The evidence of these boyhood dreams of America has been proved by my own experience.
My dream has become a reality.
[2.] The Swan
IT was The Swan who determined my career in dance and ballet management. Whatever my confused aspirations on arriving in America, the music and dance I had imbibed at the folk fonts of Pogar remained with me.
I have told the story of the gradual clarification of those aspirations in the tale of the march forward from Brooklyn’s Brownsville. The story of Music for the Masses has become a part of the musical history of America. I had two obsessions: music and dance. Music for the Masses had become a reality. “The Hurok Audience,” as The Morning Telegraph frequently called it, was the public to which, two decades later, The New York Times paid homage by asserting I had done more for music than the phonograph.
Through the interesting and exciting days of presenting Chaliapine, Schumann-Heink, Eugene Ysaye, Mischa Elman, Efrem Zimbalist, Tetrazzini, Tito Ruffo, the question of the dance, my other obsession, and how to do for it what I had succeeded in doing for music, was always in my mind.
It was then I met The Swan.
Anna Pavlova is a symbol of ballet in America; nay, throughout the world. I knew that here in America were a people who loved the dance, if they could but know it. The only way for them to know it, I felt, was to expose them to it in the finest form of theatre dance: the ballet.
The position that ballet holds today in the affections of the American public is the result of that exposure, coupled with a strongly increasing enthusiasm that not only holds its devotees, but brings to it a constantly growing new audience. But it was not always thus. Prior to the advent to these shores of Anna Pavlova there was no continuous development. America, to be sure, had had theatrical dancing sporadically since the repeal of the anti-theatre act in 1789. But all of it, imported from Europe, for the most part, had been by fits and starts. From the time of the famous Fanny Ellsler’s triumphs in La Tarantule and La Cracovienne, in 1840-1842, until the arrival of Anna Pavlova, in 1910, there was a long balletic drought, relieved only by occasional showers.