Nijinsky (20 page)

Though the overall impression the piece would create was more important to both composer and designer than strict academic ‘correctness' – they did not want
Sacre
to be dry or museum-like – each relied heavily on what was then seen as authentic source material. Roerich studied a three-volume history of Russian dress and the folk way of life and the folklorist Alexander Afanasyev's monumental
The Poetic Views of the Slavs on Nature
, as well as a twelfth-century chronicle of pagan customs and Herodotus's description of the Scythians during the Persian Wars. Stravinsky used Rimsky-Korsakov's collection of
100 Russian Folk Songs
and an extensive anthology of Lithuanian folk tunes.

Both men were inspired by the poetry of Sergey Gorodetsky. A few years earlier Stravinsky had composed music to accompany some of his poems. The 1907 poem ‘Yarila' described an ancient wise man attended by two young girls, one of whom he kills with a flint axe by a pale lime tree in the spring as a sacrifice to the sun god, Yarilo: ‘a white bride' who springs out of her bloodstains to become ‘a new god'. This imagery is
repeated in a letter from Roerich to Diaghilev describing a tribe gathered at
‘the foot
of a sacred hill, in a lush plain … to celebrate the spring rites … there is an old witch … a marriage by capture, round dances … the wisest ancient [imprints] his sacred kiss on the new-flowering earth'. Then the young virgins dance before choosing one of their number to be ‘the victim they intend to honour'.

The titles of the sections Stravinsky used as he began composing echoed these visions: ‘Divination with Twigs' (he told Roerich that
‘the picture of
an old woman in a squirrel fur … is constantly before my eyes as I compose'); ‘Khorovod – Round Dance'; ‘The Kiss of the Earth; ‘Game of Abduction'; ‘Round Dances'; ‘Secret Night-games' (which would become ‘Mystic Circles of the Young Girls'); and ‘Holy Dance'. By January 1912 he had finished Part One, and on 17 March he wrote to tell his mother that when he had played the completed sections to Diaghilev and Nijinsky in Monte Carlo,
‘they were wild about it
'.

Two days later he told Roerich triumphantly that he thought he had ‘penetrated the secret of the rhythm of spring'. The mood and sounds of the Russian spring were vitally important to the piece, as essential to its émigré creators as Roerich's shamanic studies or Stravinsky's complex modernism. Serge Lifar described spring in Kiev, where he grew up, being marked by the
‘dull, rumbling explosions
' of the dislodged floes of the thawing Dnieper crashing against one another in a torrent of melt-water. Later, an exiled Stravinsky would speak of
‘the violent Russian spring
that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking. That was the most wonderful event of every year of my childhood.'

Diaghilev raved so enthusiastically to Pierre Monteux about Stravinsky's
‘extraordinary new
work' that he was desperate to hear it when Stravinsky played it to them in Monte Carlo in the spring of 1912, but he was totally unprepared for the sadistic novelty of what he heard. As Stravinsky, drenched in sweat, pounded away on a quivering, shaking upright piano, the sound dwarfed everything. Monteux listened ‘in utter amazement', worried his friend might burst. ‘I must admit I did not understand one note of
Le Sacre du printemps
. My one desire was to find a
quiet corner in which to rest my aching head.
*
Then my director turned to me with a smile and said, “This is a masterpiece, Monteux, which will completely revolutionise music and make you famous, because you are going to conduct it.”'

In June, Stravinsky and Debussy played Stravinsky's four-hand arrangement of
Sacre
at the Paris home of Louis Laloy, editor of
La Grande Revue
.
‘When they finished
, there was no question of embracing, nor even of compliments,' wrote Laloy. ‘We were dumbfounded, overwhelmed by this hurricane which had come from the depths of the ages, and which had taken life at the roots.' Five months later, Debussy was still in thrall to what he had heard, writing to Stravinsky that he was haunted as if
‘by a beautiful nightmare
', trying ‘in vain to recall the terrifying impression that it made. That's why I wait for the performance like a greedy child who's been promised some jam.'

When they first began discussing
Sacre
, Roerich and Stravinsky had assumed that they would use Fokine as choreographer. In 1910–11 he was still the Ballets Russes's
directeur choreographique
and although Nijinsky had begun work on
Faune
, no one apart from Diaghilev, Bakst and Bronia knew about it. But by early 1912, as he was finishing
Sacre
, Stravinsky was having doubts, writing to his mother from Monte Carlo in March to complain that Fokine was not up to the job. Each of his successive works was immeasurably weaker than the one before, Stravinsky said, and for
Sacre
‘new forms must be created
and the evil, the greedy and the gifted Fokine has not even dreamed of them … Genius is needed, not
habileté
.' It could only be Nijinsky.

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 by the
corps de ballet
, for it is a thing of concrete masses, not of individual effects.'