Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  And so it was. The ballet was performed only eight times—ever—and the choreography was then forgotten, but pictures and notes show just how disarmingly unballetic it was: hunched figures shuffled, stomped, and turned their feet into awkward, pigeon-toed poses with arms curled and heads askew. The movements were jerky and angular, with dancers gathered in clumps, bent, quivering and huddled, or circling furiously in traditional round dances and then compulsively thrust from the ring or thrown into wild jumping motions. Nijinsky devised uncomfortably uncoordinated movements in which the arms moved in one rhythm and the legs in another, and one dancer recalled leaps that crashed deliberately onto flat feet, jarring “every organ in us.”30

  Stravinsky’s score posed daunting challenges. Nijinsky’s only other ballets—Faune and the less successful Jeux (about sports and leisure, premiered in Paris just two weeks before Sacre)—had both been created to music by Debussy. But Sacre had none of the oceanic calm or expansiveness of Faune, and Nijinsky struggled to make sense of Stravinsky’s strange new sounds and complicated rhythmic and tonal structure. Even the rehearsal pianist couldn’t get it right: on one occasion Stravinsky impatiently pushed him aside and took over, playing twice as fast, shouting, singing, stamping his feet, and banging out rhythms with his fists to convey the sheer percussive energy and volume of the music (the dancers would not hear the fully orchestrated music until the final stage rehearsals). In an effort to help, Diaghilev hired the young Polish dancer Marie Rambert (born Cyvia Rambam), a specialist in the Dalcroze method of Eurythmic dancing, to assist Nijinsky and rehearse the performers.* She and Nijinsky spoke Polish together, and she was sympathetic to his radical approach to movement. But nothing seemed to work: the dancers found the score disconcertingly opaque and almost impossible to count, and they hated Nijinsky’s intricate steps and stylized movements. In the end, however, their resistance may have served the ballet well: forced submission to the logic of the music and movements was exactly the point.

  Le Sacre du Printemps was not a ballet in any traditional sense of the word. There was no easy narrative development or room for individual self-expression, and no conventional theatrical landmarks by which to gauge the action. The ballet worked instead by repetition, accumulation, and an almost cinematographic montage: static scenes and images juxtaposed and driven forward by a ritual and musical rather than strictly narrative logic. There were stomping tribal dances and a stylized rape, the ceremonial abduction of the chosen maiden, and a solemn procession led by a white-bearded high priest that culminated in the girl’s agonizing dance of death. At the end, when the virgin collapsed dead to the floor and six men raised her limp body high above their heads, there was no cathartic outpouring of despair, sadness, or anger, only a chilling resignation.

  It is difficult to convey today just how radical Sacre was at the time. The distance separating Nijinsky from Petipa and Fokine was immense; even Faune was tame by comparison. For if Faune represented a studied retreat into narcissism, Sacre signaled the death of the individual. It was a bleak and intense celebration of the collective will. Everything was laid bare: beauty and polished technique were nowhere to be seen, and Nijinsky’s choreography made the dancers halt midstream, pull back, and redirect or change course, breaking their movement and momentum as if to release pent-up energies. Control and skill, order, reason, and ceremony, however, were not set aside. Nijinsky’s ballet was never wild or discursive: it was a coldly rational depiction of a primitive and irrationally charged world.

  It was also a defining moment in the history of ballet. Even at its most rebellious moments in the past, ballet had always had an underlying nobility: it cleaved to anatomical clarity and high ideals. Not so with Sacre. Nijinsky modernized ballet by making it ugly and opaque: “I am accused,” he boasted, “of a crime against grace.” Stravinsky admired him for it: the composer wrote to a friend that the choreography was “as I wanted it,” although he added, “One must wait a long time before the public becomes accustomed to our language.” This was exactly the point: Sacre was both difficult and genuinely new. Nijinsky had thrown the full weight of his talent into breaking with the past, and the feverishness with which he (like Stravinsky) worked was an indication of his fierce ambition to invent a whole new dance language. This is what drove him, and it made Sacre the first truly modern ballet.31

  What the French thought of the Ballets Russes was another story. And it was the French that mattered, for although the Ballets Russes performed across continental Europe and in Britain (and eventually the Americas), no city was more important to its success than Paris. It was Paris that embraced the company and elevated ballet—Russian ballet—to the apex of modernism in art. The way had been well prepared. The rapprochement between Russia and France culminating in the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894 and the Triple Entente (with Britain) in 1907 had sparked renewed interest in Russian culture and art. Parisians bought up billfolds picturing the river Neva, portraits of the tsar and tsarina, and matchboxes stamped with Russian scenes; Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were widely read and discussed. In 1900 Paris had hosted an exhibition of Russian arts and crafts, including a model Russian village designed by Korovin and built, Talashkino-style, with Russian peasant hands. And as we have seen, Diaghilev’s own art exhibition and performances of Russian opera followed. But it was not only the Russians who gave the East its renewed sheen. The glamorously exotic dancer and courtesan Mata Hari (who was Dutch) made her Parisian debut in 1905, and the American dancer Ruth St. Denis arrived the following year with her pseudo-Indian and oriental choreographies. In a different but related key, Isadora Duncan arrived in the capital in 1900, and her free-form dances became the height of Parisian chic. The stage had been set for the Ballets Russes.

  Who paid for them to come? The Russian state initially helped quite a lot: costumes, sets, dances, and music were courtesy of the tsar’s Imperial Theaters. But this arrangement did not last and Diaghilev, who had few resources of his own and diminishing support from the Russian court, was increasingly thrown into the marketplace. Ballet may have been less costly than opera, but it was still a daunting undertaking, and without the support of a wealthy state the odds of sustaining such a costly enterprise were slim. Thus in spite of the Ballets Russes’ critical success, Diaghilev’s early ballet seasons often left the impresario broke: at one point the sets and costumes even had to be hawked to a competitor to settle the debt. And so Diaghilev worked hard, very hard, to win the support of the local French (and European) elite: he charmed, cajoled, and connived, twisted arms, and played one party off another, telegrams flying, to hold the far-flung finances of his enterprise together.

  Diaghilev courted prominent diplomats, government officials, and bankers, and worked closely with the maverick Parisian impresario Gabriel Astruc, who built the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (where Faune had its premiere) and who counted Rothschilds, Vanderbilts, and Morgans among his patrons. But above all, he fit in with the French aristocracy and was taken up by prominent salonnières: the elegant Comtesse Greffuhle (a model for Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes) and Princesse Edmond de Polignac (an American sewing-machine heiress who had married into the French aristocracy) were loyal friends and supporters; so was Misia Edwards, a Pole born in Russia, raised in Paris, and married first to a newspaper magnate and later to the Spanish artist José Maria Sert. Leaders in taste and fashion, these women, and others like them, gave the Ballets Russes a coveted high-society cachet. Designers were quick to follow their lead: the couturier Paul Poiret took up the Ballets Russes look in exotic and flowing fashions that challenged the old corseted styles, and the young Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel became a close friend to Diaghilev and would herself also design ballet costumes.

  What really established the Ballets Russes, however, was not social connections or commercial interests but the artistic climate in the French capital. Over the previous thirty years, Parisian confidence had been shaken by a series of unnerving events, beginning with the city’s defeat at the han
ds of the Prussians in 1870–71 and the subsequent violent revolutionary upheaval of the Commune. War scares, anarchist bombings, and the bitter feuds unleashed by the Dreyfus Affair further intensified anxieties. A dwindling birthrate, moreover, along with periodic economic depressions, were seen by many as signs of atrophy and decline. In culture and art, the confident positivism of the mid-nineteenth century gave way to a fascination with decadence and the irrational.

  Everywhere, appearances no longer seemed a reliable guide to reality. Even science said so: hitherto commonly held assumptions about truth and the immutable laws of nature were undermined by the discovery of X-rays and radioactivity, which proved the existence of hidden and invisible forces hitherto relegated to the imagination. Einstein’s early revelations of possible new dimensions in space and time and a distinct atomic world governed by its own physical laws had a similarly jarring and expansive effect and seemed to consign the old Newtonian certainties to the past. Equally unsettling were Freud’s exacting descriptions of the secret and irrational workings of the subconscious mind: dreams, sex, and dark psychological realities undermined traditional views of human behavior and motivation.

  French artists registered these broader cultural upheavals, and created their own. In literature, Marcel Proust (a Ballets Russes devotee) found a way to document what he once called the “shifting and confused gusts of memory.” Music found a correlative in Debussy’s Impressionistic sound, with its new and constantly shifting tonalities, and in subsequent innovations by composers such as Ravel, Poulenc, and Satie—all of whom would work with Diaghilev. The musical links with Russia were long-standing: Debussy had visited Russia in 1881 and admired Glinka and Mussorgsky, and he and Ravel both followed and drew from Rimsky-Korsakov. The emerging art of cinema drew on similar undercurrents and seemed to exemplify the era: here was a machine-age “magic” that promised to show dreams and illuminate heretofore secret and unseen dimensions of human experience. The parallel with the Ballets Russes was direct and irresistible, leading one observer to dub the company the “cinematograph of the rich.”32

  But it was developments in painting and art that mattered most for dance. The years preceding the arrival of the Ballets Russes saw a growing interest in “primitive” African art and masks, which seemed to embody elemental truths long abandoned by the “civilized” West. In 1907 Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon launched Cubism. The painting’s vulgar subject (his models were prostitutes), fractured and multiple perspectives, and raw energy shocked just about everyone. (Braque said it made him feel sick, as if he had swallowed petrol.) In a different key, the following year Henri Matisse showed Harmony in Red: flat and decorative, it “sang, no screamed color and radiated light” and seemed to more than one observer “new and ruthless in its unbridled freedom.” Two years later, the artist completed Dance and Music, huge, Dionysian works painted on eight-by-twelve-foot panels. He was not alone in his fascination with dancers: Picasso and André Derain (among others) would also attempt to express the rhythm and physicality of dancers in motion. Matisse’s early dancers and musicians, however, created an uproar in Paris: at the opening people jeered and critics called the paintings bestial and grotesque, a “caveman” art.33

  The Russians knew otherwise. In a sign of the converging of taste in French and Russian art, all three Matisse paintings were purchased by the Moscow-based merchant collector Sergei Shchukin, who already had more than a dozen Gauguins hanging in his dining room and would become an important patron of Picasso. Shchukin’s fortune came from importing oriental textiles and his eye was accustomed to the patterns and bright colors of the East. When Matisse visited Moscow, he was astonished by Russian folk art and religious icons. “Russians do not realize what treasures they possess,” he said, “everywhere the same vividness and strength of feeling … such wealth and purity of colour, such spontaneity of expression I have never seen anywhere before.” He told a group of Russian artists (including Natalya Goncharova, who was soon to join the Ballets Russes in Paris), “It’s not you who should be coming to learn from us, we should be learning from you.”34

  And so the French did. The Ballets Russes seemed to fuse all of the underlying currents of modernism into a single electrifying charge. Here was an art that was vibrant and colorful (Bakst talked about “reds that assassinate”), dreamy and interior, but also primitive and erotic, “ruthless in its unbridled freedom.” It was visual, musical, and above all physical: an immediate and visceral assault on all of the senses which painting and literature could only approximate. If movement, broken and staccato rhythms, and the dynamic juxtaposition of elements were guiding principles of modernism, then the Ballets Russes had them all: live. Pavlova’s piercing fragility, Nijinsky’s animal virility (“undulating and brilliant as a reptile”), and Karsavina’s elevated but sensual allure seemed to embody the energy and vitality so lacking in an “old, tired” Europe. Critics rushed to proclaim “this voluptuous performance, at once barbarous and refined, sensual and delicate,” and over and again they found themselves astonished and delighted by the urgency, attack, and full-blooded passion of the Russian dancers. Compared to them, one critic lamented, the French seemed “too civilized … too retreating: we have lost the custom of expressing ourselves with the whole body.…We are all in our heads.” The Ballets Russes had not only revived the art of dance (which the French had so regrettably left to languish); they promised to rejuvenate civilization itself.35

  This was the reception accorded Fokine and the company’s early “Russian” ballets. After 1912, however, things changed dramatically. First came the shock of Faune. According to Fokine (who hated the ballet), the preview performance before an audience of critics, patrons, and other notables was so incomprehensible that the dance had to be repeated a second time. The press was outraged: a front-page article in Le Figaro written (unusually) by the paper’s editor squealed, “False Step,” and found the “lecherous faun” to be “filthy and bestial.” The police were called in for the second performance—which sold out. Nijinsky, however, had important defenders: Auguste Rodin wrote a letter (which Diaghilev immediately printed and circulated) praising the dancer and his ballet. That same year, the sculptor created his own bronze cast of Nijinsky. It showed the dancer crouched and bent on one leg with the other knee crushed to his chest, torso twisted with rippling muscles, a mask-like face, flared nostrils, and high, sculpted cheekbones: a perfect statement of Nijinsky’s own attempts to reinvigorate an etiolated classicism.36

  Auguste Rodin: Danseur, dit Nijinsky. (8.1)

  The uproar over Faune, however, was nothing compared to the brawling commotion that greeted the opening performance of Le Sacre du Printemps on May 29, 1913. Although firsthand accounts vary wildly and the events of that evening were almost immediately obscured by the fog of the ballet’s own myth, we know that Diaghilev—no stranger to the commercial value of controversy—deliberately stocked the house with the adherents of rival and feuding artistic factions who could be counted on to create a ruckus. Moreover, the impresario had deftly fueled expectations: invitation-only stage rehearsals heightened public interest, and advance publicity loudly proclaimed the ballet a new “real” and “true” art. Capitalizing on Nijinsky’s already controversial reputation, ticket prices had been doubled. But whatever prior antagonisms and anticipations existed in the theater that night, it was Stravinsky’s music and Nijinsky’s dances that set the audience to riot.

  Shouting, yelling, pitching chairs, and police: the outcry was loud and physical. Those who were there that first night (and even some, such as Gertrude Stein, who thought they had been there but were not) never forgot it. Indeed, the show in the house was at least as impressive and unnerving as the show onstage: the theater, it was said, was “shaken like an earthquake” and seemed to “shudder.” When the dancers held their cheeks in a strange pose, people cried out, “Un docteur! Un dentiste! Deux dentistes!” and one man was reportedly so engrossed that he compulsively beat the rhythms of
Stravinsky’s music on the head of the critic standing in front of him. In their intense identification with the events onstage, the audience—hecklers and supporters alike—seemed to be enacting their own rite. They canonized and mythologized the ballet on the spot, elevating it (and themselves) to icons of modern art.37

  But why? The best answer we have comes from the critic and editor Jacques Rivière. Rivière was an admirer of Gauguin, publisher of Proust and André Gide, and deeply interested in instinctive and subconscious forms. He was drawn to Nijinsky’s choreography for its raw, unadorned aesthetic; it was, he said, a ballet entirely without “sauce.” Cold and clinical, it was a “stupid” and “biological” dance of “colonies” and “cells in mitosis.” “It is a stone full of holes, from which unknown creatures crawl intent on work that is indecipherable and long since irrelevant.” Its dances left him inert and filled with anguish: “Ah! How far I was from humanity!” Yet even if the ballet described a “stupid” and shockingly indifferent social organism, it was itself supremely ordered and rigorously performed. Sacre, he suggested, proclaimed a new classicism: rule-driven and disciplined, it trained its eye not on the reason and noble ideals of the past but on their immolation.38

  What Rivière had pinpointed and many others felt was not just the nihilism of Nijinsky’s vision, nor did it have much to do with the ur-Russian overtones that had been so important to Nijinsky, Roerich, and Stravinsky’s own thinking about the work. For audiences in Paris in 1913, Le Sacre du Printemps was first and foremost a betrayal. It abandoned once and for all the vital, intensely human, and sensual dance that audiences had come to expect from the Ballets Russes (Nijinsky, their favorite star, did not even appear—instead he stood in the wings shouting counts at the dancers). The Russians, it seemed, would not rejuvenate a languishing European civilization at all: instead they would describe and promote its willful self-destruction. Critics called it the massacre du printemps, seeing in it a threatening depiction of a diminished humanity. And indeed, as events pushed the Continent closer to war, Sacre was increasingly understood as an ominous prelude. Not long after the assassination of the Austrian archduke, a French critic declared Sacre du Printemps a “Dionysian orgy dreamed of by Nietzsche and called forth by his prophetic wish to be the beacon of a world hurtling toward death.” For Parisians, Sacre was not a celebration of the “spirit of the prehistoric Slavs”: it was incriminatory evidence of the decline of Western thought and civilization.39