Amoun and Berenis are engaged in the sport of hunting. She represents Gazelle, and he the hunter who wounds her in the breast. The engaged couple plight each other to everlasting love. But soon Amoun betrays his bride. He falls in love with Queen Cleopatra. Not having the opportunity of coming near his beloved queen, he sends an arrow with a note professing his love and readiness to sacrifice his life for her. Notwithstanding the tears and prayers of Berenis, he throws himself into the arms of Cleopatra, and, lured by her tenderness, he accepts from her hands a cup of poison, drinks it and dies. Berenis finds the corpse of her lover, forgives him and mourns his death.
The Hippodrome version consisted of “The Meeting of Amoun and Berenis” “The Entrance of Cleopatra,” by the orchestra; “The Dance Before Cleopatra”; “The Betrayal of Amoun and the Jealousy of Berenis”; “The Hebrew Dance,” by the orchestra; “The Death of Amoun and the Mourning of Berenis.”
In 1927, I presented the Fokines with their “American Ballet,” composed of their pupils, at the Masonic Auditorium, in Detroit, and on subsequent tours. Prominent professional dancers were added to the pupil roster.
That summer, with the Fokines and their company, I introduced ballet to the Lewisohn Stadium Concerts in New York, for three performances, to a record audience of forty-eight thousand people. I also presented them for four performances at the Century Theatre in Central Park West. The Stadium programmes included Les Elves, arranged to Mendelssohn’s Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the addition of the same composer’s Andante and Allegro from the Violin Concerto. Also Medusa, a tragedy set to Tchaikowsky’s Symphonie Pathétique, a work for four characters, the title role being danced by Vera Fokina, and the sea god Poseidon, who fell in love with the beautiful Medusa, danced by Fokine.
It was during one of the Stadium performances, I remember, I had occasion to go to the Fokines’ dressing-room on some errand. I knocked, and believing I heard an invitation to enter, opened the door to discover the two Fokines dissolved in tears of happiness. So moved was Michel by Vera’s performance of the title role in Medusa, that they were sobbing in each other’s arms.
“Wonderful, wonderful, my darling!” Fokine was murmuring. “Such a beautiful performance; and to think you did it all in such a short period, with so very few rehearsals; and the really amazing thing is that you portrayed the character of the creature precisely as it is in my mind!”
In the love, the adoration, the romance of Michel and Vera Fokine, there was the greatest continuous devotion between man and wife that it has been my privilege to know.
Fokine’s American ballet creations have been lost. Perhaps it is as well. For the closing chapter of the life of a truly great artist they were sadly inferior. Towards the end of his career, however, he staged some fresh, new works in France for René Blum’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, including Les Elements, Don Juan, and L’Epreuve d’Amour. Then, for de Basil’s Original Ballet Russe, Cinderella, or since he used the French, Cendrillon, to a commissioned score by Baron Frederic d’Erlanger, which might have been better. But choreographically Cendrillon was a return to the triumphant Fokine. There was also his triumphant re-staging of Le Coq d’Or. Perhaps his last really great triumph was his collaboration with Serge Rachmaninoff on Paganini, a work that takes rank with Fokine’s finest.
Fokine restaged Les Sylphides and Carnaval for Ballet Theatre’s initial season. When Ballet Theatre was under my management, he created Bluebeard, in 1941, for Anton Dolin. In 1942, I was instrumental in having German Sevastianov engage Fokine to stage the nostalgic tragedy, Russian Soldier, to the music of Prokofieff.
While in Mexico, in the summer of 1942, working on Helen of Troy, for Ballet Theatre, Fokine contracted pleurisy, which developed into pneumonia on his return to New York, where he died, on 22nd August. For a dancer, he was on the youthful side. He was born in Mannheim-am-Rhine, Germany, 26th April, 1880, the son of Ekaterina Gindt. According to the official records of the St. Petersburg Imperial School, his father was unknown. He was adopted by a merchant, Mikhail Feodorovitch Fokine, who gave him his name. In 1898, he graduated from the St. Petersburg Imperial School. In 1905, he married Vera Petrovna Antonova, the daughter of a master of the wig-maker’s Guild, who had graduated from the School the year before.