Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  It is not that the stage is quiet or the choreography sparse: Ivanov’s initial twenty-four swans are soon joined by twelve cygnets (children, usually left out of today’s productions) and by soloists until as many as forty dancers fill the stage. Yet no matter the crowds and the choreography’s increasing demands and complexity, the dancers never break order or rank; nor do they lose their discipline and inner focus. Moreover, they never lose their spatial and physical—or musical—relationship to Odette, their queen. They are her likeness, and their movements and patterns mirror and reflect her own: as they shadow her, they become an outward manifestation of her inner life.

  This is even true in the pas de deux. Today we often think of this dance as a love story, but in 1895 it was more of a first-person soliloquy: Odette’s story. At the beginning of the scene, as we have seen, Odette relates her sad tale in mime; she then repeats it here, abstracted in movement, in her dance with Prince Siegfried. This pas de deux was not an impassioned Romeo-and-Juliet-style duet—in fact, it was not a pas de deux at all, but instead a ménage à trios: Siegfried was originally performed by Pavel Gerdt, who was apparently too old to manage the partnering alone, so Benno (Siegfried’s friend) danced with Odette too. Any love interest was thus diluted: Siegfried and Benno were there to lift and support Odette and to allow her feelings to fully emerge. This was a kind of love, to be sure, but more courtly than romantic, an idealization of woman rather than of feelings.

  The dance begins as Odette descends gracefully to the ground in an arpeggio of movement (to a delicate harp cadenza), her body folded over on itself and her face hidden beneath her long, wing-like arms. As the first notes of the violin solo begin, her partner lifts her arm and literally unfolds her body as she rises up to full pointe. As she moves, he seems to disappear: it is just her and the long legato phrases of the violin. If audiences experience this dance as love, it is the harmony between Odette and the music, not her relationship with Siegfried, that inspires the feeling. Fittingly, the dance ends not in embrace but instead with Odette plunged into a deep supported arabesque or fallen with arms folded over on herself, head down, and the corps de ballet arrayed behind her, similarly draped.

  Even as the dance opens out again—with solos, the arm-plaited “four little swans,” and a rushing coda—Odette’s self-absorption intensifies. No matter how bravura the demands (and there are some very difficult passages), the steps are designed as a kind of inverse showing off: small, quick movements requiring steely discipline and restraint—steps that force a ballerina to pull into herself and the music, rather than flashing out to the audience. The ballerina role was danced by the Italian Pierina Legnani, whose thick legs and fluid, strong technique—not to mention the ropes of pearls she liked to wear over her costume—made her an unlikely interpreter for Ivanov’s pure and lucid choreography. But in fact her impressive range and flexibility and (as many observers put it) the “plastique” of her dancing were crucial to the ballet’s success. As one critic noted: “It was as if Legnani were actually experiencing these moments, filled with poetic melancholy.”45

  The contrast between Ivanov’s “white” lakeside scenes and Petipa’s own architectonic and fiercely difficult dances for the court scenes could not have been sharper (it is Petipa’s black swan who executes the famous thirty-two fouettés—another Italian trick). It was a difference of style but also of ideas. In Petipa’s lexicon the individual is ennobled through fine taste and eloquence, grace and manners; the flamboyant, black Odile appears evil because she corrupts classical technique with her stylishly exaggerated bravura and false eloquence. Her movements are too skilled and alluring, lacking discernment and bordering on crass. Petipa’s choreography enshrined hierarchy and order, refinement and elegance—not as a set of repressive or stifling rules but as a necessary condition for beauty and art. Ivanov submitted to this aesthetic but also undercut it: there was a solvent in his dances, a yearning to break patterns and discard ornament in favor of a simpler grammar that might, in its most concentrated and lyrical forms, capture something more intimate and interior. He was interested in the inner sanctuaries—the private Russian chambers—of Petipa’s grand and marble-faced aesthetic.

  Swan Lake had no successor: it stood alone in the repertory, not only for what it was but for where it came from. It was a product of Moscow and St. Petersburg, of the 1870s and the 1890s. Its fractured history and truncated, rearranged text, choreographed in fits and starts by Ivanov and Petipa after Tchaikovsky’s death, captures something of the competing forces and extraordinary invention shaping ballet at the time. Swan Lake, moreover, was no féerie but instead a full-blown Romantic tragedy, even in its gentler St. Petersburg form. It was not Petipa’s greatest work; that distinction rests firmly with The Sleeping Beauty. But if Beauty summoned forth an idealized classical and courtly past and was itself an exemplary monument to Imperial style, Ivanov’s lakeside dances in Swan Lake conjured the possibility of a perfect future in which love exists out of time and dancers are joined in a pure, plastic, and musical art. Together these two ballets stand as pillars marking ballet’s place as an Imperial Russian art.

  By century’s end, however, the Russian moment in ballet was over. Petipa and Ivanov’s generation passed abruptly from the scene. In 1899 Vsevolozhsky left the Imperial Theaters to take up a position at the Hermitage Theater, and Petipa went with him. Petipa was thus withdrawn deeper into the court, his ballets performed in ever-smaller venues for a restricted and elite audience. The Imperial Theaters, by contrast, turned increasingly toward Moscow: Vsevolozhsky was replaced briefly by the thoughtful but politically inept Prince Volkonsky (grandson of the Decembrist), whose efforts to discipline the extravagant behavior of the tsar’s former lover, the ballerina Matilda Kschessinska, cost him his job; and then by V. A. Teliakovsky, a Muscovite and military man who cared little for Petipa and worked instead to promote a new generation of self-consciously Russian artists. Petipa lasted at the Hermitage for a few years but was finally forced into retirement in 1903. His ballets continued to be mounted at the Maryinsky, but he himself was rudely sidelined and those in charge treated him with thinly veiled contempt.

  Distraught and frustrated, Petipa retired to the Crimea and wrote his autobiography, an exercise that served him poorly. He was too disenchanted to reflect on his life, and instead documented his rage—rage at the fraying of the social order and the decline of proper manners, rage at the new generation’s rampant and careless disregard for the past (“I’m not quite yet dead, M. Teliakovsky!”), and at the mangled state of his own dances. He dedicated the book to Vsevolozhsky. It was translated from the French and published in St. Petersburg in 1906, but by then Petipa’s closest colleagues were gone: Ivanov had died in 1901 and Johansson in 1903, Vsevolozhsky would go in 1909, and the ballerinas Legnani and Brianza had long since shifted their sights back to western Europe. Petipa himself died in 1910, and an official at the Imperial Theaters stiffly recorded the event: “The maître de ballet Petipa died on July 1st/13th, 1910, in the town of Gurzuf, and I have therefore removed his name from the list of directors.”46

  Petipa’s legacy, however, was enormous. His early ballets were largely forgotten, but the later years of his reign at the Imperial Theaters saw the creation of nearly all of the ballets that would form the base of the classical tradition for the century to come. Not just La Bayadère and The Sleeping Beauty and—with Ivanov—The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, but also Giselle, which was rechoreographed by Petipa in the 1880s (in the version from which most modern productions derive), Paquita and Le Corsaire (both from earlier French ballets), Don Quixote, and perhaps most significantly Raymonda (1898) to gorgeously Russian-inflected music by Glazunov, which contained a wealth of jewel-like dances that choreographers would mine well into the twentieth century. Elevated to mythic status, these ballets—and none more than Beauty—would become the root and source of classical ballet not just in Russia but also in France, Italy, and–especially—America and Britain.

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nbsp; Under Petipa’s stewardship, the entire axis of classical ballet had shifted. For two centuries, the art form had been quintessentially French. No more: from this point forth, classical ballet would be Russian. It is often said, rather flatly, that Russian ballet was a mix of French, Scandinavian (through the teacher Johansson), and Italian sources—that Russia, through Petipa, absorbed all of these and made them her own. This is certainly true; but what really changed ballet was the way it became entwined with Imperial Russia herself. Serfdom and autocracy, St. Petersburg and the prestige of foreign culture, hierarchy, order, aristocratic ideals and their ongoing tension with more eastern folk forms: all of these things ran into ballet and made it a quintessentially Russian art. Moreover, because classical ballet sat at the intersection of Russia and the West, it took on an unprecedented symbolic importance: to this day, ballet matters more in Russia than it ever has elsewhere, before or since.

  Marius Petipa was Russia’s last foreign ballet master, Lev Ivanov its first native voice. In their wake came a new—and newly confident—generation of Russian dancers and ballet masters, including Alexander Gorsky and Agrippina Vaganova; Mikhail Fokine, Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, and Vaslav Nijinsky, all of whom graduated from the Imperial Theater School at or near the turn of the century. These dancers did not shy from authority: Gorsky took charge of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow and Fokine would eventually assume the mantle of the St. Petersburg company. Henceforth ballet’s greatest stars would be Russian.

  But this new Russian generation faced a daunting challenge: classical ballet was in Russian hands, but Russia itself was on the brink of collapse. Everything that had made ballet important since Peter the Great was about to come to a violent end. These dancers had been trained under the old order: Imperial Russia was all they knew. Many had worked with Petipa and Ivanov, performed at the Maryinsky and been given chocolates by the tsar. But in the coming years, building on Petipa and Ivanov’s legacy would prove difficult and contentious. Their ballets—indeed, ballet itself—stood for the past and a dying aristocratic principle, for a way of life that was rotting from within and under attack from without. Ballet would have to change. A new and defiantly Russian century in dance was about to begin.

  *Serf theater flourished most in regions with an abundance of house serfs who, in contradistinction to field serfs, were thought to be more domesticated and suited to their new roles. Serf theaters were thus especially concentrated in the regions in and around Moscow and (to a somewhat lesser extent) St. Petersburg. The map of theatrical life in Russia, with repercussions right up to the present, was largely set by the patterns of serfdom.

  *Indian dancers (bayadères) were a popular theme in French Romantic ballet and opera. In 1810 Pierre Gardel created dances for the opera Les Bayadères, and in 1830 Marie Taglioni danced in Le Dieu et la Bayadère, with choreography by her father and a libretto by Eugene Scribe, which ended with the ballerina leaping to her death in a blazing pyre and emerging secure in Brahma’s arms as she walked through the clouds into a paradis indien of dazzling light.

  *Drigo’s cuts meant that the 1895 production was shorter than the original by a full quarter. The original four acts were thus compressed into three: Act I, Scene 1 and Act II were choreographed by Petipa, Act I, Scene 2 and Act III by Ivanov. Ivanov also created the Venetian and Hungarian dances for the divertissements in Act II.

  Diaghilev had the cunning … to combine the excellent with the chic, and revolutionary art with the atmosphere of the old regime.

  —LYDIA LOPOKOVA

  I love ballet and am more interested in it than in anything else.…For the only form of scenic art that sets itself, as its cornerstone, the tasks of beauty, and nothing else, is ballet.

  —IGOR STRAVINSKY

  Advanced civilization and archaic barbarism … the crudest materialism and the most lofty spirituality—are they not the whole history of Russia, the whole epic of the Russian nation, the whole inward drama of the Russian soul?

  —MAURICE PALÉOLOGUE

  Ballets Russes is perhaps the most renowned company in the history of ballet. Understandably so. In the space of twenty years from 1909 to 1929 Diaghilev and his dancers gathered up the energy and vitality of Russian ballet and returned classical dance to the forefront of European culture. At the same time, they forced the Imperial ballet out of its nineteenth-century mold and onto the cutting edge of modernism. All of this happened abroad, and especially in Paris: the Ballets Russes never once performed in Russia. But although the company had its greatest successes in the French capital and drew deeply on the city’s artistic traditions and anarchic chic, the inspiration and source of Diaghilev’s new ballet always came from Russia itself. It was in Russia that the radical changes in dance that made the Ballets Russes first began, and it was to Russia that Diaghilev constantly returned for the dancers and choreographers who were to set ballet on a new course.

  The most celebrated ballerina in St. Petersburg at the turn of the twentieth century was Matilda Kschessinska (1872–1971). Kschessinska was voluptuous and sturdy, with short, thickly muscular legs, a well-rounded figure, and a captivating charm. Her dancing was impressively bravura and she had a strong Italian-accented technique, described by one critic as “wild, crude and brimming with passion.” But it was her notorious private life as much as her dancing that propelled Kschessinska to the top ranks of her art: she had been mistress to the future Tsar Nicholas II in the early 1890s, and “Niki” had provided a small mansion and kept her in high style. Various grand dukes had followed, and she dined on Limoges china, kept up with the latest French fashions, and vacationed in Biarritz, in Paris, and on the Riviera. A shallow and capricious woman, Kschessinska’s demimonde escapades came to stand for the insularity and indulgence besetting the Russian Imperial court by the early years of the twentieth century.1

  There was also, however, a new generation of dancers—the Ballets Russes generation—and they were an entirely different breed: among them, Anna Pavlova (1881–1931), Tamara Karsavina (1885–1978), Mikhail Fokine (1880–1942), and Vaslav Nijinsky (born around 1889–1950). The ballerinas in particular were physically distinctive: long and lithe, with smooth lines, evenly developed muscles, and a soft sensuality. This was partly a matter of training. Under the guidance of the transplanted Italian ballet master Enrico Cecchetti, who taught most of Diaghilev’s future dancers in St. Petersburg and would later accompany the Ballets Russes across Europe, ballet became more supple and malleable. The reasons for this were not immediately obvious: Cecchetti belonged to the old Italian school and emphasized repetition and tricks (especially multiple pirouettes) and designed long, grueling enchaînements to build strength and endurance. In so doing, however, he also inadvertently gave his students the tools to redefine classical technique, to remake it in ways he himself did not always like or approve. Rather than dwelling on steps and bravura stunts, the new generation of dancers used their technical powers to sculpt their bodies and develop molten and flowing movements that emphasized flexibility and plastique.2

  Consider Anna Pavlova, who studied with Cecchetti and became, with Karsavina, the prototype of the new Russian ballerina. Pavlova had none of the strength or full-bodied beauty of Kschessinska. To the contrary, she was thin and awkward-looking, with highly arched feet, gangly arms, and a long, straight neck (she referred to herself as a “puny giraffe”). Pavlova despaired at her willowy body and tried to fatten herself by drinking cod liver oil, but in fact her frailty turned out to be her greatest asset. Her dancing had a tremulous, fragile look—her arabesques and balances were, as Bronislava Nijinska later recalled, “insecure” and “trembling … like an aroma, a breeze, a dream.” Her toe shoes had a hard, pinhead point and the line of her leg was slender and tapering: she never perched stolidly on toe but seemed instead to move through positions. And although she had lanky, muscular legs (“taut like a goat’s,” according to the critic Akim Volynsky) and a strong jump, she looked wispy and evanescent, without a hint of heavy st
rength or bravura. Her dancing appeared spontaneous and elusive, as if painted from nature—like Impressionism applied to dance.3

  Pavlova, moreover, had none of Kschessinska’s coquettish charm: she was dead serious about her art. Her classmates called her “the broom” for her gaunt figure and earnest determination. Nor was she alone. Tamara Karsavina was cultivated and a voracious reader, and Nijinsky and his sister Bronislava both devoured books and discussed them with urgent passion, especially Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. As Karsavina later noted in her memoirs, her fans were not the sumptuously attired dukes and duchesses of what old balletomanes called the “diamond row,” but the students and intellectuals who queued for hours and crowded into the gallery to support a fresh, new kind of dancing.4

  This new generation found a choreographer in Mikhail Fokine. Fokine had been trained at the Theater School and worked with Petipa, but the main impetus for his art came from outside of ballet: from music, art, and theater. Fokine took painting lessons and spent hours at the Hermitage studying the techniques and styles of past artists, an exercise which led him to question the conventions that had defined ballet for so long. Why, he wondered in a preface accompanying one of his first ballets, did ballet dancers stand with such unnaturally ramrod-straight backs and ridiculously turned-out feet? Where were the lilting, bending figures so prominent in painting and sculpture? And the corps de ballet, arranged in sharp geometric configurations, was absurd—since when, he asked, did crowds of peasants line up and dance in perfect synchrony? Ballet, he decided, was hopelessly “confused”: he found it nonsensical for pink-tutued ballerinas to run around with Egyptian-clad peasants and Russian top-booted dancers. A ballet, he said, must “have complete unity of expression.” It must be historically consistent and stylistically accurate. Petipa’s French classical vocabulary was appropriate only for French classical or Romantic subjects. If a ballet was about ancient Greece, then the choreographer must invent movement based on the art and sculptures of that place and time.5