Impressive as Cléopatre is in its scenic and pantomimic vigor and tragic atmosphere, yet it is hardly a ballet in the modern sense. There is no unity of music, this being altogether a patch-work. It may sound exceedingly pretty and appropriate occasionally to the accompaniment of the mute drama, yet it is by no means dance music. This is an example of the patchy ballet music that the Diaghileff company is continually trying to employ. Musically less patchy is Le Pavillon d’Armide, with music by Tcherepnin and setting by Benois. But the theme is old-fashioned and over-perfumed. The story takes place in mediæval France at the castle of a certain Marquis, a magician. It is night. Winds blow, rain pours down and thunder rolls. A nobleman is to meet his sweetheart near the Marquis’ castle and takes refuge from the bad weather. The Marquis places his Pavillon d’Armide at his disposal. In the pavilion he sees an old Gobelin tapestry representing the beautiful Armide, beneath it, a great clock supported by Love and Time. The nobleman goes to sleep and at midnight sees the figures of Love and Time step down from the clock. Armide becomes alive. The nobleman falls in love with her and Armide embraces him. This is the beginning of an animated dance. It is a fantastic scene, the old Marquis taking part in the feast. Finally Time triumphs over Love and they return to their places. It is an interesting short phantasy, a poem in pantomime.
A ballet which has created the greatest comment and discussion in its dramatic and scenic beauty is the Scheherezade, with music by Rimsky-Korsakoff. This is a symphonic suite of which Bakst and Fokine have manufactured a kind of pantomime-ballet. Though the music is magnificent as an orchestra piece by itself, yet it is a perversion to employ it to accompany a queer pantomimic drama. Rimsky-Korsakoff had no idea of a Zobeide played by Karsavina, of her negro lover, danced by Nijinsky, of Schariar, the Grand Eunuch, and of the Odalisque, who are the characters of the ballet. This again is a patch-work and not a dance in its real sense. If it is a dance, it is such that only one artist or at most two could depict. According to the scenario writers it draws the story of a Sultan’s harem from ‘The Arabian Nights.’ All the harem beauties are dancing with their lovers and slaves. Among them we find the pretty Sultana. The Sultan enters and suspects that Zobeida has betrayed him. He finds her lover. We see death and passion. It is picturesque, but the dance is only an incidental affair. Scheherezade without Karsavina’s vivid mimicry and youthful beauty, and Nijinsky’s agility, would be nothing. In the words of a Russian critic, ‘Nijinsky makes us understand that a gesture is, as Blake said of a tear, an intellectual thing. His gestures, by which I do not mean the technical steps, are different in manner and in spirit from those of the traditional Italian school. With the conventional gestures of the academies, which mimic such attitudes as men are supposed naturally to adopt when they perform certain actions or experience certain emotions, he will have nothing to do. Nijinsky’s gestures mimic nothing. They are not the result of a double translation of idea into words, and words into dumb show. They are the mood itself. His limbs possess a faculty of speech. Wit is expressed in his Arlequin dance as lucidly as in an epigram. His genius consists in a singular pliancy of the body to the spirit.’[C]
[C] S. Hudekoff: ‘History of Dancing’ (in Russian).
If Karsavina had not joined the choreographic revolutionists her dramatic talent would have had little or no opportunity to express itself, for the exponents of the old classic ballets are strictly opposed to display of natural gestures and acting. While she now exhibits a talent equal to Pavlova’s, in the old ballet she would be only half of what she is. Although her excellent dramatic sense is displayed in Le Spectre de la Rose, Scheherezade and in several of Stravinsky’s ballets, still we have not had a chance yet to become enthusiastic over any of her abstract dances. This view we notice also expressed by many French and English critics. ‘Of her performances at Covent Garden, all were marked by such rare technique and instructed grace that it is difficult to put any one before another; but certainly she never surpassed her achievement in Le Spectre de la Rose. Her dancing caught the very spirit of a maiden’s revery, and nothing could have been more finely imagined than those transitions from languor into quick rushes of darting movement, which illustrate the abrupt and irrational episodes of a troubled dream. She was the very embodiment of faint desire. We felt, as it were, a breath of perfume, and were troubled in spite of ourselves. Moreover, the long partnership between the two performers seemed to have resulted in a very special and intimate harmony. For the most part they simply floated about the stage as though borne upon a common current of emotion. There was a marriage, not only between their bodily movements, but between their spirits, such as I have never noted in the union of any other dancers.’
Like the ballet Prince Igor, music by Borodine, scenario by Fokine, Le Carneval, music from Schumann, Liadoff, Glazounoff, Tcherepnine and various other sources, are nothing but dances from an opera, dances taken here and there. Neither is there any unity of theme or style in these trimmed-up panoramas. The Polovetsi dances of Borodine’s opera Prince Igor are magnificent examples of savage Tartar art. The music is the very image of the hot and restless Mongolian temperament, the very breath of battle lust, the exaltation of victory. Fokine has taken a scene from the second act of the opera and patched a story together with some characters of the opera. The dance in the opera itself is wonderful. But in the ballet form, as arranged by Fokine, it is a mediocrity.
IV
In the repertoire of Diaghileff’s company there have been, thus far, only two more or less satisfactory ballets, Le Pavilion d’Armide, by Benois and Tcherepnin, and Le Spectre de la Rose by Weber and Vaudoyer. But both might be termed choreographic sketches in one scene rather than ballets. Without Nijinsky and Karsavina even these would not be very charming. The aristocratic sentimentality and poetic pathos of the two dance pantomimes are perfectly displayed by these two most talented artists of the revolutionary group, as their miming and dancing are characterized by a certain natural softness of movement, the quality of languor and passion. But it was the music of Igor Stravinsky, a young Russian composer working in the impressionistic style, that saved the situation of the new ballet. Stravinsky has a genius for the ballet, such as perhaps the world has never seen before. However, he seems to be greatly hampered by lack of proper conception of what constitutes the modern ballet. It is evident that he is influenced in his compositions too much by the Diaghileff-Fokine tendencies, as most of his ballets are built up in the old form of construction, though the phonetic images and spirit are new. His music is graphically vivid, as it should be, has a strong rhythm and inspiring modern spirit. It is the form of construction that he has not grasped yet fully, except in his Petrouchka.
This Petrouchka, Stravinsky’s masterpiece, is a Russian burlesque taken from an old fairy-story of Harlequin in love with the Clown’s wife. In this ballet the scenes are splendidly arranged by Fokine and the music is thrilling. The puppet has always exercised a curious fascination upon the human mind. The animated doll is a fantastic and yet pathetic symbol of our emotions. Petrouchka is the Russian counterpart of English ‘Punch and Judy,’ though differing in its more sentimental character. Petrouchka represents the character of a real puppet. Stravinsky has woven a dramatic plot around the puppet stage. ‘To take us behind the scenes and show the mingled comedy and tragedy of the puppet world, was a true and dramatic inspiration’ of the composer. The scenic effect of Petrouchka is calculated to create a melancholy feeling in the spectator with its bleak gray background and dull frigidity. It gives a striking contrast to the barbaric colors of the crowd on the stage. One has the feeling of opaque leaden skies, of snow and gay people at a fair. The costumes and scenery designed by Benois are true to Russian life and strikingly in harmony with the dance. In every phrase of the music the composer shows himself a master of the art of writing ballet music. ‘Throughout the four scenes he displays not only a nice sense of dramatic firmness, but a shrewd appreciation of character. In the treatment his humorous percept is of large assistance. In the trumpet dance by which the Blackamoor is first lured into the fair one’s toils or in the slower pas de fascination, by which the conquest of him is completed, Stravinsky’s sense of the ludicrous has turned two slender occasions to most diverting account. A piece of clever orchestration is a passage at the outset of the opening scene where the composer succeeds not only in reproducing the peculiar sounds of an old hurdy-gurdy, but weaves the opposition between two such competing instruments into a most entertaining and harmonious discord.’
As in all the other Stravinsky ballet compositions, the orchestration of Petrouchka is realistically true to the action and the characters of the play. It is full-blooded and modern. It breathes an air of the unsophisticated joy of a simple people who attend to their affairs regardless of conventional restrictions. Nijinsky, with his dramatic flexibility and vigor, makes the play a vivid fairy tale in actuality, or rather gives life to a dream of a fairy tale. ‘That the ballet is thereby endowed with meaning, an inwardness, which it might not otherwise possess, must be accounted as a tribute to the dancer’s genius,’ writes an English critic.
Another splendid Stravinsky ballet performed by the Diaghileff company is L’Oiseau de Feu. Fokine has arranged the music successfully in this ballet. Like Petrouchka, it is based upon a folk-tale. The overture of the play indicates that a fantastic story is to follow. Strange mutterings and unexpected harmonies dispose the hearer to an atmosphere of another world. The adventurous pantomime opens in a gloomy forest emanating an air of midnight mysteries. But the music glows gradually like the magic glow in the forest. One sees the spectacular Fire Bird floating downward toward the stage. Now dancing and music melt into one fascinating picture of two dimensions, to which the brilliant scenic effects add a special spiritual note. Performed by Karsavina, as the Fire Bird, the ballet is excellent.