Certain of the works performed have been taken from the concert room, l’Après-midi d’un Faune, for example, with the approval, and even the applause, of Monsieur Debussy; and Sheherazade, in spite of the protests of Rimsky-Korsakow’s heirs. Balakirew’s Thamar, too, was programme music before it became a ballet. But several works have been written for performance by this organization. Among these I may mention Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloë, the music of which exactly illustrates the action of the ballet but is not easily transferable to the concert room, although Ravel made an arrangement which the Colonne Orchestra has played in Paris and the Symphony Society of New York has performed in New York; Debussy’s Jeux; Reynaldo Hahn’s Le Dieu Bleu; Steinberg’s Midas; Tcherepnine’s Narcisse; Richard Strauss’s The Legend of Joseph, which the composer himself conducted for several performances both in London and in Paris; and the three really extraordinary works of Igor Strawinsky, The Firebird, Petrouchka, and The Sacrifice to the Spring. I have elsewhere expressed my great admiration for the genius of this young man; it is certainly my opinion that more inspiration is made manifest in these three works than in any other recent music I have heard in the theatre or the concert room. Paul Dukas also wrote a ballet for the Russians, La Péri, but although it was announced, the production was finally made under other auspices.
Any concert-goer will immediately note the fact that a good deal of the music in the répertoire of the Russian Ballet is familiar to him. Balakirew began his symphonic poem, Tamara (the ballet is called Thamar), suggested by a poem by Lermontoff, in 1867; it was concluded in 1882. The composer wrote in 1869 that he had composed parts of it as he “danced along” the street. The Chicago Orchestra performed the work for the first time in America in 1896. The Russian Symphony Society introduced it to New York in 1908. When the Russians adopted the work to use as a ballet the critic of the “Morning Times” in London said that the action did not fit the music very well, and yet the story of the ballet is almost precisely that of the symphonic poem, so that if anyone was at fault in this regard it must have been the composer. Here is the fable to which Balakirew wrote music, in the words of the programme notes (by William Hubbard Harris) of the Chicago Orchestra:
“In the narrow Dariel Pass, where the River Terek roars, covered with heavy mists, there rises an ancient tower, in which there lived Queen Thamar, an angel of beauty, a cruel, wily demon in thoughts, and yet at the same time divine. At her enchanting call the passing traveller entered the tower to take part in the banquet in progress there. Shouts and cries of revelry awakened echoes in the darkness, as if at a great feast a hundred young, pleasure-loving men and women were gathered, or as if, in that great tower, erstwhile forbidding, the celebration of funeral rites were taking place. At the break of day gloomy silence again reigned, broken only by the foaming Terek as it hurried away a corpse. At this moment there appeared at the window a pale shadow. It waved afar a last farewell to the loved one. That farewell breathed such tender ecstasy, the voice which uttered it was so sweet, that its every accent, filled with promise, seemed to tell of near, unspeakable happiness.”
Only in its conclusion does the ballet action vary from this story. The Queen lures the Prince to his doom, dances with him as the centre of a bacchanale, and then gives him the knife-thrust, as her slaves hurl him through an opened door into the river. But as the curtain falls we see her, not waving farewell to her old victim, but waving welcome to a new one.
Perhaps the composer really was at fault, because the music has never made a profound impression in this country. Here is W. J. Henderson’s account of it in “The Sun,” following the performance by the Russian Symphony Society:
“Tamara was a queen, and she dwelt by the River Terek in an ancient tower, where she was wont to indulge in nights à la Cléopâtre russe. In the mornings the dead bodies of her lovers went floating down the stream, while she sang exquisite love-songs, just as if her lovers could be lured back. In the music of Balakirew one could hear the river, which sounded much like the Rhine, even to suggestions of the Drachenfels. The riotous nights were perhaps less clearly indicated. They were somewhat repressed, muffled, as it were. Perhaps Tamara, out of consideration for the neighbors, used to shut the windows when she was holding high jinks on the banks of the blue Terek in the Caucasus. But they had long nights up there, for the listener sitting outside the tower (in a hard orchestra chair) and waiting for the exquisite love-song, grew stiff and cold. And, after all, it was a mean little love-song, because it had no tune, and it would not have lured a red-headed boy, let alone a dead man.”
However, Mr. Henderson had not seen Karsavina as the wicked queen when he wrote those lines, nor had he seen Bakst’s gorgeous Georgian costumes—a variant, it is true, of the greens and blues with which he had decorated Sheherazade. The fault of the ballet, as a whole, is that it is reminiscent of Sheherazade; and yet it is effective and has persisted in the répertoire of the Russians since it was first given in 1912. The overdresses of the women gave rise to one of the fashions in women’s gowns which spread over our world two years ago.
Rimsky-Korsakow’s Sheherazade is another matter. The music was not written to accompany the story used in the ballet, and yet it fits it perfectly. Still, Mme. Rimsky-Korsakow (the composer, of course, is dead) protested violently against what she called a desecration of her husband’s intention, when the ballet was first produced. (A similar protest was lodged against the organization in 1914, when it produced Rimsky-Korsakow’s last opera, The Golden Cock, with a double cast, one choreographic and one vocal, although the opera had been written to be sung.) No piece of music is better known in the concert hall than this, and any concert-goer will remember the violin theme which portrays the last of the Sultan’s wives, as she relates the four stories from the “Arabian Nights” which the four movements of the Suite describe. The ballet follows the action of the prologue of these stories; the women of the harem steal the keys from the grand eunuch and let loose the black slaves for a drunken revel of lust, which is interrupted by the sudden return of the sultan and death to all concerned. The third movement, that which in the Suite describes the love of the young prince and the young princess, was omitted from Fokine’s original arrangement of the ballet, but in 1914 he added this movement to the action. Sheherazade has been considered since the time it was first produced in Paris some six years ago, the masterpiece of the Russians. It made the designer of its scenery and costumes, Leon Bakst, famous. His color-scheme, mostly of greens, blues, and oranges, has been frequently imitated in later theatrical productions. Karsavina’s Zobeide is a suggestive picture of languorous lust, and Nijinsky, as the principal slave, alternates between surprising leaps into the air and the most lascivious gestures, as, like some animal, he paws the reclining Sultana.
L’Après-midi d’un Faune is as well known as Sheherazade in the concert room. This was the first ballet which Nijinsky staged (he also enacted the principal rôle). The music was written by Debussy as a prelude to Mallarmé’s somewhat obscure poem. An English translation, at least an acceptable one, has hitherto been lacking, but Walter Conrad Arensberg’s very sympathetic and understanding version has just appeared; were it not for its length I should like to transcribe it here. When Debussy’s work is performed Edmund Gosse’s summary of his idea of the meaning of the poem (with which, by the way, the poet expressed himself as entirely pleased) usually appears in the programme notes. But Debussy’s music is called a prélude to the poem and so the action of the ballet is a prelude to the wonderings of Mallarmé’s faun. This is the scenario as it was printed in the programmes given out for the first Paris performances:
“Ce n’est pas l’Après-midi d’un Faune de Stéphane Mallarmé; c’est, sur le prélude musical à cet épisode panique, une courte scène qui la précède: