Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

14

‘Our apologies, first of all, to those of you who might have seen this first ballet at the Royal Opera House. Mr Diaghilev felt that it suits the setting here particularly well.

‘So we begin today with the story of Thamar, Queen of Georgia, who rules her country in somewhat unorthodox ways. We see her first at her leisure. Then she orders a dance to lure a wandering Prince to her high castle. They dance together. They seem to fall in love. But they don’t. Thamar the Georgian Queen is played by Tamara Karsavina and the Prince by Alfred Bolm.’

Foster sat down. A small procession of ballerinas, accompanied by the Georgian Queen, made their way onto the stage. The pale, brooding Queen languished on her couch as her maids began a dance to rouse her. Karsavina’s clothes were a dark melange of Eastern promise, her dark-brown eyebrows a bewitching glimpse of Eastern beauty. Roused from her slumbers, she too joined the dance and waved a scarf out over the lake to entice a passing suitor.

The music rose to a crescendo as her suitor was ushered onto the stage from a bridge of boats. Alfred Bolm was brought forward to greet the Queen by two of her attendants. The Prince, her suitor, was lured in by the music and the dancing attendants; he wore a conical cap of astrakhan, a thick scarf wound round his neck and a great black cloak draped around him. With regal dignity and a smiling glance full of Eastern promise, the Queen advanced to greet him. The music swelled again as they drew close and her hands, half eagerly and half in a kind of caress, darted to his throat to loosen his scarf and show his face. The Queen summoned assistance to welcome her guest, and here Powerscourt realized how well Diaghilev’s people had made use of the scenery. As she stamped her foot on the floor, two troupes of four guards, clad in Cossack uniform of red jackets with black trousers and long black boots, made their way onto the stage from the further end of the Palladian bridge.

They began a wild Caucasian dance, a blur of tossing sleeves and flashing boots. The men danced with a dagger in their right hand, whirling it up and down in a circular movement, then hurling it into the floor and leaping over it to drag out the quivering dagger and throwing it down once more. The daggers hit the floor with a thud that could be heard in the palace itself.

‘Told you it would be like the bloody circus,’ whispered a cynic a few rows in front of Powerscourt.

‘Shut up! For once in your bloody life, just shut up!’

Two more guards crossed the little pontoon to wave their swords at the dancers’ feet and make them leap even higher.

Bolm, the Prince, now performed a solitary dance to attract this Georgian Queen. It consisted of a series of leaps, each one higher than the last, one arm raised vertically above his head, his body arched like a string bow. As the dance ended, the Queen kissed her suitor on the lips and sped ashore, pursued by the Prince.

Some of the audience began muttering at this point, but the music was swelling louder and louder to tell that the end had not yet come. From opposite sides of the bridge, the Queen and her lover reappeared, the Prince staggering and gasping as he made his way back on stage. Then the Queen manoeuvred him right to the end of one of the wooden tongues that led to the pontoon. She too was menacing and wild-eyed. She slipped an arm around his neck, drew back his head and stabbed him in the chest.

A couple of the Caucasian dancers carried the body off stage, fake blood now dripping from his heart. The music stopped and the dancers bowed to the audience. Bolm, making a rapid recovery, slipped away from his guards and made his return to the stage.

Waves of applause and cheers rang out across the grounds of Blenheim Palace. Even the policemen were applauding. The football crowd were on their feet and shouting for more. There were cries of ‘Bravo!’ and ‘Well done!’ And a small boy, just next to Powerscourt, asked his mother, ‘Is that man really dead?’

‘Our second ballet,’ George Foster repeated himself so his vast booming voice reached the farthest reaches of the lake, ‘is set in ancient Greece at the shrine of Pomona, the goddess of fruit trees. The shrine is a wooded glade, rather smaller than here,’ he smiled at his own witticism, ‘where a spring feeds into a glassy pool. The story is of Narcissus.’

At this point Nijinsky pirouetted his way across the bridge of boats and bowed to the audience. ‘A beautiful and self-indulgent young man, who spurns the advances of the beautiful mountain-nymph Echo.’ Tamara Karsavina followed Nijinsky across the pontoon onto the stage and the huge pool of water surrounding it.

‘Echo appeals to the goddess to send her a bacchante, a young woman with spells, to make Narcissus fall in love with her. Under the spell of the bacchante,’ Nijinsky’s sister, Nijinska was to join the stage a little later, ‘he does fall in love; but not how Echo wanted.’

Echo was dressed in a violet robe, decorated with silver leaves, her hair loose and hanging down her back. The bacchante danced, sometimes holding a beaker of wine in one hand and a wine cup in the other, and sometimes playing with a red scarf that she held extended above her hands. All was in vain. Narcissus Nijinsky, now gazing at his reflection on one side of the lake, now on the other, now facing the bridge, now facing the town gate, was falling in love with one person only: himself. At the close he sank slowly onto his knees and leant over into the water, in love with his own reflection, eventually falling back in a sort of swoon.

‘Bravo Nijinsky,’ the football crowd hailed him as if he had just scored a hat-trick in a vital cup game.

‘Bravo!’

Sections of the audience rose to their feet to cheer. On stage the Duke was seen to rise and join the cheering.

The third ballet was to have the most dramatic denouement of them all.

The audience were settling themselves back down on their cushions or on the grass or shifting from foot to foot if they were standing. Many were still discussing the ballet they had just seen. George Foster had them in the palm of his hand now.

‘Our last ballet has a title that says it all. The Spirit of the Rose. A young girl, played by Tamara Karsavina, returns to her bedroom dressed in a white bonnet and ball gown. She has come home from her first ball. She holds a rose as a souvenir of the evening. She drops into a chair and falls asleep. The rose falls from her fingers to the floor. The Spirit of the Rose, Nijinsky, is seen at the window. He steps onto the floor and nears the young girl. Still asleep, she rises and dances with him. He leads her back to the chair, kisses her, then leaps through the window and into the night. The girl awakes and rises. She picks up the rose she dropped and kisses it. The curtain falls.’

The musicians began their romantic tunes and George Foster resumed his narration. ‘The young girl walks slowly into the room and takes off her cloak. Underneath she is wearing white crinoline. She sinks into a chair and looks affectionately at her lover’s gift, a red rose. She presses it to her lips, as though remembering the dances with her lover, which now seem so far away. As she relives her memories, her eyelids begin to droop and she falls asleep. The rose slips and the petals stain the floor.’

It was not the football section of the crowd but a different group on the opposite side who, as Powerscourt remarked to Lady Lucy later, must have been more accustomed to the world of panto.

‘Look behind you! Look behind you for heaven’s sake!’

The music changed. To an infectious whirl of rhythm, Nijinsky, curled up like a ball on the tongue behind the girl, rose to his feet and launched himself into the space in front of her. He was wearing rose-coloured tights and a cap and tunic of rose petals. He spun slowly round and passed his hands over the girl’s head, as if summoning her back by some magical movement. Then he drew her from her chair as though she were guided towards him by some magnetic force, and led her into an ever-quickening waltz. Round and round they went, faster and faster, the audience beginning to clap in unison to the tune of the music. Then he returned the girl to her chair and danced to the opposite end of the room. He leapt out of the stage onto one of the tongues, took two steps forward and dived full length into the lake.

The audience were stunned at first. Then they burst into a long rolling round of applause that travelled right round the arena. Nijinsky rose from the waters of the lake and made his way to the edge, great drops dripping down his clothes. There was a long, slow gasp from the women in the audience as they watched him clamber ashore and be taken into the care of a stagehand who had arrived with a cloak and a dry pair of shoes. He squelched his way back to the main party at the Palladian bridge where Diaghilev and all the Russian party were standing to applaud him.

The dancers, the wet and the dry, took their places on the main stage once more. The musicians played an operatic adventure while the audience calmed down. Then, one by one, the dancers, major and minor, bowed to the audience and departed to the big house. The musicians too took up their music and their instruments and left their separate stage. The audience began to make their way home, discussing that final leap and the dive into the water. ‘An act of such dramatic surprise that has not being witnessed in or around Oxford in living memory,’ said the Manchester Guardian; ‘a truly dramatic denouement to a truly dramatic day’ was the verdict of The Times; ‘a tour de force for M. Diaghilev,’ said the Illustrated London News.