family’s apartment on Rue Ballu, in the northwest corner of Paris’s ninth arrondissement. She also began to perform publicly on the piano and organ, to substantial acclaim. Yet despite her many successes, there remained one more prize to grasp: the Prix de Rome. No woman had ever won it, but her father, Ernest Boulanger, had attained it in 1836, and she was determined to follow in his footsteps.35
In 1907, Nadia Boulanger reached the final round of the Prix de Rome, but the following year she created a scandal when she submitted an instrumental rather than the required vocal fugue. According to Lili’s diary, “[Camille] Saint-Saëns didn’t want Nadia’s work to be heard, but the jury overruled him and allowed it to go forward.”36 Saint-Saëns of course was the renowned but by now crotchety and conservative composer who so severely disapproved of Debussy’s and Ravel’s works; it was unlikely that any change to the Prix de Rome, especially by a woman—even one with Nadia Boulanger’s connections and credentials—would meet with his approval. In the end, Nadia won second Grand Prize for her cantata, “La Sirène,” but the first prize eluded her—whether because she had challenged the hidebound traditions of the Prix de Rome and its most conservative members or, as some thought, because she was a woman.
In 1909, Nadia once again tried and failed to receive the Prix de Rome. It was then that Lili—unschooled but hugely talented in everything musical—announced that she was going to become a composer and win the Prix de Rome herself.
Soon after the close of Diaghilev’s triumphant 1909 Ballets Russes season, he concluded that, to remain in the limelight, he would have to mount world premieres rather than merely perform repertory. He also decided that these world premieres should include works by non-Russian—preferably French—composers. He could have looked to long-established French composers such as Saint-Saëns, d’Indy, or Dukas, but he preferred those who were more cutting-edge and exciting. In this category, two names stood out: Debussy and Ravel.
By now Debussy was regarded, at least in the most forward-looking circles, as the leading French composer of his generation, and Diaghilev wen
t to some pains to persuade him to write a ballet. At first Debussy was reluctant, telling his publisher, Jacques Durand, that he couldn’t suggest a ballet subject “at the drop of a hat” and that Diaghilev was proposing something that would take place in eighteenth-century Venice—“which, for Russian dancers, strikes me as a bit contradictory.” Yet the idea was sufficiently intriguing that Debussy began to work on a libretto for Masques et bergamasques. “I intend to enjoy myself writing this ballet,” he wrote Louis Laloy. “I have no intention of asking Nijinsky to describe symbols with his legs or Karsavina to explain Kant’s philosophy with her smile.”37
But then something happened, and the entire project disappeared. Possibly it was a misunderstanding; possibly it was something more. Diaghilev had more than merely one ballet and one composer in mind, including concepts that would become The Firebird and Scheherazade, as well as a ballet from Ravel. Whatever actually happened, Debussy clearly was angry when he wrote Laloy in August that “the Russian whom we both know imagines that the best way to deal with his fellow men is first of all to lie to them.”38 It was not a good way to end their first venture together, but Diaghilev seems not to have understood the extent of Debussy’s ire and would later approach him on further ideas for ballets. Debussy would continue to work with Diaghilev, but the episode left a lingering blot on their relationship.
By this time Diaghilev had turned to Ravel, and in late June the composer was already in the throes of preparing a ballet libretto for Daphnis et Chloé, due for performance during the Ballet Russes’s upcoming 1910 season. The libretto, based on an ancient Greek romance, was Fokine’s idea, which meant that Ravel had to work with him, despite distinct linguistic difficulties. Writing Madame René de Saint-Marceaux in late June, Ravel told her that he had just had an insane week: “Almost every night, I was working until 3 a.m. What complicates things is that Fokine doesn’t know a word of French, and I only know how to swear in Russian.”39
As it turned out, language barriers would not be the only problem, and Daphnis et Chloé would not be performed by the Ballets Russes until 1912.
In January, Ravel’s brilliant and demonically difficult Gaspard de la nuit, a suite for solo piano, received its premiere at a Société Nationale recital by Ricardo Viñes, where it was well received. As it happened, Ravel was about to break with the Société, where he served on the steering committee; to his mind, the organization had become too staid and conservative, despite its original intent. As he put it, the Société was turning down works that “didn’t offer those solid qualities of incoherence and boredom, which the Schola Cantorum [of d’Indy] baptizes as structure and profundity.”40
In its place, he was forming a new society, the Société Musicale Indépendante (SMI), with Gabriel Fauré as president. This organization would be active for almost three decades, attracting the interest and support of Winnaretta, Princesse de Polignac, as well as her husband’s niece, the Princesse Armande de Polignac, and would provide useful competition to the Société Nationale.
In the meantime, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande was enjoying continued success, with two more foreign premieres, in Rome and in London. Its continued popularity from then until the outbreak of war seems to have been at least in part related to the escapism it offered. As Jacques Rivière (editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française) noted, Pelléas created a dream world, a paradise where audience members could forget their cares.41
Yet Debussy found the theatrical experience far from idyllic. He attended rehearsals for the London premiere but did not attend the premiere itself: “The theater atmosphere makes me ill,” he wrote, noting that he “rarely had such a strong desire to kill anybody” as one of the producers. Nevertheless, after the premiere, he wrote his parents that “the singers were recalled a dozen times and for a quarter of an hour there were calls for the composer, who was settled peacefully in his hotel.” He added, with considerable pride, that “received opinion states that such [exuberance] is extremely rare in England.” And then he concluded, with unaccustomed fervor: “So long live France! Long live French music!”42
Still, Debussy with his feet up in a London hotel room was not as carefree as he would have liked to convey. He was suffering from depression (as he would tell a friend, “I’m in the sort of mood where I’d rather be a sponge at the bottom of the sea or a vase on the mantelpiece, anything rather than a man of intellect; such a fragile kind of machine”).43 In addition, as he would eventually realize, the weakness and pain he already was experiencing would not be going away.44
In July, Louis Blériot crossed the English Channel in his tiny monoplane—a first, marking a major turning point in aviation history. Blériot’s flight was a daring one, during which he managed to gauge his direction from the destroyer Escopette, which accompanied him. After he overtook the destroyer, he had to make his lonely way through fog and clouds until the wind rose, improving visibility.
Blériot then gauged his course from boat traffic along the Channel, and he kept moving northward at approximately a ninety-degree angle from the boats below until he spotted the rugged cliffs of Dover. Once within range, he followed the coastline until he saw a prearranged sign, a friend waving a huge Tricolor at the landing place—a low point in the cliffs near Dover Castle. Blériot landed amid gusty winds, and although portions of his plane were damaged, he was unhurt. Excited members of the press soon radioed the news back to France that Blériot had landed and was safe. He had successfully flown the Channel in thirty-six minutes and thirty seconds.
Blériot’s success had real financial benefits: not only did he win a handsome monetary prize, but orders now poured in for copies of the aircraft he had flown across the Channel. It also served as a wake-up call to the English, who no longer could be assured of protection from invasion solely by their fleet. By the same token, Blériot’s flight proved the airplane’s military significance.
In October of that same year, at Châlons, Raymonde de Laroche piloted her small airplane into the air for some three hundred meters, thus becoming the first woman to fly a heavier-than-air machine alone. A tall, elegant brunette who was the daughter of a Parisian plumber, Laroche had already made her mark as a model, actor, and race car driver. By the time she was twenty, she changed her name from Elise Deroche to Raymonde de Laroche, and she soon earned the informal title of Baroness, in tribute to her commanding presence, fashionable clothes, and easy entry to the worlds of fashion and the arts. Along the way she had an illegitimate son, André, reputedly fathered by another early star of French aviation, Léon Delagrange.
Speed and danger attracted her, and she quickly graduated from bicycles to motorcycles and then to automobiles before switching to airplanes. Early in 1910, she suffered severe injuries when she crashed her plane, but soon she was back in the cockpit. The Baroness de Laroche was determined to be the first woman to receive her pilot’s license—which she did in March 1910. The risks never bothered her. “In any case,” she said with a shrug, “what is to happen will happen.”45
That same year, another daring woman—albeit with an entirely different purpose and personality—received recognition. Joan of Arc, who had fearlessly led French troops against English invaders five centuries earlier, was beatified in Notre-Dame de Paris, leading to her eventual canonization as a saint in 1920.
Joan of Arc has always been held in especial reverence by the Catholic Right, and by the nation as a whole during times of great duress. Throughout the Great War, French troops would carry her image into battle with them, and during World War II, General de Gaulle was reputed to have identified himself with the Maid of Orléans (“I am Joan of Arc,” he is supposed to have told President Roosevelt, although the story may well be apocryphal).46
Now, as Franco-German relations were deteriorating and armaments were piling up in the nations of the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy), some among the French were developing a fervent nationalism that bordered on t
he religious. It was around this time that a professor at the Ecole Militaire declared that the nation should place its faith in the French 75 mm gun, which was—as he put it—“the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”47
It was during the summer of 1909 that Georges Clemenceau was ousted from office, following a difficult winter and spring when tensions between European nations overshadowed domestic affairs. He had spent much of his three years as prime minister in an attempt to cobble together a coalition of the moderate Left while fending off attacks both from the Right and from the socialists, especially from socialist leader Jean Jaurès, who regularly accused Clemenceau of having become reactionary—fighting words for someone of Clemenceau’s left-wing history. By 1908, Clemenceau had managed to attain the nationalization of a major railway, and the Chamber had passed a hard-fought income tax reform, making it possible to tax the interest payment on the French government debt. (A law making a weekly rest day compulsory had already been passed in 1906.)
Yet despite his long record of championing reforms, which reached back to the 1870s, Clemenceau in office had committed himself to suppressing disorder, and now he was better known for repression than for reform. Violent strikes in 1906 and 1908 had brought him into direct conflict with the trade union movement, but it was foreign rather than domestic affairs that provided the main elements of tension in Clemenceau’s ministry during 1908 and 1909, especially after Austria annexed Bosnia in the autumn of 1908. Russia’s acceptance of the annexation during early 1909 helped defuse the situation, although Bosnia continued to contribute to deteriorating relations between Russia and the Triple Alliance right up to the outbreak of war in 1914.
Twilight of the Belle Epoque Page 24