Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  “The Kingdom of the Shades” was inspired by Gustave Doré’s illustrations for Dante’s Paradiso from The Divine Comedy, and even now we can see Doré’s wispy, angelic figures in Petipa’s dance. The pretext is a vision scene, conjured in the mind of the warrior Solor, who loves the beautiful bayadère; when she dies, he takes solace in an opium dream and finds her in an underworld inhabited by the shades of dead women. His dream begins as a single shade, in white tulle and draped in gauzy veils, steps onto an empty and brightly lit stage from the far upper-right corner. In profile, she takes an elegant, forward-reaching arabesque with her leg lifted high behind her, followed by a deep reclining back bend and two steps forward. She repeats the sequence again as another shade emerges from the wings and follows in synchrony, then another, and another. One by one, as if to infinity, a long chain of shades (sixty-four, to be precise, later reduced to thirty-two) wind their way single file across the stage and back, tracing a serpentine path and advancing steadily to make room for the next row. The visual crescendo builds with each repetition until the stage is full and serried ranks of dancers pose in perfect formation.

  It was a spectacular image that could only have been made in St. Petersburg. Petipa’s dance evoked the sense of individual frailty and the fascination with dreams typical of Gautier, Perrot, and others—that single dancer stepping out alone—but he transposed the fleeting Romanticism of wilis and spirits and women in white into a far grander and more formal Russian idiom—not by adding lavish sets and costumes (although he did that too) but by expanding the entire choreographic structure. The steps were French, but their arrangement—amplified through repetition—echoed the vast architectural proportions of the Hermitage and the Peterhof gardens and recalled court balls. Gautier’s description of a polonaise at the Winter Palace comes to mind: in a torchlit procession led by the tsar, courtiers arrayed in strict lines wound their way through the state rooms in a repetitive dance that lasted for hours, “the slightest awkwardness of gesture, the least misstep, the tiniest movement out-of-time … sharply noticed.” In another key, the dance of the shades (like the polonaise itself) also recalled a simple line dance, a folk ritual elevated to a formal court art.23

  La Bayadère was a marker, but it was not until Petipa was nearly seventy, with some forty years’ experience on the Russian stage, that he made his real breakthrough. He might never have done so had events—and the music of Piotr Tchaikovsky—not intervened. In 1881 Alexander II, the last of Russia’s Westernizing, reforming tsars, was assassinated. His son and successor, Alexander III, belonged to an entirely different breed. Uncultivated and sentimental, with a large, muscular build and an awkward appearance, he hated the “endless cotillion” and ceremonial life at court and preferred instead the simple domesticity of his more reclusive suburban residences. He was deeply religious and sympathized with various strains of Slavophile thought. He saw himself as a “true Russian”—naturally soulful and blissfully lacking the false manners and etiquette of the St. Petersburg elite. For the first time in nearly two centuries, Russian and not French became the lingua franca at court, and the tsar turned his sights and sympathies away from St. Petersburg and toward Moscow.24

  The look of Russia changed. Uniforms were redesigned—epaulets and sabers were out, replaced by caftans and jackboots with religious crosses added to flagstaffs. Alexander himself grew a long, bushy beard (and encouraged his soldiers to do likewise), and he lavished support on the Church: dozens of new, seventeenth-century-style churches dotted the countryside, and it is to Alexander that we owe the impressive and garish onion-domed Savior on the Blood Cathedral in St. Petersburg, an aggressively Muscovite addition to the city’s predominantly European architectural landscape. Similarly, for his coronation in Moscow Alexander ordered a ballet, and Petipa—ear to the ground—devised an allegory entitled Night and Day featuring national dances and ending with the performers joined together in a Russian round dance, circling “the most beautiful and stoutest woman, that is, Rus.”25

  In March 1882 Alexander ordered a radical reform of the Imperial Theaters. The problem, as he had come to see it, was their monopoly: for several decades all private theatrical venues had been controlled by the Imperial Theaters and were required to relinquish to them a substantial portion of their earnings. There had been complaints about the perceived injustice of this system before, but that year Alexander had been especially impressed by a scathing critique written by the playwright Alexander Ostrovsky. The Imperial Theaters, Ostrovsky argued, served the court and (in Moscow) the rich merchants who were “too European in dress, habits and customs,” thus leaving the public bereft of the indigenous “elegant spectacles” and theater they so craved. The balance, he said, was unfairly tipped toward Western forms, and he called for a new people’s theater that would be “national, all-Russian.” Alexander scrawled his enthusiastic approval in the margins of the text and followed through with a decree abruptly ending the monopoly.26

  His closest advisors were alarmed. Control of theatrical life was intrinsic to the autocratic system, and they worried that these new freedoms might enflame dangerous passions that could then be turned to radical political purpose. (When Parisian theaters were “freed” in 1791, hadn’t they turned into hotbeds of revolutionary thinking?) But this was to miss the point: Alexander’s reforms were no liberalizing gesture. To the contrary, they were conservative and nationalist, a deliberate attempt to redirect culture away from Europe and onto a stronger and more self-consciously Russian path, embodied in the tsar’s person and rule. They were a defense of autocracy, in the name of the people. That said—and here his critics were right—this kind of nationalist thinking also had an inherently radical potential: “the people” might end up undermining the autocratic system the tsar claimed to uphold on their behalf.

  The consequences of Alexander’s reforms for ballet were far-reaching. At the Maryinsky, salaries for Russian dancers rose dramatically (thus closing the gap with the higher fees customarily paid to foreigners) but ticket prices doubled, putting even the cheapest seats out of range for working people. Meanwhile, theatrical activity at the suburban edges of the city exploded. If anything, the reforms thus accentuated the gap between “high” Imperial culture and the “low” popular and fairground traditions. A real effort was nonetheless made to redress the perceived imbalance between Eastern and Western influences at the Imperial Theaters: a committee was formed to review repertory, and more Russian composers, most notably Piotr Tchaikovsky, were hired to collaborate on new works. Most important of all, Alexander appointed Ivan Vsevolozhsky (1835–1909) to the directorship of the theaters.

  At first glance, Vsevolozhsky seems an unlikely choice. A cultivated aristocrat and ardent Francophile, intelligent and with a keen sense of humor, he had worked at the Russian consulate in The Hague and in Paris and his tastes were distinctly European. His small office in the Winter Palace was crammed with paintings and sculptures from French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch masters. “Everything around Vsevolozhsky,” the Ballets Russes artist Alexander Benois later recalled, “breathed that high-born taste, that parfait goût” of the French eighteenth century. Even his bows “were marked by a special elegance and even complexity,” and to him “dance was not something frivolous or absurd” but a necessary and supremely cultivated art.27

  Yet Vsevolozhsky was also a strong advocate of Russian art. This did not mean that he sent Petipa “to the people” to create folk dances or make ballets drawn on Russian tales. Instead, he pried the ballet master away from Minkus and the predictable rhythms of made-to-order ballet music and pushed him toward the far more complex and Russian voices of Tchaikovsky and (later) Alexander Glazunov. Tchaikovsky, whose prominence in Russian musical life was by then well established, shared Vsevolozhsky’s interest in ballet and was a willing collaborator. When he was a child his mother had taken him to see Giselle with Carlotta Grisi in the title role, and as a young man he had attended the theater frequently. His brother, Modest, lat
er recalled how Tchaikovsky enjoyed demonstrating the proper balletic form, teasing Modest by likening him to the undistinguished Russian ballerina Savrenskaya—and himself to the elegant Amalia Ferraris “because of the fluidity and classicism of his movements.”28

  In 1888 Vsevolozhsky proposed a new ballet: The Sleeping Beauty. He wrote to Tchaikovsky: “I thought I would write a libretto to Perrault’s La belle au bois dormant [The Sleeping Beauty]. I want to do the mise-en-scène in Louis XIV style,” and he went on to suggest that Tchaikovsky might consider “melodies in the spirit of Lully, Bach, Rameau …” Responding in French, Tchaikovsky enthusiastically agreed. Indeed, this was not his first ballet, but it was his first, and only, sustained collaboration with Petipa and Vsevolozhsky. And it was a genuine and engaged collaboration: Vsevolozhsky and Tchaikovsky’s graceful and beautifully mannered correspondence reveals the respect and warmth they felt for each other, and the three men met frequently to exchange ideas (always in French). Tchaikovsky also often appeared at Petipa’s home (the ballet master’s daughter later recalled the excitement of these visits) and played what he had written on the piano while Petipa shifted his papier-mâché figurines around a large round table.29

  Today, we like to think of The Sleeping Beauty as an elevated artistic landmark, but at the time of its premiere in 1890 many critics and observers saw it as a sellout to low popular taste. They were not entirely wrong. As a consequence of Alexander III’s theatrical reforms and the explosion of popular musical theaters in and around the city, audiences were treated to a whole new array of performances—not just Russian fare, but lavish mime and dance spectacles mounted by Italians with (as one critic complained) “masses” of performers and fantastic effects. These were Manzotti’s Excelsior dancers, and the spectacles were known as ballets-féeries for their fairy-tale magic and emphasis on the merveilleuse. In 1885 Virginia Zucchi set the trend when she danced at the Sans Souci in St. Petersburg in a lavish six-hour-long féerie entitled An Extraordinary Journey to the Moon (after Jules Verne), which had already had successful runs at music halls in Paris, London, and Moscow. Shortly thereafter, the Italian dancer and mime Enrico Cecchetti mounted his abridged version of Excelsior, which played for over two years in the Russian capital.

  This “Italian invasion” touched a sensitive political nerve. The suburban theaters catered to a burgeoning urban populace created by industrialization and the movement of peasants and workers, fleeing crushing rural poverty, into towns and cities. Ostrovsky enthusiastically welcomed the change and saw the ballet-féerie as an “appealing” people’s art that might “replace” outmoded court ballets with a more modern and accessible form. Others, however, were mortified and complained that the féerie represented a decadent and democratizing Western culture. It was nothing more than “ballet as circus” and its performers moved like “machines” with “steel points” and “sharp” gestures. Their flexibility, one critic bristled, was an affront to “correctness and beauty of line” and unfit for a “self-respecting stage.”30

  Partly this was a matter of technique. As we have seen, Italian dancers had developed an arsenal of remarkable stunts such as multiple turns and extended balances on pointe, whereas dancers at the Imperial Theaters still favored the softer and more fleeting movements of the French Romantic school. One Russian dancer later recalled his shock at seeing the new Italian style: Russian men, he noted, generally confined themselves to a restrained three or four pirouettes, whereas the Italians brashly spun out eight or nine. More alarming still, the Italians seemed to throw themselves from step to step with anarchic abandon. Their school, one critic glumly concluded, represented “a confused nihilism in choreography.” Tchaikovsky, Vsevolozhsky, and Petipa stood firmly with the skeptics: Tchaikovsky had seen Excelsior in Naples and thought its subject “inexpressibly stupid,” and Petipa and the “old titans” (as they were referred to) at the Imperial Theaters, including Vsevolozhsky, were equally unimpressed. One dancer recalled seeing Petipa at a féerie slumped in the stalls with his head hung in despair.31

  Yet The Sleeping Beauty was itself a ballet-féerie—not a “sellout” but an astute artistic counterattack designed to beat the Italians at their own game while at the same time affirming the aristocratic heritage of the Russian ballet. It marked a sharp departure from the exotic and Romantic ballets of the past and had none of the charming village boys or ghostly, spirit-like ballerinas coveted on the St. Petersburg ballet stage. Nor was Beauty a slavish reprise of Perrault’s fairy tale, for although Perrault had originally written it as a tribute to Louis XIV’s “modern” France, it was Vsevolozhsky who introduced the lavish grand siècle setting. The ballet opens in the sixteenth century with the birth of a young princess who is cursed by an evil fairy and condemned to death upon her coming of age. The good (Lilac) fairy, however, softens the sentence and when the princess pricks her finger on a spindle the entire French court falls into a deep sleep, only to be awakened one hundred years later to the glorious reign of the Sun King. As a story, it was thin (one disgruntled critic complained, “They dance, they fall asleep, they dance again”), but that was the point: The Sleeping Beauty was not a narrative pantomime ballet in the old sense at all. It was about the court and its formal ceremonies—a royal birth and coming of age, a wedding and celebration. It was a sympathetic ritual reenactment of the courtly principles of classical ballet and Imperial Russia alike.32

  Petipa took seriously the seventeenth-century setting: he studied pictures of the Sun King and made careful notes about Apollo and the “fairies with long trains, as drawn on the ceilings of Versailles.” He read about old court dances and pored over Perrault’s works, carefully cutting out and saving illustrations. Vsevolozhsky spared no cost in the sets and costumes (the ballet absorbed more than a quarter of the 1890 annual production budget for the Imperial Theaters) and brightly colored silk, velvet, gold and silver embroidery, brocade, furs, and plumes were all in abundant display, giving the production a vibrant, candy-coated appeal. This impressive pomp and pageantry was never stuffy or bombastic, and the ballet had many entertaining fairy-tale characters drawn from other Perrault stories, such as Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, and Puss-in-Boots, whose whimsical dances lightened the last act. The apotheosis, however, struck a high note: against a backdrop of Versailles with terraces, fountains, and the grande pièce d’eau, audiences were given a vision of “Apollo in the costume of Louis XIV lit by the sun and surrounded by fairies.” The ballet ended triumphantly with a musical quotation from the French popular tune celebrating an earlier French king, “Vive Henri IV!”33

  Just as the fairies in the prologue endowed the baby princess with gifts of beauty, wit, grace, dance, song, and music, so The Sleeping Beauty civilized and refined the ballet-féerie, bringing it up to meet the elevated standards of a classical art. Tchaikovsky’s music set the tone, and its sophisticated, graceful classicism and eloquent Russian sweep presented Petipa with unprecedented choreographic challenges. Many critics found the music too operatic, and the dancers complained bitterly that it was difficult to move to. Accustomed to the predicable rhythms and simple, programmatic structure of Pugni and Minkus, Petipa pressed himself—and his dancers—to find newly suitable movements. Ironically, when searching for material he drew precisely on the Italian techniques he had so lamented. Indeed, the title role was performed by the Milanese dancer Carlotta Brianza (a veteran Excelsior performer), and Enrico Cecchetti was cast as the evil fairy Carabosse and in the difficult Bluebird Variation.

  Petipa, however, did more than just repeat the tricks he learned from these Italians. He had a concrete, technical mind—he was interested in the mechanics of the steps and readily grasped the Italian innovations, particularly in pointe work—but he also had a deep appreciation of the architecture and physics of ballet, and he knew, or learned, how to refine and discipline their bombast and enthusiasm to give them a depth and dimension they lacked hitherto. In the Rose Adagio, for example, in which the princess is courted by four
princes hoping to win her hand in marriage, the ballerina must balance on one leg as each of her suitors takes her hand and then leaves her to make way for the next. This kind of balance, in which the ballerina is left standing perilously alone on a single pointe, was a typical Italian stunt. But Petipa transformed it into a poetic metaphor. Sustained by the lyricism of Tchaikovsky’s music, the ballerina’s balance represents her independence and strength of character: it was no longer a trick but a test of free will.

  So it was with the charming solo dances for each of the six fairies in the ballet’s prologue. These dances are all perfectly constructed models of classical principles. Again, Petipa did not shy away from virtuosity—the dances are full of difficult jumps on pointe, multiple turns, and fast footwork—but he tamed these bravura steps, ordered them, and pinned them into elegant, architectonic, and musically disciplined phrases. They look like scintillating aphorisms, the dance equivalent of La Bruyère’s sharp-tongued maxims or the conversational wit of les précieuses. Each dance works on many levels: it traces a symmetrical path across the floor (recalling Feuillet) with clear lines and sharp diagonals, for example, and these same lines and diagonals are then reflected and reproduced in the geometry of the steps themselves. But it was not just the construction of the dances that was so impressive; it was the way that dancers moved to Tchaikovsky’s music. It is difficult today to imagine just how different these dances must have been to perform. Tchaikovsky’s music brought out a whole new range and tone color in the human body, a nuance and subtlety that Minkus or Pugni could never inspire.