Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Considering the dancers to have been “dulled” by the Opéra’s past repertory, Rudolf’s priority was “to force-feed” them with a new vocabulary: “a Bournonville course and a course of modern dance, preferably the Graham technique.… When one has that one can tackle everything, from Cunningham to the post-moderns.” First, though, he wanted to fine-tune their classical style. Finding the men overly sporty and lacking polish, he wanted them to aspire to the feline plastique of his youth fused with Erik’s long, elegant line. The women, he said, were “too frontal” (meaning they had not grasped the concept of épaulement, the Russians’ eloquence of the upper back), and “too French.” Edwin Denby’s description of the feminine flourishes of Parisian ballerinas during the company’s 1950 season in Florence—“a fluster of waist wriggles, wrist flicks, and … those little shakes, pecks, and perks of the head that look so pretty around a Paris dinner table”—was precisely the kind of affectation that Rudolf was determined to eliminate. He wanted nothing gratuitously decorative or nonfunctional, but wanted rather to forge innate French chic with what former étoile Elisabeth Platel calls, “du vrai style classique, du vrai Petipa pur.”

  To transform Paris Opéra Ballet into his company, with its dancers exhibiting traits of his own schooling and experience, Rudolf needed to “attack on all fronts.” An immediate stratagem was to insist on compulsory daily class, arranging the schedule so as to prevent anyone from taking class outside. “I thought if they all go and listen to their private gods, it’s paganism, you know? You want to hear only one source of truth.… So … I bring in excellent teachers and entice the dancers from their own gurus to my gurus.” To improve the company’s footwork and speed of execution, Stanley Williams was the first Nureyev guru to be approached, and when Williams declined to come (“Stanley was too private to survive in Paris”), Rudolf turned to someone he knew could pass on the same methods. Elizabeth Anderton, the Festival Ballet dancer who created the role of Juliet’s Nurse, had become a teacher of exceptional panache, and Rudolf had helped to enrich her classes by feeding her “bits of information from Stanley.” “Betty would have incorporated a lot of what Rudolf believed into her work,” says Monica Mason. “Rudolf picked up instantly on courage and energy, intelligence—people he could sweep up to be as hungry as he was. Betty has an extraordinary way of inspiring people—that genuine ability to take people to another place.”

  He gave the role of ballet mistress to Claire Motte, his oldest friend in Paris, and brought in Yvette Chauviré to coach the principals. “A fact that is very important with Rudolf is how faithful he was,” remarks Elisabeth Platel. But if this was an act of loyalty, it was also politically canny, as both women were exemplars of French schooling at its most refined, the veteran ballerina having become a virtual institution, “La Chauviré Nationale.” As ballet master Rudolf appointed Bolshoi-trained Eugene “Genia” Poliakov, who had been one of his most devoted fans in Russia. Then working in Florence as director and choreographer, he had refused the offer at first because his position in Italy was so good, but after several visits to Paris decided that working with Rudolf would be a greater challenge. A small, unassuming man with close-cropped, gingerish hair and a beard, Poliakov was the personification of the Russian intelligentsia, with a quality his Florentine colleagues describe as garbo, which in Italian means something beyond civilized. “It’s more like grace.… Everything Genia did was infused with this civilized grace.”

  One of the new director’s conditions before taking on the job was to demand the departure of the administrator, George Hirsch, an authoritarian figure with the kind of old-fashioned outlook Rudolf despised. He had been replaced by the young, bilingual Thierry Fouquet, who had spent the past months working closely with Rudolf in preparation for his arrival. Rudolf had chosen as his assistant Franck Raoul-Duval, who had just finished his military service in the Far East. “Rudolf called me and said, ‘I need my people,’ but after a few months it felt as if the whole bureaucracy of the Paris Opéra was falling on me, and I knew it wasn’t going to work. They seemed to think, ‘Rudolf alone is hard enough to cope with, but if he brings his own team it will be impossible.’ ”* Rudolf inherited Hirsch’s personal assistant, Marie-Suzanne Soubie, whom Thierry Fouquet had thought of letting go until he was warned, “Watch it!” (Her husband, Raymond Soubie, an eminent civil servant, had been former prime minister Raymond Barre’s main adviser, and in 1987 would be appointed president of the Opéra.) A petite, elegant woman with a lovely heart-shaped face and dancer’s physique, she was, Rudolf informed Maude, “A real lady. Too much of a lady to be working at the Opéra.” After a couple of weeks Sandor Gorlinsky rang to tell her Rudolf was so pleased that he wanted her to be “a little more present.” So indispensable, in fact, did Marie-Suzanne become that to the doting Douce François, Rudolf’s personal assistant was to prove more threatening than any other relationship in his life.

  The new director’s most iconoclastic early move was to insist on the demolition of the Salle Lifar, the huge practice room in the Opéra’s rotunda, named after Serge Lifar, an earlier redeemer of twentieth-century French ballet. Rudolf’s idea was to divide the space into three separate studios, remarking, “It’s only when [these] are complete that one will be able to really work. I will have all the dancers together in front of me, and this situation will attract the foreign choreographers who are still reticent to come.” The salon at the top he christened Petipa, and the two underneath it Balanchine and Bournonville—the Trinity.† But although very few Lifar works had survived, and only vestiges remained of his training, Rudolf was strongly urged to drop Bournonville’s name for that of Lifar who, to most of the senior staff, was still synonymous with Paris Opéra Ballet.‡ “He wasn’t happy,” recalls Marie-Suzanne, “but he was forced to acquiesce.”

  The last of Diaghilev’s protégés, the beautiful, charismatic Serge Lifar had reigned over the Ballets Russes in the late twenties, and after the impresario’s death in 1929, was invited to the Opéra, where he became étoile, choreographer, and director. “Lifar was more than a star dancer,” Lynn Garafola writes. “He was a celebrity.… A force to be reckoned with in the corridors of power.” Intent on reviving the moribund French company, he sent its youngest members to study with Paris’s great émigré professors: Kschessinskaya, Preobrazhenska, Trefilova … their vastly improved technique also acquiring a lush Maryinsky lyricism. And by combining a number of much-needed new reforms with a touch of the innovative magic he had absorbed from Diaghilev, Lifar succeeded in restoring to Paris Opéra Ballet the cachet it had not seen since the Romantic era.

  In 1961, during the Kirov’s three-week season in Paris, Lifar had gone out of his way to befriend the young Russian he considered to be “incontestably the star of the Leningrad company.” Awarding Rudolf the prestigious Nijinsky Prize, Lifar described him as the most influential male dancer to have emerged since Nijinsky and himself. There were undeniable resemblances. All three had strived to redress the imbalance between male and female dancing, and as history’s greatest Albrechts, made this quintessential Romantic hero assume an importance equal to Giselle’s. Photographs of Lifar at the grave, his arms full of lilies, his trailing black cloak an extension of his grief, were as formative to Rudolf’s interpretation as those he had studied of Nijinsky. Lifar, too, had come late to dance—“a diamond in the rough who willed himself to dazzle”—displaying the same kind of lithe, wild-animal grace and burning stage presence. Both had dared to challenge their own fate by moving to the West in search of opportunity—in fact, there was speculation at the time of Rudolf’s defection that it was Lifar’s example that had influenced him. (An article in the Sunday Times claimed that the older Russian was “almost certainly—if unwittingly—involved in Nureyev’s decision to seek asylum in France.”)

  Two years later, however, in 1963, an astonishing attack on Rudolf appeared in the April 9 issue of Izvestia, translated and reprinted from Paris-Jour (April 2, 1963). Signed by Lifar, it was t
itled, “He Loves No One and Betrays All.” “He has become a star by sheer virtue of the fact that he is a traitor … his moral behavior is unbalanced, hysterical and vain. His first attempts at choreography came to nothing and showed no imagination whatsoever. All he did was regurgitate what he had learned from Petipa and his tutor Pushkin.”

  Invited to return to his homeland for the first time in forty-six years, Lifar, according to René Sirvin, had been “bought by the Russians,” and was, therefore, obliged to take this line. But to Rudolf a denunciation of such malevolence from someone who himself had been attacked as a traitor when the war ended was staggering hypocrisy. Lifar, he told Robert Tracy, had “choreographed entrance for Hitler into Paris.… He showed Hitler Paris Opéra—took him around.” And indeed, although Lifar always denied being at the Palais Garnier the day Hitler made his tour, he did openly fraternize with high-ranking Nazis during the occupation, making a number of tours at Goebbel’s request, and meeting the Führer in Berlin. (To Sirvin, Lifar boasted that Hitler had been “so taken with [his] body” that he sent his private plane to fetch the dancer.) Summoned for trial when the Allies entered Paris, Lifar was banished from the Opéra for life, but several months later this verdict was revised, and the period of exclusion reduced to a year. In September 1947, cleared of all charges, Lifar was reinstated as the Opéra’s maître de ballet, remaining in power until his retirement in 1958.

  Taking up his own position in the fall of ’83, Rudolf had received a note of congratulations from Diaghilev’s friend and secretary, Boris Kochno, but no such welcome came from Lifar. “It’s sad, because they could have talked a lot,” says Charles Jude, who has a photograph of the three of them in Paris. “It was Rudolf’s dream to have the same career as Lifar: to be director, star, and choreographer, staying at the Opéra for thirty years, and creating all those ballets.” But Lifar had achieved Rudolf’s dream before that: a personal repertory created for him by Balanchine. Apollo, the choreographer’s earliest masterpiece, had been made specifically for the twenty-three-year-old youth from Kiev, transforming him into “a glamorous deco god: sleek of limb, neoclassical in line, athletic in style.” What Rudolf could never forgive was that this had directly rebounded on him. Four decades later the memory of having been forced by Diaghilev to choreograph vehicles for a male star still rankled, Balanchine vowing, “I never do that again.”

  Rudolf could never bring himself to like Lifar, a character with an ego as massive as his own. There was also the fact that he had hardly any regard for Lifar’s choreography, finding its theatrical, symbol-laden style “kitsch, and ‘everything he didn’t rate.’ ” “Suite en Blanc and Icare—those are very good ballets,” he told Charles Jude. “All the rest are shit.” To Edwin Denby even the best works had “a curious antimusical and desperate pound,” while Violette Verdy described them as “not what Balanchine could be even on a bad day.” Despite having written several treatises defending the principles of classical ballet, Lifar was no craftsman. And not having been formed by a particular school as a child, his own dancing had always lacked precision and control. “He didn’t know how to do a true fifth position, his pirouettes were unfinished—everything was done for effect,” says Hélène Traïline, then the Opéra’s director of programming. “Rudolf was the complete opposite of this.” If each star choreographed in order to promote and explore his own persona, the profound difference was that Lifar did not have the technical knowledge to bring out the best in his dancers. To Rudolf this deficiency as a classicist had negated a legacy of any lasting value in the Paris company. Not only that, but he believed that the three decades Lifar monopolized the repertory meant that “the Opéra cut itself off from the rest of world creation and ignored it.” The malign presence of Lifar was “everywhere,” Rudolf told Gore Vidal. “In rehearsal halls. Backstage. We name rooms after this one, after that one. They make me name Lifar Room. Always evil in that room.… Bad ghost.” And it was the one ghost that Rudolf was determined to exorcise.

  Rudolf’s own ambition was “not to be a new Lifar, but to permit other choreographers to come to the opera.” In the five years before he arrived, (in the hands of Violette Verdy and Rosella Hightower) the repertory had become considerably more international, with the staging of key works by Balanchine, MacMillan, and Cranko. There had also been programs of contemporary choreography—though not at the Palais Garnier. Modern dance was seen to be “the business of GRCOP” (Groupe de Récherche Choréographique de l’Opéra de Paris), a workshop organization run with foresight and great efficiency by Jacques Garnier. According to Jean Guizerix, Rudolf was jealous of Garnier’s achievement, but if Rudolf was dismissive of this splinter group it was largely because he saw no need for it. “I want it to be the company and not GRCOP who dance the works of Lucinda Childs or Karole Armitage.”

  His vision of a repertory comprising “fifty-fifty classical and contemporary work” was a lot more pioneering than it might seem. Until the arrival of Garnier’s predecessor, the Alvin Ailey dancer Carolyn Carlson, who ran the Opéra’s experimental troupe from 1974 to 1980, Paris audiences had little experience of modern dance. Martha Graham’s only season in Paris in 1950 had been a disaster, closing on its “second excruciating night.” (Exhausted by all the symbolism and metaphysics, the Figaro critic was left with a craving for frivolity—“to see the French cancan or the ballet from Faust.”) Rudolf, however, was determined to educate the Palais Garnier audience to appreciate the avant-garde, which meant enticing the world’s greatest innovators to Paris, among them Merce Cunningham, William Forsythe, and theater director Robert Wilson.

  Recognizing that the Opéra must also represent the French tradition, he had already written to Béjart to ask him to remount “notre Faust,” and also to create a new piece, offering to put at the choreographer’s disposal a number of dancers to perform experimental work, to be presented to the public or not. He had announced the revival of Roland Petit’s Phantom of the Opera, but over the summer the two men had fallen out, and in retaliation, Petit had withdrawn all his ballets.* To Rudolf this was no great loss. Disliking the choreographer’s recent work, he had taken to calling him “Roland Pas de Pas,” his derogatory pun on the name “Petipa,” meaning “no steps.” It wasn’t that Rudolf did not think that Petit and Béjart should be seen at the Opéra, but as Thierry Fouquet said, “He had many other more important things in mind to do first.” One journalist wrote, “It does not seem that the French are much appreciated,” to which Rudolf replied that he had “a boundless admiration for the French school of the nineteenth century.” His first program in September was to be Pierre Lacotte’s authentic revival of Coppélia, and he had asked Lacotte to bring to the Opéra the production he had recently mounted in Rome—a reconstruction of Marco Spada, a three-act French ballet not performed for more than a century. He had scheduled Balanchine’s homage to Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and he planned to introduce baroque dance to the Opéra “because that’s where it was invented” (the Paris Opéra Ballet was a direct descendant of the Académie Royale de la Danse, established by Louis XIV in 1671).

  Rudolf’s immediate concern, however, was to restore to France its own neglected genius—Marseille-born Marius Petipa, the most influential choreographer of all time. Although it was not until he went to St. Petersburg that Petipa created his masterpieces, he was intimately linked to the Paris Opéra by his family, teachers, and partners. Astoundingly, though, the Petipa classics—the mainstay of ballet companies throughout the world—were hardly known at the Palais Garnier. The reason for this was the French public’s preference for short, innovative pieces rather than revivals spanning a whole evening. “The Parisian audience like what is outré; what is special, exotic, or novel; or, more often, what is shocking,” wrote Agnes de Mille, explaining the “cold failure” of Graham’s season. “What is simply sound dramatically … or what is essentially intellectual, they find difficult to accept.”

  This was borne out once again during the Sadle
r’s Wells Ballet’s ill-received appearance at the Opéra in September 1954, when it was critically regretted “that the British programs included classics rather than more recent works.” “The French public want novelty at all costs,” remarked Rudolf. “It’s the unfortunate legacy of Diaghilev, who evolved among snobs and said each day to Cocteau, ‘Étonnemoi!’ ” (When Diaghilev, having kept the interest of his fashionable audiences with an exciting diet of experimentation, decided to return to nineteenth-century classicism, he chose London, not Paris, as his venue.) Knowing his audience, Lifar had selected what he called Divertissements from Sleeping Beauty (the first-act waltz and Awakening scene), but his rendering of the choreography was so inept that it made Edwin Denby “cringe.” As far as Rudolf was concerned, Petipa had been “treated very unjustly” by the Opéra, and his own inaugural production in November—a sumptuous new staging of Raymonda—would waste no time in putting this to right.

  Due to be interviewed a week after his arrival at the Palais Garnier, Rudolf was to be found not in his office—“I don’t even know where it is”—but in the studio rehearsing the dancers. In vivid orange boots, he was demonstrating the ballerina variations and highlighting details like the little feminine circles of the wrist, while performing a taxing series of entrechats. The Parisians found themselves being pushed as never before. “We were armed for this ballet,” says Elisabeth Platel, Rudolf’s first-cast heroine, a long-legged, aristocratic dancer whose exceptional strength was tempered by a softly limpid style and intensity of absorption. Platel remembers how taken aback she and her fellow étoiles had been to find themselves in a studio with the corps de ballet—as inconceivable until then as it would have been for the Sun King’s courtiers to mix with the city’s sans-culottes. “With Rudolf,” she says, “we became a team.” And wanting Raymonda to be a showcase for “everyone in the company,” he cast étoiles in secondary roles (Monique Loudières as Clémence, Claude de Vulpian as Henriette); brought Yvette Chauviré out of retirement to play Countess Sybille; and used the ballet to spotlight two of his stars-in-embryo. He had already given Laurent Hilaire the leading role of Frantz in Coppélia, and now he twinned him with fellow sujet Manuel Legris as the friends Bernard and Beranger—“Ber-Ber!” Rudolf called them—flaunting their taut line and nimble footwork with a show-stopping duet. (Soon afterward, brushing aside Claude de Vulpian’s refusal to dance with a corps de ballet boy, he cast Legris as Jean de Brienne to the étoile’s Raymonda. Remembering everything he had absorbed from Dudinskaya, Shelest, and Fonteyn, Rudolf wanted the nineteen-year-old to learn as much and as soon as he could by partnering une femme d’un certain âge.)