On hearing the title L’Apres-Midi D’Un Faune most
people that have heard of it would think of the music of Claude Debussy. Yet we
would be as justified to think of Leon Bakst’s costume and set designs of 1912.
We might also think of Nijinsky and Nijinksa dancing or of the famous
impresario Serge Diaghilev. Although the music is probably now it’s most
enduring component the Ballet Russes initiated the work and the choice of music
was by no means the first of the arts to contribute.
Alexandre Benois, one of Diaghilev’s designers, was
particularly captivated by the idea of art as a single entity. ‘It was no
accident that what was afterwards known as the Ballets Russes was originally
conceived not by the professionals of the dance but by a circle of artists,
linked together by the idea of Art as an entity. Everything followed from the
common desire of several painters and musicians to see the fulfilment of the
theatrical dreams which haunted them.’ Presumably what Benois thinks of as art
does not include literature and poetry; unless one substitutes for literature
the folk tales and mythology which forms the original inspiration for themes in
classical ballet. Some of the other arts, though, are more prominently
represented. Dance and music are evident, plus the artistic value of the décor,
costumes and so on.
Although Diaghilev is such a key figure in Ballet Russes his
artistic work is not easy to trace. The choreography, for example, is not his. Although
a trained musician and singer Diaghilev’s role as impresario was in selecting,
organising and inspiring people. Of the early ballets Michel Fokine was chief
choreographer; he produced such works as The Firebird, Petrushka, Les
Sylphides and so on. Despite the success of these ballets Diaghilev turned
to Nijinsky because he thought a younger mind would be more receptive to his
own ideas. At this time Diaghilev aspired to music visualisation theories and
fashions in dance movement such as eurhythmy which is a system of performance, education
and therapy based on the harmony of bodily movement and music. Diaghilev might
have harboured the wish to be a choreographer and is credited with having
arranged Les Orientales. He also produced Fireworks, which
featured a complex light show with plastic Cubist scenery set to the music of
Stravinsky.
Diaghilev regarded his next major choreographer, Leonide
Massine, as stubborn and provincial, though Massine was actually very receptive
to the ideas of Cocteau and Picasso for the Cubist work Parade. For
example, Picasso’s French Manager of 1917 was a very difficult costume in which
to dance.
Nijinsky had performed in and choreographed L’Apres-Midi
D’Un Faune and Jeux, both with music by Debussy, and the controversial
Rite Of Spring with music by Stravinsky. His gestures were deliberately
angular and disrupted the normal flow of body movement. They were
anti-classical. Cyril Beaumont praised Nijinsky in Petrushka and Jeux
as portraying impersonality and ritual. Fokine was the choreographer for Petrushka
but Nijinsky played the lead role in their combined style. Angular
anti-classical gestures were used first by Fokine in Tannhӓuser
in which Nijinsky danced the faun. Such anti-classicism might also be seen in
the occasional lack of correspondence between the music and the pace of
movement. This idea was an attempt to express the agitation of the soul in a
relatively still body. Fokine had been influenced by Isadora Duncan in the same
way that Massine was later to be influenced by expressionist dance. Massine
also made great use of folk and national dances to extend the ballet
repertoire.
Diaghilev’s conception of artistic unity was transmitted to
his choreographers not only by the closeness with which they worked with
composers, but also by advising them to study painting. Diaghilev told Fokine
to look at the composition of Renaissance art to find aesthetic grouping of
figures. He also introduced Fokine to eighteenth century painting at this time.
Another example of taking visual inspiration from art history can be found in L’Apres-Midi
D’Un Faune where, at the suggestion of Leon Bakst, poses from Greek vases
were copied.
Part of the reason why Diaghilev was such a good organiser may
well be his passionate interest, but lack of direct ability, in different art
forms. This is most evident in music where you would think he would be
strongest. Diaghilev had originally wanted to be a composer but was advised by
Rimsky-Korsakov to give it up. At first Diaghilev was content to adapt
established music for his ballet. Les Sylphides was constructed in this
way by taking assorted pieces by Chopin. For example, the Waltz in C-Sharp
Minor, Opus 64, Number 2, which formed the pas de deux between the fourth solo
dance and the final ensemble. Adrian Stokes, describing his reaction to the ballet,
wrote, ‘An art form, the classical dance, comes to meet another entity, the art
of Chopin…For myself there is nothing as beautiful as a perfect performance of Sylphides
by the Russian ballet with the Benois décor and the Diaghilev lighting.’
There was one exception in Diaghilev’s first season to his
policy of using established music. This was a commission for a young Russian
composer, Igor Stravinsky, to write music for a ballet to be called The
Firebird. Diaghilev met with some opposition to this idea, not least from
the dancers who found Stravinsky’s music too rhythmically complex for dancing.
However, Diaghilev pushed forward with the idea in order that the choreography
of Fokine and the music of Stravinsky should be closely worked out together. This
was not a unique concept; Ivanov, Fokine’s teacher, had been in favour of it
and Fokine had worked closely with Tchaikovsky to create ‘Swan Lake’. But in
‘The Firebird’ there was the possibility of the closest mutual inspiration of
choreographer and composer. Adrian Stokes, writing in Russian Ballets on
the success of The Firebird, contends ‘that the universal appeal of
modern Russian ballet lies in the fact that it has occasionally achieved the
only complete form known to history of musical drama. Dramatic action or
movement and music have consistently inspired the one the other in modern
Russian ballet alone.’
Diaghilev went on to commission Stravinsky to write Pulcinella,
Petrushka, Les Noces, Le Chant De Rossignol and others including The
Right of Spring. But Stravinsky was by no means the only composer to find
work with Diaghilev; others include Maurice Ravel, Richard Strauss, Erik Satie,
Serge Prokofiev and Claude Debussy. Debussy, in particular, was interested in
art forms other than his own. He was fond of painters such as Whistler, the
French Symbolists and Turner (who he called the greatest creator of mystery in
art). He was interested in theatre, novels like Edgar Alan Poe’s The Fall of
the House of Usher and especially poetry. L’Apres Midi D’Un Faune was
inspired by a ‘musical poem’ by Mallarmé to which Debussy worked very closely.
Mallarmé
and Debussy conceived of music and poetry as being totally synchronous art
forms.
On the visual side most people’s expectation of the design work
would be that it was competent, efficacious, perhaps even imaginative, but not
‘proper art’ like you’d see in a gallery. Such terminology artificially
separating art and design is often fairly meaningless and unhelpful but in the
context of the design work for the Russian Ballet it appears especially trite and
unnecessary. Diaghilev organised many Russian art exhibitions outside of Russia
which brought him into contact with many leading artists in Europe. Such was
the ballet’s impact that Rodin championed Nijinsky’s choreography of L’Apres
Midi D’Un Faune against it’s critics and celebrated it in his own sculpture
with a statuette of Nijinsky dancing.
The painters Konstantin Korovin and Alexander Golovin had
already merged the worlds of art and decoration in their sets for Sava
Mamontov’s private opera company in Moscow which were regarded as being of the
highest artistic value in Russia. In 1914 Diaghilev used two other Russian
painters who achieved notoriety for developing cubist rayonism. There were
Natalia Gontcharova and Mikhail Larionov. Goncharova made designs for The
Firebird, Le Coq D’Or and for Liturgie. In the latter she drew on historical
influences from Cimabue. Larionov was initially employed to supervise the
choreography – something for which he was not experienced and that shows
Diaghilev’s attitude to smashing rigid departmentalism in artistic trades.
Diaghilev’s next important acquisition of designer was Pablo
Picasso. Picasso had been a founder member of the St. Petersburg dilettantes
who wanted to unite music, design and choreography. Picasso produced designs
for Le Train Bleu and others including Parade. This was
originally the idea of the poet Jean Cocteau and used music by Erik Satie.
Cocteau had wanted to incorporate voice and gramophone but it was decided
against. Picasso’s designs were mostly cubist as he was developing this style
with Georges Braque at the time. But he also uses clown images (which he mostly
used in his paintings from 1905-6) and some Futurist influence is also evident
plus the enigmatic style of Giorgio de Chirico who had designed sets for Le
Bal.
In the same way that Picasso’s style was often eclectic in
its fusion of influences, so Diaghilev’s use of artists spanned the whole
spectrum of contemporary art styles from the time: cubism, French symbolism,
surrealism, socialist realism and constructivism. Constructivism was associated
with the Russian revolution but by the time Diaghilev used it in 1927, with
Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner, it was no longer politically or culturally aligned
with the Russian state as it evolved under Stalin. Alexandre Benois, one of the
chief designers, had been heavily influenced by Wagner’s ideas of artistic
unity or ‘total work of art’ where different artistic disciplines combined.
Picasso occasionally worked alongside Benois.
Although not a symbolist himself, Leon Bakst’s designs were
used for Scherazade which had a storyline of the type that would appeal
to French symbolists. Another friend of Picasso, the naïve painter Christopher
Wood, designed the sets for Romeo and Juliet. The costumes were to be by
Augustus John. However Max Ernst and Joan Miró eventually worked on Romeo
and Juliet. Ernst worked on the designs and Miró on the costumes. Ernst and Miró’s involvement
with the Ballets Russes made them unpopular with the other surrealists because
they regarded ballet as a pastime of the bourgeoisie. One ballet was even
planned to be based on William Blake’s Book of Job with music by Vaughn
Williams but Diaghilev turned it down. Most of the ballet design work was by
modern artists. Other modern painters who worked for Diaghilev include André
Derain, Henri Matisse, Juan Gris, Marie Laurençin, Georges Braque, Henri
Laurens, Maurice Utrillo, Pavel Tchelitchew and Georges Rouault.
Diaghilev’s involvement with the ‘world of art’, and his attempt
to export Russian art in particular, never received the same acclaim as his facilitating
the infusion of art into ballet. This is born out by Alexandre Benois, writing
in his Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet, ‘Strange to say, of all
these “export” items, the most decisive, stable and universal success fell to
the Russian ballet, while our endeavours to ‘export’ Russian pictorial art did
not get the success it deserved. Nevertheless, after the music, it was the
painting that had the predominant part in our productions.’
The essence of Diaghilev’s ballets is choreography, but less so
than in any previous ballet. The Firebird, and possibly Swan Lake,
make important advances in bringing the normally subservient music on to an equal
basis. In Les Sylphides, in fact, the choreography is subservient to the
music. Superficially the costumes and backcloths might be expected to play the
most low-key role, but by using artists of the highest calibre they take on a
new dynamism. That is not to say that art invariably acts on an equal basis.
That is not the question. The overall effect of the ballet relies on the
contribution of all the parts, whether equal or not. In so far as a union is a whole
resulting from a combination of parts, then, the Ballets Russes can accurately
and to totally justifiably be seen as a union of the arts.
Copyright 1982 Adrian Annabel
