The Dance

by Unknown

II

How much the Russian ballet has influenced drama, opera, painting and music can be judged from the fact that almost without an exception all the Russian operas require dancing; thus there are several dramas and orchestra works interwoven with the ballet. On the other hand the dancer has made use of themes and compositions that had been created for other purposes; for all such ballets as the Scheherezade, Prince Igor, Baba Yaga and many others, were written as orchestral suites, symphonic poems or parts of operas. But the choric imagination discovered in them latent music dramas adapted for dancing. We are inclined to think that the Moscow ballet, but not that of Petrograd, is a thoroughly Russian institution, since Begutcheff, who was a director of the Moscow Opera and Ballet at the time of Tschaikowsky and Ostrowsky, banished all foreign influence from that stage, more so than has ever happened in Petrograd.

In 1873 Begutcheff asked Ostrowsky, one of the foremost Russian dramatists, to write a fairy ballet for performance at the Imperial Opera in St. Petersburg, exacting that it should be free from any satirical or politically undesirable element. Begutcheff asked the dramatist to submit the scenario to him for approval. Ostrowsky was noted for his bitter sarcasm anent the Russian bureaucracy and for his idealization of the peasants. This he was told he should avoid in the ballet, ‘for such would be not pleasing to the imperial family.’ Ostrowsky smiled, grunting: ‘God be thanked, the imperial family has no business to interfere with the imagination of an artist.’ He finished his libretto without consulting Begutcheff and entitled it Snegourotchka—‘Snow Maiden.’ The director of the Petrograd ballet did not like Ostrowsky’s libretto and refused to consider it. Begutcheff, however, turned the libretto over to Tschaikowsky to compose the music and it was performed with great success in Moscow.

One of the special features of the Russian ballet is its chorovody character—that is, the musical accompaniment, on many occasions, is supplied by the singing of the dancers themselves. This species of vocal ballets evidently originated in the choral dances of the peasants. The Russian ballet is, in fact, an outgrowth of the folk-dance just as Russian music emanates from the folk-song. While watching the Russian ballet, you see glimpses of the racial traits. It is not like the music, however, a picture of the gloom of lonely moujik life, in which only here and there a beam of light breaks through the melancholy. It is a succession of brilliant pictures of the mediæval Boyars, the semi-barbaric nobility. Every part of the ballet is meant to show the rich Byzantine colors, and primitive passions as set forth in a half-civilized garb.

It is true the Russian ballet is controlled by the court and therefore is forced to be aristocratic in appearance. The composers and the ballet-masters have been strictly instructed to avoid all undesirable themes; but, strange to say, the ballet is just as much a mirror of the hospitable, good natured, naïve and emotional peasant as it is of a spoiled Boyar. It is not that all the ballet dancers are children of peasants, educated for the stage by the court, but because the Russian dramatists and composers have unconsciously put their own moujik souls in their creations, for, though most of the Russian composers and dramatists are descendants of the aristocracy, yet in their hearts they have remained one with the people, whose life they live in thought and feeling.

In its principles the ballet is the most aristocratic and the oldest of all Russian arts of the stage. The unwritten history of the enchanting Russian dance would make a thrilling record of more than two centuries. The romances, tragedies, mysteries, and intrigues connected with this sealed drama have often played a decisive rôle in the affairs of the country. As the result of a romance with pretty Teleshova Griboyedoff, a famous Russian dramatist was killed in Teheran. For having dedicated his ‘Eugene Onyegin’ to the fascinating Istomina, prima ballerina of the Imperial Opera, Poushkin, the poet, lost the love of his wife and was subsequently shot in a duel. The Czar Paul fell in love with Eugeny Kolossova and in consequence was strangled at his palace in Petrograd. Before the present Czar ascended the throne he was said to have been so much in love with Mathilda Kshesinskaya that he made plans to renounce his throne and marry her.

The ballet was introduced in Russia as early as 1672. Czar Alexis Mihailowitch ordered his aid-de-camp, Colonel Van Staden, to have a troupe of Dutch comedians brought to Moscow. Van Staden made a contract with a ballet manager in Brussels, but the foreigner was frightened into giving up the venture because of a rumor that he and his troupe might eventually land in Siberia. After this a German pastor, the Rev. Johann Gregory, undertook the management of the troupe, hiring sixty-four German and Italian dancers and producing in 1673 the first ballet, ‘Orpheus and Euridice,’ with great success. Peter the Great was so fascinated with the ballet that he himself took part and for this purpose received lessons from the ballet-master.

The ballet of this time was, of course, Italian-French in conception and music. But the early foreign masters soon produced a school of native instructors who gradually made use of the peculiarities of national dances. Many Russian ballets were already at this time of national color, one of them, Baba Yaga, having been written by the Czar himself. Baba Yaga is a Russian fairy tale. Like the English ‘Witch on a Broomstick,’ Baba Yaga rides through the sky on a huge mortar, propelling herself with a pestle, while her great tongue licks up the clouds as she passes. The dancers were trained in various military or municipal schools and the teaching was unsystematic in every respect.

The first impetus to a national dancing academy was given by Empress Anna Ivanovna, the sister of Peter the Great, who felt that the education of the dancers was not systematic enough, and regretted that the best dancers had to be hired from abroad. In 1735, she asked Christian Wellmann, a teacher of gymnastics in the Cadet Corps, to found a dramatic dancing school in which girls and boys could be educated for the ballet. The Italian composer Francesca Areja was employed to take care of the music, while Lande, a pupil of Noverre, was to act as ballet director. As the newly formed school could not get children of the nobility to learn dancing, Lande trained a number of poor city boys and girls free of any charge, and with them gave a performance at the palace. The Empress was so pleased with their dance that she instructed that the pupils be educated in the Imperial Dramatic Dancing School free of charge.