by Lucy Moore
Diaghilev agreed, though neither he nor Stravinsky was motivated solely by artistic concerns. At this time Diaghilev and Fokine were locked in conflict over Faune and Daphnis et Chloé and he had no intention of retaining Fokine for another ballet. Using Nijinsky as choreographer – he thought – would also reassert his authority over Sacre, about which he was still smarting because it had been conceived without him. He assumed Nijinsky, whom he still saw as his creature, would act as his cypher. For his part Stravinsky, who had resented being a junior partner in earlier collaborations with Diaghilev, thought he would have more creative control with the inexperienced Nijinsky staging Sacre.
Both men sought to assert their influence over Vaslav with (according to which source you choose to believe) varying success. Grigoriev thought that while composing Sacre, Nijinsky ‘was as helpless as a child and relied entirely on suggestions from Diaghilev and Stravinsky’. Because Nijinsky’s method relied upon working out movements on his own body and then demonstrating them to his dancers – ‘something he brought with him and showed you and you could either do it or you couldn’t do it’ – rather than working spontaneously with them as Fokine had used to, many of the dancers assumed Diaghilev worked out the steps and showed them to Nijinsky, who was then expected to teach them to the company. However Diaghilev’s faith in his taciturn friend’s capacity for communication was so limited that he had brought in Marie Rambert to help him explain what he wanted from the dancers. That Diaghilev was the ultimate source of the ballet and only used Nijinsky as his interpreter is as unlikely as the image of the portly impresario stomping around a hotel suite demonstrating to Nijinsky the Chosen Maiden’s solo, though this is what Serge Lifar would later claim on Diaghilev’s behalf.
Throughout the choreographic process, Stravinsky worked closely with Nijinsky, attending rehearsals whenever he could – and once furiously pushing aside the fat German accompanist, whom Diaghilev had nicknamed Kolossal, to play the music the way he intended it: ‘twice as fast as we had been doing it, and twice as fast as we could possibly dance,’ remembered Marie Rambert. ‘He stamped his feet on the floor and banged his fist on the piano and sang and shouted, all to give us an impression of the rhythms of the music and the colour of the orchestra.’
He annoyed Nijinsky, though, by his time-wasting assumption that he was the only one who knew anything about music. ‘He explains the value of the black notes, the white notes, of quavers and semi-quavers, as though I had never studied music at all,’ Vaslav complained to Bronia, who replied that since Stravinsky did that with everybody Vaslav shouldn’t take it personally. While Stravinsky may not have believed that anyone other than himself understood music, he expected Nijinsky to listen to his ideas about dance. Luckily his ideas for Sacre were closely in line with Nijinsky’s. Throughout the collaborative process Stravinsky declared repeatedly that he and Nijinsky were wholly in tune. His conviction that the movement should be all dancing with no mime was perhaps a response to Petrushka, in which emotions and drama had been conveyed as much through facial expression as by using the body, a style Nijinsky had already moved away from in Faune and Jeux.
Like Diaghilev and Nijinsky, Stravinsky was in contact with Jaques-Dalcroze, who wrote to him in January 1913 to argue that only when the musician understood the human body as fully as the dancer’s body was impregnated by the music would the regeneration of ballet that Stravinsky had initiated be complete. All three of them were influenced by Dalcroze’s idea that in dance each musical note should be expressed by a corresponding movement; this would become one of the defining, and controversial, ideas behind Sacre’s choreography. Using Dalcrozian theory as a starting point, Nijinsky would originate the important ‘idea of the ballet as an organism broken up into interacting members, dancing in relation to itself and to each other, keeping the time of its unit in relation to the great pulse of the whole’.
Throughout the summer and autumn of 1912, when he had time, Vaslav was planning Sacre, writing out his ideas swathed in a hotel dressing gown, the hood pulled down over his face like a prize-fighter’s. The solidity, strength and simplicity of modern art – especially that of Gauguin – fascinated him, reflecting as it did his own preoccupations with rejecting illusion and artifice. Like Stravinsky he wanted to challenge preconceptions, violate rules and redefine expectations to bring audiences to a new reality. Ottoline Morrell observed him ‘incessantly thinking out new ballets, new steps … absorbed by the ideas of the old Russian myths and religions’.
In November, as they toured Germany, Nijinsky began work on the second part of Sacre with Bronia as the Chosen Maiden. Immediately she understood what he wanted from her. ‘As I danced I imagined above me the dark clouds in the stormy sky, remembered from the painting by Roerich. Around me I pictured the calm of nature before the onslaught of a hurricane. As I envisaged the primitiveness of the tribal rites, where the Chosen Maiden must die to save the earth, I felt that my body must draw into itself, must absorb the fury of the hurricane. Strong, brusque, spontaneous movements seemed to fight the elements as the Chosen Maiden protected the earth against the menacing heavens. The Chosen Maiden danced as if possessed, as she must until her frenzied dance in the primitive sacrificial ritual kills her.’ In two sessions Vaslav had created the role for her; by the third, Bronia was dancing it alone while her brother watched, delighted.
When the Ballets Russes were in London in December 1912 Vaslav began working on Sacre with the whole company for the first time. An approving Stravinsky told a reporter that, ‘Nijinsky works with passionate zeal, forgetting himself’. The dancers were less enthusiastic, however. The music was so difficult and unpredictable that even the orchestra had trouble with the rhythms – they needed seventeen orchestral rehearsals as opposed to nine for L’Oiseau de feu – and, on first seeing the score, some demanded to know if the music was correctly printed: they could not believe how complicated it was. Occasionally during rehearsals, when the music began an awkward crescendo, nervous giggles could be heard, infuriating Stravinsky who would rush to the piano, shouting, ‘Gentlemen, you do not have to laugh, I know what I wrote!’
Because there was no melody, the dancers had to follow the rhythm, calling out the time as they danced – they loathed what they called these ‘arithmetic classes’ in which all they did was count.* To make it even more difficult, the polysyllabic Russian numbers they all used took so long to say that they couldn’t keep pace with the music. The girls ran around ‘with little bits of paper in their hands, in a panic, quarrelling with each other about whose count was right’. This was why Diaghilev had employed Marie Rambert, whom the company quickly nicknamed Rhythmichka. Her role was to explain to them what Nijinsky wanted, helping to link the movements directly to Stravinsky’s complex score; but although she was popular with the dancers, hardly any of them, including Bronia, approved of her Dalcrozian ideas or understood her strange position within the Ballets Russes – neither really one of them nor part of Diaghilev’s inner circle of tacticians.
The lack of melody was one problem for the corps; Nijinsky’s steps were another. The flat-footed, straight-legged jumps, the pounding stamping that made up a percussion section of its own (so interconnected were the choreography and the composition that Stravinsky noted the rhythm of their steps on his piano score), the bent-over stance, turned-in feet and shuffling steps contradicted in every gesture the nobility and grace of classical ballet. Movement was disconnected, jagged, frenzied, apparently chaotic. The dancers found the steps physically painful and resented being asked to perform them.
Because they spent much of the time turned away from the audience, absorbed in their mystery, and there was only one short solo – most of the ballet was danced by the corps en masse – there was no chance for the dancers to shine individually. As Nijinsky would tell a journalist in February 1913, Sacre ‘is the life of the stones and the trees. There are no human beings in it. It is only the incarnation of Nature … and of human nature. It will be danced only b
y the corps de ballet, for it is a thing of concrete masses, not of individual effects.’
This depersonalisation, this denial of individual virtuosity and beauty for its own sake, was an implicit repudiation of the dancers’ ideals and their years of training and discipline. Many saw Nijinsky’s challenging choreographic style as an insult to the traditions their work celebrated. Karsavina was one of these. Though she did not dance in Sacre, she said that in it (and Faune) Nijinsky ‘declared his feud against Romanticism and bid adieu to the “beautiful”’ – which was about as disapproving as the diplomatic Karsavina could force herself to be.
But while his critics complained that his work was a rejection of beauty, Nijinsky knew they were wrong. He was, he wrote, ‘the artist who loves all shapes and all kinds of beauty. Beauty is not a relative thing. Beauty is god. God is beauty with feeling … Beauty cannot be discussed. Beauty cannot be criticised.’ Instead he wanted to re-examine beauty: ‘La grace, le charme, le joli sont rangés tout autour du point central qu’est le beau. C’est pour le beau que je travaille,’ he explained to a journalist. Grace, charm, prettiness – Karsavina’s ‘Romanticism’ – could obscure what he considered the essence of the art to which he was devoted, and it was this to which he wanted to return, not unlike Cézanne painting and repainting the same view of Mont Sainte-Victoire in an effort to uncover its spirit, or Gertrude Stein re-examining the use and function of language by subverting what people expected to hear or read. As Stein would write of Picasso, ‘Another vision than that of all the world is very rare … to see the things in a new way that is really difficult, everything prevents one: habits, schools, daily life, reason, necessities of daily life, indolence, everything prevents one.’
As the rehearsals went on, Nijinsky became increasingly defensive, all too aware how inadequately the dancers grasped his concept for Sacre. Even with Rambert’s help he was ‘unable to reach them [the corps de ballet] personally and obtain their cooperation, so they might believe in him and be supportive of his work and ideas, so essential during the process of creation’. If they could not perfectly copy a movement he demonstrated, he would accuse them of deliberately working against him and Diaghilev would have to come and make peace. When he saw how unpopular Sacre was proving in rehearsal, Diaghilev remarked sanguinely, ‘that it was an excellent sign. It proved the composition to be strikingly original.’
What he was seeking to convey, as Vaslav told Lady Ottoline, was the sense of ‘pagan worship, the religious instinct in primitive nature, fear [and] ecstasy, developing into frenzy and utter self-oblation’. His inspirations were Stravinsky’s extraordinary score and the spiritual and anthropological discussions he had with Roerich, whom he respected enormously. He was also indebted to the folk dances he had performed as a boy – the Ukrainian hopak, with side kicks, big jumps and powerful arm movements; the Caucasian lezghinka, in which men wearing soft leather boots dance almost on pointe, with fisted hands and turned-in legs; the khorovod, a circular dance used in ritual ceremonies, with flat palms and turned-in feet – and even to the costumes Roerich was designing. Roerich used folk motifs from the libretto like the firewheel and bundles of dry twigs used for setting fire to effigies, as well as rhythmical repetition, perhaps the main decorative element of Russian folk art. So important were his ideas that Nijinsky apparently waited to begin composing the ensemble sequences until he had seen Roerich’s sketches so that he could incorporate their arcs and broken and concentric circles into his choreography.
Another element in the fractured, disconnected quality of Nijinsky’s choreography for Sacre must have been his own increasingly fragile emotional state. Through the spring of 1913 the psychological pressures he was under, which had been building since he began composing Faune in 1910–11, were approaching a crisis point. It was ‘as if he felt that a net was being woven around him and was about to envelop him’.
His schedule of performing, composing and rehearsing, never in the same place for longer than a few weeks, was ever more relentless. There had never before been a ballet-master as young as him. Although he was convinced of the importance of what he was doing, he was not always sure he was doing it right and he had no real support. Bronia was newly married; his mother could not begin to comprehend the complexities of his life with Diaghilev (he wrote in his diary that he avoided speaking to her and Bronia about Diaghilev because he knew how worried they were about him); and Diaghilev himself, it was becoming increasingly obvious – the man who was meant to be his patron and protector – had a private agenda that clashed with his own.
Lydia Sokolova, a young British dancer born Hilda Munnings (until Diaghilev transformed her into a Russian ballerina when she joined the Ballets Russes in early 1913), described Nijinsky as being like ‘a wild creature who had been trapped by society and was always ill at ease’. He barely spoke to anyone and, if addressed, looked ‘as if he might suddenly butt you in the stomach’; he was always nervous, fiddling with his hands and nails, ‘and seemed to exist on a different plane. Before dancing he was even more withdrawn, like a bewitched soul. I used to watch him practising his wonderful jumps in the first position, flickering his hands; I had never seen anyone like him before.’
What kept Vaslav going was the knowledge that he was creating something totally original. In late January 1913 he wrote to tell Stravinsky how pleased he was with Sacre’s progress. ‘If the work continues like this, Igor, the result will be something great. I know what Le Sacre du printemps will be when everything is as we both want it: new, and for an ordinary viewer, a jolting impression and emotional experience. For some it will open new horizons flooded with different rays of sun. People will see new and different colours and different lines. All different, new and beautiful … So, goodbye until we see each other. A bow to your wife. I kiss your hand. Vaslav.’
The first blow to Vaslav’s hopes came a few weeks later, when Bronia told him that she could not dance the role of the Chosen Maiden. She had been feeling nauseous and faint for some weeks and the doctor had informed her she was expecting a baby. Nijinsky lost control, screaming violently at her, ‘You are the only one who can perform this dance, only you, Bronia, and no one else! … You are deliberately trying to destroy my work, just like all the others.’ When Bronia’s husband Sasha Kochetovsky came into the room, Vaslav turned on him as if he were about to hit him, calling him an ‘uncouth muzhik [peasant]’ despite all Eleonora’s protests that it was perfectly normal for a married woman to have children. Later he told Rambert that ‘“a blackguard, a brigand … has prevented Bronia from dancing Jeux and Sacre”. “But who is he?” “Kochetovsky!”’
Marriage – the first time Bronia had deviated from the path of art to which she and Vaslav had jointly been devoted from childhood – had shaken the bond between brother and sister; this betrayal, as he saw it, hardened the rift, leaving him even more isolated. In her memoirs, Bronia also described arguing with him during this period about the Dalcroze system, which she thought had nothing to teach classical dancers. After his furious response to her pregnancy she avoided him altogether, even though she longed to tell him how much she admired Sacre’s choreography and realised ‘how exhausting and fatiguing it was for him to be surrounded by uncooperative artists and try to create a ballet in such a hostile atmosphere … what an effort it cost him to obtain from the artists such exactness in the execution of a choreography they did not understand’.
Diaghilev, Nijinsky and the ballet travelled to Paris for their final rehearsals before the season began, but the news that Isadora Duncan’s two children had been drowned in the Seine on 19 April cast a dark shadow over their arrival. Their driver had left the car in gear when he got out to crank the engine and, when it started, it shot off the road, plunging into the river. It was impossible to reach the two children and their governess who were trapped inside. Vaslav, who had known the children, was very distressed by this tragedy.
Just as in 1909, the theatre they were using was under construction, so t
hey were having to rehearse alongside all the dusty commotion of builders. But the atmosphere was very different from the holiday feel of four years earlier. With Jeux still unfinished and so much riding on Sacre, the overwrought Nijinsky was furious at any distraction from his work and the entire company was picking up its mood from him and Diaghilev.
The Théâtre des Champs-Elysées was Gabriel Astruc’s baby, a vast new building intended to be a temple to modern dance and music. The sculptor Antoine Bourdelle had even used Nijinsky, alongside Isadora Duncan, as his inspiration for the bas-reliefs that adorned the monumental exterior, showing Vaslav tearing ‘himself away with a wild leap from the marble still holding him fast’. He called Nijinsky ‘more than human … [with] something of the sacred animal’ about him.
Astruc was so determined to have the Ballets Russes as his opening programme that he promised Diaghilev an astronomical fee for the season: 25,000 francs a night for twenty nights (when in earlier years he had received less than half that for a night’s performance), as well as extra money for supplementary expenses – electricians, coiffeurs, costumiers, stage hands and so on. Diaghilev couldn’t have accepted less. His existing debts and the number of rehearsals Nijinsky and Monteux needed for Sacre were crippling him. Even though the front row of seats had already been installed – and the tickets for them sold – when Stravinsky, ‘in that sad delightful Slav voice of his’, insisted that they be ripped out to make space for the extra musicians he needed for Sacre (‘You know, old friend, it’s done with the utmost ease nowadays by that powerful machine they have for cutting steel and reinforced concrete. And the upholsterers will patch up the damage very quickly’), Astruc had agreed.
