by Lucy Moore
Marie Rambert participated in the process Larionov described. ‘Explaining [what he wanted from a dancer] is the wrong word when applied to Nijinsky. He spoke very little, and words did not come easily to him, which is why the rehearsing of his ballets took so long. But he demonstrated the details of the movement so clearly and perfectly that it left no doubt as to the way it had to be done.’
Despite the intuitive understanding between Bronia and Vaslav, it was not an easy process. Bronia was amazed by how her brother, ‘without any preparation, is in complete mastery of the new technique of his ballet. In his own execution, each movement, each position of the body, and the expression of each choreographic moment is perfect.’ But what he was demanding of her was difficult – the usually reverent Bronia actually used the word unreasonable – and Vaslav, impatient to see his vision realised, was ‘unable to take into account human limitations’. While she understood the delicate precision of his work, knowing that ‘any undue tension in the rhythm of the movements, any small mistake, could destroy the whole composition, leaving only a caricature of the choreographic idea’, still she often found it impossible to ‘master the refinements of each detail of the movement’.
Before they left St Petersburg in February they showed their work to Diaghilev and Bakst. Bakst was immediately supportive, understanding as Bronia did the monumental newness of what Vaslav was creating, but Diaghilev had doubts: the ‘inkstand’ had gone rather beyond his remit. He was uneasy about the ‘unexpected and unusual severity of the composition and the lack of dance movements’ and worried about presenting to the public someone so young – Vaslav was only twenty-two – as a choreographer. Finally, having signed Fokine up for the 1911 season as directeur choreographique (though this year Vaslav, as the company’s official premier danseur, would be dancing all the leads), Diaghilev was reluctant to antagonise him. He postponed Faune for a year.
In the spring of 1911, on their way to Paris, Nijinsky and Diaghilev visited Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s school for eurythmics outside Dresden, interested to hear more about his new theories on the relationship of music to movement – particularly pertinent at this moment as they embarked on the experiment of Faune, although its main choreography was already in place. Dalcroze did not teach dance but he believed music could only be fully understood through movement and had developed a system of education incorporating singing, games and improvisation, based on new psychological and physiological insights, that was intended to develop an integral and creative musicality.
Richard Buckle suggested that Diaghilev was taken aback by the ‘remoteness of music from movement’ in Nijinsky’s early sketches for Faune, while Diaghilev’s most recent biographer, Sjeng Scheijen, speculates that Diaghilev may have hoped Jaques-Dalcroze’s rhythmical exercises would ‘compensate for Nijinsky’s lack of musical knowledge’. But I think attacking Nijinsky for lacking musicality (as Diaghilev later did, to Lifar and others, and as Stravinsky did) was just an easy way of undermining him. All the evidence suggests that Nijinsky was perfectly musically literate at the very high standard required by a dancer. He played the piano by ear, remembering music that he had heard only a few times, according to his sister, with exceptional facility; he was quite capable of playing four-handed pieces with Maurice Ravel, as shown in a photograph from about 1912. The dance notation system on which he worked throughout his career, according to its modern student, Ann Hutchinson Guest, reveals a deep understanding of the intricacies of music notation. Further, the critical response to Nijinsky’s performances praised his musicality: Cyril Beaumont called his dancing ‘music made visible’. Even Fokine, who did not like Faune, congratulated Nijinsky with his customary backhandedness for having in it ‘the courage to stand still when the music seemed to demand agitated movement’.
More importantly, the radical nature of what Nijinsky was trying to do with Faune, and indeed in his choreography as a whole, demanded a new and radical approach to music and its relationship to dance. The composers to whom Vaslav was drawn – Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss and Stravinsky, in particular – created music to which it seemed almost impossible to dance. Pavlova had refused to dance L’Oiseau de feu because the music was ‘horribly decadent’, meaning too modern; Karsavina did it, but she recognised that contemporary music and choreography did not always do justice to her lyrical, elegant style. Fokine, Grigoriev and others thought Stravinsky’s music undanceable. But Nijinsky, trying to fashion something totally new, required this level of difficulty from the music for which he wanted to create movement.
This debate did not begin until Nijinsky started choreographing. Though his contemporaries agreed he was an extraordinary dancer, actor and performer, there was no consensus on the works he created for others. Very often, critical views were coloured by personal allegiances. Fokine praised his dancing but believed Nijinsky had ousted him from the Ballets Russes and therefore never credited him as a choreographer, and in any case his style was a reaction against (or an overt rejection of) Fokine’s. Grigoriev had little faith in Nijinsky’s talents but he was Fokine’s friend, whom Fokine had brought into the company. Walter Nouvel, like Alexandre Benois, never saw Nijinsky as anything more than Diaghilev’s creature – but Nouvel and Benois were both Diaghilev’s friends before anything else. They had condescended to Nijinsky for years, and could not fathom the petulant adolescent they had first met blossoming into a creative artist. To them he was almost an idiot savant – the only genius they were willing to credit him with was subconscious. These prejudices would crystallise as Nijinsky’s revolutionary (or ridiculous, for those who took the other view) ideas took shape.
The 1911 season had been dominated by two new ballets: Le Spectre de la Rose and Petrushka. That winter, for the first time, Nijinsky did not return to Russia and the company played in London and toured central Europe. Pavlova returned to Diaghilev for a few performances, finally agreeing to dance her celebrated Giselle opposite Nijinsky’s Albrecht.
And after years of rivalry, Mathilde Kshesinskaya had permitted Diaghilev to win her over so that she too could taste the delights of the Ballets Russes’s foreign triumphs, consenting – entirely on her own terms – to perform with his company for a limited season. Her performances were notable less for her dancing than for the staggering quantity of jewels with which she was encrusted (she brought her million-rouble collection with her, storing it at Fabergé’s London shop, and the Savoy arranged for two plain-clothes detectives to guard the jewels whenever she wore them), but, swathed offstage in ermine, even at forty her star quality was undeniable. As The Times’s ballet critic observed, unlike Karsavina or Pavlova, ‘she never makes one forget that she is a prima ballerina’.
She and Diaghilev were well-matched sparring partners. One evening at dinner he said to her, ‘Oh, Mathildoshka; yes. You are superb. You deserve all your success, even to the two Grand Dukes at your feet.’
‘But Sergey Pavlovich,’ she replied, not missing a beat. ‘I have two feet.’
Their last stop, in March, was Budapest which, in its own way, would prove to be the site of an event as momentous in Nijinsky’s life as Diaghilev’s gift of Faune. Sitting in the audience at the Municipal Opera House with her then-fiancé’s mother was a very determined and resourceful young lady of nineteen (later she would say she had been sixteen), Romola de Pulszky. Overwhelmed by the colours, the beauty, and the passion on stage in front of her, she decided to discover all she could about the Ballets Russes and its dazzling star – Nijinsky.
It was a piece of good fortune for Romola that her mother, Emilia Márkus, was Hungary’s most celebrated actress. Using her theatrical connections, Romola made friends with Adolph Bolm, who told her about Nijinsky ‘almost as a priest might speak of a divinity’. There was no opportunity to meet her idol – she could not have known that Diaghilev had constructed around his precious, troubling Vatsa an invisible but impenetrable wall – and anyway, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to: though his ‘genius’ had swept her off
her feet, he gave her ‘an uncanny feeling of apprehension’.
In March 1912 the Ballets Russes reconvened in Monte Carlo to prepare for the upcoming year. This was the Riviera’s high season and the ice cream-coloured hotels and restaurants overflowed with a glamorous, raffish set: portly American tycoons with money to burn on the baize-covered tables of the casino, French and English aristocrats, extravagantly moustachioed Maharajas and bearded Grand Dukes. One particular admirer of Diaghilev and his troupe was the Aga Khan, whom – in hopes of his backing – Diaghilev permitted to attend the meetings of what he called his ‘heads of department’: Nijinsky, Stravinsky, Bakst, Karsavina and Cecchetti.
One evening the Aga Khan took Karsavina out to dinner. ‘When she unfolded her napkin, there was a huge emerald concealed in it. She gently but firmly pushed it away’: Karsavina was no Kshesinskaya. Diaghilev urged her to accept it, on the grounds that a jewel from the Aga Khan was a bouquet from another man, but she would not. The disappointed prince consoled himself with another dancer, Josefina Kovaleska, nearly as pretty as Karsavina but importantly more interested than her in presents hidden in napkins.
Rehearsals for Faune now began in earnest. If Nijinsky had found it hard to explain to his sister what he wanted from her, the other artists were impossible. Grigoriev said the ‘dancers dreaded the monotony and fatigue’ of working on Faune and Bronia’s memoirs corroborate this. ‘Up to then the ballet artist had been free to project his own individuality [on a role] … he was even expected to embellish it according to his own taste, possibly neglecting the exactness of the choreographic execution.’ What mattered was the mood of the piece and preserving the basic steps and the groupings on stage. But with Faune Nijinsky demanded that the artists perform exactly as he understood their roles: they were his instruments, not his collaborators, and he would permit them no freedom of interpretation. ‘Each position of the dance, each position of the body down to the gesture of each finger, was mounted according to a strict choreographic plan.’ For a nine-minute ballet this precision required ninety rehearsals – well above the usual number.
Marie Rambert remembered watching Nijinsky teach a new dancer one of the nymph’s roles. When he asked her why she looked so frightened, she replied that she thought she was meant to be scared. Nijinsky retorted that he was not interested in how she felt: ‘the movement he gave her was all that was required of her’. For him, the face was ‘merely an extension of the body’, as one admiring critic would write of his work. ‘It is above all the body that speaks.’
Before they left for Paris Diaghilev wobbled again, asking Vaslav to change fundamentally his completed composition on the grounds that it would not appeal to the public and throwing his already defensive friend into a frenzy of self-justification. Angrily Vaslav insisted to Bronia that despite the complaints of the dancers who did not understand him, despite the shocking modernity of his work, he would stand by his art as he had conceived it or leave the company altogether. In a panic Diaghilev cabled Astruc in Paris to say that he had ‘never seen him [Nijinsky] so firm and intransigent’.
It was not until Bakst saw a rehearsal and rushed up to Vaslav, kissing him and saying loudly, ‘You will see … how wild Paris will be for this,’ that Diaghilev’s nerves were calmed. Later, excitedly, he told Bronia he had never seen Bakst so enthusiastic. ‘Levushka said that L’Aprèsmidi d’un faune is a “super-genius” creation and we are all fools not to have understood it.’
Nijinsky as Harlequin by Antoine Bourdelle, c.1910. ‘His dancing was music made visible’.
Initially Faune was scheduled for four performances in Paris but Diaghilev extended its run to eight performances, overshadowing the new ballet Fokine was to present, Daphnis et Chloé, unfortunately also on a classical theme. Fokine felt that Diaghilev’s promotion of Nijinsky – ‘“creating” a choreographer out of’ him, as he put it – was an effort to undermine his authority among the dancers and a bid to unite the Ballets Russes under Diaghilev’s leadership, not Fokine’s. Though it is surprising to think Fokine could ever have imagined that he rather than Diaghilev was the real leader of the Ballets Russes, it is true that by presenting Nijinsky as his modern choreographer there was nothing else for Fokine to be, by comparison, but old-fashioned and outdated. As Grigoriev put it, by prioritising Faune over Daphnis, Diaghilev was knowingly letting Fokine go.
‘This was a very unhappy time for the ballet,’ recalled the conductor Pierre Monteux, the reason Misia Sert was able later to call the Ballets Russes just a ‘shabby, jealous little group … [surrounding everything] with pettiness’. Fokine was furious about the lengths to which Diaghilev was going to make Faune a success and seething with conspiracy theories. Rehearsals for Faune and Daphnis were occasionally at the same time, so dancers who were in both had to choose which to attend; the argument between Fokine and Grigoriev over these rehearsals was so deeply felt that it ended their friendship. Spitefully, Fokine included in Daphnis parodies of what he was able to glean of Faune’s choreography, worsening the atmosphere for the confused dancers and forcing them to take sides between him and his young rival. The budget for new costumes and sets was so small Daphnis was required to share with the previous year’s production of Narcisse. At Faune’s dress rehearsal, Diaghilev lavished his influential audience with champagne and caviar – an expense he had not considered worthwhile for Fokine’s premieres. By this point, Fokine was no longer speaking to Diaghilev or Grigoriev.
Nijinsky, for his part, was unimpressed by Diaghilev’s efforts on his behalf: he took them as his due, or more correctly, the due owed to art. All he minded about was the integrity of the performance. Cocteau watched Diaghilev and Bakst fret over him at dinner at Larue’s one night shortly before Faune opened because he had a stiff neck. It turned out he had been practising ‘with the weight of real horns … This perpetual study for his parts … made him irritable and sulky’. He and Diaghilev were bickering endlessly.
Materially as well as artistically, a great deal was riding on Faune’s success. It had been expensive to make – the dancers had to be paid for all those miserable rehearsals – and as ever, Diaghilev was sailing close to the wind, taking out high-interest, short-term loans to keep his company afloat and ensure, by expanding their repertoire, that it continued to attract large audiences. Each season had been costlier than the previous one and he was probably in debt for close to 300,000 francs in 1912 (he had even been forced to borrow money, just once, from Vaslav) and would be paying the money back for years to come even with sell-out seasons. But the first two premieres of the Paris season, Le Dieu bleu and Thamar, vehicles for Nijinsky and Karsavina respectively, were not the successes for which Diaghilev had hoped.
L’Aprèsmidi d’un faune opened on 29 May 1912. After months of disagreement, resentment and distrust, the mood backstage was bleak. Bronia was nervous: ‘doubts in the wings before a premiere reach out into the auditorium, to the public, and can lead to catastrophe’. Bakst painted the Faun’s dappled hide directly onto the thin bodystocking Nijinsky was wearing, making him look ‘plus nu que nu’. On his head was a woven cap of golden hair and two small horns, his ears were pointed and elongated with wax, and heavy make-up made his face look uncannily, languorously bestial. ‘In the costume, as in Nijinsky’s expression, one could not define where the human ended and the animal began … He did not imitate; he merely brought out the impression of a clever animal who might be human.’
Like Petrushka, this was Vaslav’s story – a meditation, as the ballet historian Jennifer Homans writes, upon ‘introversion, self-absorption and cold physical instinct’. It tells of the hesitant sexual awakening of a young faun who is fascinated by a group of bathing nymphs. At his approach they flee, one returning briefly to retrieve their discarded veils and to taunt him before being frightened away. The faun bears off a forgotten veil in triumph. For now, it is enough. Apparently without having read Mallarmé’s poem, Nijinsky had summed up its premise: ‘Ces nymphs, je les veux perpétuer.’
As the Faun, Nijinsky was ‘thrilling. Although his movements were absolutely restrained, they were virile and powerful, and the manner in which he caressed and carried the nymph’s veil was so animal that one expected to see him run up the side of the hill with it in his mouth. There was an unforgettable moment just before his final amorous descent upon the scarf when he knelt with one knee on top of the hill, with his other leg stretched out behind him. Suddenly he threw his head back silently and laughed.’
This ‘final amorous descent’, in which in the last gesture of the piece an impassive Nijinsky, alone on stage, lowered himself face down onto the precious stolen scarf and shuddered with what clearly represented a masturbatory orgasm, caused a sensation.* The audience, already unsure whether to cheer or catcall, was stunned into momentary silence. ‘Nobody was certain what had happened, who had won; was it a success or not?’ For the only time in the Ballets Russes’s history (as far as I have been able to ascertain), Diaghilev came onstage as the dancers waited to take their bows and told them to return to their places to repeat the piece. When the curtain fell for a second time the crowd applauded wildly, though loud whistles and hisses could also be heard among the cheers.
