Pavlowa
a painting by John Lavery
This briefly expresses the fundamental traditions of the Russian ballet school. To a certain extent it is academic, but it has never interfered with the racial and the individual tendencies of the artists. Though there are only three large independent ballet corps in Russia, those of Petrograd, Moscow, and Warsaw, yet nearly every one of the sixty or more provincial opera houses keeps its local ballet corps in connection with the operatic and dramatic staff. While in foreign countries ballet has been appreciated mainly as an accessory to the opera for its spectacular effects, its æsthetic appeal being regarded as not possessing a high order of merit, in Russia it is considered a great and independent art of the stage, standing on a plane with opera, both musically and dramatically. When a few years ago the Russian dancers made their appearance abroad the public was startled, as no one could imagine that any good thing could come out of Czardom. It is a great mistake to suppose that the Russian ballet is an aristocratic or autocratic institution. By no means. Like Russian drama and music the Russian ballet is a national institution and a national achievement.
In how far the Russian ballet differs from her sister institutions outside is best to be seen in such old-fashioned ballets as Les Sylphides, which was danced by Taglioni, and is danced by the artists of the French-Italian schools and figures in the repertoires of the Russian ballet. Another work of similar nature is the Coppélia. Not only are these two time-worn ballets wholly changed in their thematic and musical sense but in the very form of conception. The Russian Sylphides and Coppélia are old scenes in modern light, the French-Italian Sylphides and Coppélia are pitiable museum shows. Where a French-Italian ballerina would leap and whirl, a Russian acts and poses. Like the art of an actress that of a Russian ballerina is in the first place a personification of the character in whose rôle she is dancing. Pavlova as she depicts the incomparable fury of Glazounoff’s L’Autômne Bacchanale, could not by any means be a Cleopatra as personified by Astafieva. Karsavina with all her dramatic thrill and arabesques is a mediocrity in the rôles in which Pavlova excels. The dramatic issue is the foremost question in the Russian ballet, often to such an extent that it minimizes the musical significance. The most talented of the foreign ballet dancers do not begin to go into the dramatic details of a dance as the Russians do.
To get an idea of the Russian ballet with all its true atmosphere one must go to Russia. The performances of the Diaghileff company which foreign audiences have seen, belong to the revolutionary school, but not to the typical classic dance of Russia, which we shall discuss later. The Russian ballet dancer is free from all the stiffness, decadent artificiality, preconceived emotions, and fossilized formalities of the French-Italian ballet dancers. This freedom he owes, in the first place, to the thorough training in the school; second, to the distinctly racial traditions of the Russian drama and art; and third, to the serious critical attitude of the audiences. To say that the Russian ballet has not travelled in ideals far from those of Milan in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, as a foreign dance critic has said, is untrue. The difference between these two schools is just as real as that between the Catholic and the Protestant church: the one believes in the form, the other in the spirit.
II
How much the Russian ballet has influenced drama, opera, painting and music can be judged from the fact that almost without an exception all the Russian operas require dancing; thus there are several dramas and orchestra works interwoven with the ballet. On the other hand the dancer has made use of themes and compositions that had been created for other purposes; for all such ballets as the Scheherezade, Prince Igor, Baba Yaga and many others, were written as orchestral suites, symphonic poems or parts of operas. But the choric imagination discovered in them latent music dramas adapted for dancing. We are inclined to think that the Moscow ballet, but not that of Petrograd, is a thoroughly Russian institution, since Begutcheff, who was a director of the Moscow Opera and Ballet at the time of Tschaikowsky and Ostrowsky, banished all foreign influence from that stage, more so than has ever happened in Petrograd.
In 1873 Begutcheff asked Ostrowsky, one of the foremost Russian dramatists, to write a fairy ballet for performance at the Imperial Opera in St. Petersburg, exacting that it should be free from any satirical or politically undesirable element. Begutcheff asked the dramatist to submit the scenario to him for approval. Ostrowsky was noted for his bitter sarcasm anent the Russian bureaucracy and for his idealization of the peasants. This he was told he should avoid in the ballet, ‘for such would be not pleasing to the imperial family.’ Ostrowsky smiled, grunting: ‘God be thanked, the imperial family has no business to interfere with the imagination of an artist.’ He finished his libretto without consulting Begutcheff and entitled it Snegourotchka—‘Snow Maiden.’ The director of the Petrograd ballet did not like Ostrowsky’s libretto and refused to consider it. Begutcheff, however, turned the libretto over to Tschaikowsky to compose the music and it was performed with great success in Moscow.
One of the special features of the Russian ballet is its chorovody character—that is, the musical accompaniment, on many occasions, is supplied by the singing of the dancers themselves. This species of vocal ballets evidently originated in the choral dances of the peasants. The Russian ballet is, in fact, an outgrowth of the folk-dance just as Russian music emanates from the folk-song. While watching the Russian ballet, you see glimpses of the racial traits. It is not like the music, however, a picture of the gloom of lonely moujik life, in which only here and there a beam of light breaks through the melancholy. It is a succession of brilliant pictures of the mediæval Boyars, the semi-barbaric nobility. Every part of the ballet is meant to show the rich Byzantine colors, and primitive passions as set forth in a half-civilized garb.
It is true the Russian ballet is controlled by the court and therefore is forced to be aristocratic in appearance. The composers and the ballet-masters have been strictly instructed to avoid all undesirable themes; but, strange to say, the ballet is just as much a mirror of the hospitable, good natured, naïve and emotional peasant as it is of a spoiled Boyar. It is not that all the ballet dancers are children of peasants, educated for the stage by the court, but because the Russian dramatists and composers have unconsciously put their own moujik souls in their creations, for, though most of the Russian composers and dramatists are descendants of the aristocracy, yet in their hearts they have remained one with the people, whose life they live in thought and feeling.