Nijinsky (22 page)

Others were less convinced. At one of the last rehearsals, Diaghilev asked Enrico Cecchetti, venerable
maître de ballet
and guardian of the old style of dance, what he thought of
Sacre
.
‘I think the whole thing
has been done by four idiots,' Cecchetti replied. ‘First, Monsieur Stravinsky,
who wrote the music. Second, Monsieur Roerich, who designed the scenery and costumes. Third, Monsieur Nijinsky, who composed the dances. Fourth, Monsieur Diaghilev, who wasted money on it.' Diaghilev just laughed.

The people who crowded into the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on the unseasonably warm evening of 29 May 1913 (the anniversary of
Faune
's premiere) were a mixture of types – as Cocteau would put it,
‘the thousand varieties of snobbism
, super-snobbism, anti-snobbism'. Many were bejewelled ladies from the highest ranks of society, accompanied by men in white tie, the grand music-lovers who had been Diaghilev's earliest supporters in Paris. Others were younger, intellectual and rebellious – refusing to wear stiff collars and tailcoats (which anyway they could not afford) as a mark of their rejection of the traditional and outdated. Although the seats had all been sold, at double the normal price, Diaghilev, seeking support for his radical programme, had given these artists, critics and poets free standing passes, so that inside the theatre they were mingling on foot amidst the boxes occupied by the
gratin
.

Stravinsky had given an interview (which he later disowned) which came out that morning, explaining the inspirations behind
Sacre
and what he, Nijinsky and Roerich hoped to achieve with it. He concluded,
‘I am happy to have found
in Monsieur Nijinsky the ideal collaborator, and in Monsieur Roerich, the creator of the decorative atmosphere for this work of faith.' This public show of confidence does not tally with descriptions of the final orchestral rehearsals (during which Nijinsky tried to throw a chair at a workman who interrupted them) and the dress rehearsal the previous day, which Rambert described as pandemonium, and during which the dancers heard the orchestra play the score for the first time.

‘Whatever happens
,' Diaghilev told Pierre Monteux and the dancers, ‘the ballet must be performed to the end.' To calm everyone's nerves, the first piece was
Les Sylphides
: graceful, poised and beautiful. Then, after an interval, Monteux gave the signal for the orchestra to begin playing
Le Sacre du printemps
. Stravinsky said later that his conductor had
been
‘impervious and nerveless
as a crocodile' but Monteux remembered keeping his eyes glued to the score in front of him, not daring even to glance at the stage.
‘You may think
this strange,
cherie
,' he told his wife, ‘but I have never seen the ballet.'

Like Monteux, the dancers waiting on stage were nervous, sweating heavily in their thick costumes.
*
This is the Sotheby's description, from a 1968 sale, of a costume for one of the Maidens:
‘Exceptionally long-sleeved
robe [of cream-coloured flannel] stencilled all over in barbaric patterns of oxblood, scarlet, lemon-yellow, turquoise-blue, peacock-blue, ochre and bottle-green, the predominant effect being tawny; and an attached vermillion petticoat stencilled with an oxblood and white stripe and dashes of white and yellow.' The glowing, gem-like colours Roerich used recalled traditional Russian ikons. On their legs both men and women wore loose white leggings over which the ribbons of their soft shoes criss-crossed. The men wore false beards and strange, pointed, fur-trimmed caps, the women headbands and long false plaits. Behind them the set portrayed a lush green landscape dotted with the mystical symbols or ‘memory signs' so important to Roerich: animal skulls, sacred rivers, hills and trees, magical stones and ominously gathering storm clouds.

The first strains of
Sacre
, a technically intimidating bassoon solo in an unusually high register, are hauntingly delicate, but the body of the score is wild, violent, powerful and provocative: complex rhythms layered over one another, pounding away in a remorseless, dissonant frenzy of primitive abandon. For an audience of 1913, even an audience as sophisticated as this one, hearing this kind of noise for the first time was overwhelmingly disconcerting,
‘as irritating to
the nervous system,' said one early listener, ‘as the continuous thudding of a savage's
tom-tom'. Hisses, whistles, boos and disbelieving laughter broke out: was this some kind of joke? The composer Camille Saint-Saëns leapt out of his seat to leave, hissing to his neighbour,
‘If that's a bassoon
, I'm a baboon!' Debussy, who had so longed to hear an orchestra playing
Sacre
, was sitting in Misia Sert's box. After a few moments he turned to her
‘with a
sad, anxious face' and whispered, ‘It's terrifying – I don't understand it'.

Onstage, as the audience reaction grew less inhibited, the frightened dancers struggled to hear the music over the noise of the crowd and forced themselves to keep moving. Trembling with fury, dripping with sweat beneath the stage lights, his face ashen, Nijinsky stood on a chair in the wings, frantically shouting out the time for them. Stravinsky, who had rushed backstage when the tumult began, was by his side. Astruc leant forward out of his box, his fist clenched, and screamed,
‘First listen!
Then
hiss!' Desperately Diaghilev switched the house lights on and off several times, appealing for calm.

Nijinsky's willingness
‘to exclude the audience
', partly by denying them the lightness and sensuality they had come to expect from the Ballets Russes, partly by having his dancers apparently more absorbed in the ritual of their dance than the performance, caused fury. When the maidens held their cheeks as if in pain, hecklers shouted out, ‘
Un docteur! Un dentiste!
' One countess took their heavily rouged cheeks as a deliberate dig at her own make-up, and stood up, cheeks flaming, tiara askew, to shout indignantly,
‘I am sixty years old
, but this is the first time anyone has dared to make a fool of me!'

Defenders of the piece were equally vehement, believing like Harry Kessler that they were witnessing
‘an utterly new vision
, something never before seen … art and anti-art at once'. They recognised that what they were seeing and hearing was as revolutionary as the writings of Nietszche, Proust and Freud, the scientific discoveries of Einstein or the art of Cezanne, Picasso and Brancusi. Fisticuffs broke out between opposing factions: one man hit another over the head with his cane; Monteux saw a man pull someone else's hat down over his face. Some witnessed
gendarmes
arriving to quell the riot. The music critic Florent
Schmitt cried,
‘Down with the whores
of the
Seizième
!' Finding herself in the midst of a battleground, Eleonora fainted.

At times, reading the accounts of the rowdy, roiling mob, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they had all come spoiling for a fight. The
succès de scandale
was an established part of cultural life, particularly in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century – the first Impressionist painters made a virtue of being rejected by the establishment with the
Salons des refusés
, while both Oscar Wilde's 1894
Salomé
and Richard Strauss's 1906 opera of Wilde's play caused their audiences to return again and again in delighted horror. Premieres of pieces by Wagner and Schoenberg had provoked riots. Diaghilev himself was hardly a stranger to courting commercial success by leading his audiences to the outer bounds of what they considered acceptable.

The audience at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées was apparently restless from the start, whispering and giggling even before
Sacre
began. Roerich later observed that the real savages that night were not the dancers portraying on stage
‘the refined primitivism
of our ancestors, for whom rhythm, the sacred symbol, and subtlety of movement were great and sacred concepts', but the brawling mass watching them.
‘What an idiot
the public is,' Rambert heard Nijinsky muttering. ‘
Dura publika, dura publika
.'

The theatre did not quieten until Maria Piltz calmly faced the hooting, bellowing audience for her solo.
*
‘She seemed to dream
, her knees turned inwards, the heels pointing out – inert. A sudden spasm shook her body out of its corpse-like rigour. At the fierce onward thrust of the rhythm, she trembled in ecstatic, irregular jerks.' Finally the Maiden collapsed, having danced herself to death, and six of the men lifted her
limp body to the skies and bore it off with
‘no cathartic outpouring
of despair, sadness, or anger, only a chilling resignation'.

The pitiless quality of
Sacre
, the impossibility of catharsis, is perhaps the main reason no one there that night quite knew what to make of it. As Prince Volkonsky, Diaghilev's friend and former colleague at the Imperial Theatres, said,
‘Nothing could be
less appropriate to prepare one for this spectacle than the word “ballet” and all the associations it carries with it.' Not only was there no demonstrable grace, virtuosity or eroticism, but there was also no narrative and none of the conventional devices that steered an audience towards a sense of unity and completion.
‘This is not
the usual spring sung by poets, with its breezes, its birdsong, its pale skies and tender greens. Here there is nothing but the harsh struggle of growth, the panic terror from the rising of the sap, the fearful regrouping of the cells,' wrote Jacques Rivière, hailing
Sacre
a masterpiece. ‘Spring seen from inside, with its violence, its spasms and its fissions. We seem to be watching a drama through a microscope.'

The music and the choreography combined to create something simply breathtakingly new. If
Le Sacre du printemps
was for Roerich an attempt at reconstruction of an ancient ceremonial rite, for Stravinsky and Nijinsky the distant past was a metaphor for the tragedy of modern existence. Their
Sacre
– the music and the movement – was
‘a bleak and intense celebration
of the collective will' and its triumph over the individual. If audiences found it frightening, remorseless, inhuman, at times absurd – well, that was the point.

Grigoriev kept the curtain down for longer than usual before the next piece,
Le Spectre de la Rose
, in an attempt to restore order. Think of Vaslav in the crowded changing room while the wardrobe mistress stitched him into his pink body stocking, preparing himself after that tumult to dance a role which merely irritated him – one that he saw as cloyingly sentimental and outdated and by which he resented being defined.

After the final curtain, said Stravinsky, they were
‘excited, angry
, disgusted, and … happy'. He, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Bakst, Cocteau and Kessler went off to dine. Diaghilev's only comment on the evening was,
‘Exactly what I wanted.' After dinner, during which they agreed that it might take people years to understand what they had just shown them, they drove through the dark and empty city in a cab, Cocteau and Kessler perched on the roof, Bakst waving a handkerchief tied to his cane like a flag. Diaghilev was muffled up against the night air in his opossum coat; Vaslav sat in his
‘dress coat and top hat
, quietly contented, smiling to himself'.

Cocteau remembered their midnight ride taking them on to the Bois de Boulogne – where by coincidence Rambert and the rest of the company were also having a late supper, too excited to think of going to bed. The scent of acacia blossom hung in the air. When the coachman lit his lantern, Cocteau saw tears glistening on Diaghilev's face. He was reciting Pushkin under his breath, with Stravinsky and Nijinsky listening intently. Whatever happened later, Cocteau wrote,
‘You cannot imagine
the sweetness and nostalgia of those men.'

In June Nijinsky went on to London with Diaghilev and Walter Nouvel, his usual travelling companions. Also on their train was Romola de Pulszky, who had in Vienna some months earlier managed to persuade Diaghilev to allow her to follow the Ballet with the plan that if she carried on her training with Cecchetti she might one day dance with them. Nijinsky had been against the idea – what else could she be but a dilettante? – but Diaghilev, always aware of who people were, was happy to be able to please her mother, the great Emilia Márkus. Romola had managed to convince Diaghilev that it was Bolm, not Nijinsky, with whom she was in love; and so she had been accepted.

Since then, Romola had been tailing
le petit
(as she and her maid had codenamed Vaslav) with all the focus and guile of an international spy. The dresser at the Viennese Opera House, Mr Schweiner, fed her titbits of information; once a girlfriend entered Nijinsky's room at the Hotel Bristol while he was dressing
‘as if she
was making a mistake'; in Monaco Romola lay on a bench under a blossoming magnolia tree as Nijinsky, Diaghilev and their party had dinner on the terrace at the Hotel de Paris,
‘and watched them
for hours and hours'. Having exhausted Bolm and Cecchetti, she had moved on to Baron de Günzburg, one of Diaghilev's most important backers, and by his side had complete access to the Ballets. It was with Günzburg that she had watched the first night of
Sacre
, squashed in among the mob of dancers and friends watching from the wings, looking out for Nijinsky's pale, tense face in the crowd.