Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  In mid-June, taking advantage of Margot’s absence to insist on his conditions, Rudolf agreed to appear in Swan Lake. His partner (making her Royal Ballet debut) was Sonia Arova, whom he had warned that if she mimed the traditional “I-you-love” sequence in act 1, he would walk off the stage. Notwithstanding her disapproval, he also introduced a long pause after her Black Swan variation in order to build up audience expectation for his own solo. This was Swan Lake with Siegfried as its focus—an immature, rebellious, Byronic prince whose hectic, unleashed technique left some critics feeling that the young Russian was being overpraised.

  The Prince in act 1 was usually portrayed as a carefree youth, but Rudolf, clearly influenced by Erik, whose recent Siegfried at Covent Garden was a skulking, morose figure, made him complex and moody. “The Prince was exceptional man. It does not happen just to everybody to see there are swans.” Yet, whereas like most Danes, Erik equated Romanticism with melancholy, Rudolf, wanting to emphasize the Russian spirit of Swan Lake, projected the kind of soulfulness that Russians call dushevnyi.* To convey this in choreographic terms, he introduced a contemplative danced soliloquy in act 1, the legato solo now standard in most productions of Swan Lake. At the time it caused an outcry, the “rumpus” even reaching New York, where Clive Barnes’s Spectator review deriding Rudolf’s lack of talent as a choreographer was picked up by the New York Herald Tribune. And yet this controversial solo, which everyone presumed was the “Nureyev version” and “entirely new,” had in fact already been performed at the Kirov. Rudolf’s contemporaries claim that he took the idea from Konstantin Sergeyev, whose act 1 solo had used the same deep, sustained movements, and even the same music (the Andante sostenuto written for, but not used in, the pas de trois). Sergeyev, in turn, had the model of Chaboukiani, who often rechoreographed and expanded his own roles, so that in making his changes Rudolf was only continuing the Soviet tradition. The English critics, though, were appalled that a twenty-four-year-old boy, never having created a ballet before, had been allowed to sabotage what several generations had labored to preserve.

  For Rudolf, however, it was hard to understand why the kind of radical transformations of the classics taking place in English theater were not paralleled at the Royal Ballet. His autobiography, published in November 1962, contains several paragraphs on the subject, but reviewing the book for Dance & Dancers, Peter Williams makes a convincing counterargument:

  What he has not taken into consideration is that ballet in England is still but a child starting to walk, and that when British ballet started but a little over thirty years ago we had no foundation, nothing to build upon. Ninette de Valois, Marie Rambert and a few others pursued the only course open to them which was to build up British ballet in the precious fragments from Russia which had been brought to these islands by Diaghilev. There was no other ballet tradition that made itself felt in this country.… We are not yet old enough to start monkeying around with classical works and making them what is generally called “alive.” We still have to guard our meagre heritage even though Nureyev’s presence in London is the surest bet that a little refurbishing of the classics is imminent.

  In his American Glossary, published in 1959, Lincoln Kirstein had already made the point that ballet in Britain showed little of the vitality and innovation present in contemporary art, drama, or fiction. What was needed, he said, was a sense of outrage and energy: “an Angry Young Man on his way to rouse the Sleeping Princess right out of Windsor Forest.” But while prophetically heralding the arrival of Nureyev, Kirstein, in slighting the Royal Ballet’s “self-satisfied parochialism” and “sweet, moderate graciousness,” badly underestimated Ninette de Valois. Along with her conventional qualities—the sound leadership, common sense, and discipline inherited from her army-officer father—ran a bright thread of Celtic unpredictability. To Richard Buckle she was as capricious as an E. M. Forster heroine who might bolt off over the hills without a hat or gloves “if the right breeze blew at the right time.” And it was “this romantic spark, this moonshine, this ‘artistic nonsense,’ ” that, as Buckle says, had led de Valois to conceive the almost impossible ambition of transforming half a dozen girl pupils into a national ballet. “From the marriage of inspiration and discipline works of art are born.”

  Having danced in the 1920s for Diaghilev, the single most important influence on her career, de Valois had heard all about the dangers of ossification and bureaucracy inherent in a state institution—the constrictions from which Rudolf had fled. And although she joined the company when, as she put it, “the impact of the present was meeting the past,” working with the most innovative choreographers of the day, including Balanchine and Nijinska, she had also learned that it was tradition and a classical background that lay beneath the experiments of the Ballets Russes. In the same way it was the solid base that she established in her own company through the “correctness of execution” and “efficiency in administration” mocked by Kirstein that allowed her to take risks. “It shows a great weakness if you daren’t take in something new. You must be able to say: ‘For a moment we’ll upset this applecart and see what happens.’ ”

  Since the late fifties de Valois had been longing for what she called a real virtuoso dancer, and when she first saw Rudolf, remarked, “Exactly what we need, not only a virtuoso dancer but one with taste.” Her decision to have Rudolf in the Royal Ballet was, as her biographer says, “a fighting point of view, the policy of an inspired general taking a calculated risk in order to improve a position.” Inevitably there would be casualties, her own leadership would be called into question, but she wanted her company—its choreographers and teachers as well as its dancers—to profit from as close a proximity as possible to Rudolf’s rare and wonderful schooling. Calls to “put her foot down” and prevent the young interloper from further undermining the Royal Ballet’s heritage were shrugged off by de Valois, who was realistic about the fact that there are no definitive versions of the nineteenth-century classics.

  Nureyev’s alterations have really meant very little to me … because I know the enormous changes we’ve made during the last fifteen years in ballets like Giselle and The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake without people noticing.… We don’t know how accurate his version is in comparison with what he either learned or saw in Leningrad. All I know is that in style and approach and musicality they are like everything I’ve ever seen over there.… Thinking of the phrasing and the general style, he’s carrying on the tradition of the Russians, that’s quite obvious.

  And yet, in taking Rudolf into her company, de Valois was ruled as much by her heart as by her head: Quite simply she adored him. “They really laughed together, and got on as equals.” There was, she believed, a special kinship between the Irish and the Russians, the same affinity and fascination that Sean O’Faoláin and Brian Friel share in their allegiance to Chekhov. When she collaborated with Yeats (who brought her to Dublin to stage his Plays for Dancers), it was his love of what she called “the moving thought, the progress and the ‘excitement’ ” of the mind with which she could most identify. This, too, was the quality she immediately recognized in Rudolf, whose mind, as she often said, interested her just as much as his feet. “He didn’t run away from Russia just because he wanted to get out.… He wanted to know what was going on in his world in other parts of the world.” The admiration was mutual. Rudolf was delighted by de Valois’s intelligence and wit, and by the fact that she seemed instinctively to understand him. “Essentially he remains, and probably will remain, an outsider in our community. He has his own creed. He will live by it and fulfil it in his own time in his own way.”

  Inevitably, though, Rudolf’s solipsistic trajectory had left several casualties in its wake. One was Alexander Ivanovich, who that summer suffered a severe heart attack, “undoubtedly brought on by the inner tension of the previous months.” The guilt of knowing he had been the catalyst of his teacher’s illness had left Rudolf inconsolable. And then there was Erik, who, according to Nadia N
erina, had left London broken in spirit even before finishing the season. “Rudi demoralised him to such an extent that he had to go into a nursing home in Denmark.… He never did recover completely. One can date the beginning of the sad decline of this superb dancer from the beginning of his relationship with Nureyev.” Never having felt so bleakly culpable and alone, Rudolf must have confided in Xenia, who wrote to console him. “I understand about melancholy feelings, but you must not let sad emotions get to you. You must study and the only salvation to this—work.”

  On July 5 Rudolf was to dance Swan Lake with Margot for the first time, at Italy’s Nervi Festival (the idea being to give them a few experimental performances away from the London critics). Their two rehearsals in London had not boded well, their arguments cut short only because Rudolf began to giggle when Margot reminded him that she had been dancing Swan Lake since 1938—the year he was born. “It broke us both up completely.” In fact this had always been one of her most dreaded ballets, its technical hurdles—particularly the thirty-two fouetté sequence—never ceasing to terrify her. With a foot injury seriously undermining her technique, she had danced her so-called farewell performance in 1959. “We all knew it was her last,” said Georgina Parkinson. “And she did her usual 23½ fouettés, and everybody cheered … and we all shed a suitable tear.” Three years later, with her injury significantly improved, Margot had made a comeback in the role in February with David Blair, but it was an uninteresting performance, dismissed by Dance & Dancers as a “Lack-lustre Lac.” On June 17, in the audience at the London Palladium, she had watched Rudolf dance a scintillating Black Swan pas de deux with Nadia Nerina for the Sunday-night television broadcast, followed a few days later by the “elemental and exciting” Nureyev-Arova Swan Lake at Covent Garden. She knew then that she had no choice: The time had come to drop her defenses.

  When their rehearsals recommenced in Italy, Margot, despite having broken their deadlock, sensed a major challenge. Who in the audience would look at her “with this young lion leaping ten feet in the air and doing all these fantastic things?” Enormously competitive by nature, she also thrived on adventure and risk (the side that had made her a faux-guerrilla in her husband’s abortive minirevolution in Panama in 1959). Tapping into this, Rudolf taunted her one day by saying, “So—you are Great Ballerina. Show me!” Suddenly she found herself virtually outdancing her partner, while he watched “puzzled,” asking himself how it was possible that she, “without technique was doing technical things, and me, taught the best technique … not always there?” Only too aware of her stature—her name in world terms being far better known than that of Ulanova—Rudolf himself now “felt a bit … Well, when I’m onstage beside her, who’s going to look at me?” He had always found it extraordinary the way Margot, even without this new virtuosic confidence, could make her impact felt not through showy aplomb but through her soft, lyrical, English restraint and unforced line. There was no trace of sensationalism to her artistry, yet something so excitingly internalized that, even when standing motionless, she could draw all eyes toward her. “She came onstage,” as Rudolf said, “and she made light.”

  The fact that they were both “inspired—egged on, as it were—by the other one” gave an unbelievable charge to their Nervi performance, and at the same time they found that as soon as they went onstage, all aspects of self-interest and rivalry were forgotten. The state of total harmony they rediscovered in Italy was enhanced by the theater’s extraodinarily romantic open-air setting, the balmy Mediterranean night, the backdrop of the sea. Talking later about her performance, Margot said beatifically, “I’ve found the perfect partner.” Rudolf felt the same: “We become one body. One soul. We moved in one way. It was very complementary, every arm movement, every head movement. There were no more cultural gaps; age difference; we’ve been absorbed in characterization. We became the part. And public was enthralled.”

  Before returning to London, Rudolf went to Florence to watch Erik’s La Sylphide, which the Danish ballet had invited him to perform on its tour of Italy. Bruhn’s next engagement (with the Stuttgart Ballet) was consolation of sorts for his Royal Ballet disappointment, as he and Georgina Parkinson were to dance the premiere of John Cranko’s new version of Daphnis and Chloe. The South African—born Cranko, having reached a point of stagnation in his career as resident choreographer of the Royal Ballet, had recently taken over as director at Stuttgart, and was already beginning to build it into a world-class company, inviting a roster of international dancers for a weeklong festival in July. Erik was thrilled to be working with Cranko, as this was the first time he had been chosen by a leading choreographer to create a ballet. “Tudor told me that Ashton should do something for me and Ashton told me that I should go and work with Balanchine.… They kept passing me on to someone else.” But although the July 15 premiere was a great success, Erik had been “horrified” by his follow-up performance (his self-expectations were always so high that, as Elizabeth Kaye once wrote, “He could give an impeccable performance and come offstage feeling suicidal”).

  Augmenting his distress was the furor of publicity that accompanied Rudolf’s unexpected arrival. Ray Barra, appearing as the lead in Cranko’s Prince of the Pagodas, remembers how “the photographers were wanting him, him, him, and this caused—oh, lots of friction.” Erik had always prized his anonymity, enjoying the fact that he could elbow his way through a crowd of waiting fans and be asked if Erik Bruhn was still backstage. “If I have left the audience with some idea of the performance, I seldom have the strength or the intention to give them any more of that performance at the stage door. There is nothing left. The job is finished.” He could even, he claimed, pass his best friends in the street without being noticed. “There was something ethereal about Erik. Transparent,” says the Danish dancer Ingrid Glindemann. Now, suddenly, he found himself actively seeking the spotlight, resenting the way “no one knew of me and I was very lucky to be hanging to on Rudik.” Not only that, but he was expected to help journalists understand Rudolf’s English—even to act as Rudolf’s agent. “He came to Stuttgart as a friend and then the press said, ‘Why is he not dancing in the gala?’ ”

  Georgina Parkinson remembers how Rudolf volunteered to perform at the festival’s closing gala. “It was more than Erik could bear,” though it was, in fact, his own idea. He and Yvette Chauviré were scheduled to dance Victor Gsovsky’s Grand Pas classique together, but during one of their rehearsals Erik asked Rudolf to take over, blaming his indisposition on “back trouble.” Naturally, Rudolf was delighted to have the chance to perform the duet he had so admired on Chauviré’s tour of Russia, although she herself was more than a little displeased to find herself dancing with a partner with whom she had only an erratic rapport. Erik, meanwhile, had taken to his bed. “I felt this tension growing, first of all within myself about Daphnis, and then the general bad atmosphere that pervaded when Rudolf and I were together.… People were provoking us. Jokes were being made, and it just got to me … I coped with it the only way I knew how: I cancelled.”

  Erik still had several performances left, but when Cranko, accompanied by Kenneth MacMillan, went to his room to see how genuinely sick he was, Erik threw them both out. (It was five years before he would have any further contact with Cranko.) That night, having bought a convertible from one of the dancers, and without saying a word to anyone, he left Stuttgart. When Rudolf awoke early the next morning he found only a brief note scrawled on a hotel envelope:

  My dear Rudic,

  Take care of yourself, words

  Are decieving [sic] and always misunderstood—

  So I will not say anything, but good Bye! Love Erik

  Sick with dread, Rudolf immediately called Georgina Parkinson to ask if Erik was with her. Going straight to Rudolf’s room, she found him desolate and frightened. “He didn’t have a passport, so I suggested that he get in touch with Margot because she had diplomatic contacts.” When Chauviré saw Rudolf later that day, she, too, was shocked b
y the extent of his anguish. “Il était complètement bouleversé. He adored Erik. And for him to leave like that.… Why did he do that?”

  In his book on the pathography of Strindberg and Van Gogh, Karl Jaspers titles one section “Persecution and Flight,” describing how the writer, seeking to free himself from unbearable pressures of his environment, would be overtaken by intense restlessness leading him to go “instinctively on a trip, without any preconceived plan.” Strindberg was a schizophrenic; though in Erik’s case, with no later history of serious mental disorder, a diagnosis of the illness would be doubtful. Rudolf’s arrival in Stuttgart had plunged him into such spiritual crisis that, as Georgina Parkinson remarked, “he completely withdrew, and wasn’t available to any of us.” Self-retreat, combined with a mistrust of joking, suspected conniving by “so-called friends,” and the violent stomach disorders from which he suffered, can be indications of the schizophrenic process, although friends close to Erik, including the young doctor Lennart Pasborg, insist that he was not psychologically disturbed.

  He was certainly very melancholic, and a person with a very strange sensitivity to what I can only call something transcendent. He had seen this, felt this, been in contact with it.… This made him a loner—a need to go deep inside himself; trying to get in contact with this.… He suffered from not being able to reproduce it when he wanted.… This inner struggle that may have accounted for the ulcer.