Proud Tower

by Barbara Tuchman

  By April, 1910, the full score of Act II was already at the printer before Strauss had received the libretto for Act III. Its situations contrived for the Baron’s embarrassment turned out to have been adapted by von Hofmannsthal from The Merry Wives of Windsor, with the difference that, unlike Falstaff, Ochs remained unrelievedly unlikable. By the end of summer the opera was finished and on January 26, 1911, two years after Elektra, Rosenkavalier had its premier at Dresden. It was rarely to be off the opera stage thereafter. Composer and librettist endowed it with all the shimmer of super-civilized Vienna. It glistened like the silver rose that was its symbol. All Strauss’s skill, resourcefulness and audacity—and his duality—were in the score. His highest gift of musical expressiveness could convey the bustle of an Eighteenth-Century levee, the delicious discovery of young love, the comic terror of the duel, the sweet sadness of the Marschallin’s renunciation, and at the same time be used for coarse jokes and bottom-pinching humor. He gave the world a silver rose, beautiful, glittering and tarnished.

  In 1911 Strauss was at the peak of the musical world, the most famous composer alive, “one of those,” wrote a biographer of musicians, Richard Specht, “without whom we can no longer imagine our spiritual life.” Although he and Hofmannsthal set to work at once on another opera, Ariadne auf Naxos, Strauss had reached his own peak and the palm was already passing.

  In 1908 in Paris the Russian Ballet company of Sergei Diaghilev burst like a gorgeous tropical bird upon the Western world. Its season was a triumph of wild throbbing exotic splendor, another “flash of lightning out of the North.” Instead of the tired routines of classical ballet it brought fresh excellence of music by contemporary Russian composers, new librettos, imaginative choreography and brilliant modern stage design, all assembled like a bed of jewels to set off a blaze of dancing that was virile and superb. The male dancer was the star, no longer a mere porteur to lift the ballerina, but a wind who brought vitality and zest sweeping onto the stage. Above all the rest was one, Vaslav Nijinsky. When he appeared with an astonishing leap into the air and seemed almost to pause there, people felt the excitement of perfection and knew they were seeing the greatest ballon dancer who ever lived. He was an angel, a genius, an Apollo of motion. He took possession of all hearts. The whole ensemble took Paris by storm. Devotees predicted the downfall of opera. “It was as if,” wrote the Comtesse de Noailles, “something new had been added to the creation of the world on its seventh day.”

  New movements in the arts were erupting everywhere. At the Salon d’Automne in 1905 and 1906 the Fauves (Wild Beasts) led by Matisse exhibited in riotous color and distorted line their credo of painting independent of nature. In 1907–8 Picasso and Braque, discovering essential reality in geometrical forms, created Cubism. In its terms Léger celebrated the machine and a train of other artists followed. In Germany the new idea broke out in a school of Expressionists who searched for emotional impact through exaggeration or distortion of nature. Two Americans broke old molds: Frank Lloyd Wright at home and Isadora Duncan, who, touring Europe in the years 1904–8, introduced emotion into the dance. Rodin, speaking for his own métier but voicing a new goal for all the arts, had already said, “Classical sculpture sought the logic of the human body; I seek its psychology.” Seeking it too, Marcel Proust in 1906 shut himself up in a cork-lined room to embark upon Remembrance of Things Past. Thomas Mann took up the search in Death in Venice. In Bloomsbury, Lytton Strachey prepared a new kind of biography. The Moscow Art Theatre demonstrated a new kind of acting. The Irish Renaissance flowered in Yeats and in J. M. Synge, who in Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World proved himself the only writer since Shakespeare to produce an equally fine tragedy and comedy. The time vibrated with a search for new forms and new realms. When on July 25, 1909, Blériot flew the Channel, confirming what the Wrights had begun, he seemed to mark a wiping out of frontiers, and everyone in Europe felt in his triumph “a soaring of feelings no less wonderful than that of the planes.”

  All the fever and fecundity of the hour seemed captured by the Russian Ballet. That it should come out of Imperial Russia, considered at once barbaric and decrepit, was as surprising as had been the summons to disarmament by the Czar. A great interest in things Russian aroused by the Franco-Russian Alliance and the Exposition of 1900 had inspired the enterprising Diaghilev to bring an exhibition of Russian art to Paris in 1906. Paintings and sculpture, ikons, priestly brocades and the jeweled marvels of Fabergé lent by the Imperial and private collections and by museums filled twelve rooms under the patronage of the Grand Duke Vladimir, Ambassador Izvolsky of Russia and Mme Greffulhe. The next year Diaghilev brought Russian music in a series of dazzling concerts with Rimsky-Korsakov conducting his own work, Rachmaninoff playing his own piano concerto, Josef Hofmann playing a concerto by Scriabine, and the magnificent basso Chaliapin singing excerpts from Borodin’s Prince Igor and Moussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. Building on the enthusiastic welcome, Diaghilev planned a greater triumph in a season of ballet and Russian opera. The Imperial Russian Ballet lent its leading artists, Anna Pavlova, Nijinsky, Adolph Bolm and Tamara Karsavina, with Michel Fokine as choreographer. For stage design and costumes, Diaghilev obtained the gorgeous and barbaric talent of Léon Bakst, supplermented by outstanding painters, Soudeikine, Roerich, Alexandre Benois and others. The sensation of the first season was Cleopatra, whose music was a melange from at least five Russian composers. Russian themes mingled with Egyptian and Persian and even the original sorceress of the Nile could not have matched the ravishing beauty and figure of Ida Rubinstein borne on a palanquin surrounded by a whirling bacchanal of veils and rose leaves arranged to conceal the fact that as a dancer she was as yet barely trained. Paris found her almost “too beautiful, like strong perfume.”

  Every year for the next six years the Ballet returned with new and exuberant productions which revolutionized choreography and stage design. Music was dignified by a full orchestra, with Pierre Monteux engaged as conductor. Additional operas—Moussorgsky’s Khovantschina, Rimsky’s Sadko and Ivan the Terrible—besides Prince Igor and Boris Godunov, were added to the repertoire. Pavlova later left the company, but in 1909 in Les Sylphides she seemed to dancing “what Racine is to poetry,” while Karsavina was “the exquisite union of classic tradition and revolutionary artistry.” For the music of this ballet two of Chopin’s piano compositions, Nocturne and Valse Brillante, were orchestrated by a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, Igor Stravinsky, then twenty-six, whom Diaghilev had commissioned after hearing his first performed orchestral work in St. Petersburg in 1908. In contrast to the classical delicacy of Sylphides, Fokine staged the savage Polovtsian dances from Prince Igor with Tartar-Mongol themes echoing in the music and a wild Asiatic horde of dancers against a scene in dull grays and reds, of low round-topped tents and rising columns of smoke stretching toward the infinite horizon of the steppe.

  Emotion long absent from the ballet was infused by the voluptuous physical spectacles and intoxicating colors of Bakst. Houris of the Sultan’s harem from the Arabian Nights, bacchantes from a Greek vase, Russian boyars in boots, harlequins and colombines of the Commedia dell’Arte, forest creatures in maroon, green and gold suggesting “the sparkling beauty of spotted pythons,” tennis-players in modern dress took over the stage. Bakst inspired Paul Poiret and five years of women’s fashions. When planning Rimsky-Korsakov’s Schéhérazade with his associates, the red-haired Bakst in his elegant and scented clothes jumped on a chair and explained, in his guttural accent with explicit gestures, how the Sultan’s bodyguard should cut everyone to pieces: “everyone, his wives and all their Negro lovers!” For Schéhérazade he designed a setting to suggest “dreadful deeds of lust and cruelty” which Fokine interpreted enthusiastically in a dance of Negro slaves whom the Sultan’s wives persuade the eunuchs to liberate from their golden cages and who fling themselves upon the willing harem in an orgiastic dance of “spasms of desire.” The sexual theme was a favorite of the Ballet. For Thamar, the Cauca
sian queen, a Cleopatra à la russe, Bakst designed a medieval castle above a river into whose waters rejected lovers fell to their doom. In her various roles as temptress the delicate and flower-like Karsavina conveyed vice, as the critics said, “with a great deal of verisimilitude.”

  When Rimsky died in 1908 Stravinsky composed a Chant Funèbre for a memorial concert in St. Petersburg. More than ever impressed, Diaghilev asked him to write the music for a ballet based on the Russian fairy tale of Prince Ivan and the Firebird. Set in a wood with a wicked wizard and twelve princesses under a spell, it evoked from the composer an imaginative score of mixed rhythms, graceful melody and a weird electric dance of demons. With Bolm as the Prince and Karsavina as the Firebird, it was performed in June, 1910, the first work of Stravinsky in his own right to be heard outside of Russia. Debussy rushed backstage to embrace him. The audience was delighted to appreciate music that was contemporary without being uncomfortable and Diaghilev was congratulated on every hand. He at once commissioned another ballet for the following season. When Stravinsky played for him a piece for piano and orchestra which he had already written on the adventures of Petrouchka, “the immortal and unhappy puppet, hero of every fair in every country,” Diaghilev was enchanted. Together they worked out the scenes of the ballet, the carnival in the public square, the crowds and booths, the magician with his tricks, the gypsies and trained bear, the puppet show whose dolls come to life, the vain love of Petrouchka for the Dancer and his death at the hands of his rival, the Moor.

  Petrouchka was music of power and vitality, close to the Russian people, with folk tunes and echoes of the hurdy-gurdy, humor and satire and poignant grief. Like Strauss, Stravinsky scorned development of themes but in a tradition he had inherited from the Russian “Five” rather than from Germany. Almost contrary to the nature of music, which traditionally depended on development and repetition, Stravinsky was terse and direct, aiming, as he said, “at straightforward expression in its simplest form. I have no use for ‘working-out’ in dramatic music. The one essential thing is to feel and convey one’s feelings.”

  In this Petrouchka succeeded and Paris acknowledged what Debussy’s embrace had already recognized: the appearance of an original and major composer. Nijinsky as the puppet broke the audience’s heart. Thrown by his master into a black box, rushing about waving his stiff arms in the air, pathetic in love and frantic in jealousy, his performance was a triumph just in time for the London season.

  England greeted the Russian Ballet with a fervor equal to France. In the brilliant Coronation summer of 1911 “it was exciting to be alive.” The heat broke records, festivities were at a peak, airplanes landed on country lawns, everybody was stimulated by the thrill of flight but the Russian Ballet “crowned all.” It restored the dance to its “primal nobility,” wrote Ellen Terry. It was a revelation in the harmony of the arts. Society, intellectuals, everyone with any pretensions to taste, flocked to Covent Garden “night after night, entranced.” Nijinsky enraptured all who came: as the uncouth puppet, as the Negro slave in silver trousers of Schéhérazade, as Pierrot in a candle-lit garden chasing dancers dressed as butterflies to music by Schumann, as the Blue God rising from a lotus in a Chinese pool to music by Proust’s friend Reynaldo Hahn, as the ghost of a rose in a costume of petals, flying out of a window in a famous leap that made people say his element was the air. Speaking no English and hardly any French, he became the darling of the dinner parties, speechless but smiling.

  Impelled by triumph, like Strauss, to try for new sensation, Diaghilev in the season of 1912 succeeded in shocking Paris. He produced two new ballets by French composers. Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, written for the occasion, was acknowledged by Stravinsky “one of the finest things by a French composer.” Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune, whose music was already known, was a scandal for non-musical reasons. Nijinsky was the Faun in skin-fitting tights painted in animal spots, with a tiny tail, a wig of tight curls made of gold cord, and two little curling horns. In a ballet lasting twelve minutes he chased nymphs in Greek gowns and, as the last escaped him, leaving behind her veil, fell upon it in a movement of sexual consummation. The choreography in this case was Nijinsky’s own. The curtain fell upon hoots, whistles, and insults mixed with cries of “épatant!” and “Bis, bis!” Obliging, the company danced the ballet over again to “indescribable chaos.” Next morning Gaston Calmette, the editor of Figaro, published a signed editorial on his front page under the title “Un Faux Pas” denouncing “the extraordinary exhibition of erotic bestiality and shameless gesture” and demanding its suppression in subsequent performances. Agreeing, if less excitedly, Le Gaulois found the final gesture “de trop,” while Le Temps with customary dignity expressed the “justified discontent” of the French people at this “regrettable adventure.” A report quickly circulated that the Prefect of Police at Calmette’s request had issued an injunction against further performance. In clubs, salons, cafés and lobbies of the Chamber no one talked of anything else; Paris momentarily was again in two camps. The excitable Russian Ambassador, M. Izvolsky, wanted to know if Figaro was attacking the Franco-Russian Alliance. Next day Le Matin published a letter from Rodin defending Nijinsky for restoring “freedom of instinct and human emotion” to the dance. The controversy transferred itself to Rodin, whose supporters issued a manifesto in which Jules Lemaître and Maurice Barrès were now on the same side as Anatole France and Octave Mirbeau along with ex-President Loubet, former premiers Clemenceau, Léon Bourgeois and Briand, Ambassador Izvolsky and Baron d’Estournelles. Forain, unreconstructed, published in Figaro an anti-Rodin cartoon. With every ticket for the second performance sold at a premium, the offending gesture was suppressed, leaving the Faun merely gazing on the veil with doleful regret.

  In Vienna that season, where owing to a current Balkan War the mood was anti-Slav, a fiasco was barely averted. At rehearsals the orchestra of the Viennese Royal Opera, which could play anything put before it with accomplished ease, played the Russian music with ostentatious disapproval and deliberate mistakes. Monteux was helpless and when the enraged Diaghilev commented out loud on the behavior of these “pigs,” the musicians downed their instruments and left the stage. Only by extracting an apology from Diaghilev next day was the crisis resolved. In Berlin the Kaiser attended a performance of Cleopatra and Firebird. Preferring the former, he summoned Diaghilev and told him he would send his Egyptologists to see it, apparently under the impression that Bakst’s fantastic decor was authentic and the Russian potpourri a revelation of the real music of Ptolemaic Egypt.

  Strauss too came to the performance and afterward complimented Stravinsky, adding a characteristic piece of advice. Referring to the muted mysterious opening of Firebird, where the Prince rides into the enchanted wood, he said, “You make a mistake in beginning your piece pianissimo; the public will not listen. You should astonish them by a sudden crash at the start. After that they will follow you and you can do what you like.”

  To capture Strauss for the Ballet was an obvious next task, and the Ballet’s prestige in turn had already interested von Hofmannsthal, who opened negotiations. After obtaining Diaghilev’s financial terms, he suggested to Strauss a ballet on Orestes and the Furies with Nijinsky portraying the hero’s “terrible deed and terrible suffering” and the Furies “bursting forth horribly and triumphantly” in a dance of destruction at the end. It was hardly a fresh idea but Hofmannsthal wrote temptingly that it would provide the occasion for “wonderful, somber, grandiose music.… Think it over and please don’t refuse.” He enclosed a note of the terms which Diaghilev “takes the liberty of submitting to you.” When Strauss promptly rejected the idea, Hofmannsthal hurriedly offered instead a libretto for a ballet based on Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife which he had already written in collaboration with Count Harry Kessler, a German litterateur, amateur in politics and patron of the arts who like other Germans of liberal ideas had no place in official life. Applying pressure to Strauss, Hofmannsthal wrote that
if he refused, Diaghilev—who liked the libretto—would commission a Russian or French composer. This worked. “Joseph is excellent,” Strauss replied. “I’ll bite. Have already started sketching it out.”

  Trouble soon developed. The libretto as conceived by its two sophisticated authors was a metaphysical version of the story of the Baptist and Salome, with Joseph as a God-seeker “whose secret is that of growth and transmutation, whose holiness is that of creating and begetting, whose perfection is that of things which have not yet been.” He is confronted by a sensual woman who is ruined “by perception of the divine which she cannot conquer.” These were not the most suitable ideas to express in music, much less the dance. Squirming, Strauss complained, “The chaste Joseph isn’t at all up my street and if a thing bores me I find it difficult to set to music.” He complained that Joseph in the ballet did nothing but resist the Queen’s advances; “this God-seeker is going to be a hell of an effort.” Hofmannsthal explained carefully that Joseph’s resistance was “the struggle of man’s intensified intellectuality” against woman’s urge to drag him down, a clarification which did little to relieve Strauss’s boredom with his task. His first sketches, which he played for Hofmannsthal in December, 1912, left his collaborator “disturbed” and conscious that “there is something wrong between the two of us which in the end will have to be brought into the open.” For the time being he implored Strauss not to feel constrained by the demands of the dance but to write “unrestrained pure Strauss” expressing his own personality “with every conceivable freedom in polyphony and modernism in a manner as bold and bizarre as you may wish.” Joseph remained chaste, however, and Strauss uninspired. In the meantime Diaghilev had another premiere ready for the season of 1913.