The Premiere of Le Sacre du printemps
29 May 1913, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris
FOR ONCE ON A FIRST NIGHT he was backstage in his practice clothes, rather than in his dressing room trying to ignore the throng of admirers while he put on his costume and made up his face. He wore a full white crêpe de Chine shirt and narrow black trousers, buttoned down the calves. It was the first interval and the audience was restive, shifting and murmuring. Les Sylphides, their opening piece, had received the usual rapturous applause.
The dancers moved loosely around him, some warming up, some pretending nonchalance, a few grouped together, whispering. He avoided eye contact with them, but then he usually preferred not to look directly at people. Their brightly coloured costumes were heavy and unwieldy and the men had complained about their false beards. Some crossed themselves, lips moving silently. Like all experienced performers, he recognised how important the backstage mood would be for the success of his debut. On a first night, doubts in the wings, as his sister would observe, can lead to catastrophe. If only she were dancing the role he had conceived for her.
Most of them, he knew, disliked the ballet he had created, could not understand what he was asking of them or what he wanted to achieve. That was partly his fault: movement was his medium of communication, not words. The dancers resented being ordered brusquely to move exactly as he instructed them, without any opportunity for interpreting their roles at all. The shuffling steps, flat-footed jumps, clenched hands, hunched shoulders and unsynchronised, deliberately primitive choreography seemed to them ugly and painful. He knew they asked themselves what ballet was for, if beauty and grace had been removed. It was a question he asked himself.
At least the theatre was packed, despite the fact that they had charged double the normal ticket price. For the past four years, all Paris had been obsessed by the Ballets Russes and by him, its star, Nijinsky – the young savage. Tonight, an unseasonably warm evening at the end of May, they were to premiere a daring new ballet billed as being created by three poets: Igor Stravinsky, its thoroughly modern composer; Nicholas Roerich, a distinguished student of pre-historical, pagan Russia, its set designer; and Nijinsky, its brilliant twenty-four-year-old choreographer. Although it was rumoured that their charming but ruthless impresario, Sergey Diaghilev, was not above giving away tickets to ensure a full house, the thought of empty seats on such a night was inconceivable.
Through the peephole in the curtain he could see his mother in the front row (her usual seat; her one evening dress), and then all around her the city’s cultural and social elite. The diamonds on the bosoms and the bare, white arms of chic ladies from the grand arrondissements – the sort whose parties dapper little Monsieur Proust (his Du côté de chez Swann would come out in six months’ time) schemed to get invited to – glittered alongside the soft jackets worn by self-proclaimed aesthetes, writers and artists, who scorned formal evening wear as bourgeois trappings of an outdated society, considering themselves guardians of the new wave. Igor in his element, four rows from the front, nervously anticipating the applause; glamorous Misia Sert, fanning herself against the heat, waiting for Diaghilev to join her in the box she had booked for every night of their season. Many of them were friends and acquaintances, here to defend their bold new work. The grandees, he knew, were here to be shocked by it.
Aware that some of the audience might find the new material disturbing, Sergey Pavlovich had constructed the rest of the programme to pander to potential critics. The show had opened with the moonlit elegance of Chopin and tulle skirts and would progress, after their premiere, to the ethereal romance of Le Spectre de la Rose – his virtuoso role, the one that made audiences gasp, and the only part he would be dancing tonight – before concluding with the wild, warlike Tatar dances from the opera Prince Igor. Only Le Sacre du printemps could possibly be seen as controversial.
This was the Ballets Russes’ third performance at the brand-new Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and he should have been encouraged by the knowledge that it was his image, alongside that of Isadora Duncan, that had inspired the decorative bas-reliefs on the exterior, almost leaping out of the marble into the air. All things considered, the dress rehearsal had gone well (as it ought to have done, after the nearly one hundred expensive practice sessions he had insisted upon) and that morning an early notice in Le Figaro had raved about the ballet’s dazzling modernity. His sister Bronia thought he was calm, waiting to be judged but confident his art would not be found wanting.
But the nerves would not be silenced. Relentlessly they bubbled up into his throat. L’Après-midi d’un faune, his first composition, premiered the previous year, in which he played the faun, had caused such a scandal that the onanistic ending had to be altered for subsequent performances. Only two weeks earlier at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées’ grand opening, Jeux, the second ballet he had choreographed, had been greeted with hisses and derisive laughter. Despite its score by Debussy, the setting by Léon Bakst of a garden at dusk, and Nijinsky himself in the lead role, its slight premise – two girls and a boy in modern tennis clothes flirting with one another – had not impressed. Jeux had been dismissed as immature and ugly. Beneath his arms, the thin silk of his shirt was already wet through.
He knew that, in private, Sergey had begun to lose faith, to doubt the wisdom of entrusting all the Ballets Russes’ choreography to his young protégé. Of late all he could see when he looked at him was dyed hair, false teeth and an oily smile. Their arguments were a measure of the stresses under which their relationship – professionally and personally – was labouring. Over the past few months, Sergey had insisted more and more vehemently that although a painting or a piece of music might be misunderstood at first, even remain unappreciated for many years, and yet still be considered a true work of art, a ballet must be well received by the public or it would be doomed to obscurity: it must sell tickets. This was his first major work. It had to succeed.
But why shouldn’t it? Igor was, perhaps, no stranger to controversy, but he was acclaimed as the greatest young composer of the twentieth century. L’Oiseau de feu and Petrushka were dazzling ballets, even without him dancing them. Roerich – he had nicknamed him the Professor – had created a wild and primitive world in which their sacred mystery would be enacted, a tree-studded hill on a lush, green plain. Most importantly, Sergey had trusted them with this work, placing his faith and experience in their united talents. Between them they were creating a revolutionary, entirely modern form of ballet, stripped of the tinselled artifice of previous generations.
And, as he told himself, he was the greatest dancer of his age – the greatest dancer and, God willing, the greatest choreographer. An artist, as well as a performer. Over and again the public had proclaimed him the god of the dance; Sergey had annointed him the prophet of ballet’s future. One day, perhaps even tonight, with this ballet, the power and beauty of his work would prove all the critics wrong.
The chef de la scène banged his stick hard on the floor three times, a signal for all non-performers to clear the stage. That girl was here again, her blue eyes soaking everything up from behind the Baron de Günzburg’s shoulder, looking – he knew – for him. He would not think about that now. Reluctantly – or was he imagining it? – the dancers moved to their places, their make-up already softening beneath the hot lights.
He saw Diaghilev standing in his usual spot, solemn and magnificent, his expression revealing nothing, scanning the stage to ensure everyone was in the correct position before he gave the sign for the curtain to be raised. He had given orders that whatever happened they must not stop dancing. The white streak in his brilliantined hair echoed the starched white shirt-front standing out against his black tailcoat; the almond-blossom scent of his hair-wax hung in the air, an overpowering waft of stale aftershave.
Outside in the pit, he knew, the conductor would be standing before the orchestra with his still arms upraised. Vaslav Nijinsky, possibly the greatest genius of twentieth-century dance, drew in a deep breath, closed his eyes, and waited for the music to begin.