Lifar’s fantastic behavior in New York before we shipped him back to Paris was but an example of his lack of tact and his overwhelming egoism. He proved to be a colossal headache; but I believe much of it was due to a streak of self-dramatization in his nature, and a positive delight he takes in being the central character, the focus of an “incident.”
Under the influence of a genuine creative urge, Massine’s directions of the new Monte Carlo Ballet Russe for two seasons richly fulfilled the promise it held at the company’s inception. The public grew larger each season. At the same time, slowly, but none the less surely, that public became, I believe, more understanding. The ballet public of America was cutting its eye-teeth.
It was during the early seasons that Massine added three more symphonic ballets to the repertoire, with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony; Rouge et Noir, to the brilliant First Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich; and Labyrinth, a surrealist treatment of the Seventh Symphony of Franz Schubert. Christian Bérard provided scenery and costumes for the first of them; Henri Matisse, for the second; Salvador Dali, for the last. The Shostakovich work was the most successful of the three. Regrettably, all these symphonic ballets are lost to present-day audiences.
The outstanding comedy success was Gaîté Parisienne, the Offenbach romp, originally started in Boston before the company as such existed. The most sensational work was Massine’s first surrealist ballet, Bacchanale, to the Venusberg music from Wagner’s Tannhauser. A quite fantastic spectacle, from every point of view, it was a Massine-Dali joke, one that was less successful when the same combination tried to repeat it in Labyrinth.
There were lesser Massine works, produced under frantic pressure; examples: Saratoga, an unhappy attempt to capture the American spirit of the up-state New York spa, to a commissioned score by Jaromir Weinberger; The New Yorker, which was certainly no American Gaîté Parisienne, being Massine’s attempt to try to bring to balletic life the characters, the atmosphere, and the perky humors of the popular weekly magazine, all to a pastiche of George Gershwin’s music. A third work was one of his last Monte Carlo Ballet Russe creations, Vienna—1814, an evocation of the spirit of the Congress of Vienna, to music by Carl Maria von Weber, orchestrated by Robert Russell Bennett.
Bogatyri, a colorful Russian spectacle, designed as a sort of successor to Fokine’s Le Coq d’Or, had spectacular scenery and costumes by Nathalie Gontcharova, and was a long and detailed work utilising a movement of a Borodin string quartet and his Second Symphony. In cooperation with Argentinita, Massine staged a quite successful Spanish divertissement to Rimsky-Korsakoff’s Capriccio Espagnol, using for it the set and costumes Mariano Andreu had designed for Fokine’s Jota Argonesa.
In summing up Massine’s creations for the new company, I have left his most important contribution until the last. It was St. Francis, originally done in our first season at London’s Drury Lane, where it was known as Noblissima Visione. A collaboration between the composer, Paul Hindemith, and Massine, it may be called one of Massine’s greatest triumphs and one of his very finest works. The ballet, unfortunately, was not popular with mass audiences; but it was work of deep and moving beauty, with a ravishing musical score, magnificent scenery and costumes by Pavel Tchelitcheff, and two great performances by Massine himself in the title role, and Nini Theilade, as Poverty, the bride of St. Francis.
For the record, let me note the other works that made up the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo repertoire under my management: Massine’s productions of The Three-Cornered Hat, The Fantastic Toy Shop, and Le Beau Danube. George Balanchine staged a revival of Le Baiser de La Fée (The Fairy’s Kiss) and Jeu de Cartes (Card Game), both Stravinsky works he had done before, and all borrowed from the American Ballet. There was a new production of Delibes’s Coppélia, in a setting by Pierre Roy; and the Fokine-Blum works I have mentioned before.
I accepted as a new production a revival of Tchaikowsky’s The Nutcracker, staged by Alexandra Fedorova, and a re-working of parts of Tchaikowsky’s Swan Lake, also staged by Fedorova, under the title of The Magic Swan.
Three productions remain to be mentioned. One was Icare, staged only at the Metropolitan Opera House in the first season, a graphic and moving re-enactment of the Icarus legend, by Serge Lifar, to percussive rhythms only. The second was Richard Rodgers’s first and only exclusively ballet score, Ghost Town, a genre work dealing with the California Gold Rush. It was the first choreographic job of a talented young American character dancer, Marc Platoff, born Marcel Le Plat, in Seattle. Not a work out of the top drawer, it was nevertheless a good try for a young choreographer.