Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  With me, at any rate—he was ferociously passive, so that sex was energetic and exciting but I always felt there was a part of him that was challenging me to subdue him, and then, abandoning himself to surrender, he found fulfillment. It was as if there was some inner loneliness, some sense of rejection that he could never overcome, and he provoked this frenzied eroticism to hide from it for a little while. I didn’t analyze it at the time; it was just terrific, and exhausting. But, looking back, I wondered what need was expressing itself in him that he had to be treated with such savagery. Afterwards, tugging one of my arms over him, he fell asleep quickly and deeply like a child. Once he woke me in the middle of the night talking animatedly in his sleep in Russian, and kicking.

  Keith knew all about Erik, who posed no threat. “Rudolf would say, ‘Is such pity I cannot be in love with you, Keith. You’re not in love with me, and I’m not in love with you.’ And we would laugh.” The more Keith saw of Rudolf, however, the more he was made aware of how lonely Rudolf was. “Because his English was still so rudimentary, he had no small talk and couldn’t gossip or exchange ideas easily, so that the usual dancer camaraderie was denied him.” When they were with other people, Keith noticed the way Rudolf would use his natural hauteur to mask the fact that he did not understand much of what was being said and seemed nervous of revealing his lack of manners: “He would look to see which knife and fork I was using. In those days he seemed secure only onstage or when we were alone. Onstage and in bed he was classless. I felt that he was desperate for company of his own age.”

  In the spring of 1966 Rudolf returned to Vienna. He had asked Lynn Seymour to come from Berlin to dance his Swan Lake with him; and he also wanted to exploit the workshop appeal of the company by choreographing something of his own. Tancredi, which premiered at the State Opera on May 18, 1966, took its name from the score, Hans Werner Henze’s Tancred und Cantylene. This was a shorter, revised version of a piece written in 1952 with a new libretto by Peter Csobadi. Henze would have welcomed a collaboration with Rudolf but says that the dancer made “not a single attempt” to get in touch.* This seems oddly uncharacteristic. What Rudolf originally had in mind was a Balanchine-style work—“perhaps to Stravinsky’s music, without a story and very classical.” Since Henze was Europe’s most eminent contemporary composer, it seems that Rudolf would have seized the chance to try out his own version of the kind of music-ballet partnership that Balanchine had had with Stravinsky. The music’s twelve-tone austerity prompted movements that were plainly derived from Balanchine’s Stravinsky- and Webern-based ballets—in fact Michael Birkmeyer remembers Rudolf setting out in one sequence “to beat Balanchine.” Using as his model a grouping of the Three Muses in Apollo, “He was trying to go one better,” Birkmeyer says. “But it all ended up with him and the girls stuck together in a clump. He just burst out laughing, and said, ‘Sorry, Mr. B!’ ”

  The protagonist of Tancredi was virtually the same as Rudolf’s Siegfried—“the outsider, the neurotic male.” Forced to choose between a chaste Odette-type ideal and a blatantly seductive “second female image,” Tancredi was torn to the point that his personality literally split in half. The ballet then became an enactment of mental schizophrenia, “a tone poem of the subconscious,” with Barry Kay’s dark, membranous, vein-streaked setting providing a visualization of the human brain. Like Rudolf’s Swan Lake, Tancredi was an exploration of Erik’s bipolar psyche as well as the abiding love-lust conflict within himself. If anything, though, it was even more self-revelatory, its hero a man who was no longer able to love his ideal “because he loves nobody as much as himself.”

  Preempting the charge of self-interest, Rudolf told John Percival that when he began Tancredi he “divided up the music carefully to give equal opportunity to my cast as well as myself.” Nevertheless the fact remains that eight of the other male roles were reflections of the hero, not characters in their own right, and there was hardly a moment when he himself was not onstage. While praising Rudolf’s stunningly dramatic performance, even the partisan Linda Zamponi was forced to admit that the ballet perplexed critics and audiences alike. It was also disappointing choreographically. With steps as feverish as the scenario—acrobatic runs, dives, a human trampoline, strobe jerks—there was no sign of a personal or original style. Michael Birkmeyer agrees. “There was no style. Rudolf realized very fast that this was not his way of choreographing things, and he went on to do productions where he knew what he was doing.”

  In order to prepare himself for the job of staging the ballet Don Quixote, Rudolf decided to spend his summer reading Cervantes’s novel, an experience the writer Martin Amis has compared to “an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies.” Rudolf himself hated Petipa’s Don “quite a lot,” although at this point he knew only the ballet’s unfunny, befuddled clown. “There is so much there,” he said, “but in a ballet you can only skim the surface. I tried to put in a lot of things I felt about the book, like impressions of the Callot lithographs, but you daren’t put too much comment in. It really is largely a lot of dances and great zest and comic spirit.”

  Certainly no one could claim this Petipa work to be a masterpiece. Like other nineteenth-century versions, it focuses on a pair of childhood sweethearts from volume 2 of the novel and banishes Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, his roly-poly sidekick, to no more than walk-on roles. With Petipa having considerably reworked the ballet within a space of two years, it was difficult to determine the original choreography, so Rudolf decided to base his production on the Kirov one he knew. Although he could reconstruct most of the parts from memory, he was also able to draw on a rough, pirated film sent by the Pushkins* with the help of a Canadian dancer then studying in Leningrad. Anna Marie Holmes, who also smuggled out the full score, claims that Rudolf’s production hardly departed from the film. “It was when there was a gap because of a reel being changed that he made up his own stuff.”

  Wanting his Don Quixote to be even more robustly comic than the Kirov’s, Rudolf decided to commission John Lanchbery to inject the Minkus score with a lighter-hearted tone. He also set out to restore authenticity to the Spanish dances, which he believed were just as vital to the ballet’s success as the thrust and flavor of Cervantes’s words in their original language. He began by asking his teacher Hector Zaraspe, an ex-Antonio dancer, to show him dances like the jota, fandango, and seguedilla—“where the accents go, the expression, the positions of the body.” And he also tried hard to enlist the help of Heinz Mannigel, the young dancer who had shown him the spirit of real flamenco during the tour of East Germany in 1959.

  Having himself defected to the West, Heinz was now dancing in Hamburg, and had come across Marika Besobrasova at a ballet summer school in Cologne. Impressed by her teaching, he and his dancer wife decided to audition for the International Ballet Festival which she was staging in mid-July as part of Monte Carlo’s centennial celebrations. “There Rudik was in Marika’s class with Erik Bruhn. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘Heinz: it’s you!’ He invited me to come to his house and drove me around in his old Volvo.” Heinz had little Russian and even less English, so few words were exchanged—“it was more feelings between us … looks, smiles”—but both must have wondered if they could recapture their rapport of seven years earlier. On this occasion, though, Rudolf had a very definite idea in mind. In December he would be premiering a first draft of his Don Quixote in Vienna,† but he had intended all along to stage the ballet on the Australian company (a plan that did not come about until 1970). Not only did the dancers have the energy and panache to reanimate this “old warhorse,” but he felt that Heinz’s fire and expertise in flamenco could inject it with the ardor verging on dementia that had made such an impact on Petipa.* Instead of asking Heinz for his assistance, however, Rudolf made him a strangely unrealistic offer. “Come to Australia!” he urged. “You will choreograph Don Quixote, and I will be your guest star.” Hein
z says:

  I just thought, this is much too much for me. I was a dancer. I’d taken a teacher’s course in East Germany, but I’d never made a ballet. He was very insistent. He really believed in my work, and kept saying, “Heinz, you should do it. It would be a very good thing for you. And I’ll be there too!” But I never thought about big opportunities: I was only twenty-five … my wife wouldn’t have wanted to go to Australia—I just thought about being happy.

  Erik was at La Turbie, too, that day, reserved but not at all hostile toward Heinz. Having spent the last three months in Rome dancing, teaching, and producing new works, he had arrived in the South of France in a state of near-collapse. He was spending six weeks in Cannes with a dancer friend, but after a few days the strain began to show and he became violently ill with his recurring stomach problem. He had only just recovered when Rudolf arrived, and feeling that he had no emotion to spare, refused to stay with him at LaTurbie. Distraught that Erik would not agree even to come to the house for dinner, Rudolf turned up one evening at the Cannes apartment of Arlette Castanier, a close friend of Erik. They began drinking, and Erik, who had a supper engagement with the director of the Harkness Ballet, went out soon afterward, leaving Rudolf with Arlette. “You do what you want with this drunk mujik,” he told her, “but don’t let him drive back.” By now in a woozily amorous mood, Rudolf lunged at Arlette and began trying to kiss her. “A wonderful girl with a wonderful heart,” she understood he was “needing comfort,” and gently humored him while plying him with coffee until he was sober enough to go home. The following day a huge bouquet of roses arrived for her, and Erik went to stay at LaTurbie. A snippet of 8-mm footage taken by Arlette in their garden captures Rudolf’s unleashed euphoria as, watched by Erik—wearing an expression of affectionate resignation—he performs his own, Russified takeoff on Isadora Duncan.

  Rudolf’s high spirits did not last long. He had asked Heinz to appear as Hilarion to his Albrecht as he and Margot were to dance Giselle in the festival. “I told him that I couldn’t, that I wasn’t good enough. But saying no to him again clearly made him angry.” Rudolf remained angry. Several French dancer friends who were in Monte Carlo were shocked by his brutishness during rehearsals with Margot. “He was impossible” (Rosella Hightower); “He was calling her ‘an old cow’ in front of the young kids” (Ghislaine Thesmar); “Il était odieux!” (Yvette Chauviré). Instead of shrugging things off as usual, Margot was in despair, quietly crying as she waited for her entrance. “But she dried her eyes and went onstage,” said Pierre Lacotte, who had been standing beside her in the wings.

  In fact there was nothing new about Rudolf’s behavior. It was Margot’s circumstances that had changed. With her domestic life in perpetual crisis, she badly needed the escape of her world onstage. Unhappily, though, she was now entering the bleakest phase of her career, a period when the Royal Opera House had begun systematically to reduce the number of her performances. This was part of a new policy to promote the younger ballerinas, but it was one that Margot’s admirers, particularly the protective Keith Money, viewed as “quite evil toward her.”

  Those were awful days, because it was just so completely, utterly, discreditably shoddy. And as a result Rudolf got quite perplexed and scared, not knowing how to hedge his bets safely in terms of the management. He distanced himself from Margot rather obviously, like scuttling off as soon as the curtain calls ended. None of the usual “Are you going to get some food?” Just slipped out of the theater and away. I’m sure this attitude hurt Margot, even if she could work out the political dimension of it.

  For some time, John Tooley says, Rudolf had been making it very clear that he did not want to confine himself to partnering Margot. The extraordinary resurgence in her that he had instigated had waned, and she was finding it a strain to keep up with him. Much of his aggression toward her in Monte Carlo had been, in Marika Besobrasova’s view, “a big kick for the energy.” She was becoming untidy and too reliant on his support, when more and more he expected a ballerina to be autonomous. If he felt that his stamina was being deflected from his variations, he would retaliate (as he would do during a December performance in Vienna, when he almost dropped Ulli Wuhrer “not once, not twice, but three separate times”). Carla Fracci, a ballerina he had dismissed at first as “lazy,” says that being partnered by Rudolf required a completely different discipline. “You have to learn to stand on your own legs, to find the strength to help him, make preparation he need.” They had performed together during Erik’s brief tenure as director at the Rome Opera Ballet, but Fracci, the diva of Italian ballet, had no intention of tolerating the kind of abuse that Margot accepted. “She was excusing him because he was young, but I had the nerve to say ‘Enough! You are viziato—spoiled—by Margot!’ ”

  Although she and Erik were now consolidating what would become their famous partnership, Fracci was someone with whom Rudolf badly wanted to forge a link of his own. Not only a wonderful dancer with the serene beauty of a quattrocento Madonna combined with the glamour of a movie star, she was also the wife of director Giuseppe “Beppe” Menegatti, a powerful force in the Italian arts. From Fracci’s point of view, although she idolized Erik—her “friend, partner, and master”—she knew that working with Rudolf would significantly extend her resources as an artist: The one gave her confidence and security—“He presented me”—the other strengthened her technique. Her March 1966 performances with the two dancers in Rome (Rudolf partnering her in La Sylphide,* Erik in his own Balcony Scene from Romeo and Juliet) were considered by Vittoria Ottolenghi, Italy’s preeminent ballet critic and historian, to be Fracci’s “most beautiful and magical.” Understandably this short run was a huge theatrical event, with fans sleeping in the street waiting for tickets and the audiorium teeming with such celebrities as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. At that time, Menegatti says, there was great rivalry between the Rome Opera House and La Scala—“One theater jump on reputation of the other”—a situation the couple took advantage of when the La Scala administration came to Rome to see a performance. “We push, we push for Rudolf to do a production in Milan.”

  The invitation could not have come at a better time. Vaslav Orlikovsky, with whom Rudolf had clashed over the filming of Le Spectre de la rose in 1961, was now director of the Staatsoper in Vienna and had no intention of staging any further Nureyev productions after Don Quixote (an Aurel Milloss commission). It was Rudolf’s idea to mount Sleeping Beauty at La Scala; it was the ballet that had helped form both Balanchine and Ashton as choreographers, and one he believed could be equally educational for him. “When you know these ballets, you know what is what in choreography. Only to that point can you do something of your own. Petipa teaches. This is this. That is that. He is the basis of all ballets.” The experience of having tried and failed to create an original work of his own had tempered his audacious attitude toward the classics—“It is my duty to be truthful to Petipa”—and for the La Scala production he planned no radical departures or even cuts. Sleeping Beauty was, he said, “the Parsifal of ballet … very long and very lush,” and he wanted his own version to have all the resonance of grand opera.

  Although often perceived as a féerie ballet—the reason Rudolf had so hated the Folies-Bergères frivolity of the de Cuevas version—the lavish original was criticized at the time for being too serious. Rudolf felt it was significant that the czar and all his court had attended the répetition générale as this not only endorsed the actual link between the imperial household and the Maryinsky Theater but was reflected in the ballet’s own opulence and majesty—what Alexander Bland called “the peculiar Russian furs-and-diamonds glitter so marvellously conveyed in the score.” Nico Georgiadis was the obvious choice for designer, although he had not been particularly pleased with his decor for the Vienna Swan Lake. “It was the first time I’d done something classical, and I felt that it was all much too constricted.” Nevertheless the broodingly atmospheric, darkly burnished sets had been a step in the direction
of the 1965 MacMillan Romeo and Juliet—a visual feast with exactly the architectural splendor, rich textures, and Byzantine colors that Rudolf had in mind for his Beauty. He described to Georgiadis a lavish earlier Kirov production he remembered, and they agreed on an imperial Russian approach, the designer noticing how “suddenly, Rudolf’s own inherent Russian baroque/Russian expressionism came out.” Rudolf was full of suggestions; one, inspired by a black-and-white film he had seen of Peter the Great, was to begin the ballet with a baronial dinner, the Prologue’s colors similarly gray, silver, and black. It was also his idea to make the production more than unusually architectural, with a long table stretched slantways across the stage, and a great central staircase conveying the sense of monumental structures beyond the confines of the proscenium—“great gardens, a great empire.”

  Inevitably it was hard for the dancers to compete with these sumptuous mass effects, but this in itself was deliberate. If the look of Rudolf’s Sleeping Beauty was an ultramasculine Romanov opulence, the quality of movement he wanted was Margot-inspired English reticence. Having cruelly mimicked the ballerina’s distinctive low-legged, squarely placed arabesque in Monte Carlo two months earlier, he now described it to the dancers as something of incomparable integrity, using it to demonstrate the kind of moderate, restrained classicism he wanted to see. “He worked so much with us,” said Fracci, “but he was very demanding, very tough, I must say. There was one time when he slapped a girl, which caused a big scandal.” For Carla he did not need to invoke the image of Margot’s dancing—it was already her lodestar. As a student she had appeared as a page in a Fonteyn performance of Sleeping Beauty at La Scala, and, from the moment of Aurora’s first joyous entrance, discovered her real vocation. Margot, as Menegatti says, was “the inside push for Carla,” and remained her “idol forever.” Nevertheless, as an exceptionally pliant dancer she found it hard to restrict her line to the ninety-degree angles and “poses like still pictures” that Rudolf was demanding. Consequently their battle of wills continued.*