Free Nijinsky by Lucy Moore

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 FlorentSchmitt 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 herlimp 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,