Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Aware that he still had much to learn about production—particularly the bridging of scenes—Rudolf was grateful to be able to use the Vienna experience as a period of apprenticeship: literally, as John Percival put it, “to teach himself the job.” On the other hand, counterbalancing the freedom of approach, unlimited time, and financial independence was the difficulty of working with a company almost wholly unschooled in the St. Petersburg style. Rudolf intended his production to pay homage to Petipa’s assistant and modest shadow, Lev Ivanov, who created the lyrical “white acts” of Swan Lake, now considered to be the essence of Russian choreography. The Vienna company had been exposed in the past to Maryinsky style, through its ballet masters and through visiting stars such as Pavlova and Ulanova, but the influence was not enough to instill in the dancers’ movement the kind of adagio plastique that Rudolf was demanding.

  Then there were “other unpleasant things.” Governed by union rules and cushioned by lifelong civil-servant contracts, the dancers, as far as Rudolf was concerned, were “ugly, fat, and lazy”—and never more so than when they insisted on having “rest breaks” in the middle of rehearsals. Establishing a precedent he never relinquished, Rudolf disregarded company hierarchy and gave leading roles to the young and promising. One corps de ballet dancer who interested him was Michael Birkmeyer, whom he approached after class to ask where he was from. “He could tell I had been trained differently”—or, as Rudolf put it, “Not so bad.” The third generation of male dancers going back to the mid-1800s, twenty-three-year-old Michael was the son of Toni Birkmeyer, who had been a soloist and ballet master at the opera. His father sent him to study in Paris with Viktor Gsovsky, where his fellow students included Violette Verdy and such rising Paris Opéra stars as Noëlla Pontois. When Michael returned to Vienna, however, he felt like an outcast, relegated to the back row of the corps, even though he was now technically far more advanced than his colleagues. “I’m thinking about leaving the company,” he admitted to Rudolf, who told him decisively, “You will not. You will dance in my Swan Lake.” The next day Michael saw his name listed for the pas de cinq (a Nureyev innovation replacing the pas de trois, which is traditionally danced by the most talented soloists). Used as the guinea pig to try out steps by Rudolf, and also by Erik, who attended all the early rehearsals, Birkmeyer began to understand for the first time that there is more to dance than technique: “I was not fast in picking things up, and was always thinking about what step came next, terrified that Rudolf would scream at me. But he and Erik taught me that you should never dance without a story in your mind: That’s where art begins.”*

  Initially intended to be a Nureyev-Bruhn collaboration, which Erik then planned to stage for the National Ballet of Canada, Swan Lake began as a synthesis of two models: the 1953 Bourmeister version which had greatly impressed Erik when he saw it performed by the Stanislavsky Ballet; and John Cranko’s elegiac Stuttgart production in which Rudolf had danced in May 1964. Both had made the Prince central to the ballet, and changed the usual happy ending by omitting the reuniting of the lovers, instead having Siegfried die alone in a torrent of waves. “He lost,” Rudolf said. “This was tragic—and tragic in a way that official Soviet art could not understand.” In fact, though, as Vera Krasovskaya points out, “the banal optimism” of the St. Petersburg production must also have disturbed Ivanov, who instinctively discerned the music’s deep melancholy, particularly in the final act. Drawing his movements from the “broken sighs of Tchaikovsky’s phrases,” Ivanov invested classical form with a psychological profundity way ahead of its time. It was this element that the Vienna Swan Lake, originating as it did in Freud’s home city, would take much further.

  To Rudolf the Romantic ballet heroes were all versions of Erik—“they already have in them that character. That brooding, Danish character”—and this troubled Siegfried, whom Clive Barnes would describe as “a manic-depressive … a Hamlet who faces no longer any alternative question, but who is just longing not to be,” was more Bruhn-like than any other. The ballet itself, dramatizing the unattainability of ideal love, seemed to allude to their own story, the White Swan being, in Erik’s words, “a spirit of love who makes him aware … they can never be together.” In a letter dated [March 5, 1964] … he tells Rudolf, “It is the right thing to accept that love can exist as a spiritual and ideal love and still be a happy one providing we forget or try to forget our hunger and thirst.” The two extremes, he believed, could not be combined, and Siegfried’s fatal flaw was the conviction that he had found “both the pure love and the sexual in one and the same person.”

  Rudolf, by his own admission, “loyal and disloyal, good and bad,” also viewed Siegfried’s dilemma as his own, his “existential and artistic problem” being, in Horst Koegler’s words, “the conflict between soul and body, between Odette and Odile—or, if you want, between East and West, between the Kirov’s purity of tradition, and the more degenerate pleasures of the Western ballet world.” This division of self was also one of sexual orientation, experienced to a degree by Rudolf and Erik, and by no one more acutely than Tchaikovsky himself.

  Hinting at the idea of a homosexual hero—and anticipating by a decade John Neumeier’s more explicit treatment*—Rudolf shows the Prince recoiling from his mother’s attempts to persuade him to get married, waltzing impassively with each of the six Prospective Fiancées as if in a world of his own. Earlier, during act 1’s festive mazurka, when everyone other than himself onstage is coupled, the Prince stands to one side as if enacting Tchaikovsky’s own account of his extreme loneliness. “It is true that my damned pederasty does form an unbridgeable abyss between me and most people. It imparts to my character an aloofness, a fear of people … qualities which make me grow more and more unsociable.”

  In this context Rudolf’s addition of a slow, contemplative solo for Siegfried is completely justified. The drawn-out développés, sinking fondus, and arms that droop like Nijinsky’s above his head not only speak of sadness and solitude but provide a perfectly judged transition of mood from the celebrations at court to the mysterious lakeside world of the swan maidens. Erik, who had always been skeptical about Rudolf’s interpolation in the Royal Ballet production, quickly changed his mind. “Suddenly he got excited. He saw that it worked and it did portray the mood of the prince—brooding, melancholy … and makes him unique.” Their influence on each other went deep; the steps themselves, which Rudolf had borrowed almost unchanged from a Pushkin adage, were now fine-tuned with Bruhn-like streamlined control. As rehearsals progressed, however, the extent to which Rudolf was turning the ballet into a four-act showcase for himself began to rankle. Erik refused to condone what he considered to be severe lapses of judgment (the worst being the bouncy virtuoso solo Rudolf gave himself in act 2, completely destroying Ivanov’s mood of lyricism). As Horst Koegler would later point out, Rudolf was badly in need of an artistic mentor—“a sort of Diaghilev, whom he is able to trust and who is able to shape and mould his wild flowing talents and direct them towards an artistically desirable aim.” Older and more experienced, Erik could have fulfilled this role—“the only one over here who can tell me things I don’t already know”—but he was too combustible and too emotionally involved. The pair fought constantly, until Erik could take no more. “You do what you want,” he told Rudolf. “I’m leaving.” Later that month, director Celia Franca was told that Erik would prefer to stage Swan Lake in Toronto “alone without Nureyev.”*

  When Margot, whom Rudolf wanted as his partner, arrived in Vienna not long before the premiere, she, too, was far from happy to be associated with a classic she barely recognized—one the Dancing Times would review as “The Ballet Called Siegfried.” Even Odette’s first appearance was different, with the ballerina now expected to impersonate the mechanical swan that traditionally glides across the lake (an ungainly process that involved arching out of what Robert Greskovic has described as “a belly flop position with her torso, arms and legs curving up from her abdomen which is res
ting on what might well be a skateboard”). More crucially, with Odette perceived as an abstract image of purity, the Fonteyn-Nureyev Swan Lake was no longer the great love story of before, when conventional movements of partnering had seemed more like forms of embrace. Now, confusingly, it was Odile, the Black Swan, who had become the main recipient of Siegfried’s tenderness.

  In order to lessen the emotional disparity between the Petipa and the Ivanov acts, Rudolf decided to exchange the brashly percussive music associated with Odile for the more melodic oboe piece composed as part of the original Moscow score. But while a softer, more swanlike temptress vindicates the hero for being duped by her, the sexual excitement Odile embodies is lost—and with it the glinting, diamantine hardness of one of Margot’s greatest interpretations. Not surprisingly “a terrible row” ensued, followed by a telephone call to Joan Thring telling her to come immediately to the theater: “Margot had walked out, and they were sure there was not going to be a performance.”

  By the time Maude and Nigel arrived from Leningrad, the dress rehearsal was in progress, and Rudolf was going out of his way to accommodate his ballerina. Aware that she had not yet mastered the new variation, Margot asked if she could perform it once again, but the orchestra refused: They had agreed to one complete run-through only. Walking downstage to the orchestra pit, Rudolf announced that if Dame Margot did not get what she wanted, he would abandon the production. “Go then,” came the reply. The dancer had not endeared himself to the renowned Vienna Philharmonic, either with his demands that the tempo be slowed down, or by ordering the director of music to “Go back to [his] Glockenspiel!” It was only after the Intendant himself was brought in that the musicians reluctantly agreed to play.

  Mounting the ballet, Rudolf claimed, had put more demands on him “as a lawyer than a dancer,” and yet the first night proved such a triumph that the Staatsoper immediately began negotiations for his return. Curtain calls for Margot and Rudolf throughout the ballet totaled a record eighty-nine, and even after they had returned to London the production continued to be a box-office success. Rudolf would later admit that there was much about the production that could be improved, but his main goal had been achieved. “Here in Central Europe where the classics are often petrified mummies,” wrote Linda Zamponi, “Nureyev’s attempt to being a classic up to date was blessed. Blessed too is the disturbance and controversy he brings to our stages.”*

  In London, however, when dancing the Royal Ballet version, the Vienna experience was having an adverse effect on its two stars. Reviewing their “Turgid Lake” at Covent Garden, Peter Williams described the way in which Rudolf appeared to be dancing alone, completely unconcerned about the fate of Odette—a lapse he attributed to the fact that both dancers were having to “unlearn” the Nureyev version. There could have been something else diverting Rudolf’s attention. Erik was then in Canada mounting a full-length production of Bournonville’s La Sylphide, and although Rudolf was not scheduled to appear in it, he was becoming increasingly attracted by the idea of portraying its hero. Like Siegfried and Albrecht, James is an unfaithful Romantic mystic who falls obsessively in love with a supernatural woman. With his troubled, tense features, Erik played him as a man haunted by a fearful intuition, but Rudolf believed that a more passionate, youthfully impulsive approach would help absolve the hero of his betrayal. Notwithstanding the fact that Erik was recognized to be the definitive interpreter, Rudolf was determined to make James a signature role of his own. And just as he had traveled to Florence to see Erik’s performance in 1962, he now used a period of convalescence from a tonsillectomy to fly to Toronto to “glean as much as he could.”

  To Erik, the perfect Sylph was Carla Fracci, once called “a modern incarnation of Marie Taglioni,” who created the role in the first version choreographed by her father, Filippo Taglioni. The pair had already danced the pas de deux for an American television broadcast in 1962, but as Fracci was not free to come to Toronto, at Rudolf’s suggestion Erik had asked the Royal Ballet’s Lynn Seymour, herself a Canadian, to be his partner. With her light, noiseless jump and round, seemingly boneless arms, Seymour had the plump contours of a dancer in a Chalon lithograph, which Rudolf, who had partnered her in the La Sylphide duet at the Bath Festival, thought “old-fashioned and nice.” Erik, however, was dismayed by what he saw. Far from representing a chaste, inaccessible ideal, Seymour belonged more to the earth than the air; sensuous, ribald, tangibly real, she was, in Arlene Croce’s phrase, “the Magnani of dance actresses.” “Erik didn’t like me at all, but there was no point getting upset. Fortunately, Rudolf was there to make me feel a bit better about it.”

  When they did “go around as a three,” the atmosphere, Seymour recalls, was turbulent and uncomfortable—no more so than on the night she was left standing alone in subzero temperatures outside one of Toronto’s most exclusive restaurants. Looking wonderfully striking in a fur coat and cashmere turtleneck, Rudolf had lost his temper when the manager refused to seat them because he was not wearing a tie. Grabbing the man by his shirt and crushing his nose into the fur collar, he had shouted, “Feel! If the coat isn’t worthy of your restaurant then nothing is!” before storming into the street and flinging fistfuls of snow at the window. Appalled by his behavior, Erik went off on his own, walking in the opposite direction from Rudolf, who, a few minutes later, trudged back through the slush to fetch Lynn. Returning to their hotel, they passed an empty parking lot pristine with fresh snow. “Do you know how to make snow angels?” Rudolf suddenly said, letting himself fall backward in a cruciform and fanning his outstretched arms like wings. Lynn fell down next to him, and they began to play like children, tumbling over each other, singing, laughing, and throwing snowballs into the sky.

  Over the next days the existing affection and trust between them deepened. “We’ve become very very good friends,” Lynn wrote to her mother. “A sort of fan club for each other.” “She is fabulous,” Rudolf told a television reporter. “She educate herself as I believe Canada didn’t help her.” They had much in common. Both late starters, “aware that we had a lot of time to make up and it would always be like that,” they had each struggled to master willful, unconventional bodies, and combined their cerebral autodidactic approach to dance with an affectingly visceral exposure of themselves. “What you give to the public is more than they realize … it’s like in the Colosseum,” said Seymour—a view Rudolf echoed. “Every time you dance,” he said, “it must be sprayed with your blood.”

  With Erik hardly paying any attention to his ballerina, Rudolf, who had learned most of La Sylphide by watching the rehearsals, took it upon himself to coach her. “I didn’t agree with everything he told me. I thought that dancing should look effortless, and didn’t approve of the fact he made it look hard work. I had my principles.” Seymour noticed how Rudolf was becoming increasingly restless, making obvious the extent to which he longed to be dancing in the ballet himself. Consequently neither she nor anyone else was particularly surprised when, having performed the opening night, Erik “developed a bad knee.” “We all knew that he was ‘pulling an Erik,’ said one of the soloists. ‘Faking an injury to give Rudolf a chance.’ ” The Canadian ballet’s Earl Kraul took over the following night, and when Celia Franca and Betty Oliphant were discussing who else in the company could replace Erik, he interrupted them by saying slyly, “What about Rudik? He knows it.” Sure enough, despite having had only two days to rehearse the whole ballet—“something like learning Hamlet in a weekend”—and despite an injury resulting from a fall on the ice, Rudolf wrapped up his “half broken foot” and gave a performance of astonishing authority. For the Canadians it was “a profoundly exciting theatrical coup,” but for Erik the enormity of Rudolf’s success was unsettling. Having watched the performance from the wings “looking very wistful,” according to Oliphant, he went backstage, where he was spotted “mysteriously walking with a perfect gait in spite of a reported leg injury.” Elbowing his way through the mob of admirers surging out
side Rudolf’s dressing room door, he suddenly turned nasty, threatening to smash the camera of one of the photographers. Rudolf, meanwhile, was in an excellent humor. Although tired and still husky voiced from his tonsil operation, he relaxed in his dressing gown, obligingly answering the reporters’ questions. His reply to whether or not he had done “an emergency good turn for his friend” made the reason for his appearance even more equivocal: “I tell you how it was. Mr. Bruhn from the beginning he asked me because it is tremendous strain to produce and dance at the same time. And he said, If you could come and do first performance. And I said I will of course. I would pay my fares and everything and just come and dance.”

  The next day Erik’s knee had “miraculously recovered.” Partnering Lois Smith, making her debut in the title role, he gave the performance of his life, scoring twenty-five curtain calls to Rudolf’s nineteen, and proving himself “the still undisputed master of the Bournonville style.” In his perceptive appraisal of the two versions, the Globe and Mail’s Ralph Hicklin, while admiring Erik’s restraint, admitted that he found Rudolf’s showier, more yearningly romantic James more affecting. “There was established between Nureyev and Seymour a passion—always with decorum—that is lacking in the cooler interpretation of Bruhn.… his is a cool approach to the melodramatic narrative of La Sylphide, an approach that allows the dance to speak for itself.”

  Dancing with Seymour, Rudolf said, made him aware that he was dancing with a woman; just watching her move affected him like an aphrodisiac—or, as he quirkily put it, “Heaven descends into your lap.” Offstage, too, he found her physically arousing—“He used to love my skin”—and the sexy complicity between them is tangible in rushes from a documentary made at the time. Wearing a funny little boater perched on top of her Mary Quant crop, she edges her way into the crowded dressing room, snuggles up to Rudolf, and kisses him so languorously on the lips that he takes a second or two to recover.… She picks up a whiskey glass. Empty. Rudolf slaps her rump with a chuckle, and as she is stroking his hair, looks her up and down. With her way-out clothes, round face, and large, heavily mascaraed eyes, “Liluchka” (his diminutive for her) must have reminded him of Menia Martinez, an equally original personality. “He adored her,” Georgina Parkinson says, “especially her maverick side. She was fat … nonconformist.… He was really tender with her.” Seymour recalls, “He told me later on that he did try to make a move on me. I didn’t realize it—which shows how naive I was. Thank God. Because it really would have disturbed me. If Margot’s relationship was anything like the one Rudolf and I had, that’s all you ever needed. It’s really sacred as opposed to profane love.”