Scenes and Dances by Michel Fokine.
Scenery and Costumes Designed by Léon Bakst.
NOTHING is more eloquent of the Russians’ art than the distinction they are able to give to a theme which, less sensitively treated, would be merely commonplace, if not banal. In no ballet is this refining instinct more delicately employed than in “Le Spectre de la Rose,” which Nijinsky and Karsavina dance to the familiar strains of “L’ Invitation à la Valse.”
It might not be just to call Weber’s music commonplace; but sentimental it certainly is, and with such a “plot” (if an incident so slight can thus be termed) as the Russians, inspired by a dainty poem of Théophile Gautier, have devised for the music’s accompaniment, the faintest excess would have turned it sugary—and sickly. In the nice restraint which they display, the two artists vie with each other—Karsavina as a picture of youth and innocence, of unsophisticated sentiment: Nijinsky as a phantom, conveying the suggestion of being verily the mere figment of a dream, without recourse to that note of the bizarre by which one of less subtle perceptions might seek to insinuate a spectral character.
To the restraint of the dancers is added that of Léon Bakst, whose setting for this sentimental idyll has that simplicity which the situation requires. It is a quaint, almost queer, little bedroom which is disclosed after the opening bars have been played by the orchestra—an apartment daintily decked, and arranged with a kind of prim formality as engaging as the crinoline and flounces of Victorian girlhood: a completely unsophisticated chamber, in short.
Long windows, open to the summer night, show a garden beyond, flooded with romantic moonshine, and at one of these stands a young girl, loth to break the reverie in which her thoughts are held. Her backward glance drinks in the beauty of the night, her pulses more than faintly stirred by the glamour of the dance so lately ended, her whole self thrilling to a potent magic but half understood.
Reluctantly she turns her head from the moonlit garden and passes from the window. She lifts her hands abstractedly to remove the wrap from her shoulders, and in so doing touches the rose that droops upon her bosom. Her fingers close upon it: she plucks it from her dress, presses it to her lips, and though its first fresh fragrance has gone, lingers tenderly over the faint aroma which remains. The crimson rose gives form and colour, deep colour, to the vague sentimental imaginings of the young girl’s mind. She clasps it tightly as she crosses the room, keeping her gaze upon it as she presently sinks into a chair. It is the heart and focus of her thoughts. But lassitude overcomes her, her eyelids droop, and the rose, slipping through her loosened fingers, falls from her lap to the floor.
Allegro Vivace.—A spectral form leaps swiftly into the pale moonbeams, and alights at the threshold of the open window. The visitant thus lightly appearing, like a leaf before the fitful eddy of a
