Free Nijinsky by Lucy Moore Page A

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himself after that tumult to dance a role which merely irritated him – one that he saw as cloyingly sentimental and outdated and by which he resented being defined.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