12 Ballet Climax — Sadler’s Wells and After
SADLER’S WELLS—a name with which to conjure—had been a part of my balletic consciousness for a long time. I had observed its early beginnings, its growth from the Old Vic to Sadler’s Wells to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, with the detached interest of a ballet lover from another land. I had read about it, heard about it from many people, but I had not had any first hand experience of it since the Covent Garden Opera Trust had invited the Sadler’s Wells Ballet to move to Covent Garden from their famous ballet center, Sadler’s Wells. This they did, early in 1946, leaving behind yet another company called the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet.
I arrived in London in April, 1946, at a time when I was very definitely under the impression that I would give up any active participation in ballet in any other form than as an interested member of the audience.
The London to which I returned was, in a sense, a strange London—a London just after the war, a city devastated by bombs, a city that had suffered grave wounds both physical and spiritual, a city of austerity.
It was also a London wherein I found, wherever I went, a people whose spirits were, nevertheless, high; human beings whose chins were up. The typical Cockney taxi-driver who brought me from Waterloo to my long-time headquarters, the Savoy, summed it all up on my arrival, when he said: “We’ll come out of this orlrite. We weren’t born in the good old English climate for nothin’. It’s all a bit of a disappointment; but we’re used to disappointments, we are. Why when ah was a kid as we ’ad a nice little picnic all arranged for Saturday afternoon, as sure as fate it rained and the bleedin’ picnic was put orf again.... We’re goin’ to ’ave our picnic one day; this ’ere picnic’s just been put orf, that’s all....”
As the porters were disposing of my luggage, the genial commissionaire at the Savoy, Joe Hanson, added his bit to the general optimism. After greeting me, he asked me if I had heard about the shipwreck in the Thames, opposite the Savoy. I had not, and wondered how I had missed the news of such a catastrophe.
“Well, it was like this, guv’nor,” he said. “Churchill, Eden, Atlee and Ernie Bevin went out on the river in a small boat to look the place over. Just as they were a-passin’ the ’otel ’ere, a sudden squall blew up and the boat was capsized.”
He paused and blew his nose vociferously into a capacious kerchief. “Who do you think was saved?”
“Churchill?” I enquired.
He shook his head in the negative.
“Eden?”
He shook his head.
“Atlee?”
Again he shook his head.
“Bevin?”
Once more the negative.
“No one saved?” I could hardly believe my ears.
“Ah, there’s where you’re wrong, sir.... England was saved!”
The commissionaire’s big frame shook with prideful laughter.
I freshened myself in my room and went down to my favorite haunt, my London H. Q., as I like to call it, the Savoy Grill, that gathering place of the theatrical, musical, literary, and balletic worlds of London. One of the Savoy Grill’s chief fixtures, and for me one of its most potent attractions, was the always intriguing buffet, with my favorite Scottish salmon. This time the buffet, while putting up a brave decorative front, was a little disappointing and, to tell the truth, a shade depressing.
But a glance at the entertainment advertisements in The Times (the “Thunderer,” I noted, was now a four-page sheet) showed me that the entertainment world was in full swing, and there was excitement in the air.
I dined alone in the Grill, then returned to my room and changed to black tie and all, for it was to be a festive evening, and walked the short distance between the Savoy Hotel and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. I was going to the ballet in a completely non-professional capacity, as a member of the audience, going for the sheer fun of going, with nary a balletic problem on my mind.
I was to be the guest of David Webster, the Administrator of Covent Garden, who met me at the door and, after a brief chat, escorted me to my seat. My eyes traveled around the famous and historic Opera House, only recently saved from the ignominy of becoming a public dance hall. Here it was, shining and dignified in fresh paint, in damask, and in the new warm red plush fauteuils; poor though Britain was, the house had just been remodelled, redecorated, reseated, with a new and most attractive “crush bar” installed.
The depression I had felt earlier in the day vanished completely. Now that evening had come, there was a different aspect, a changed atmosphere. I looked at the audience that made up the sold-out house. From the top to the bottom of the great old Opera House they were a happy, relaxed, anticipatory people, ready to be entertained and stimulated. In the stalls, the audience was well-dressed and some of the evening frocks were, I felt, of marked splendor. But the less expensive portions of the house were filled, too, and I remembered something that great director, Ninette de Valois, who had made all this possible, had said way back in 1937: “The gallery, the pit [American readers should understand that the “pit” in the British theatre is usually that part of the house behind the “stalls” or orchestra seats, and is not, as in the States, the orchestra pit where the musicians are placed] and the amphitheatre are the basis and backbone of the people s theatre.... That they are the most loyal supporters will be maintained with deep appreciation by those who control the future of the ballet.”
There was, as I have said, an anticipatory atmosphere on the part of the audience, as if the temper of the people had become graver, simpler, and more concentrated; as if, during the war, when the opportunities for recreation and amusement were more restricted, transport more limited, the intelligence craved and sought those antidotes to a troubled consciousness of which ballet and its allied arts are the most potent.
While I relaxed and waited for the rising curtain with that same anticipatory glow that I always feel, yet, somehow, intensified tonight, I reflected, too, on the miracle that had been wrought. I remembered David Webster had told me how, only the year before, the company was preparing for a good-will tour to South America, and how the sudden end of the war had made that trip impracticable and unnecessary. It had become more urgent to have the company at home. Negotiations had been initiated between the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, the British Arts Council, and Boosey and Hawkes, who had taken over the Covent Garden lease, for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet to make its headquarters at Covent Garden, where it would be presented by the Covent Carden Opera Trust. Having been turned into a cheap dance hall before the war, Covent Garden’s restoration as a theatre devoted to the finest in opera and ballet required very careful planning.
All of this whetted my appetite. My eyes traveled to the Royal Box, to the Royal Crest on the great curtains, to the be-wigged footmen.... Slowly the lights came down to a dull glow, went out. A sound of applause greeted the entry into the orchestra pit of the conductor, the greatly talented musical director of the Sadler’s Wells organization, Constant Lambert. In a moment, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, was filled with the magnificent sound of the overture to Tchaikowsky’s The Sleeping Beauty, played as only Lambert could play it.
Then the curtain rose, revealing Oliver Messel’s perfectly wonderful setting for the first act of this magnificent full-length ballet. Over all, about all, was the great music of Tchaikowsky. My eyes, my ears, my heart were being filled to overflowing.
The biggest moment of all came with the entrance of Margot Fonteyn as the Princess. I was overwhelmed by her entire performance; but I think it was her first entrance that made the greatest impact on me, with the fresh youthfulness of the young Princess, the radiant gaiety of all the fairy tale heroines of the world’s literature compressed into one.
I was so enchanted as I followed the stage and the music that I forgot all else but the miraculous unfolding of this Perrault-Tchaikowsky fairy story.
Here, at last, was great ballet. The art of pantomime, so long dormant in ballet in America, had been restored in all its clarity and simplicity of meaning. The high quality of the dancing by the principals, soloists, and corps de ballet, the settings, the costumes, the lighting, all literally transported me to another world. I knew then, in a great revelation, that great ballet was here to stay.
“This is Ballet!” I said, almost half aloud.
After the performance, back at the Savoy Grill once more, at supper I met, once again, Ninette de Valois, whose taste and drive and determination and abilities have made Sadler’s Wells the magnificent institution it is.
“Madame,” I said to her, “I think you’re ready to go to the States.”
“Are we?”
“Yes,” I replied, “you are ready.”
The supper was gay and charming and animated. I was filled with enthusiasm and was a long time falling asleep that night.
After that evening, there was no longer any attitude of “to hell with ballet” on my part. Ballet, I realized, with a fresh conviction solidifying the revelation I had had the night before, was here to stay. “To hell with ballet” had given way to “three cheers for ballet!”
After breakfast, the next morning, I telephoned David Webster to invite him to luncheon so that I might discuss details of the proposed American venture with him. During the course of the luncheon we went into all the major points and problems. Webster, I found, shared my enthusiasm for the idea and agreed in principle.
But, in accordance with the traditionally British manner, the thought and care and consideration that is given to every phase and every department, every suggestion, every idea, such matters do not move as swiftly as they do in the States. Before I started out for my usual London “constitutional” backwards and forwards across Waterloo Bridge, from where one looks up the Thames towards the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, mother of all our freedoms, I sent flowers to Margot Fonteyn with a note of appreciation for her magnificent performance of the night before and for the great pleasure she had given me.
There followed extended discussions with Ninette de Valois, the Director of whom, perhaps, the outstanding characteristic is that her outlook is such that her greatest ambition is to see the Sadler’s Wells Ballet become such an institution in its own right that, as she puts it, “no one will know the name of the director.” However, before any decisions could be reached, it became necessary for me to get home. So, with the whole business still very much up in the air, I returned to New York.
No sooner was I back in my office than there came an invitation from Mayor William O’Dwyer and Grover Whalen for me to take over the direction of the dance activities for the Festival for the One Hundred Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of the City of New York. I accepted the honor in the hope that I might be able to organize a completely international and representative Dance Festival, wherein the leading exponents of ballet and other forms of dance would have an opportunity to demonstrate their varied repertoires and techniques. To that end, I sent invitations in the name of the City of New York to all the leading dance organizations in the world, seeking their participation in the Festival. The response was unanimously immediate and enthusiastic; but, unfortunately, many of the organizations, possessing interesting repertoires and styles, were not in a position to undertake the costs of travel from far distant points, together with the heavy expenses for the transportation of scenery, equipment, and costumes. Among these was the newly-organized San Francisco Civic Ballet.
The Sadler’s Wells organization accepted the invitation in principle, as did the Paris Opera Ballet, through its director, Monsieur Georges Hirsch. Ram Gopal, brilliant exponent of the dance of India, accepted through his manager Julian Braunsweg; and, in this case, I was able to assist him in his financial problems, by bringing him at my own expense. Representing our native American dance were Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, together with their company. I happen to feel this group is one of the most representative of all our native practitioners of the “free” dance, in works that often come to grips with the problems and conflicts of life, and which eschew, at least for the time, pure abstraction. Most notable of these works, works in this form, is their trilogy: New Dance—Theatre Piece—With My Red Fires American dance groups were invited but for one reason or another were not able to accept.
As preparations for the Festival moved ahead, David Webster arrived from London to investigate the physical possibilities for the participation of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet as the national ballet of Great Britain.
The logical place for a Dance Festival of such proportions and such significance, and one of such avowedly international and civic nature, would have been the Metropolitan Opera House. Unfortunately, the Metropolitan had commitments with another ballet company. My friend and colleague, Edward Johnson, the then General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera Company, regretted the situation and did everything in his power to remedy the position and free our first lyric theatre for such an important civic event. However, the other dance organization insisted on its contractual rights and refused to give way, or to divide the time in any way.
The only other place left, therefore, was the New York City Center, in West Fifty-fifth Street. Webster made a thorough inspection of this former Masonic Temple from front to back, but found the place entirely inadequate, with a stage and an orchestra pit infinitely too small, and the theatre itself quite unsatisfactory for a company the size of the Covent Garden organization and productions. As a matter of fact, it would be hard to find a less satisfactory theatre for ballet production.
As Webster and I went over the premises together, I sensed his feeling about the building, which I shared. Nevertheless, I tried to hide my disappointment when, at last, he turned to me and said: “It’s no go. We can’t play here. Let us postpone the visit till we can come to be seen on your only appropriate stage, the Metropolitan.”
We had had preliminary meetings with the British Consul General and his staff; plans and promotion were rapidly crystallizing, and my disappointment was none the less keen simply because I knew the reasons for the postponement were sound, and that it could not be otherwise.
The Dance Festival itself, without Sadler’s Wells, had its successes and left a mark on the local dance scene. The City Center was no more satisfactory, I am afraid, for the Ballet of the Opera of Paris, presented by the French National Lyric Theatre, under the auspices of the Cultural Relations Department of the French Foreign Ministry, than it would have been for the Covent Garden company. It was necessary to trim the scenery, omit much of it, and use only part of the personnel of the company at a time. But, on the other hand, it was a genuine pleasure to welcome them on their first visit to the United States and Canada. In addition to the Dance Festival Season in New York, we played highly successful engagements in Montreal, Toronto, and Chicago.
The company was headed by a distinguished French ballerina in the true French style, Yvette Chauviré. Other principal members of the company, all from the higher echelons of the Paris Opera, included Roger Ritz, Christiane Vaussard, Michel Renault, Alexandre Kalioujny, Micheline Bardin, and Max Bozzini, with Robert Blot and Richard Blareau as conductors. The repertoire included Ports of Call, Serge Lifar’s ballet to Jacques Ibert’s Escales; Salad, a Lifar work to a Darius Milhaud creation; Lifar’s setting of Ravel’s Pavane; The Wise Animals, based on the Jean de la Fontaine fables, by Lifar, to music by Francis Poulenc; Suite in White, from Eduardo Lalo’s Naouma; Punch and the Policeman, staged by Lifar to a score by Jolivet; Divertissement, cuttings from Tchaikowsky’s The Sleeping Beauty; The Peri, Lifar’s staging of the well-known ballet score by Paul Dukas; The Crystal Palace, Balanchine’s ballet to Bizet’s symphony, known here as Symphony in C; Vincent d’Indy’s Istar, in the Lifar choreography; Gala Evening, taken from Delibes’ La Source, by Leo Staats; Albert Aveline’s Elvira, to Scarlatti melodies orchestrated by Roland Manuel; André Messager’s The Two Pigeons, choreographed by Albert Aveline; the Rameau Castor and Pollux, staged by Nicola Guerra; The Knight and the Maiden, a two-act romantic ballet, staged by Lifar to a score by Philippe Gaubert; and Les Mirages, a classical work by Lifar, to music by Henri Sauguet.
Serge Lifar returned to America, not to dance, but as the choreographer of the company of which he is the head.
I happen to know certain facts about Lifar’s behavior during the Occupation of France, facts I did not know at the time of the publication of my earlier book, Impresario. Certain statements I made in that book concerning Serge Lifar were made on the basis of such information as I had at the time, which I believed was reliable. I have subsequently learned that it was not correct, and I have also subsequently had additional, quite different, and reliably documented information which makes me wish to acknowledge that an error of judgment was expressed on the basis of inconclusive evidence. Lifar may not have been a hero; very possibly, and quite probably, he may have been indiscreet; but it is now obvious to any fair-minded person that there has been a good deal of malicious gossip spread about him.
Lifar was restored to his post at the head of the Paris Opera Ballet by M. Georges Hirsch, Administrator, Director of the French National Lyric Theatres, himself a war-hero with a distinguished record. The dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet threatened to strike unless Lifar was so restored; the stage-hands, with definite indications of Communist inspiration, to strike if he was. Hirsch had the courage of his convictions. I have found that Lifar did not take the Paris Opera Ballet to Berlin during the Occupation, as has been alleged in this country, although the Germans wanted it badly; and I happen to know numerous other French companies did go. I also have learned that it was Serge Lifar who prevented the Paris Opera Ballet from going. I happen to know that Lifar did fly in a German plane to Kieff, his birthplace; as I happen to know that he did not show Hitler through the Paris Opera itself, as one widely-spread rumor has had it. As a matter of fact, stories to the effect that he did both these things have been widely circulated. I happen to have learned that Lifar made a tremendous effort to save that splendid gentleman, René Blum, but was unable to prevail against Blum’s patriotic but unfortunately stupid determination to remain in Paris. I also happen to know that Lifar was personally active in saving many Jews and also other liberals from deportation. Moreover, I know that, as has always been characteristic of Lifar, because he was one who had, he helped from his own pocket those who had not.
The performances of the Ballet of the Paris Opera at the City Center were not the slightest proof of the quality of its productions or its performance. The shocking limitations of the playhouse made necessary a vast reduction of its personnel, its scenery, its essential quality. The Paris Opera Ballet is, of course, a State Ballet in the fullest sense of the term. It is an aristocratic organization, conscious of the great tradition that hangs over it. The air is thick with it. Its dancers are civil servants of the Republic of France and their promotion in rank follows upon a strict examination pattern. It would be interesting one day to see the company at the Metropolitan Opera House, where its original setting could be approximated, although I fear the Metropolitan has nothing comparable with the foyer de la dance of the Paris Opera.
Here is ballet on a big scale and in the grand manner, with all the scenic and costume panoply of the art at its most grandiose. It is the sort of fine ballet that succeeds in giving the art an immense popularity with the masses.
As a matter of fact, I am negotiating with the very able Maurice Lehmann, the successor to Georges Hirsch as Director-General of the Opera, and I can think of no happier result than to be able to bring this rich example of the balletic art of France to America under the proper circumstances and conditions, if for no other reason than to compensate the organization for their previous visit.
The International Dance Festival over, my chief desire was to bring Sadler’s Wells to this continent.
Perhaps it would be as well, for the sake of the reader who may be unfamiliar with its background and thus disposed to regard this as merely another ballet company, to shed a bit of light on the Sadler’s Wells organization.
Following the death of Diaghileff, in 1929, we knew that ballet in Britain was in a sad state of decline, from which it might well never have emerged had it not been for two groups, the Ballet Club of Marie Rambert and the Camargo Society. Each was to be of vital importance to the ballet picture in Britain and, indirectly, in the world. The offspring of the Ballet Club was the Rambert Ballet; that of the Camargo Society, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. As a matter of fact, the Camargo Society, a Sunday night producing club, utilized the Ballet Club dancers and another studio group headed by the lady now known as Dame Ninette de Valois, D.B.E., D. Litt.
Back in 1931, at the time of the formation of the Camargo Society, the little acorn from which grew a mighty British oak, Dame Ninette, “Madame” as she is known to all who know her, was plain Ninette de Valois, who was born Edris Stannus, in Ireland, in 1898. She had joined the Diaghileff Ballet as a dancer in 1923, had risen to the rank of soloist (a rare accomplishment for a non-Russian), and left the great man, daring to differ with him on the direction he was taking, something amounting to lese majesté. She had produced plays, in the meantime, at Dublin’s famous Abbey Theatre and at Cambridge University’s Festival Theatre; and had also formed a choreographic group of her own which she brought along to the Camargo Society to cooperate. When she did so, she was far from famous. As a matter of fact, she was, to all intents and purposes, unknown.
One Sunday night in 1931, two things happened to Ninette de Valois: she became famous overnight, which, knowing her as I do, was of much less importance to her than the fact that, quite unwittingly, she laid the foundation for a British National Ballet under her own direction.
The work she produced for the Camargo Society on this Sunday night in 1931 did it. It was not a ballet in the strictest or accepted sense of the word. Its composer called it A Masque for Dancing. The work was Job, a danced and mimed interpretation of the Biblical story, in the spirit of the painter and poet Blake, to one of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s noblest scores.
From Biblical inspiration she turned to the primitive, in a production of Darius Milhaud’s Creation du Monde, a noble subject dealing with the primitive gods of Easter Island, set to the 1923 jazz of the French composer.
Coincidental with the Camargo Society activities, Ninette de Valois was making arrangements with another great Englishwoman, Lilian Baylis, who had brought opera and drama to the masses at two theatres in the less fashionable parts of London, the Old Vic, in the Waterloo Road, and Sadler’s Wells, in Islington’s Rosebery Avenue. Lilian Baylis wanted a ballet company. Armed with only her own determination and high-mindedness, she had established a real theatre for the masses.
Ninette de Valois, for a penny, started in with her group to do the opera ballets at the Old Vic: those interludes in Carmen and Faust and Samson and Delilah that exist primarily to keep the dull businessman in his seat with his wife instead of at the bar. However, Lilian Baylis gave Ninette de Valois a ballet school, and it was in the theatre, where a ballet school belonged, a part of and an adjunct to the theatre. The Vic-Wells Ballet, soon to become the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, was the result.
It was not nearly as easy and as simple as it sounds as I write it. It is beyond me fully to convey to the reader those qualities of tenacity of purpose, of driving energy, of fearless courage that this remarkable woman was forced to draw upon in the early years. There was no money; and before a single penny could be separated from her, it had to be melted from the glue with which she stuck every penny to the inside of her purse.
Alicia Markova joined the company. Anton Dolin was a frequent guest artist. It was, in a sense, a Markova company, with the three most popular works: Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and Giselle.
But, most importantly, Ninette de Valois had that vital requisite without which, no matter how solvent the financial backing, no ballet company is worth the price of its toe-shoes, viz., a policy. Ninette de Valois’ policy for repertoire is codified into a simple formula:
1) Traditional-classical and romantic works.
2) Modern works of future classic importance.
3) Current work of more topical interest.
4) Works encouraging a strictly national tendency in their creation generally.
The first constitutes the foundation-stone, technical standard, and historical knowledge that is demanded as a “means test” by which the abilities of the young dancers are both developed and inspired.
The second, those works which both musically and otherwise have a future that may be regarded as the major works of this generation.
The third, the topical and sometimes experimental, of merely ephemeral interest and value, yet important as a means of balancing an otherwise ambitious programme.
The fourth is important to the national significance of the ballet. Such works constitute the nation’s own contribution to the theatre, and are in need perhaps of the most careful guidance of the groups.
It was the classics which had, from the beginning, the place of priority: Swan Lake (Act II), Les Sylphides, Carnaval, Coppélia, The Nutcracker, Giselle, and the full-length Swan Lake.
In 1935, Markova left Sadler’s Wells to form her own company with Dolin. With Markova’s departure, the whole character of the Sadler’s Wells company changed. The Company became the Star. The company got along without a ballerina and concentrated on its own personality, on developing dancers from its school, and on its direction. Creation and development continued.
However, during this time, there was emerging not precisely a “star,” but a great ballerina. Ballerina is a term greatly misused in the United States, where any little dancer is much too often referred to both in the press and in general conversation in this way. Ballerina is a title, not a term. The title is one earned only through long, hard experience. It is attained only in the highly skilled interpretation of the great standard classical parts. Russia, France, Italy, Denmark, countries where there are state ballets, know these things. We in the United States, I fear, do not understand. A “star” is not one merely by virtue of billing. A ballerina is, of course, a “star,” even in a company that has no “stars” in its billing and advertising. A true ballerina is a rare bird indeed. In an entire generation, it should be remembered, the Russian Imperial Ballet produced only enough for the fingers of two hands.
The great ballerina I have mentioned as having come up through the Sadler’s Wells Company, as the product of that company, is more than a ballerina. She is a prima ballerina assoluta, a product of Sadler’s Wells training, of the Sadler’s Wells system, a member of that all-round team that is Sadler’s Wells. Her name is Margot Fonteyn. I shall have something to say about her later on.
I have pointed out that the backbone of the Sadler’s Wells repertoire is the classics. Therein, in my opinion, lies one of the chief reasons for its great success. There is a second reason, I believe. That is that, along with Ninette de Valois’ sound production policy, keeping step with it, sometimes leading it, is an equally sound musical policy. Sitting in with de Valois and Frederick Ashton, as the third of the directorial triumvirate, was the brilliant musician, critic, and wit, Constant Lambert, who exerted a powerful influence in the building of the repertoire, and who, with the sympathetic cooperation of his two colleagues, made the musical standards of Sadler’s Wells the highest of any ballet company in my knowledge and experience.
The company grew and prospered. The war merely served to intensify its efforts—and its accomplishments. Its war record is a brilliant, albeit a difficult one; a record of unremitting hard work and dogged perseverance against terrible odds. The company performed unceasingly throughout the course of the war, with bombs falling. Once the dancing was stopped, while the dancers fought a fire ignited by an incendiary bomb and thus saved the theatre. The company was on a good-will tour of Holland, under the auspices of the British Council, in the spring of 1940. They were at Arnheim when Hitler invaded. Packed into buses, they raced ahead of the Panzers, reached the last boat to leave, left minus everything, but everything: productions, scenery, costumes, properties, musical material, and every scrap of personal clothing.
Once back in Britain, there was no cessation. The lost productions and costumes were replaced; the musical material renewed, some of it, since it was manuscript, by reorchestrating it from gramophone recordings. As the Battle of Britain was being fought, the company toured the entire country, with two pianos in lieu of orchestra, with Constant Lambert playing the first piano. They played in halls, in theatres, in camps, in factories; brought ballet to soldiers and sailors, to airmen, and to factory workers, often by candlelight. They managed to create new works. Back to London, to a West End theatre, with orchestra, and then, because of the crowds, to a larger West End playhouse.
It was at the end of the war, as I have mentioned earlier, that the music publishing house of Boosey and Hawkes, with a splendid generosity, saved the historic Royal Opera House, at Covent Garden, from being turned into a popular dance hall. A common error on the part of Americans is to believe that because it was called the Royal Opera House, it was a State-supported theatre, as, for example, are the Royal Opera House of Denmark, at Copenhagen, and the Paris Opéra. Among those Maecenases who had made opera possible in the old days in London was Sir Thomas Beecham, who made great personal sacrifices to keep it open.
When Boosey and Hawkes took over Covent Garden, it was on a term lease. On taking possession they immediately turned over the historic edifice to a committee known as the Covent Garden Opera Trust, of which the chairman was Lord Keynes, the distinguished economist and art patron who, as plain Mr. John Maynard Keynes, had been instrumental in the formation of the Camargo Society, and who had married the one-time Diaghileff ballerina, Lydia Lopokova; this committee had acted as god-parents to the Sadler’s Wells company in its infancy. The Arts Council supported the venture, and David Webster was appointed Administrator.
A word or two about the Arts Council and its support of the arts in Britain is necessary for two reasons: one, because it is germane to the story of Sadler’s Wells, and, two, germane to some things I wish to point out in connection with subsidy of the arts in these troubled times, since I believe a parallel can be drawn with our own hit-and-miss financing.
Under the British system, there is no attempt to interfere with aesthetics. The late Sir Stafford Cripps pointed out that the Government should interfere as little as possible in the free development of art. The British Government’s attitude has, perhaps, been best stated by Clement Atlee, as Prime Minister, when he said: “I think that we are all of one mind in desiring that art should be free.” He added that he thought the essential purpose of an organized society was to set free the creative energies of the individual, while safeguarding the well-being of all. The Government, he continued, must try to provide conditions in which art might flourish.
There is no “Ministry of Fine Arts” as in most continental and South American countries. The Government’s interest in making art better known and more within the reach of all is expressed through three bodies: the Arts Council, the British Film Institute, and the British Council.
The Arts Council was originally known by the rather unwieldy handle of C. E. M. A. (The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts), originally founded by a gift from an American and Lord De La Warr, then President of the Board of Education. In 1945, the Government decided to continue the work, changed the name from C. E. M. A. to the Arts Council of Great Britain, gave it Parliamentary financial support, and granted it, on 9 August, 1946, a Royal Charter to develop “a greater knowledge, understanding and practice of fine arts exclusively, and in particular to increase the availability of the fine arts to the public... to improve the standard of the execution of the fine arts and to advise and cooperate with... Government departments, local authorities and other bodies on matters concerned directly or indirectly with those objects.”
Now, the Arts Council, while sponsored by the Government, is not a Government department. Its chairman and governors (called members of the Council) are appointed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer after consultation with the Minister of Education and the Secretary of State for Scotland. The Chancellor answers for the Council in the House of Commons. While the Council is supported by a Government grant, its employees are in no sense civil servants, and the Council enjoys an independence that would not be possible were it a Government department.
The first chairman of the Arts Council, and also a former chairman of C. E. M. A., was Lord Keynes. His influence on the policy and direction of the organization was invaluable. There are advisory boards, known as panels, appointed for three years, experts chosen by the Council because of their standing in and knowledge of their fields. Among many others, the following well-known artists have served, without payment: Sir Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Noel Coward, Peggy Ashcroft, J. B. Priestley, Dame Myra Hess, Benjamin Britten, Tyrone Guthrie, Dame Ninette de Valois, and Henry Moore.
While statistics can be dull, a couple are necessary to the picture to show how the Arts Council operates. For example, the Arts Council’s annual grant from the British Treasury has risen each year: in 1945-1946, the sum was £235,000 ($658,000); in 1950-1951, £675,000 ($1,890,000).
Treasury control is maintained through a Treasury Assessor to the Arts Council; on his advice, the Chancellor of the Exchequer recommends to Parliament a sum to be granted. The Assessor is in a position to judge whether the money is being properly distributed, but he does not interfere with the complete autonomy of the Council.
The Council, in its turn, supports the arts of the country by giving financial assistance or guarantees to organizations, companies, and societies; by directly providing concerts and exhibitions; or by directly managing and operating a company or theatre. The recipient organizations, for their part, must be non-profit or charitable trusts capable of helping carry out the Council’s purpose of bringing to the British people entertainment of a high standard. Such organizations must have been accepted as non-profit companies by H. M. Commissioners of Customs and Excise, and exempted by them from liability to pay Entertainments Duty.
An example of the help tendered may be gathered from the fact that in 1950, eight festivals, ten symphony orchestras, five theatres, twenty-five theatre companies, seven opera and ballet companies, one society for poetry and music, two art societies, four arts centers, and sixty-three clubs were being helped. In addition, two theatres, three theatre companies, and one arts center were entirely and exclusively managed by the Arts Council. Some of the best-known British orchestras, theatres, and companies devoted to opera, ballet, and the drama are linked to the Arts Council: The Hallé Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, Covent Garden Opera Trust, Covent Garden Opera Company, and the Sadler’s Wells Companies are among them. Also the Old Vic, Tennent Productions, Ltd., and the Young Vic Theatre companies.
Government assistance to opera in twentieth century Britain did not begin with the Arts Council. In the early ’thirties Parliament granted a small subsidy to the Covent Garden Opera Syndicate for some two years to help present grand opera in Covent Garden and the provinces at popular prices. A total of £40,000 ($112,000) had been paid when the grant was withdrawn after the financial crisis of 1931, and it was more than ten years before national opera became a reality.
In the meantime, some ballet companies and an opera company began to receive C. E. M. A. support. The Sadler’s Wells Opera Company and Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company, for instance, began their association with C. E. M. A. in 1943. C. E. M. A. was also interested in plans stirring in 1944 and 1945 to reclaim the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as a national center for ballet and opera. I have pointed out how this great theatre in London, with a history dating back to the eighteenth century, was leased in 1944 by the international music firm of Boosey and Hawkes, who, in turn, rented it to the newly formed Covent Garden Opera Trust. The Trust, an autonomous body whose original chairman was Lord Keynes, is a non-profit body which devotes any profits it may make to Trust projects. Late in 1949, H. M. Ministry of Works succeeded Boosey and Hawkes as lessees, with a forty-two-year lease.
The Arts Council, in taking over from C. E. M. A., inherited C. E. M. A.’s interest in using Covent Garden for national ballet and opera. The Council granted Covent Garden £25,000 ($70,000) for the year ended 31 March, 1946, and £55,000 ($154,000) for the following year. At the same time, it was granting Sadler’s Wells Foundation £10,000 ($28,000) and £15,000 ($42,000) in those years.
The Covent Garden Opera Trust, in the meantime, had invited the Sadler’s Wells Ballet to move to Covent Garden from their famous ballet center, Sadler’s Wells. This it did, early in 1946, leaving behind another company called the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet. Ninette de Valois continued to direct both groups.
It was a year later the Covent Garden Opera Company gave its first presentation under the Covent Garden Opera Trust, and the two chief Covent Carden companies, opera and ballet, were solidly settled in their new home.
The Trust continues to receive a grant from the Arts Council (£145,000 [$406,000] in 1949-1950), and it pays the rent for the Opera House and the salaries and expenses of the companies. So far as the ballet company is concerned, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet pretty well pays its own way, except for that all-besetting expense in ballet, the cost of new productions. The opera company requires relatively more support from the Trust grant, as it has re-staged and produced every opera afresh, not using any old productions. Moreover, the attendance for ballet is greater than that for opera.
The aim of Covent Garden and its Administrator, David Webster, is to create a steady audience, and to appeal to groups that have not hitherto attended ballet and opera, or have attended only when the most brilliant stars were appearing. Seats sell for as little as 2s 6d (35¢), rising to 26s 3d ($3.67) and the ballet-and-opera-going habit has grown noticeably in recent years. It is interesting to note the audience for opera averaged eighty-three per cent capacity, and for the ballet ninety-two per cent.
The two British companies alternately presenting ballet and opera provide most of the entertainment at Covent Garden, but foreign companies such as the Vienna State Opera with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, La Scala Opera, the Paris Opéra Comique, the Ballet Theatre from New York, the New York City Ballet Company, the Grand Ballet of the Marquis de Cuevas, and Colonel de Basil’s Original Ballets Russes have had short seasons there.
The Arts Council is in association with the two permanent companies coincidentally operating at Sadler’s Wells—the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet and the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company. Other opera and ballet companies associated with the Arts Council are the English Opera Group, Ltd., and the Ballet Rambert, while the Arts Council manages the St. James Ballet Company.
All these companies tour in Britain, and some of them make extended tours abroad. The Ballet Rambert, for instance, has made a tour of Australia and New Zealand, which lasted a year and a half, a record for that area.
The Sadler’s Wells Ballet has made long and highly successful tours of the European continent. Its first visit to America occurred in the autumn of 1949, when the Covent Garden Opera Trust, in association with the Arts Council and the British Council, presented the group at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, and in various other centres in the United States and Canada, under my management. A second and much longer visit took place in 1950-1951, with which visits this chapter is primarily concerned.
Sadler’s Wells has a ballet school of something more than two hundred students, including the general education of boys and girls from ten to sixteen. Scholarships are increasing in number; some of these are offered by various County Councils and other local authorities, and a number by the Royal Academy of Dancing.
In addition to the Arts Council, I have mentioned the British Council, and no account of Britain’s cultural activities could make any pretensions to being intelligible without something more than a mention of it. It should be pointed out that the major part of the British Council’s work is done abroad.
Established in 1934, the British Council is Britain’s chief agent for strengthening cultural relations with the rest of the British Commonwealth, Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, the United States, and Latin America. It is responsible for helping to make British cultural achievements known and understood abroad, and for bringing to the British, in turn, a closer knowledge of foreign countries.
Like many other British cultural bodies, the British Council derives its main financial support from the Government (through grants from the Foreign Office, plus certain sums on the Colonial and Commonwealth votes), and is a body corporate, not a Government organization. Its staff are not civil servants and its work is entirely divorced from politics, though the Council has a certain amount of State control because nine of the Executive Committee (fifteen to thirty in number) are nominated by Government departments.
The British Council’s chief activities concern educational exchanges with foreign countries of students, teachers, and technicians, including arranging facilities for these visitors in Britain; they include supporting libraries and information services abroad where British books and other reading materials are readily available, and further include the financing of tours of British lecturers and exhibitions, and of theatrical, musical, and ballet troupes abroad. Sadler’s Wells Ballet has toured to Brussels, Prague, Warsaw, Poznau, Malmö, Oslo, Lisbon, Berlin, and the United States and Canada under British Council auspices with great success. The Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet has toured the United States and Canada, under my management, with equal success, and is soon to visit Africa, including Kenya Colony. The Old Vic Company, the Boyd Neel String Orchestra, and the Ballet Rambert toured Australia and New Zealand, and the Old Vic has toured Canada. John Gielgud’s theatre company has visited Canada. In addition, the British Council has sponsored visits abroad of such distinguished musicians as Sir Adrian Boult, Sir John Barbirolli, Sir Malcolm Sargent, and Maggie Teyte.
One of the British Council’s important trusts is the responsibility for the special gramophone recordings of distinguished musical works and of the spoken word. This promotion is adding notably to record libraries, and is helping to make the best music available to listeners all over the world. It is also the Government’s principal agent for carrying out the cultural conventions agreed upon with other members of the United Nations. These provide, in general, for encouraging mutual knowledge and appreciation of each other’s culture through interchanging teachers, offering student scholarships, and exchanging books, films, lectures, concerts, plays, exhibitions, and musical scores.
The relationship between the British Council and the Arts Council is necessarily one of careful collaboration. In the time of C. E. M. A. many tasks were accomplished in common, such as looking after foreign residents in Great Britain. Now the division of labor of the two Councils is well defined, with clear-cut agreement on their respective responsibilities for the various entertainment groups that come to or go from Britain. The British Council helps British artists and works of art to go ahead; the Arts Council assists artistic activities in Britain, including any that may come from abroad. Both bodies have a number of committee members in common, and the feeling between the groups is close and friendly.
It is, I feel, characteristic of the British that, without a definite, planned, long-term programme for expanding its patronage of the arts, the British Government has nevertheless come to give financial aid to almost every branch of the art world. This has developed over a period of years, with accumulated speed in the last twelve because of the war, because the days of wide patronage from large private incomes are disappearing if not altogether disappeared, and also perhaps because of an increasing general realization of the people’s greater need for leisure-time occupation.
In all of this I must point out quite emphatically that it is the British Government’s policy to encourage and support existing and valuable institutions. Thus the great symphony orchestras, Sadler’s Wells Ballet, Covent Garden Opera, and various theatre companies are not run by the Government, but given grants by the Arts Council, a corporation supported by Government money.
What is more, there is no one central body in Britain in charge of the fine arts, but a number of organizations, with the Arts Council covering the widest territory. Government patronage of the arts in Britain, as has frequently been true of other British institutions, has grown with the needs of the times, and the organization of the operating bodies has been flexible and adaptable.
The bodies that receive Government money, such as the Arts Council, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and the British Council are relatively independent of the Government, their employees not being civil servants and their day-to-day business being conducted autonomously.
There is no attempt on the part of the Government to interfere with the presentations of the companies receiving State aid, though often the Government encourages experimentation. A very happy combination of arts sponsorship is now permissible under a comparatively recent Act of Parliament that allows local government authorities to assist theatrical and musical groups fully. Now, for instance, an orchestra based anywhere in Britain may have the financial backing of the town authorities, as well as of the Arts Council and private patrons.
While accurate predictions about the future course of relations between Government and the arts in Britain are not, of course, possible, it seems likely, however, that all of mankind will be found with more, rather than less, leisure in the years to come. In the days of the industrial revolution in Britain a hundred-odd years ago, the people, by which I mean the working classes, had little opportunity for cultivating a taste for the arts.
Now, with the average number of hours worked by British men, thanks to trade unionism and a more genuinely progressive and humanitarian point of view, standing at something under forty-seven weekly, there is obviously less time devoted to earning a living, leaving more for learning the art of living. It may well be that the next hundred years will see even more intensive efforts made to help people to use their leisure hours pleasantly and profitably. As long ago as the early 1930’s, at a time when he was so instrumental in encouraging ballet through the founding of the Camargo Society, Lord (then J. Maynard) Keynes wrote that he hoped and believed the day would come when the problem of earning one’s daily bread might not be the most important one of our lives, and that “the arena of the heart and head will be occupied, or reoccupied, by our real problems—the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.” Then, “for the first time since his creation,” Lord Keynes continued, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure science and compound interest will have won for him to live wisely and agreeably and well.”
Stripped to the simplest explanation possible, Sadler’s Wells leased its company to Covent Garden for a period of years. The move must have entailed a prodigious amount of work for all concerned and for Ninette de Valois in particular. Quite apart from all the physical detail involved: new scenery, new musical material, new costumes, more dancers, there was, most importantly, a change of point of view, even of direction. With a large theatre and orchestra, and large responsibilities, experimental works for the moment had to be postponed. New thinking had to be employed, because the company’s direction was now in the terms of the Maryinsky Theatre, the Bolshoi, the Paris Opéra.
The keystone of the arch that is Sadler’s Wells’s policy is the full-length productions of classical ballets. The prime example is The Sleeping Beauty, my own reactions to which, when I first saw it, I have already recounted. In the production of this work, the company was preeminent, with Margot Fonteyn as a bright, particular star; but the “star” system, if one cares to call it that, was utilized to the full, since each night there was a change of cast; and it must be remembered that in London it is possible to present a full-length work every night for a month or more without changing the bill, whereas in this country, almost daily changes are required. This, it should be pointed out, required a good deal of audience training.
The magnificent production of The Sleeping Beauty cost more than £10,000, at British costs. What the costs for such a production as that would have been on this side of the Atlantic I dislike to contemplate. The point is that it was a complete financial success. Another point I should like to make is that while The Sleeping Beauty was presented nightly, week after week, there was no slighting of the other classical works such as the full-length Swan Lake, Coppélia, Les Sylphides, and Giselle; nor was there any diminution of new works or revivals of works from their own repertoire.
It was in 1948 I returned to London further to pursue the matter of their invasion of America. It was my very dear friend, the late Ralph Hawkes of the music publishing firm of Boosey and Hawkes, the leaseholders of Covent Garden, who helped materially in arranging matters and in persuading the Sadler’s Wells direction and the British Arts Council that they were ready for America and that, since Hawkes was closely identified with America’s musical life, that this country was ready for them.
Meanwhile, Ninette de Valois grew increasingly dubious about full-length, full-evening ballets, such as The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake, in the States, and was convinced in her own mind that the United States and Canadian audiences not only would not accept them, much less sit still before a single work lasting three and one-half hours. Much, of course, was at stake for all concerned and it was, indeed, a serious problem about which to make a final, inevitable decision.
The conferences were long and many. Conferences are a natural concomitant of ballet. But there was a vast difference between these conferences and the hundreds I had had with the Russians, the Caucasians, the Bulgarians, and the Axminsters. Here were neither intrigues nor whims, neither suspicion nor stupidity. On the contrary, here was reasonableness, logic, frankness, fundamental British honesty. George Borodin, a Russian-born Englishman and a great ballet-lover, once pointed out that ballet is a medium that transcends words, adding “the tongue is a virtuoso that can make an almost inexhaustible series of noises of all kinds.” In my countless earlier conferences with other ballet directorates, really few of those noises, alas, really meant anything.
At last, the affirmative decision was made and we arrived at an agreement on the repertoire for the American season, to include the full-length works, along with a representative cross-section, historically speaking, of the Sadler’s Wells repertoire of their shorter works. The matter settled, I left for home.
On my return to New York, still other problems awaited me. The Metropolitan Opera House, the only possible New York stage on which Sadler’s Wells could appear, was faced with difficulties and perplexities, with other commitments for the period when the British visitors would be here.
However, thanks to the invaluable cooperation and assistance of Edward Johnson, Alfred P. Sloan, and Mrs. August Belmont, it was decided that a part of the season should be given to Sadler’s Wells. Had it not been for their friendly, intelligent, and influential offices, New York might not have had the pleasure and privilege of the Sadler’s Wells visit.
The road at last having been cleared, our promotional campaign was started and was limited to four weeks. The response is a matter of theatrical history.
Here, for the first time in the United States, was a company carrying on the great tradition in classical ballet, with timely and contemporary additions. Here was a company with a broad repertoire based on and imbedded in the full-length classics, but also bolstered with modern works that strike deep into human experience. Here were choreographers who strove to broaden the scope of their art and to bring into their works some of the richness of modern psychology and drama, always balletic in idiom, with freedom of style, who permitted their dramatic imaginations to guide them in creating movement and in the use of music.
By boat came the splendid productions, the costumes, the properties, loads and loads of them. By special chartered planes came the company, and the technical staff, the entire contingent headed by the famous directorial trio, Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton, and Constant Lambert, with the executive side in the capable hands of David Webster, General Administrator. The technical department was magnificently presided over by Herbert Hughes, General Manager of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, and the late Louis Yudkin, General Stage Director.
It was an American ballerina, Nora Kaye, who hustled Margot Fonteyn from the airport to let her have her first peek at the Metropolitan Opera House. The curtain was up when they arrived, revealing the old gold and red auditorium. Margot’s perceptive eyes took it all in at a glance. She took a deep breath, clasped her hands in front of her. “Thank goodness,” she said, “it’s old and comfortable and warm and rich, as an opera house should be.” She paused for a reflective moment and added, “I was so afraid it would be slick and modern like everything else here, all steel and chromium, and spit and polish. I’m glad it’s old!”.
On an afternoon before the opening, my very good friend, Hans Juda, publisher of Britain’s international textile journal, Ambassador, together with his charming wife, gave a large and delightful cocktail party at Sherry’s in the Metropolitan Opera House for a large list of invited guests from the worlds of art, business, and diplomacy. Hans Juda is a very helpful and influential figure in the world of British textiles and wearing apparel. It was he, together with the amiable James Cleveland Belle of the famous Bond Street house of Horrocks, who arranged with British designers, dressmakers, textile manufacturers, and tailors to see that each member of the Sadler’s Wells company was outfitted with complete wardrobes for both day and evening wear; the distaff side with hats, suits, frocks, shoes, and accessories; the male side with lounge suits, dinner jackets, shoes, gloves, etc. The men were also furnished with, shall I say, necessaries for the well-dressed man, which were soon packed away, viz., bowler hats (“derbies” to the American native) and “brollies” (umbrellas to Broadway).
The next night was, in more senses than one, the BIG night: a completely fabulous première. The Metropolitan was sold out weeks in advance, with standees up to, and who knows, perhaps beyond, the normal capacity. Hundreds of ballet lovers had stood in queue for hours to obtain a place in the coveted sardine space, reaching in double line completely round the square block the historic old house occupies on Broadway, Seventh Avenue, Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Streets. The orchestra stalls and boxes were filled with the great in all walks of life. The central boxes of the “Golden Horseshoe,” draped in the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack, housed the leading figures of the diplomatic and municipal worlds.
Although the date was 9 October, it was the hottest night of the summer, as luck would have it. The Metropolitan Opera House is denied the benefit of modern air-conditioning; the temperature within its hallowed walls, thanks to the mass of humanity and the lights, was many degrees above that of the humid blanket outside.
Despite all this, so long as I shall live, I shall never forget the stirring round of applause that greeted that distinguished figure, Constant Lambert, as he entered the orchestra pit to lead the orchestra in the two anthems, the Star Spangled Banner and God Save the King. The audience resumed their seats; there was a bated pause, and then from the pit came the first notes of the overture to The Sleeping Beauty, under the sympathetic baton of that finest of ballet conductors. So long as I shall live I shall never forget the deafening applause as the curtains opened on the first of Oliver Messel’s sets and costumes. That applause, which was repeated and repeated—for Fonteyn’s entrance, increasing in its roar until, at the end, Dame Ninette had to make a little speech, against her will—still rings in my ears.
I have had the privilege of handling the world’s greatest artists and most distinguished attractions; my career has been punctuated with stirring opening performances of my own, and I have been at others quite as memorable. However, so far as the quality of the demonstrations and the manifestations of enthusiasm are concerned, the première of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House, on 9 October, 1949, was the most outstanding of my entire experience.
Dame Ninette de Valois, outwardly as calm as ever, but, I suspect, inwardly a mass of conflicting emotions, was seated in the box with Mayor O’Dwyer. As the curtains closed on the first act of The Sleeping Beauty, and the tremendous roar of cheers and applause rose from the packed house, the Mayor laid his hand on “Madame’s” arm and said, “Lady, you’re in!”
Crisply and a shade perplexed, “Madame” replied:
“In?... Really?”
Genuinely puzzled now, she tried unsuccessfully to translate to herself what this could mean. “Strange language,” she thought, “I’m in?... In what?... What on earth does that mean?”
We met in the interval. I grasped her hand in sincere congratulation. She patted me absently as she smiled. Then she turned and spoke.
“Look here,” she said, “could you translate for me, please, something His Lordship just said to me as the curtain fell? Put it into English, I mean?”
It was my turn to be puzzled. “Madame” was, I thought, seated with Mayor O’Dwyer. Had she wandered about, moved to another box?
“His Lordship?”
“Yes, yes, of course. Your Lord Mayor, with whom I am sitting.”
I hadn’t thought of O’Dwyer in terms of a peer.
“Yes, yes,” she continued, “as the applause, that very surprising applause rang out at the end, the Lord Mayor turned to me and said, ‘Lady, you’re in!’ Just like that. Now will you please translate for me what it is? Tell me, is that good or bad?”
Laughingly I replied, “What do you think?”
“I really don’t know” was her serious and sincere response.
The simple fact was that Dame Ninette de Valois, D.B.E., D. Litt., to whose untiring efforts Sadler’s Wells owes its success, its existence, its very being, honestly thought the company was failing in New York.
This most gala of gala nights was crowned by a large and extremely gay supper party given by Mayor O’Dwyer, at Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the Mayor of the City of New York. It was a warm and balmy night, with an Indian Summer moon—one of those halcyon nights all too rare. Because of this, it was possible to stage the supper in that most idyllic of settings, on the spacious lawn overlooking the moon-drenched East River, with the silhouettes of the great bridges etched in silver lights against the glow from the hundreds of colored lights strung over the lawn. Beneath all this gleamed the white linen of the many tables, the sparkle of crystal, the gloss of the silver.
Two orchestras provided continuous dance music, the food and the champagne were ineffable. It was a party given by the Mayor: to honor the Sadler’s Wells Ballet and to cement those cultural ties between the two great world centers, London and New York. What better means are there for mutual understanding and admiration?
There was, however, a delay on the part of the company in leaving the Metropolitan Opera House, a quite extended delay. Three large buses waited at the stage door, manned by Police Department Inspectors in dress uniforms, with gold badges. But this was the first time the company had worn the new evening creations I have mentioned. It took longer to array themselves in these than it did for them to prepare for the performance. As a matter of fact, Margot Fonteyn and Moira Shearer were the last to be ready, each of them ravishing and stunning, the dark, flashing brunette beauty of Fonteyn in striking contrast to the soft, pinkish loveliness of Shearer.
Then it was necessary for our staff and the police to form a flying wedge to clear a path from the stage door to the waiting buses through the tightly-packed crowd that waited in Fortieth Street for a glimpse of the triumphant stars.
Safe aboard at last, off the cavalcade started, headed by a Police Department squad car, with siren tied down, red lights flashing, together with two motorcycle police officers fifteen feet in advance and the same complement, squad car and outriders, bringing up the rear of the procession, through the red traffic lights, thus providing the company with yet another American thrill.
There was a tense instant as the procession left the Metropolitan and the police sirens commenced their wail. The last time the company had heard a siren was in the days of the blitz in London, when, no matter how inured one became, the siren’s first tintinnabulation brought on that sudden shock that no familiarity can entirely eradicate. It was Constant Lambert’s dry wit that eased the situation. “It’s all right, girls,” he called out, “that’s the ‘all clear.’”.
Heading the receiving line at Gracie Mansion, as the company descended the wide stairs into the festive garden, were the Mayor and Grover Whalen, Sir Oliver and Lady Franks, Sir Alexander Cadogan, the Honorable Trygve Lie, President Romulo. There was a twinkle in Mayor O’Dwyer’s eye, as some of the corps de ballet girls curtsied with a “Good-evening, your Lordship.”
Toasts were drunk to the President of the United States, the King of England, Dame Ninette de Valois, to the Mayor, to Margot Fonteyn, Moira Shearer, and the other principals. The party waxed even gayer. Dancers seem never to tire of dancing. It was three in the morning when the Mayor made a short speech to say “good-night,” explaining that he was under doctor’s orders to go to bed, but that the party was to continue unabated, and all were to enjoy themselves.
It was past four o’clock when it finally broke up, and the buses, with their police escorts, started the journey back through a sleeping Manhattan to deposit the company at their various hotels. Constant Lambert, the lone wolf, lived apart from the rest at an East Side hotel. All the rest of the company had been dropped, when three buses, six inspectors, two squad cars, four motorcycle officers, halted before the sedate hostelry after five in the morning, and Constant Lambert, the sole passenger in the imposing cavalcade, slowly and with a grave, seventeenth-century dignity, solemnly shook hands with drivers, motor police, and all the inspectors, thanked them for the extremely interesting, and, as he put it, “highly informative” journey, saluted them with his sturdy blackthorn stick, and disappeared within the chaste portals of the hotel, while the police stood at salute, and two bewildered milk-men looked on in wonder.
The New York season was limited only by the availability of the Metropolitan Opera House. We could have played for months. Also, the company was due back at Covent Garden to fulfil its obligations to the British taxpayer. Following the Metropolitan engagement, there was a brief tour, involving a special train of six baggage cars, diner, and seven Pullmans, visiting, with equal success and greeted by capacity and turn-away houses, Washington, Richmond, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Michigan State College at East Lansing; thence across the border into Canada, for engagements at Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal, to honor the Commonwealth.
Before David Webster returned to London, we discussed the matter of an early return for a longer stay. I pointed out that, with such an evident success, Sadler’s Wells could not afford to delay its return for still further and greater triumphs. Now, I emphasized, was the time to take advantage of the momentum of success; now, if ever, was the time, since the promotion, the publicity, the press notices, all were cumulative in effect.
Webster, I knew, was impressed. I waited for his answer. But he shook his head slowly.
“Sol,” he said, “it’s doubtful. Frankly, I do not think it is possible.”
Meanwhile, I discussed the entire matter of the return with leading members of the company. All were of a single opinion, all of one mind. They were anxious and eager to return.
Such are the workings of the Sadler’s Wells organization, however, that it was necessary to delay a decision as to a return visit until at least the 3rd or 4th of January, 1950, in order that the matter could be properly put before the British Arts Council and the British Council for their final approval.
It should not be difficult for the reader to understand the anxiety and eagerness with which I anticipated that date.
It seems to me that during this period of suspense it might be well for me to sum up my impression of the repertoire that made up the initial season.
The Sadler’s Wells Ballet repertoire for the first American season consisted of the following works: The Sleeping Beauty; Le Lac des Cygnes (Swan Lake) in full; Cinderella, in three acts; Job; Façade; Apparitions; The Rake’s Progress; Miracle in the Gorbals; Hamlet; Symphonic Variations; A Wedding Bouquet; and Checkmate. The order is neither alphabetical nor necessarily in the order of importance. Actually, irrespective of varying degrees of success on this side of the Atlantic, they are all important, for they represent, in a sense, a cross-section of the repertoire history of the company.
The Sleeping Beauty, in its Sadler’s Wells form, is a ballet in a Prologue and three acts. The story is a collaboration by Marius Petipa and I. A. Vsevolojsky, (the Director of the Russian Imperial Theatres at the time of its creation), after the Charles Perrault fairy tale. The music, of course, is Tchaikowsky’s immortal score. The scenery and costumes are by Oliver Messel. The original Petipa choreography was reproduced by Nicholas Serguëeff.
It was the work which so brilliantly inaugurated the company’s occupation of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on 20th February, 1946. Sadler’s Wells had previously revived the work in 1939, on a smaller scale, under the title The Sleeping Princess.
My unforgettable memories of the present production are topped by the inspired interpretation of the title role by Margot Fonteyn, who alternated moods of subtlety and childlike simplicity with brilliant fireworks, always within the ballet’s frame. There is the shining memory of Beryl Grey’s magnificent Lilac Fairy, the memory of the alternating casts, one headed by Moira Shearer, entirely different in its way. There is, as a matter of fact, little difference between the casts. Always there were such ensemble performances as the States had never before seen. Over all shone the magnificence of Oliver Messel’s scenery and costumes.
The full-length Swan Lake (Le Lac des Cygnes), actually in four acts, was a revelation to audiences for years accustomed to the truncated second act version. Its libretto, or book, is a Russian compilation by Begitschev and Geltser. It was first presented by Sadler’s Wells in the present settings and costumes by Leslie Hurry, with the original choreography by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, reproduced by Nicholas Serguëeff, on 7th September, 1943.
This production replaced an earlier one, first done at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, on 20th November, 1934, with Alicia Markova as the Swan Queen, and the scenery and costumes by Hugh Stevenson.
On the 13th April, 1947, it came to Covent Garden, with an increased corps de ballet, utilizing the entire Covent Garden stage, as it does at the Metropolitan Opera House.
As always, Margot Fonteyn is brilliant in the dual role of Odette-Odile. In all my wide experience of Swan Queens, Fonteyn today is unequaled. With the Sadler’s Wells company, there is no dearth of first-rate Swan Queens: Margot Fonteyn, Moira Shearer, Beryl Grey, Violetta Elvin. Altogether, in case the reader has not already suspected it, Swan Lake is, I think, my favorite ballet. It is not only a classical ballet; it is a classic. The haunting Tchaikowsky score, its sheer romanticism, its dramatic impact, all these things individually and together, give it its pride of place with the public of America as well as with myself. Here my vote is with the majority.
The third full-length work, so splendid in its settings and so bulky that its performances had to be limited by its physical proportions only to the largest stages, was Cinderella, which took up every inch on the great stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. Cinderella was the first full evening ballet in the modern repertoire of Sadler’s Wells. A three-act work, with choreography by Frederick Ashton, to the score by Serge Prokofieff, its scenery and costumes are by the French painter, Jean-Denis Malclès.
Here was an instance where the chief choreographer of Sadler’s Wells, Frederick Ashton, had the courage to tackle a full-length fairy story, the veritable stuff from which true ballets are made in the grand tradition of classical ballet: a formidable task. The measure of his success is that he managed to do it by telling a beautiful and thrice-familiar fairy tale in a direct and straightforward manner, never dragging in spectacle for the sake of spectacle. Moreover, he was eminently successful in avoiding, on the one hand, those sterilities of classicism that lead only to boredom, and the grotesqueries of modernism, on the other.
For music, Ashton took the score Prokofieff composed for the Soviet ballet of the same name, but created an entirely new work to the music. The settings and costumes by Malclès could not have been more right, filled as they are with the glamor of the fairy tale spirit and utterly free from any trace of vulgarity.
I shall always remember the Ugly Sisters of Ashton and Robert Helpmann, in the best tradition of English pantomime. Moreover, the production was blessed with three alternating Cinderellas, each individual in approach and interpretation: Fonteyn, Shearer, and Elvin.
Job, the reader will remember, is not called a ballet but “A Masque for Dancing.” The adaptation of the Biblical legend in the spirit of the William Blake drawings is the work of a distinguished British surgeon and Blake authority, Geoffrey Keynes. It was the first important choreographic work of Ninette de Valois. Its scenery and costumes were the product of John Piper; its music is one of the really great scores of that dean of living British composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams.
In the music, completely modern in idiom, Vaughan Williams has followed the overall pattern of the sixteenth and seventeenth century “Masques,” using period rhythms (but not melodies) such as the Pavane, the Minuet, the Saraband, and the Gaillard.
The production itself is on two levels, in which all the earthly, material characters remain on the stage level, while the spiritual characters are on a higher level, the two levels being joined by a large flight of steps.
One character stands out in domination of the work. That is Satan, created by Anton Dolin, and danced here by Robert Helpmann. The climax of Job occurs when Satan is hurled down from heaven. The whole thing is a work of deep and moving beauty—a serious, thoughtful work that ranks as one of Ninette de Valois’ masterpieces.
Façade represented the opposite extreme in the Sadler’s Wells repertoire. There was considerable doubt on the part of the company’s directorate that it would be acceptable on this side of the Atlantic, because of its essential British humor; it was also feared that it might be dated. As matters turned out, it was one of the most substantial successes among the shorter works.
Façade was originally staged by Ashton for the Camargo Society in 1931, came to the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in 1935, was lost in the German invasion of Holland, and was restored in the present settings and costumes of John Armstrong in 1940. It is, of course, freely adapted from the Edith Sitwell poems, with the popular score by Sir William Walton.
Fresh, witty, and humorous throughout, there is no suggestion of either provincialism or of being dated. Its highlights for me were the Tango, superbly danced by Frederick Ashton and Moira Shearer, who alternated with Pamela May, and the Yodelling Song with its bucolic milkmaid.
Apparitions perhaps bore too close a resemblance in plot to Massine’s treatment of the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, although the former is a much earlier work, having been staged by Ashton in 1933. Its story is by Constant Lambert; its music, a Lambert selection of the later music of Franz Liszt, re-orchestrated by Gordon Jacob. Cecil Beaton designed the extremely effective scenery and costumes. It was taken into the Sadler’s Wells repertoire in 1936.
It provided immensely effective roles for Margot Fonteyn and Robert Helpmann.
Strikingly successful was Ninette de Valois’ The Rake’s Progress. This is a six-scene work, based on William Hogarth’s famous series of paintings of the same name. Its story, like its music, is by Gavin Gordon. Its setting, a permanent closed box, subject to minor changes during the action, scene to scene, with an act-drop of a London street, is by the late Rex Whistler, as are the costumes, Hogarthian in style.
It is a highly dramatic work, in reality a sort of morality play, perhaps, more than it is a ballet in the accepted sense of the term, but a tremendously important work in the evolution of the repertoire that is so peculiarly Sadler’s Wells.
Miracle in the Gorbals is another of the theatre pieces in the repertoire. The choreographic work of Robert Helpmann, it is based on a story by Michael Benthall, to a specially commissioned score by Sir Arthur Bliss. Its setting and costumes are by the British artist, Edward Burra. It was a wartime addition to the repertoire in the fall of 1944.
Like The Rake’s Progress, Miracle in the Gorbals is also a sort of morality play, with strong overtones of a sociological tract. Bearing plot and theme resemblances to Jerome K. Jerome’s The Passing of the Third Floor Back, it puts the question: “What sort of treatment would God receive if he returned to earth and visited the slums of a twentieth century city?”
A realistic work, it deals with low-life in a strictly down-to-earth manner. As a spectacle of crowded tenement life, it mingles such theatrical elements as the raising of the dead, murder, suicide, prostitution. The Bliss music splendidly underlines the action.
With all of its drama and melodrama, it was not, nevertheless, one of my favorite works.
The other Helpmann creation was Hamlet, staged by him two years before Miracle in the Gorbals, in 1942. Utilizing the Tchaikowsky fantasy-overture, its tremendously effective scenery and costumes are by Leslie Hurry.
Hamlet was not an attempt to tell the Shakespeare story in ballet form. Rather is it a work that attempts to portray the dying thoughts of Hamlet as his life passes before him in review. Drama rather than dance, it is a spectacle, linked from picture to picture by dances, a work in which mime plays an important part.
Symphonic Variations, set to César Franck’s work for piano and orchestra of the same title, was Ashton’s first purely dance work in abstract form.
A work without plot, it employed only six dancers, three couples, on an immense stage in an immensely effective setting of great simplicity by Sophie Fedorovich. The six dancers were: Margot Fonteyn, Moira Shearer, and Pamela May; Michael Somes, Henry Danton, and Brian Shaw. There is no virtuoso role. It is a lyric work, calm, ordered, in which the classical spirit is exalted in a mood of all for one, one for all.
A Wedding Bouquet is certainly the most genuinely witty work in all modern ballet repertoire. The work of that genuine wit and gentleman of impeccable taste in music, literature, and painting, the late Lord Berners, it was staged by Ashton in 1937. Utilizing a text by Gertrude Stein, spoken by a narrator seated at a table at the side of the stage, its music, its scenery, its costumes, all are by Lord Berners. At the Metropolitan Opera House, the narrator was the inimitable Constant Lambert. In later performances, the role was taken over by Robert Irving, the chief conductor.
The work, a collaboration between Ashton, Berners, and Gertrude Stein, is the most completely sophisticated ballet I know. The amazing thing about it to me is that with its utterly integrated Stein text, it goes as well in large theatres as it does in the smaller ones. The text is as important as the dancing or the music.
For me, aside from the hilarity of the work itself, was the pleasure I derived from the performance of Moira Shearer as the thwarted spinster who loved her dog, and June Brae, who danced the role of Josephine, who was certainly not fitted to go to a wedding, as Gertrude Stein averred. As the Bridegroom, Robert Helpmann provided a comic masterpiece.
Checkmate was the first British ballet to have its première outside the country, having been first presented as a part of the Dance Festival at the International Exposition in Paris, in the summer of 1937. Both music and book are by Sir Arthur Bliss, with scenery and costumes by the Anglo-American artist, E. McKnight Kauffer.
The concerns of the ballet are with a game of chess, with the dancers pawns in the game. It appeals to me strongly, and I feel it is one of Ninette de Valois’ finest choreographic achievements. It is highly dramatic, leading to a grim tragedy. Its music is tremendously fine and McKnight Kauffer’s settings and costumes are striking, effective, and revolutionary. This is a work of first importance in all ballet repertoire.
I embarked upon a continuing bombardment of Ninette de Valois and David Webster by cables and long-distance telephone calls. I never for a instant let the matter out of my mind.
As I counted off the days until a decision was due, the old year ran out. It was on New Year’s Eve, while working in my office, that I was taken ill. I had not been feeling entirely myself for several days, but illness is something so foreign to me that I laughed it off as something presumably due to some irregularity of living.
Suddenly, late in the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, I found myself doubled up with pain. I was rushed to hospital. A hasty blood-count revealed the necessity for an immediate appendectomy. Before the old year was greeted by the new, I had submitted to surgery. The doctors said it was just in time—a case of “touch and go.” A good many things in my life have been that.
A minimum of a week’s hospitalization was imperative, the doctors said, and after that another fortnight of quiet recuperation. I remained in hospital the required week.
Very soon after, against the united wishes of Mrs. Hurok and my office, I was on a plane bound for London.
At the London airport I was met by David Webster, who took me as quickly and as smoothly as possible to my old stamping-ground, the Savoy Hotel, where, on Webster’s firm insistence, I spent the next twelve hours in bed. There followed extended consultations with Ninette de Valois and Webster; but neither was able to give a definite answer on the all-important matter of the second American tour.
I pointed out to them that, in order to protect all concerned, bookings were already being made across the United States and Canada: bookings involving in many instances, definite guarantees. As I waited for a decision, my office was daily badgering me. I was at a loss what to reply to them. There were daily inconclusive trans-Atlantic telephone conversations with my office and daily inconclusive conversations with the Sadler’s Wells directorate.
At last there came a glimmer. Webster announced that he believed a final decision could be reached at or about 16th February. He required, he said, that much further time in order to be able to figure out the precise costs of the venture and to determine what, if anything, might be left after the payment of all the terrific costs. In other words, he had to determine and calculate the precise nature of the risk.... Figures, figures, and still more figures.... Cables backwards and forwards across the Atlantic, with my New York office checking and rechecking on the capacities of the auditoriums, theatres, opera houses, and halls in which the bookings had been made.
The 16th February passed and still no decision was forthcoming. On 19th February, all that could be elicited from Webster was: “I simply can’t say at this juncture.” He added that he appreciated my position and regretted the daily disappointments to which I was being subjected.
There came the 22nd of February, in the United States the anniversary of the birth of George Washington. This year in London, the 22nd of February was the eve of the General Election. Most of the afternoon I spent with Webster at his flat, going over papers. We dined together and, as we parted, Webster’s only remark was: “See you at the performance.”
Meanwhile the pressure on me from New York increased.
“What is going to happen?” became the reiterated burden of the daily messages from my office.
Other matters in New York were requiring my attention, and it had become necessary to inform Webster that it would be impossible for me to remain any longer in London and that I was sailing in the Queen Mary on Friday.
Election Eve I went to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, to watch another Sadler’s Wells performance. In the main foyer I ran into Webster.
“Can you guarantee us our expenses and a profit?” he asked.
“I can.”
“It’s a deal.”
It was eight-thirty in the evening of the 22nd February that the verbal deal was made. Five hours difference in time made it three-thirty in the afternoon in New York. I hurried back to the Savoy and called Mae Frohman.
“What’s going to happen?”
“It’s all set,” I replied.
Back to Covent Garden I went. In the Crush Bar, Webster and I toasted our deal with a bottle of champagne.
During Election Day, Webster, “Madame,” and I worked on repertoire and final details; but, for the most part, we gave our attention to the early returns from the General Election. After the performance that night at the Garden, David Webster and his friend James Cleveland Belle, joined me at the Savoy and remained until four in the morning, with one eye and one ear on the returns.
The next day I sailed in the good Queen Mary and had a lovely crossing, with my good friend, Greer Garson, on board to make the trip even more pleasant.
Mrs. Hurok, my daughter Ruth, Mae Frohman, and my office staff met me at the Cunard pier; and I told the whole story, in all its intricate detail, to them.
But there were still loose ends to be caught up, and April found me again back in London. The night following my arrival, I gave a big party at the Savoy, with Ninette de Valois, Margot Fonteyn, Moira Shearer and David Webster as the guests of honor. We toasted the success of the first American season; drank another to the success of the forthcoming and much more extended tour.
While in London, we clarified and agreed upon many details, including the final repertoire for the second American venture—which was to reach, not only from coast to coast, but to dip into the far south as well as far to the north.
Back in New York for a brief stay and then, in June, Mrs. Hurok and I left for our annual sojourn in Europe. This time we went direct to London, where we revelled in the performances at Covent Garden.
I have always loved London and always have been a great admirer of London, the place, and of those things for which it stands as a symbol. I love suddenly coming upon the fascinating little squares, with their stately old houses, as often as not adorned with a fifteenth-century church. Although modernism sometimes almost encroaches, they still retain an old-fashioned dreaminess.
About all is the atmosphere of history, tradition, and the aura of a genuinely free people. The Royal Opera House itself has a particular fascination for me. So far as I am concerned, there is not the slightest incongruity in the fact that its façade looks out on a police station and police court and that it is almost otherwise surrounded by a garden market. A patina of associations seems to cover the fabric, both inside and out—whether it is the bare boards and iron rails of the high old-fashioned gallery, or the gilt and red plush and cream-painted woodwork, the thin pillars of the boxes, the rather awkward staircases, the “Crush” bar and the other bars, the red curtain bearing the coat of arms of the reigning Monarch. Then, lights down, the great curtain sweeps up, and once again, for the hundredth time, the tense magic holds everyone in thrall.
I love the true ballet lovers who are not to be found in the boxes alone or in the stalls exclusively. Many of them sit in the lower-priced seats in the upper circle, the amphitheatre, and in the gallery. The night before an opening or an important revival or cast change, a long queue, equipped with camp-chairs and sandwiches, waits patiently to be admitted to the gallery seats the following evening.
There is one figure I miss now at Covent Carden, one that seemed to me to be a part of its very fabric. For years, going back stage to see Anna Pavlova, Chaliapine, others of my artists, and in the days of the de Basil Ballet, it was he who always had a cheery greeting. In 1948, Tom Jackson closed his eyes in the sleep everlasting, to open them, one hopes, at some Great Stage Door. He was the legendary stage door-keeper, was Tom Jackson, and certainly one of the most important persons in Covent Garden. He was a gentleman in the best sense of the word. Many were the celebrated artists he saw come and go during his long regime. Everybody spoke to him in their own tongue, although Jackson invariably replied in English. He was, I remember, in charge of the artists’ mail, and knew everyone, and remembered every name and every face. Jackson was not only interested in his stage door, but took deep interest in the artistic aspect of Covent Garden. Immediately after a performance of either ballet or opera, he made up his mind whether it had been good or bad.
Sometimes it fell to Jackson’s lot to regulate matters outside the Garden. The gallery queues, as is the London custom, attract all sorts of itinerant musicians and entertainers to the Floral Street side where they display and reveal their art to the patiently waiting galleryites. If the hurdy-gurdies and public acclamations grew so loud that they might disturb any in the offices above, Jackson, with infallible tact, stopped the disturbance without offending the queuers or the entertainers by his interference.
Jackson guarded the Garden inexorably and was relentless on questions of admission. With unerring instinct, he distinguished between friend and foe, and was renowned for his treatment of the yellow press and its columnists, with its nose for gossip and scandal. He is said once to have unceremoniously deposited an over-enthusiastic columnist in the street, after having refused a considerable sum of money for permission to photograph a fainting ballerina. He was once seen chasing a large woman who was brandishing a heavy umbrella around the outside of the building. The large woman, in turn, was chasing Leonide Massine running at full tilt. The woman, obviously a crackpot, had accused Massine of stealing her idea for a ballet. Jackson caught the woman and disarmed her.
The London stage doorkeeper is really a breed unto himself.
I love opening nights at Covent Garden, when it becomes, quite apart from the stage, a unique social function in the display of dresses and jewels, despite the austerity. It is always a curious mixture of private elegance and public excitement. The excitement extends to all streets of the district, right down to the Strand, making a strange contrast with the cabbage stalls, stray potatoes, and the odor of vegetables lingering on from the early market. The impeccable and always polite London police are in control of all approaches, directing the endless stream of cars without delay as they draw up in the famous covered way under the portico. Ceremoniously they take care of all arriving pedestrians, and surprisingly hold up even the most pretentious and important traffic to let the pedestrian seat-holder through. The richly uniformed porters keep chattering socialites from impeding traffic with a stern ritual all their own, and announcing waiting cars in stentorian tones.... Ever in my mind Covent Garden is associated with that sacred hour back stage before a ballet performance, the company in training-kits, practising relentlessly. Only those who know this hour can form any idea of the overwhelming cost of the dancers’ brief glamorous hour before the public.
Particularizing from the general, from the very beginning, in all contacts with the British and with Sadler’s Wells, the relations between all concerned have been like those prevailing in a kind and understanding family, and they remain so today.
And now at the Savoy is the best smoked salmon in the world—Scottish salmon. When I am there, a special large tray of it is always ready for me. It is a passion I share with Ninette de Valois, who insists it is her favorite dish. The question I am about to ask is purely rhetorical: Is there anything finer than smoked Scottish salmon, with either a cold, dry champagne or Scotch whiskey?
The repertoire for the second American-Canadian tour of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet included, in addition to The Sleeping Beauty, the four-act Le Lac des Cygnes (Swan Lake), Façade, A Wedding Bouquet, The Rake’s Progress and Checkmate, the following works new to America: their own production of Giselle, Les Patineurs, Don Quixote, and Dante Sonata.
Giselle, in the Sadler’s Wells version, with its Adam score, has scenery and costumes by James Bailey, and was produced by Nicholas Serguëeff, after the choreography of Coralli and Perrot.
The original Wells production was at the Old Vic, in 1934, with Alicia Markova in the title role. The production for Covent Garden dates from 1946, with Margot Fonteyn as Giselle.
It requires no comment from me save to point out that Fonteyn is one of the most interesting and effective interpreters of the role in my experience, and I have seen a considerable number of Giselles.
Les Patineurs had been seen in America in a version danced by Ballet Theatre. The Sadler’s Wells version is so much better that there is no real basis for comparison. This version, by Frederick Ashton, dates back to 1937. It has an interesting history. It is my understanding that the original idea was that Ninette de Valois would stage it. The story has it that, one night at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Ashton, whose dressing-room adjoined that of Constant Lambert, heard the latter working out dance rhythms from two Meyerbeer operas, Star of the North and The Prophet. The story goes on that Ashton was moved by the melodies and that because “Madame” was so occupied with executive and administrative duties, the choreographic job was given to him. Ashton states that he composed this ballet, which is exclusively concerned with skating, without ever having seen an ice-rink.
I find it one of the most charming ballets in the repertoire, with something in it for everyone. In these days of so-called “ice-ballets,” which have little or no relation to ballet, however much they may have to do with ice, I find here an academic ballet, which is very close to skating.
Don Quixote was seen in but a few cities. It was the most recent work, at that time, to be shown. Choreographed by Ninette de Valois, it was a ballet in five scenes with both its scenario and its music by Robert Gerhard, with scenery and costumes by Edward Burra.
The story, of course, was the Cervantes tale. It was not a “dancing” ballet, in the sense that it had no virtuoso passages. But it told its story, nevertheless, through the medium of dance rather than by mime and acting. My outstanding impressions of it are the splendid score, Margot Fonteyn’s outstanding characterization of a dual role, and the shrewdly observed Sancho Panza of the young Alexander Grant.
Dante Sonata was, in a sense, a collaborative work by Frederick Ashton and Constant Lambert. Its date is 1940. Its scenery and costumes are by Sophie Fedorovich. The music is the long piano sonata by Franz Liszt, D’après une lecture de Dante, utilizing the poem by Victor Hugo. The orchestration of the piano work by Lambert, with its use of Chinese tam-tam and gong, is singularly effective.
At the time of its production, there was a story in general circulation to the effect that Ashton found his inspiration for the work in the sufferings of the Polish people at the hands of the Nazi invaders. This appears not to have been the case. The truth of the matter seems to have been that at about the time he was planning the work, Ashton was deeply moved by the death of a close and dear relative. The chief influence would, therefore, seem to be this, and thus to account for the choreographer’s savagery against the inevitability and immutability of death.
It is not, in any sense, a classical work, for Ashton, in order to portray the contorted and writhing spirits, went to the “free” or “modern” dance for appropriate movements. While, in the wide open spaces of America, it did not fulfil the provincial audiences’ ideas of what they expected from ballet, nevertheless it had some twenty-nine performances in the United States and Canada.
The second American season opened at the Metropolitan Opera House, on Sunday evening, 10th September, 1950. Again it was hot. The full-length Le Lac des Cygnes (Swan Lake) was the opening programme. The evening was a repetition of the previous year: capacity, cheering houses, with special cheers for Fonteyn.
The demand for seats on the part of the New York public was even greater than the year before, with a larger number consequently disappointed and unable to get into the Metropolitan at all.
From the company’s point of view, aside from hard work—daily classes, rehearsals, and eight performances a week—there was a round of entertainment for them, the most outstanding, perhaps, being the day they spent as the guests of J. Alden Talbot at Smoke Rise, his New Jersey estate.
The last night’s programme at the Metropolitan season was The Sleeping Beauty. The final night’s reception matched that of the first. Ninette de Valois’ charming curtain speech, in which she announced another visit on the part of the company to New York—“but not for some time”—couldn’t keep the curtain down, and the calls continued until it was necessary to turn up the house lights.
Following the New York engagement, Sadler’s Wells embarked on the longest tour of its history, and the most successful tour in the history of ballet.
The New York season extended from 10th September to 1st October. The company appeared in the following cities: Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, Denver, Lincoln, Des Moines, Omaha, Tulsa, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Memphis, St. Louis, Bloomington, Lafayette, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, Winnipeg, Boston, White Plains, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec.
Starting on the 10th September, in New York, the tour closed in Quebec City on 28th January, 1951.
In thirty-two cities, during a period of five months, the people of this continent had paid more than two million and one-half dollars to see the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. On Election Eve in London, David Webster had asked me if I could guarantee them their expenses and a profit.
On the first tour the company covered some ten thousand miles. On the second tour, this was extended to some twenty-one thousand.
The box-office records that were broken by the company could only add to the burden of statistics. Suffice it to say, they were many. History was made: the sort of history that can be made again only by the next Sadler’s Wells tour.
Some idea of the magnitude of the transportation and railroading problems involved in an extended tour of this sort may be gathered from the fact that the “Sadler’s Wells Special” consisted of six Pullman sleeping cars, six baggage cars, and two dining cars, together with a club-bar-lounge car on long journeys.
I made it a point to be with the company at all the larger cities. I left them at Philadelphia, and awaited their arrival in Los Angeles. Neither I nor Los Angeles has ever seen anything like the opening night of their engagement at the enormous Shrine Auditorium, or like the entire engagement, as a matter of fact.
Because of a company rule that, on opening nights and in the case of parties of official or semi-official greeting nature, the entire personnel of the company and staff should attend in a body, an unfortunate situation arose in Los Angeles. A Beverly Hills group had announced a large party to which some of the company had been invited, without having cleared the matter in advance. The resultant situation was such that the advertised and publicized party was cancelled.
The sudden cancellation left the company without a party with which to relieve the strain of the long trek to the Pacific Coast, and the tense excitement of the first performance in the world’s film capital. As a consequence, I arranged to give a large party to the entire company and staff, in conjunction with Edwin Lester, the Director of the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera Association, and the local sponsor of the engagement. The party took place at the Ambassador Hotel, where the entire company was housed during the engagement, with its city within a city, its palm-shaded swimming-pool.
As master of ceremonies and guest of honor, we invited Charles Chaplin, distinguished artist and famous Briton. Among the distinguished guests from the film world were, among many others, Ezio Pinza, Edward G. Robinson, Greer Garson, Barry Fitzgerald, Gene Tierney, Cyd Charisse, Joseph Cotton, Louis Hayward.
Chaplin was a unique master of ceremonies, urbane, gentle, witty. As judge of a ballroom dancing contest, Chaplin awarded the prize to Herbert Hughes, non-dancer and the company’s general manager.
At the end of this phenomenal engagement, the company bade au revoir to Los Angeles and the many friends they had made in the film colony, and entrained for San Francisco for an engagement at that finest of all American opera houses, the War Memorial. I have an especial fondness for San Francisco, its atmosphere, its spirit, its people, its food. Yet a curious fact remains: of all the larger American cities, it is coolest in its outward reception of all forms of art. Even with Sadler’s Wells, San Francisco followed its formal pattern. It was the more startling in contrast with its sister city in the south. The demonstrations there were such that they had to be cut off in order to permit the performances to continue and thus end before the small hours; the Los Angeles audiences seemed determined not to let the company go. By contrast, the San Francisco audiences were perfunctorily polite in their applause. I have never been able quite to understand it.
In the case of the Sadler’s Wells première at the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, the company was enchanted with the building: a real opera house, a good stage, a place in which to work in comfort. The opening night audience had been attracted not only by interest in the company, but as charity contributors to a home for unmarried mothers. The bulk of the stalls and boxes were socially minded. They arrived late, from dinners and parties. The Sleeping Beauty must start at the advertised time because of its length. It cannot wait for late-comers. There was an unconscionable confusion in the darkened opera house as the audience rattled down the aisles, chattering, greeting friends, and shattering the spell of the Prologue, disturbing those who had taken the trouble to arrive on time as much as they did the artists on the stage. My concern on this point is as much for the audience as for the dancers. A ballet, being a work of art, is conceived as an entity, from beginning to end, from the first notes of the overture, till the last one of the coda. The whole is the sum of its parts. The noisy and inconsiderate late-comers, by destroying parts, greatly damage the whole.
The War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, although a municipal property, has a divided executive in that its physical control is in the hands of the local chapter of the American Legion, which make the rules and regulations for its operation. I do not know of any theatre with more locked doors, more red tape and more annoying, hampering regulations.
There is, to be sure, a certain positive virtue in the rule that forbids any unauthorized person to be permitted to pass from the auditorium to the stage by ways of the pass-door between the two. But, like any rule, it must be administered with discretion. The keeper of the pass-door at the War Memorial Opera House is a gentleman known as the “Colonel,” to whom, I feel, “orders is orders,” without the leavening of either discretion or plain “horse sense.”
On the opening night of Sadler’s Wells, a list of names of the persons authorized to pass had been given to this functionary by checking the names on the theatre programme. When Dame Ninette de Valois, D.B.E., D. Litt., Director of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, attempted to go back stage after the first act of The Sleeping Beauty, she was stopped at the pass-door by the guardian “Colonel.”
Very simply she told him, “I am Ninette de Valois.”
That meant nothing to the “Colonel.”
“Madame’s” name, he pointed out, was not checked off. It was not even printed on the “official” staff. In another part of the programme, there it was in small type. But the “Colonel” was adamant. Horatio at the bridge could not have been more formidable. He was a composite of St. Peter at the gate and St. Michael with his flaming sword.
While all this was going on, I was in the imposing, marble-sheathed front lobby of the Opera House, in conversation with critics and San Francisco friends, sharing their enthusiasm, when I suddenly felt my coat tails being sharply pulled. The first tug I was sure was some mistake, and I pretended not to notice it. Then my coat tails were tugged at again, unmistakably yanked.
“What is it?” I thought. “Who is it?”
I turned quickly, and found a tense, white-faced “Madame” looking at me, as she might transfix either a dancer who had fallen on his face, or a Cabinet Minister with whom she had taken issue.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The man,” she said, pointing in the direction of the pass-door, “wouldn’t let me through.” Crisply she added, “He didn’t know who I was. This is disgraceful, absolutely disgraceful. Unforgivable, I must say.”
She turned quickly on her heel and disappeared.
I was greatly upset, and immediately took steps to have the oversight corrected. I was miserable.
I sent for “Bertie” Hughes, the able general manager of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet company, told him what had happened, explained how distressed I was over the stupid incident.
Hughes smiled his quiet smile.
“Come on, have a drink and forget it,” he said. “‘Madame’ will have forgotten all about it within five minutes of watching the performance.”
As we sipped our drink, I was filled with mortification that “Madame,” of all people, should have run afoul of a too literal interpreter of the regulations.
“Look here,” said Hughes, “cheer up, don’t be disturbed.”
But the evening had been spoiled for me.
A really splendid party followed, given by H. M. Consul General in honor of the company, at San Francisco’s Bohemian Club. The Bohemian Club is one of San Francisco’s genuine landmarks, a famous organization of artists, writers, professional and business men, whose “High Jinks” and “Low Jinks” in midsummer are among the cultural highlights of the area.
Dispirited, I went only from a sense of duty. It turned out to be one of the fine parties of the entire tour; but I was fatigued, distraught, and the de Valois contretemps still oppressed me. I helped myself to some food, and hid away in a corner. I was, to put it bluntly, in a vile mood.
Again I felt my coat tails being tugged. “Who is it this time?” I thought. It was not my favorite manner of being greeted, I decided, there and then.
Cautiously I turned. Again it was “Madame.”
“What’s the trouble?” she asked, now all solicitude. “Why are you hiding in a corner? You don’t look well. Shouldn’t you see a doctor?”
“I don’t need a doctor.”
“Surely, something is wrong with you. You look pale, and it’s not the very least bit like you to be off sulking in a corner. What’s the trouble?”
“The insult to you,” I said.
I remembered what Hughes had said, when “Madame” replied: “Insult? Insult?... What insult? Did you insult me?... What on earth are you talking about?”
There was no point, I felt, in reminding her of the incident.
“When you want to speak to me,” I said, “must you pull my coat off my back?”
“The next time I shall do it harder,” she said with her very individual little laugh. “Don’t you think we have been here long enough?... Come along now, take us home.”
This is Ninette de Valois.
Following the San Francisco engagement, the company turned east to the Rocky Mountain area, the South and Middle West, to arrive in Chicago for Christmas.
The Chicago engagement was but a repetition of every city where the company appeared: sold-out houses, almost incredible enthusiasm. The Sleeping Beauty was the opening programme. Because of the magnitude of the production, it was impossible to present it except in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston. Both public and press were loud in their praises of the company, the production, the music.
Another delightful piece of hospitality was the party given at the Racquet Club in Chicago, following the first performance by Ruth Page, the well-known American dancer and choreographer, and her husband, Thomas Hart Fisher. Not only was there a wonderful champagne supper in the Club’s Refectory, at which the members of the company were the first to be served; but this was followed by a cabaret, the climax of which came when Margot, in a striking Dior gown of green, stepped down to essay the intricate steps of a new and unknown (to her) South American ball-room rhythm. She had never before seen or heard of the dance, but it was a joy to watch the musicality she brought to it.
It is not my custom to visit artists in the theatre before a performance, unless there has been some complaint, some annoyance, some trouble of some sort, something to straighten out. However, on this opening night in Chicago, I happened to be back stage in the Opera House on some errand. Since I was so close, I felt I wanted to wish the artists good-luck for their first Chicago performance, and, passing, knocked at Margot’s dressing-room door.
No reply.
I waited.
I knocked again.
No answer.
Puzzled, I walked away to return ten minutes later.
I knocked again.
Again no answer.
Worried, I opened the door.
“Don’t you hear me, Margot?” I asked.
Without glancing up, there came two words, no more. Two words, bitten off, crisp and sharp:
“G-e-t O—u—t!”
It was utterly unlike her. What had happened? I could not imagine. We had dined together the night before, together with “Freddy” Ashton, “Bobby” Helpmann and Moira Shearer. It had been a gay dinner, jolly. Margot had been her witty, amusing self. She had, I knew, been eagerly awaiting a letter from Paris, a letter from a particular friend. Perhaps it had not come. Perhaps it had. Whatever it was, I reasoned, at least it was not my fault. I was not to blame.
We met after the performance at the party. I was puzzled.
“Are you angry at me?” I asked her.
“I?” She smiled an uncomprehending smile. “Why on earth should I be angry at you?”
“You didn’t answer when I knocked at your door several times, and then, when I spoke, you told me, in no uncertain fashion, to get out.”
“Don’t you know that, before a performance, I won’t talk to anyone?” she said sternly.
Then she kissed me.
“Don’t take me too seriously,” she smiled, patting me on the shoulder, “but, remember, I don’t want to see anyone before I go on.”
MARGOT FONTEYN
In Margot Fonteyn we have, in my opinion, the greatest ballerina of the western world, the greatest ballerina of the world of ballet as we know it. Born Margaret Hookham, in Surrey, in 1919, the daughter of an English businessman father and a dark-skinned, dark-haired mother of Irish and Brazilian ancestry, who is sometimes known as the Black Queen in the company, a reference to one of the leading characters in Checkmate. Margot was taken to China as a small child, where the family home was in Shanghai. There was also an interim period when she was a pupil in a school in such a characteristically American city as Louisville, Kentucky.
Margot tells a story to the effect that she was taken as a child to see a performance by Pavlova, and that she was not particularly impressed. It would be much better “copy,” infinitely better for publicity purposes, to have her say that visit changed the whole course of her life and that, from that moment, she determined not only to be a dancer, but to become Pavlova’s successor. But Margot Fonteyn is an honest person.
Her first dancing lessons came in Shanghai, at the hands of the Russian dancer and teacher, Goncharov. Back in London, she studied with Seraphina Astafieva, in the same Chelsea studio that had produced Markova and Dolin. At the age of fourteen, her mother took her, apparently not with too much willingness on Margot’s part, up to the Wells in Islington, to the Sadler’s Wells School. Ninette de Valois is said to have announced after her first class, in the decisive manner of “Madame,” a manner which brooks no dissent: “That child has talent.”
Fonteyn, in the early days, harbored no ideas of becoming a ballerina. Her idealization of that remote peak of accomplishment was Karsavina, the one-time bright, shining star of the Diaghileff Ballet. All of which is not to say that Margot did not work hard, did not enjoy dancing. In class, in rehearsal, in performance, Fonteyn developed her own individuality, her own personality, without copying or imitating, consciously or unconsciously, any other artist.
It was after Markova left Sadler’s Wells to form her own company in association with Dolin that Fonteyn began to come into her own. Ninette de Valois had a plan, to which, like all her plans, she adhered. She had been grooming Fonteyn to take Markova’s place. The fact that she has done so is a matter of history, record, and fact. This is not the place for a catalogue of Fonteyn’s roles, or a list of her individual triumphs. Margot Fonteyn is very much with us, before us, among us, at the height of her powers. She speaks for herself. I merely want to give the reader enough background so that he may know the basic elements which have gone into the making of Margot Fonteyn, prima ballerina assoluta.
As a dancer, I find her appeal to me is two-fold: first as a pure classical dancer; second as an actress-dancer, by which I mean a dancer with a fine ability to characterize. This is important, for it implies few, if any, limitations. Pavlova, as I have pointed out, was free from limitations in the same way and, I think, to a similar degree. Anna Pavlova had a wide variety: she was a superb dramatic dancer in Giselle; she was equally at home in the brittle, glamorous Fairy Doll; as the light-hearted protagonist of the Rondino; as the bright-colored flirt of the Tchaikowsky Christmas. Tamara Karsavina ranged the gamut from Carnaval, Les Sylphides, and Pavillon d’Armide, on the one hand, to Schéhérazade, Thamar, and the Miller’s Wife in The Three-Cornered Hat, on the other, doing all with equal skill and artistry. In the same way, Fonteyn ranges, with equal perfection from the Princess Aurora of The Sleeping Beauty, the title role of Cinderella, and Mam’zelle Angot, the Millers wife in The Three-Cornered Hat, the tragic Giselle, Swanilda in Coppélia, the peasant Dulcinia in Don Quixote, on the one hand, to the pure, abstract dancing appeal of her lyrical roles in ballets such as Symphonic Variations, Scènes de Ballet, Ballet Imperial, and Dante Sonata, on the other.
As a dancer, Fonteyn is freer of mannerisms than any other ballerina I have known, devoid of tricks and those stunts sometimes called “showmanship” that are so often mere vulgar lapses from taste. About everything she does there is a strange combination of purity of style with a striking individuality that I can only identify and explain by that overworked term, “personality.” She has a superb carriage, the taut back of the perfect dancer, the faultless line and the ankles of the true ballerina. Over all is a great suppleness: the sort of suppleness that can make even an unexpected fall a thing of beauty. For ballerinas sometimes fall, even as ordinary mortals. One such fall occurred on Fonteyn’s first entrance in the nation’s capital, before a gala audience at the Washington première of Sadler’s Wells, with an audience that included President Truman, Sir Oliver Franks, and the entire diplomatic corps.
The cramped, ill-suited platform of Constitution Hall, was an inadequate, makeshift excuse for a stage. As Fonteyn entered to the resounding applause of thousands, she slipped on a loose board and fell, but gracefully and with such beauty that those in the audience who did not know might easily have thought it was a part of the choreographer’s design.
On the company’s return to London, at the close of the tour, the entire personnel were the guests at a formal dinner tendered to them by H. M. Government. The late Sir Stafford Cripps, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, gave the first toast to Fonteyn. Turning to her, Sir Stafford, in proposing the toast, said: “My dear lady, it has been brought to my attention that, in making your first entry into the American capital, you fell flat on your face.”
The Chancellor paused for an instant as he eyed her in mock severity, then added: “I beg you not to take it too much to heart. It is not the first time, nor, I feel sure, will it be the last, when your countrymen will be obliged to assume that same prostrate position on entering that city.”
To sum up my impressions of Fonteyn, the dancer, I should be doing her something less than justice if I failed to call attention to a supreme quality in her work, viz., that quality of implied ease in all she does, bringing unstrained pleasure to the onlooker; coupled as it is with a spiritual quality with which her performances seem to shimmer. All these things, so far as I am concerned, add up to a ballerina absolutely unique in my experience.
Margot Fonteyn is, to me, the true artist, because a great dancer must be a human being before she is an artist; her art must, in the last resort, be the expression of her personal attitude to life. She is many-sided; and the wonder is that she is able to have this breadth of cultural outlook when so much of her time has had to be spent in acquiring technique, dealing with its problems and the means of expression.
No amount of technique, no amount of technical brilliance or recondite knowledge will hide the paucity of emotion or intellect in an artist’s make-up. Technique, after all, is no more than the alphabet and the words of an art, and it is only the difficulty of acquiring a superlative technique that has led so many astray. But along what a fatal path they have been led! How often are we told that the true artist must devote her whole energies to her art, without the realization that art is the highest expression of mankind and has value only in so far as it is enriched with the blood of life.
As for Fonteyn, the person, whom I love and admire, I have no gossip to offer, few anecdotes, no whisperings. About her there is not the slightest trace of pose, pretentiousness, or pettiness. While she is conscious she is a great ballerina, one of the top-ranking artists in any art in the world today, she is equally conscious she is a human being. Basically, she is shy and quite humble. Splendidly poised, immaculately and impeccably groomed, chic in an international rather than in a Parisian sense, she is definitely an elegant person. The elegance of her private appearance she carries over into her appearance as a ballerina. Anna Pavlova, of all other dancers I have known, had this same quality.
Usually Margot dresses in colors that are on the dark side, like her own personal coloring. Small-featured, small-boned, her clothes, exquisite in cut, are strikingly simple. She is not given to jewelry, save for earrings without which I cannot remember ever having seen her. She is remarkably beautiful, but not in the G.I. pin-up type sense. Again there is the similarity to Anna Pavlova, who would look elegant and chic today in any salon or drawing-room, because her elegance was timeless. By all this, I do not mean to suggest that Fonteyn’s Christian Dior evening frocks and day dresses are not modish, but nothing she wears suggests the “latest word.”
One more word about her actions. I have mentioned her complete lack of pretentiousness. I should like to emphasize her equal lack of apparent awareness of her exalted position in her chosen calling. With the company, she makes no demands, puts on no airs. There is no false grandeur and none of the so-called “temperament” that many lesser ballerinas feel called upon to display upon the slightest provocation, and often upon no provocation at all. She is one who submits to the discipline of a great and continuous and uninterrupted and secure company. Fonteyn works as hard, with daily classes and rehearsals, mayhap harder, as any other of the large personnel. Her relations with the company are on the same plane. When the company travels in buses, Margot piles into the buses with them, joins in with the company at all times, is a member of it and an inspiration to it. The company, individually and collectively, love her and have the highest respect for her.
Margot’s warning to me not to try to disturb her before a performance had nothing to do with pose or “temperament.” It is simply that in order to live up to her reputation she has a duty, exactly as she has a duty to the role she is to enact, and because of these things, she has the artist’s natural nervousness increased before the rise of the curtain. She must be alone and silent with her thoughts in order to have herself under complete control and be at her best.
In all ballet I have never known a finer colleague, or one possessed of a greater amount of genuine good-heartedness. The examples of this sort of thing are endless, but one incident pointing it up stands out in my mind.
A certain American ballerina was on a visit to London. Margot invited this American girl to go to Paris with her. “Freddy” Ashton was also coming along, she said, and it would be fun.
“I can’t go,” replied the American ballerina. “I’ve nothing to wear that’s fit to be seen in Paris.”
“Come, come, don’t be silly,” replied Margot. “Here, take this suit of mine. I’ve never worn it.”
And she handed over a new Christian Dior creation.
Now Margot at that time was by no means too blessed with the world’s goods, and could not afford a new Dior outfit too often.
On their arrival in Paris, the group telephoned me at the Meurice and came to see me. Turning to the American ballerina, a long-time friend of mine, I could not help admiring her appearance.
“Where did you get that beautiful suit?” I enquired.
“Margot gave it to me, isn’t she sweet?” she replied, quite simply.
This is Margot Fonteyn: always ready to share with others; always thinking of others, least of all, of herself.
The following incident sums up the Margot Fonteyn I know and love. On the final night of the second American tour, after the last performance, I gave a farewell supper for the entire company at the Chateau Frontenac, in Quebec City. There were speeches, of which more later. When they were over, a corps de ballet member spontaneously rose to propose a toast to Margot Fonteyn, on her great personal triumph in North America. The rounds of applause that followed the toast reminded me of the opening night at the Metropolitan in New York. That applause had come from an audience of paying customers, who had just witnessed a new dancer scoring a triumph in an exciting performance. The applause that went on for minutes and minutes, came from her own colleagues, many of whom had grown up with her from the School. My eyes were moist. After a long time, Fonteyn rose to thank them. In doing so, she reminded them that a ballerina was only as good as her surroundings and that it was impossible for a ballerina to exist without the perfect setting, which they provided.
Here was a great artist, the greatest living ballerina we of the western world know, with all her triumphs, all her successes about her, at the apex of her career; very much of the present, here was the true artist, the loyal comrade, the humble, grateful human being.
From Chicago, a long journey to Winnipeg for a four-day engagement to be filled at the request of the British Council and David Webster, following a suggestion from H. M. the King. Winnipeg had suffered shocking damage from floods, and His Majesty had promised Winnipeg a visit from the Ballet while it was in America as a gala to lift the spirits of the people.
Here the company had its first taste of real cold, for the thermometer dropped to thirty-two degrees below zero. The result was that when it came time to entrain for the journey half-way across the continent to Boston, the next point on the itinerary, the baggage car doors were so frozen that they had to be opened with blowtorches and charges of explosives.
It was a four-day and three-night journey from Winnipeg to Boston, in sub-zero, stormy weather. The intense cold slowed the locomotives and froze the storage batteries, with the result that save for the lounge-bar car, the cars were in complete darkness and were dimly lighted at bed-time by a few spluttering candles. The severe cold had also caused the steam lines in the train to freeze, so that the temperature inside the cars was such that all made the journey wrapped in overcoats and blankets, wearing the heterogeneous collection of ear-lapped caps which they had purchased, even to North-west Canadian wool and fur shakos that blossomed in Winnipeg. Somewhere east of Chicago the “Sadler’s Wells Special” got itself behind the wreck of a freight train which had blocked the tracks, necessitating a long detour over the tracks of another railway, causing still further delays. Nine hours late, the ice-covered train bearing a company that had gone through the most gruelling train adventure of the tour, limped into Boston’s South Station.
There followed a tense period, for the minimum time required to set and light The Sleeping Beauty is twelve hours. It was another case of “touch and go.” Two hours were required to get the train broken up and all the scenery cars placed for unloading; then the procession of great trucks from the cars to the Opera House commenced; there followed the unloading, the taking-in, the hanging, the setting, the installation of all the heavy and complicated lighting equipment, for the theatres of America, for the most part, are either poorly equipped or not at all, and the Boston Opera House is in the latter category. Hundreds of costumes had to be unpacked, pressed, and distributed. But such is the efficiency of the Sadler’s Wells organization, its general stage director, the late Louis Yudkin, and our own American staff, together with the valued assistance of the Boston local manager, Aaron Richmond, that the curtain rose at the appointed minute.
I had gone to Boston for the duration of the engagement there. Bearing in mind the extensive travelling the company had had, climaxed by the harrowing journey from Winnipeg, I was concerned about their fatigue and also how it might affect the quality of the performance. My memory of the Boston première of The Sleeping Beauty is that it was one of the very best I had seen anywhere. Sir Oliver Franks, the British Ambassador, and Lady Franks, together with Lord Wakehurst, head of the English-Speaking Union, one of the Governors of the Covent Garden Opera Trust, and now Governor-General of Northern Ireland, came to Boston for the opening, and greeted the company at a delightful supper and reception following the performance. Lord Wakehurst has been a veritable tower of strength in the development of international cultural relations during the Sadler’s Wells tours; together with Lady Wakehurst, he is a charming host whose hospitality I have enjoyed in their London home.
The interest of Sir Oliver Franks, Lord Wakehurst, and the British Council as evidenced throughout the entire tour, together with the splendid cooperation of the English-Speaking Union, all helped in one of the main reasons for the tour, quite apart from any dollars the company might be able to garner. That was the extension of cultural relations between the two great English-speaking nations.
Cultural relations are basically a matter of links between individuals rather than links between governments, and such a tour as Sadler’s Wells made, bringing the richness of British ballet to hundreds of thousands of individuals, helps develop those private relationships; and the sum of them presents a comprehensive picture of Britain to the world. In our struggle for peace in the world, nothing is more essential than cultural understanding. It should be pointed out that the British Council does not send overseas companies primarily for financial gain, and its policy in these matters is not dictated by financial considerations.
The charter of UNESCO states that since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed. Personally, I am inclined to doubt if wars ever begin in the minds of men, but I should be the last to dispute that it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.
It was on the 28th January, 1951, that the greatest ballet tour in North American history came to an end in Quebec City. It was a night of mixed feelings. The company was, of course, eager to get home to London, and also had a longing to continue here. There were the tugs of parting on the part of our American staff. Our American Sadler’s Wells Orchestra, forty-odd strong, the largest orchestra to tour with a ballet company in America, adored the company and the curtain had to be held on the last ballet on the programme, for the entire orchestra lined up to collect autographed photographs of their favorites, and refused to heed the orchestra personnel manager’s frantic pleas to enter the pit before each musician had his treasured picture. It was quite unusual, I assure you, for musicians are not noted for their interest in a ballerina. A sentimental, romantic interest between a musician and a dancer is something quite different, and is not at all unusual.
Although it was Sunday night, when the “blue laws” of Quebec frown upon music, gaiety, and alcohol, we managed, nevertheless, to have a genuine farewell celebration, which took the form of an after-performance dinner at the Chateau Frontenac. The company got into their evening-clothes for the last time on this side of the Atlantic, piled into buses at the theatre and returned to the hotel, while the “Sadler’s Wells Special” that was to take them back to Montreal, waited at the station. It waited a long time, for the night’s celebration at the Chateau lasted until four-thirty in the morning. It was a festive affair, with as fine a dinner as could be prepared, and the wines and champagne were both excellent and ample. We had set up a pre-dinner cocktail room in one of the Chateau’s private rooms, and had taken the main restaurant, the great hall of the Chateau, for the dinner. Before the dancing commenced—yes, despite the long tour, despite the two days the company had spent skiing and tobogganing in Quebec, with three performances in an inadequate theatre, they danced—the dessert was served. I should like to list the entire menu, but the dessert will give an indication of its nature. The lights in the great dining room were extinguished, the orchestra struck a chord, and a long line of waiters entered each bearing flaming platters of Omelette Norvegienne Flambée des Mignardires.
The guests included the Premier of Quebec and officials of the Quebec Government. The only note that dimmed the gaiety of the occasion was the absence of Dame Ninette de Valois and David Webster, both in London preparing for the new season. It was not an occasion for long speeches; our hearts and our stomachs were too full. However, I expressed my sincere thanks to the entire organization and, in the absence of “Madame” and Webster, Herbert Hughes, the general manager of the Ballet, replied, and announced to the company the figures for the tour, amidst cheers. Then followed the touching incident of the toast to Fonteyn I have mentioned.
Before the dancing began, a sudden mania for autographs started, with everybody collecting every other person’s autograph on the large, specially printed menus, which I had previously autographed. Apparently all wanted a menu as a souvenir of a venture that had gone down in the annals of ballet and entertainment as the greatest success of all time.
From then on the dancing was general, the gaiety waxed higher. I was doing a schottische with the two-hundred-fifty pound Cockney Chief Carpenter, Horace Fox, when one of my staff who was responsible for transportation slid up to the orchestra leader and whispered “The King!” We all stood silently at attention for the last time. It was well past four in the morning, and it was to be yet another case of “touch and go” if the “Sadler’s Wells Special” could make Montreal in time for the departure of the special BOAC planes which were to take the company back to London.
The company changed into traveling clothes as quickly as possible, and buses slithered down the steep slopes of Quebec to the Station, where harried railroad officials were holding the train. There was yet another delay for one person who was left behind on urgent business, finally to be seen coming, with two porters carrying his open bags and yet another bellboy with unpacked clothes and toilet articles. As the last of the retinue was pushed aboard, the train started. But it was long before sleep came, and for another two hours the party continued up and down the length of the train, in compartments, bedrooms, washrooms, as staff, orchestra, stage-hands broke all unwritten laws of fraternization.
All were asleep, however, when the train swayed violently and with groaning and bumping came to a sudden stop. It was the last journey and it, of course, simply had to happen. The flanges on the wheels of two of the baggage cars that had made the 21,000-mile journey gave way just as the train started the long crossing of the Three Rivers Bridge between Quebec and Montreal. Fortunately, we were moving slowly at the approach to the bridge, slowing down for the crossing, or else—I shudder to think what might have occurred if we had been trying to make up time—the greatest tour of history would have ended in a ghastly tragedy.
As a result of the derailment taking place on the bridge, we were hours late arriving in Montreal. But the tour was over!
Here was a tour where every record of every sort had been broken. It had reached the point where, if there was a pair of unoccupied seats in any auditorium from coast to coast and back again, we were all likely to feel as if the end of the world was at hand. I have mentioned the mundane matter of the financial returns. From a critical point of view, I cannot attempt to summarize the spate of eulogy that greeted the company in every city. Cynics may have something to say about this, to the effect that the critics had been overpowered by size and glamor. But a careful consideration of it all, a sober analysis, disproves any suggestion that this was the result of any uncritical rush of blood to the head. On the contrary, it reveals that the critical faculty was carefully exercised and that the collective testimony to the excellence of Sadler’s Wells was based on sound appreciation.
It is impossible for me to bring to a close this phase of the concise history of the association in ballet of which I am the proudest in my life without sketching an outline of the quartet that makes Sadler’s Wells the great institution it is, together with a few of the outstanding personalities that give it color and are such an important part of it.
The list is long, and lack of space limits my consideration to a few. First of all, let me pay tribute to that directorial triumvirate to whom, collectively and individually, Sadler’s Wells owes its existence and its superior place in the world of ballet in our time: Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton, and Constant Lambert. Lamentably, the triumvirate is now a duo, owing to the recent untimely passing of the third member.
NINETTE DE VALOIS
I have more than once indicated my own deep admiration for Ninette de Valois and have sketched, as best I can, her tremendous contribution. In all my experience of artists, I have never known a harder worker, a more single-purposed practical idealist, a more concentrated and devoted human being. In addition to being the chief executive of Sadler’s Wells, burdened with the responsibility for two ballet companies and a school, she is a striking creator.
Living with her husband-physician down in Surrey, she does her marketing before she leaves home in the morning for the Garden; travels up on the suburban train; spends long hours at her work; goes back to Surrey, often late at night, sometimes to prepare dinner, since the servant problem in Britain is acute; and has been known to tidy up her husband’s surgery for the next morning, before herself calling it a day. All this, day in and day out, is done with zest and vigor.
An idealist she is and yet, at the same time, completely realistic. Without wishing to cast the remotest reflection on the feminine sex, I would say that Ninette de Valois has a masculine mind in her approach to problems artistic or business, and to life itself. She feels things passionately, and these qualities are apparent in everything she does. When her mind is made up, there is no budging her. In a less intelligent person this might be labelled stubbornness.
Like the majority of English dancers, prior to her establishment of a British national ballet, she was brought up in the traditions of Russian ballet. But it should be remembered that she was the first one to break up the foundation of the Russian tradition, utilizing its richness to create an English national school. At Sadler’s Wells, in collaboration with Constant Lambert, she has devoted a great deal of attention to the music of our time, although this has never taken the form of any denial or repudiation of the tradition of the old Russian school—on the contrary, her work at Sadler’s Wells has been a continuation and development of that school, using the new to enrich the old.
As a person with whom to work, I find her completely fascinating. I have never known any one even faintly like her. Her magnificent sense of organization is but one aspect of what I have called her “masculinity” of mind. Figures as well as fouettés are a part of her life. She is adept at handling both situations and individuals. Her dancers obey the slightest lifting of her eyebrows, for she is a masterful person, although quite impersonal in her mastery. She possesses the art of the single withering sentence. Her superb organizing ability has enabled her to surround herself with a highly able staff; but the sycophantic “yes-man” is something for which she has no time. Hers is a rapid-working mind, often being several leaps ahead of all others in a conference. Sincere, honest criticism she welcomes; anything other, she detests. I remember an occasion when a certain critic made a comment based on nothing more than personal bias and a twisted, highly personal approach. Her response was acid, biting, withering, and I was glad I was not on the receiving end.
I am sure that Ninette de Valois was convinced of her mission early in her career. That mission—to found a truly national British ballet—she has richly fulfilled. Much of the work involved in this fulfilment has been the exercise of great organizing and executive ability: in the formulation of policy and plans as well as carrying them out; in the employment of a large number of talented and efficient people; in determining the scale on which the venture should be conducted.
I have spoken of “Madame’s” ability to handle people. This has earned her, in some quarters, an undeserved reputation for being a forbidding and austere person. The fact that she is, as she must be, a strict disciplinarian with her company, does not mean that she cannot be a genuinely gay and amusing person. In certain respects, despite her Irish birth as Edris Stannus, she is a veritable English lady, in the best sense of the term, with an English lady’s virtues (and they are numerous). These virtues include, among others, a very definite, forceful, but quiet efficiency; more than average common sense; a passion for being fair; the inbred necessity for being economical. Against all this is set that quality of idealism that turned a dancing school into a great national ballet. Idealism dreamed it, practicality brought it to fruition.
In those far-off days before the second world war, when I used to visit the ballet in Russia, it was one of my delights to go to the classes of the late Agrippina Vaganova, one of the greatest of ballet teachers of all time, and to watch this wise and highly talented ballet-mistress at work.
I noted that it was Vaganova’s invariable custom to open her classes with a two or three minute talk, in which she would compliment the company, and individuals in particular, on their work in the ballet performance the night before, closing with:
“I am proud of you. Thank you very much.”
Then they would go to work in the class, subjected to the strictest discipline, and, sometimes, to the sharpest and most caustic sort of criticism imaginable. Then, at the end of the class, again came individual approbation and encouragement.
This is the sort of little thing I have never observed at Sadler’s Wells. It may, of course, be there; and again, it may not.
The Sadler’s Wells personnel love “Madame”; regard it as a high privilege to be a part of the Wells organization; do not look on their association merely as a “job.”
It might be that “Madame” could advantageously employ Vaganova’s method in this regard, use her example in her own relations with her company. Certainly, it could do no harm, as I see it. It may well be that she does. The point is that I have never seen it in practice.
In the better part of a lifetime spent in the midst of the dance, I can remember no one with a greater devotion to ballet, or one willing to make more sacrifices for it, and for the spreading of its gospel.
Let me cite just one example of this devotion. It was during the second North American tour of the Sadler’s Wells company that, despite all the demands made upon her time and energy, she was impelled to undertake a long lecture tour of Canada and the Northwest to spread the gospel of ballet and the British Council.
Herbert Hughes, the general manager, came to me to point out that since “Madame” had to do this, he felt we should send some one to accompany her, because she was unfamiliar with the country, and with the train and air schedules.
I fully concurred, in view of all he had said, and the possibility of inclement weather at that time of the year.
Together we approached “Madame” with the idea. It did not meet with her approval. It was quite unnecessary. She was quite able to take care of herself. She did not want any one “making a fuss” over her.
Of course, she would require funds for her expenses. Hughes prevailed upon her to accept $300 as petty cash. “Madame” stuffed the money into her capacious reticule.
When “Madame” rejoined the company, she brought back $137 of the $300. “This is the balance,” she said to Hughes, “I didn’t spend it.”
This entire lecture tour, in which she covered thousands of miles, was but another example of her tirelessness and Ninette de Valois’ single-track mind.
She was due to rejoin the company at the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles, on the morning of the Los Angeles première of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, at which time we had arranged a large breakfast press-conference, over which “Madame” was to preside.
“Madame” was due by airplane from Vancouver early the previous evening. Hughes suggested that he should go to the airport to greet her, or that some one should be sent; but I vetoed the idea, remembering that “Madame” did not want a “fuss” made over her. Although the plane was due round about nine o’clock in the evening, midnight had produced no “Madame.” A telephonic check with the Terminal assured us the plane had arrived safely and on time. Hughes and I sat up until three-thirty in the morning waiting, but in vain.
I was greatly disturbed and exercised when, at nine the next morning, she had not put in an appearance. The press-conference was set for ten o’clock, and “Madame” was its most important feature. Moreover, I was concerned for her safety.
A few minutes before the start of the breakfast conference, unperturbed, unruffled, neat and calm as always, “Madame” entered the Ambassador foyer with her customary spirit and swift, sure gait.
We gathered round her. What had happened? Was she all right? Had anything gone wrong?
“Don’t be silly. What could go wrong?”
But what had happened? We pressed for an explanation.
“The strangest thing, my dears,” she said. “When I arrived last night, I looked in my bag for the piece of paper on which I had noted the name of this hotel. I couldn’t find it; nor could I, for the life of me, remember it.”
“What did you do?”
“Do? I went to sleep at the airport.”
“And—?”
“And this morning I said to myself, ‘Come, pull yourself together.’ I tried an old law of association of ideas. I managed to remember the name of this hotel had something to do with diplomacy. ‘Diplomacy—Diplomacy,’ I said to myself.... ‘Embassy?... No, that’s not it.’ I tried again.... ‘Ambassador?’... There, you have it. And here I am.... Let us go, or we shall be late. Where is this press conference?”
That is Ninette de Valois.
Ninette de Valois’ work as a choreographer speaks for itself. Her approach to any work is always professional, always intellectual, never amateur, never sentimental. Some of her works may be more successful than others, whether they are academic or highly original, but each bears the imprint of one of the most distinctive, able, and agile minds in the history of ballet.
So far as I have been able to observe, Ninette de Valois is Sadler’s Wells. Sadler’s Wells is the national ballet of Britain. In looking objectively at the organization, with its two fine companies, its splendid school, I pray that Ninette de Valois may long be spared, for, with all its splendid organization, Sadler’s Wells and British national ballet are synonyms, and unless the dear lady has someone up her sleeve, I cannot, for the life of me, see a successor in the offing.
FREDERICK ASHTON
Frederick Ashton, the chief choreographer of the company, is the complete antithesis of his colleague. Where de Valois is realistic, “Freddy” is sentimental. Where “Madame” may sometimes be rigid, Ashton is adaptable. Some of his work is “slick” and smooth. He is a romantic, but by that I do not necessarily mean a “neo-romantic.”
Ashton was born in Ecuador, in 1909, which does not make him Ecuadorian, any more than the fact that he spent his childhood in Peru, makes him Peruvian. His British parents happened to be living there at the time. It is said that his interest in dance was first aroused upon seeing Anna Pavlova dance in far-off Peru.
Moving to London with his parents, “Freddy” had the privilege of being exposed to performances of the Diaghileff Company, and he had his first ballet lessons from Leonide Massine. Massine turned him over to Marie Rambert when he left London. It was for Rambert that he staged his first work, The Tragedy of Fashion, for the Nigel Playfair revue, Hammersmith Nights, in 1926. An interim in Paris with Ida Rubenstein, Nijinska, and Massine, was followed by a long time with Marie Rambert and her Ballet Club. The Paris interlude with Nijinska and Massine affected him profoundly. He was a moving figure in the life of the Camargo Society, and in 1935 he joined the Vic-Wells (later to be known as the Sadler’s Wells Ballet), as resident choreographer.
During the years between, Ashton has become England’s great creator. He is also a character dancer of wide variety, as witness his Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty, his shy and wistful Ugly Sister in Cinderella. His contribution to ballet in England is tremendous. Nigh on to a dozen ballets for the Ballet Rambert; something between twenty-five and thirty for the Sadler’s Wells organization; Devil’s Holiday for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, a work which, because of the outbreak of the war, he was unable to complete, and which was never seen in this country with its creator’s full intentions; two works in New York for the New York City Ballet; and the original production of the Gertrude Stein-Virgil Thomson Four Saints in Three Acts, in New York.
It is interesting to note the wide variety of his creative work by listing some of his many works, which, in addition to those mentioned above, include, among others, the following: For the Ballet Club of Marie Rambert: Les Petits Riens, Leda and the Swan, Capriol Suite, The Lady of Shalott, La Peri, Foyer de Danse, Les Masques, Mephisto Valse, and several others.
For that founding society of contemporary British ballet, which I have mentioned before, the Camargo Society: Pomona, Façade, The Lord of Burleigh, Rio Grande (originally known as A Day In a Southern Port), and other works.
I have already mentioned some of his outstanding works for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. Others include Nocturne, to Delius’s Paris; Apparitions, to a Liszt-Lambert score; Les Rendez-vous, to a Constant Lambert score based on melodies by Auber, seen in America in the repertoire of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet; the delicious A Wedding Bouquet, to an original score by Lord Berners and a Gertrude Stein text; Les Patineurs, to melodies by Meyerbeer; Constant Lambert’s Horoscope; Dante Sonata, to Liszt works arranged by Lambert; The Wise Virgins, to Bach arranged by Sir William Walton; The Wanderer, to Schubert; Walton’s The Quest; Les Sirènes, by Lord Berners; the César Franck Symphonic Variations; the Coronation ballet of 1953—Homage to the Queen; and, in a sense, most importantly, the full length Cinderella, utilizing the Prokofieff score; and the full length production of Delibes’ Sylvia.
Actually, I like to think of Ashton as a dance-composer, moving freely with dramatic or symbolic characters.
In all my experience of ballet and of choreographers, I do not believe there is any one more conscientious, more hard-working, more painstaking at rehearsals. While his eye misses nothing, he never raises his voice, never loses his temper. Corrections are made firmly, but quietly, almost in seeming confidence. Always he has a good word for something well done. On occasion, I have noticed something to be adjusted and have mentioned it to him.
“Yes, yes, I know,” he would say.
“Aren’t you going to tell them?”
“You tell them,” Ashton would smile. “I can’t tell them. Go on, you tell them.”
This was in connection with a musical matter. The conductor in question was taking a portion of the work at a too rapid tempo. It involved “Freddy” telling the conductor the passage was being played too fast.
“No,” repeated “Freddy,” “it will work out. He will see it and feel it for himself. I don’t want to upset him.”
An extraordinarily conscientious worker, he is equally self-deprecating. Some of this self-deprecation can be found in his work, for there is almost always a high degree of subtlety about all of it. Among all the choreographers I know, there is none his superior or his equal in designing sheer poetry of movement. Ashton is able, in my opinion, to bring to ballet some of that quality of enchantment that, in the old days, we found only with the Russians.
This self-deprecating quality of “Freddy’s” is at its strongest on opening nights of his works. It is very real and sincere.
“Everything I do is always a flop here in England, you know,” he will say. “They don’t like me.... I’ve done the best I can.... There you are.”
Despite this self-deprecation, Ashton, once his imagination is stirred, his inspiration stimulated, throws off a certain indolence that is one of his characteristics, knows exactly what he wants, how to get it, and goes about it. Like all creative artists, during the actual period of creation, he can be alternately confident and despairing, determined and resigned. Despite the reluctance to exercise his authority, he can, if occasion demands, put his foot down firmly, and does.
Yet, in doing so, I am certain that never in his life has he hurt any one, for “Freddy” Ashton is essentially a kind person.
Three British ballerinas owe Ashton an immense debt: Margot Fonteyn, Moira Shearer, and Alicia Markova. It is due in large measure to Ashton’s tuition, his help, his sound advice, and his plastic sense that these fine artists have matured.
Every choreographer worthy of the name stamps his works with his own personality. Ashton’s signature is always apparent in his work. No matter how characteristic of him his works may be choreographically, they are equally dissimilar and varied in mood.
One of my great pleasures is to watch him at rehearsal, giving, giving, giving of himself to dancers. Before the curtain rises, that final expectant moment before the screen between dancer and audience is withdrawn, Ashton is always on the stage, moving from dancer to dancer: “Cheer up”.... “Back straight, duckie”.... “Present yourself”.... “Chin up, always chin up, darling.”...
Personally, “Freddy” is an unending delight. Shy, shy, always shy, shy like the shy sister he plays in Cinderella, he is always the good colleague, evincing the same painstaking interest in the ballets of others as he does in his own, something which I assure the reader is rare. I have yet to see “Freddy” ruffled, yet to see him outwardly upset. In his personal appearance he is always neat, carefully dressed. Even in the midst of hectic dress-rehearsals and their attendant excitements and alarums, I have never seen him anything but cool, neat, and well-groomed. There is never a fantastic “rehearsal costume” with “Freddy.”
The picture of “Freddy” that is uppermost in my mind is of him standing in the “Crush Bar” at Covent Garden, relaxed, at ease, listening more than talking, laughing in his self-deprecatory way, always alert, always amusing.
Ashton lives in London in a house in a little street quaintly called Yeoman’s Row, on the edge of Knightsbridge and Kensington. Here he often does his own cooking and here he works out his ideas. It is a tiny house, the work-center being a second-floor study, crowded with gramophone records, books, photographs and statuettes, all of which nearly obscure the red wall-paper. The statuettes are three in number: Anna Pavlova, Fanny Ellsler, and Marie Taglioni. The photographs range from good Queen Alexandra, through bull-fighters, to dancers.
The Sadler’s Wells hierarchy seems to travel in groups. One such group that seemed inseparable included Ashton, “Bobby” Helpmann, Margot Fonteyn, and Pamela May. Occasionally Constant Lambert would join in, to eat, to drink, to have fun. For “Freddy” is by no means averse to the good things of life.
“Freddy” Ashton is another of those figures of the dance who should never regard the calendar as a measure for determining his age. I believe the youthful spirit of Ashton is such that he will live to be a hundred-and-fifty; that, in 2075, he will be the last survivor of the founding of Sadler’s Wells, and will then be the recipient of a grand gala benefit at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where, that night, he will share the Royal Box with the then reigning monarch.
CONSTANT LAMBERT
It is difficult for me to write without emotion of the third of the trio, Constant Lambert, whose loss is deeply mourned by all who knew him, and by many who did not.
A picturesque figure, Lambert was a great conductor, a great musician, a composer of superior talents, a critic of perception, a writer of brilliance and incisiveness, a life-long student of the ballet. Lambert’s contribution to the making of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet has, I suspect, been given less credit than it deserves. I have said that, in my three decades-and-more of ballet management, I have never known a ballet company with such high musical standards. These standards were imposed by Constant Lambert. Not only did he compose ballets for the company, but when music of other composers was used, it was Lambert who provided the strikingly brilliant orchestral arrangements—witness, as a few examples: Les Patineurs, Dante Sonata, The Faery Queen, Comus, Apparitions, Les Rendez-vous, Balabile, in which he made alive for ballet purposes the assorted music of Meyerbeer, Liszt, Purcell, Auber, Chabrier, respectively.
Born in London, in 1905, the son of a painter, brother of a well-known sculptor, he spent a substantial part of his childhood in Russia, where his grandfather supplied the Trans-Siberian Railway with its locomotives. He was a living proof of the fact that it was possible for an Englishman to be a musician without being suspected of not being a gentleman. His was an incisive mind, capable of quick reactions, with a widely ranging emotional experience.
With the Camargo Society, Constant Lambert established himself not only as a conductor, but as the musical mind behind British ballet. However, it was not an Englishman who discovered him as a composer. That honor goes to a Russian, Serge Diaghileff, who, when Lambert was bordering on twenty-one, commissioned him to write a ballet for his company. No other English composer shared that honor before Diaghileff died, although Diaghileff did produce, but did not commission, Lord Berners’ The Triumph of Neptune. And so Lambert stands isolated, with his Romeo and Juliet, which was first produced at Monte Carlo, in 1926, with Lifar and Karsavina as the protagonists; and his second ballet, Pomona, which Bronislava Nijinska staged at the Colon Theatre, Buenos Aires, in 1927.
Constant Lambert’s English education was at Christ’s Hospital. Early in his school days he underwent a leg operation that compelled him always to walk with a stick. All his life he was never entirely free from pain. At the Royal College of Music he was a pupil of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Ballet came into his life at an early date, and remained there until his untimely passing. To it he gave the best years of his life in acting as a sort of hair-spring to Ninette de Valois’ mainspring in the development of Sadler’s Wells. On his sound musical foundation Sadler’s Wells rests.
It is not within my province to discuss Lambert as a composer; but his accomplishments and achievements in this field were considerable. It is, of course, as a musician he will be remembered. But I could not regard Lambert as a musician pure and simple. He had a wide variety of interests, not the least of which was painting. Both painting and sculpture were in his family, and, from conversations with him I frequently got the notion that, had his technical accomplishments been other than they were, he would have preferred to have been a painter to a musician. Much of his music had a pictorial quality, witness his ballets, Romeo and Juliet, Pomona, Horoscope, and Tiresias; observe his Piano Concerto, Rio Grande (“By the Rio Grande, they dance no Sarabande”), Music for the Orchestra, Elegiac Blues (a tribute to the American Florence Mills), the Merchant Navy Suite, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, Hogarthian in color and treatment; and the work I shall always remember him conducting as a musical interlude in the first season in New York, the Aubade Heroique, the reproduction in sound of a Dutch landscape, a remembrance of that dawn in Holland when Lambert, a visiting conductor with Sadler’s Wells, witnessed the invasion of The Hague by Nazi paratroopers.
It was as a conductor of Tchaikowsky that I feel he excelled. He was a masterly Tchaikowsky interpreter. I should have loved to hear him play the symphonies. I content myself, however, with his Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty, and the realization of how much these two Sadler’s Wells productions owe to him. Never was the music for an instant dull, for Lambert always conducted it with a fine ear for contrasts of brisk with languid, happiness with toska.
Composer that he was, he devoted a large part of his life to conducting. His recordings are to be treasured. Conducting to him was not merely a source of livelihood, but a very definite form of self-expression, an important part of him. In my experience, I have found that composers are, as a rule, bad conductors, and conductors bad composers. Two exceptions I can name. Both British. Lambert was well nigh unique in his superlative capacity in both directions, as is Benjamin Britten today. Lambert, I feel, was not only one of the most gifted composers of his time, but also one of its finest interpretative artists. He had the unique quality of being able to enter wholeheartedly into the innermost essence of forms of art diametrically opposed to his own, even positively unsympathetic to him personally, and giving superlative performances of them.
Lambert was no calm liver, no philosophic hermit; a good deal of a hedonist, he met life considerably more than half way, and went out to explore life’s possibilities to the fullest. Moreover, he richly succeeded in doing so. He was a brilliant wit, both in writing and in conversation. His book, Music, Ho!, remains one of the most stimulating books of musical commentary and criticism of our time. He was the collector and creator of an innumerable number of magnificent but unprintable limericks, in the creation of which he was a distinct poet. He had composed a series of fifty on one subject—double bishops, i.e., bishops having more than one diocese, like Bath and Wells. A friend of mine who has heard Lambert recite them with that gusto of which only he was capable, tells me that they are, without doubt, one of the most brilliant achievements in this popular form.
Wit is one thing; stout-hearted, robust humor is another. Lambert had both. There was also a shyness of an odd kind, when a roaring laugh would give way to a fit of wanting to be by himself, wrapped in melancholy. His was a delicately poised combination of the introvert and the extravert, the latter expressing itself in the love of male company over pots of ale and even headier beverages. He had a keen appreciation of the good things of life.
This duality of personality was apparent in his physical make-up. There was something about his appearance that, in a sense, fitted in with the conventional portrait of John Bull. A figure of a good deal of masculine strength, he was big, inclined to be burly; his complexion was pink. He exhibited in himself a disconcerting blend of the most opposite extremes imaginable. On the one hand, a certain morbidity; on the other, a bluff and hearty roast-beef-and-Yorkshire Britishness. I have said that he resembled, physically, the typical drawing of John Bull. As a matter of fact, he bore an uncanny physical resemblance to Winston Churchill, and had elements in common with G. K. Chesterton. And a Hollywood casting director might have engaged him to play the role of the Emperor Nero, on strict type casting. He had an alert face on which humor often played good tunes, but on which, now and then, there used to settle a kind of stern gloom, not to be dispersed by any insensitive back-slapping.
He was as much at home in France as he was in England. His late adolescence and early manhood were spent in the hectic, feverish, restless ’twenties, with the Diaghileff Ballet and the French school of musical composition as the preponderant influences. As he grew older, his Englishness, if I may call it that, grew as well. The amazing thing to me was his ability to maintain such an even balance between the two.
Lambert had a passion for enigmas. He adored cats, and had a strange attraction to aquariums, zoos, and their fascinatingly enigmatic inhabitants. He was President of the Kensington Kittens’ and Neuter Cats’ Club, Incorporated. An important club, a club with a President who knew quite a lot about cats. There is a story to the effect that there was once a most handsome cat at London’s Albert Hall who was a close friend of Lambert’s, a cat called Tiddleywinks, a discriminating cat, and a cat with a certain amount of musical taste. Lambert, the President, would never proceed with the job he had to do at the Albert Hall without a preliminary chat with Tiddleywinks. And all would be well.
Constant Lambert was working on, among other things, an autobiography, concerning which he one day inquired about completely inaccessible places left in our shrinking world, particularly since the last war and James Norman Hall have pretty well exposed the South Pacific islands. What he actually wanted to know was an inaccessible place to which to hie after its publication, “because,” he said, “I’m telling the truth about everyone I know, including myself, and I shall have to flee the wrath of my ‘friends,’ and find a safe place where the laws of libel cannot reach me. You know, in my country at least, ‘the greater the truth, the greater the libel.’”
There was an infinite variety in his “drive.” He conducted ballet at Covent Garden; radio concerts at the British Broadcasting Corporation; symphony concerts, with special emphasis on Liszt and Sibelius, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra; made magnificent, definitive recordings; recited the Sitwell poems in Façade at every opportunity; composed fresh, vital works; made striking musical arrangements. He was at once composer, conductor, critic, journalist, an authority on railroad systems, trains, and locomotives, a student of the atom bomb, and a talker. There are those who insist he was not easy to get to know. It could be. He was, as I have said, shy. He was a highly concentrated individual, living a lot on his nerves. Despite this, to those who knew him, he was the friendliest of good companions, a perpetual stimulus to those who delighted in knowing him.
One had to be prepared, to be sure, to discover, in the middle of one of one’s own sentences (and, frequently, one of his own) that he was—gone. He would tilt his chin in the air, stare suddenly into far distant spaces, turn on his heel with the help of his stick, as swiftly as a ballet-dancer in a pirouette, and silently vanish. He was a good listener—if one had anything to say. He did not suffer fools gladly, and to bores—that increasing affliction of our times—he presented an inflexible deafness akin to the switching-off of a hearing-aid, and a truly magnificent cast-iron rigidity of inattention. The bore fled. So did Lambert.
I have given some indication of the width of his interests. It was amazing. His gusto for life was unquenchable, and with it was a wise, shrewd appraisement of the human comedy—and tragedy. He was able to get through an enormous amount of work without ever seeming to do anything. Best of all, perhaps, he was able to enjoy a joke against himself. In this world of the arts and artists, where morbid egotisms and too exposed nerves victimize and vitiate the artist, it was a boon to him and an extraordinarily attractive characteristic.
Above all, he had an undying belief in British Ballet.
The last performance I saw Lambert conduct was the first performance of his last ballet, Tiresias, which was the occasion of a Gala in aid of the Ballet Benevolent Fund in the presence of H.M. the Queen and Princess Elizabeth, on the 9th July, 1951. Tiresias was a work on which Lambert had gone back to his collaboration with Frederick Ashton. The story he had made himself; it was a sort of composite of the myths about Tiresias; reduced to as much of a capsule as I can, it deals with the duality of Tiresias—as man and woman—and how he was struck blind by Hera, when Tiresias proves her wrong when she argues with Zeus that man’s lot is happier than woman’s. It was, this ballet, a sort of family affair in a sense; for Lambert’s wife, Isabel, designed scenery and costumes, setting the three-scened work on the Island of Crete.
After the first performance, we met at a large party to which I had gone with David Webster. Lambert and his wife, along with Ninette de Valois and Lady Keynes (Lydia Lopokova), joined us at supper. The ballet had been a long one, running quite a bit more than an hour, and there was general agreement among us that the work would benefit from judicious cutting. Lambert thoughtfully considered all the suggestions that were proffered; agreed that, conceivably, a cut or two might improve it, but the question was where and how, without damaging what he felt was the basic structure of the whole.
Not long after this, Lambert and I met at the door of Covent Garden, having arrived simultaneously. We had a brief chat, and he was his usual vastly courteous and amusing self.
A few days later, at the Savoy, my telephone rang quite early in the morning. “Madame’s” secretary, Jane Edgeworth, at the other end, informed me Constant Lambert had just died. I was stunned.
It appeared that Lambert had been taken ill while at a party and had been rushed to London Clinic, one of London’s most exclusive and finest nursing-homes, on Sunday evening, the 19th August. It was on Tuesday morning, the 21st August, that I received the news of his death. The funeral was quite private, since the entire Sadler’s Wells company was away from London performing at the Edinburgh Festival. Lambert was buried from the Church of St. Bartholomew the Great, at Smithfield, in the City of London. So private was the service that almost no one was there, and there were no Pallbearers.
I was present at the Memorial Service, held at the famous Church of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, at Charing Cross, overlooking the National Gallery. There were gathered his sorrowing company, now returned from Edinburgh, headed by Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton, and David Webster. The address was given by the Reverend C. B. Mortlock. Robert Helpmann, an old colleague, read the Lesson. The chorus of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, sang Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. At the close, John Churchill, one of Britain’s greatest organists and an old friend of Lambert’s, played on the organ that elegiac work Lambert had composed at the rape of Holland, and which he had conducted so magnificently at the Metropolitan Opera House—his Aubade Heroique.
Here at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields his colleagues paid him honor. I was deeply moved. At the little funeral, I had been equally stirred. Here before me was all that remained of the great man who never took his greatness seriously; the man who would go to any trouble on behalf of those who tried, but who, for those who were lazy, or cynical, or thought themselves superior, and without justification, he had no use whatever. Here was a man about whom there was nothing of the academic recluse, but a man who loved life as he loved music, ballet, fully, strongly, with ever-growing zest and with ever-deepening understanding; the man who had done so much for ballet, its music, its standards; who had been of such vital importance in the fashioning of Sadler’s Wells. My thoughts went back to his creations, his arrangements. I was actually conscious of his imprint on all ballet. Memories of his wit, his brilliance, crowded into my mind.
I expected, I think, that with the sudden passing of a man of such fame, there would be an outpouring of thousands for his funeral, to pay their last, grateful respects. I was surprised. This was not the case, as I have explained. A few close distinguished friends and colleagues gathered beside the coffin in the Church of St. Bartholomew the Great, in the City: Sir William Walton, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Sir Arthur Bliss, Edmund Rubbra, Alan Rawsthorne, Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton, and Robert Helpmann who had hurried down from Edinburgh.
The service was brief and hushed. I was indeed very sad, and my thoughts traveled out to the little chapel in Golder’s Green, not so far as an angel flies, where lay all that was mortal of another genius of the dance and another friend, in the urn marked: “East Wall—No. 3711—Anna Pavlova.”
As Lambert’s body was borne from St. Bartholomew the Great’s gothic pile, I bowed my head low as a great man passed, a very lovable man.
DAVID WEBSTER
I have dwelt at some length on my impressions of the artistic directorate of Sadler’s Wells. Beyond and apart from the artistic direction of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, but very much responsible for its financial well-being, is David Lumsden Webster, the General Administrator of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
David Webster is not a head-line hunter. He is certainly not the press-agent’s delight. He does not court publicity. He permits his work to speak for itself.
On more than one occasion I have been appropriately chilled by a reading of the impersonal factual coldness of the entries in that otherwise useful volume, Who’s Who. The following quotation from it is no exception:
Webster, David Lumsden, B.A.—General Administrator Royal Opera House 1946—Born 3rd July, 1903—Educated Holt School, Liverpool University, Oxford University—President Liverpool Guild of Undergraduates, 1924-25—General Manager Bon Marché, Liverpool, Ltd., 1932-40—General Manager Lewis’s Ltd., Liverpool, 1940-41—Ministry of Supply Ordnance Factories, engaged on special methods of developing production, 1942-44—Chairman Liverpool Philharmonic Society, June 1940-October 1945.
To be sure, the facts are there. Not only is it possible to elaborate on these facts, but to add some which may be implicit in the above summary, but not apparent. For example, I can add that David Webster is a cultured gentleman of taste, courage, and splendid business perspicacity. His early background of business administration, as may be gathered, was acquired in the fields of textiles and wearing apparel, and was continued, during the war, in the highly important field of expediting ordnance production.
Things that are not implicit or even suggested in Who’s Who are the depth and breadth of his culture, his knowledge of literature and drama and poetry and music—his love for the last making him a genuine musical amateur in the best sense of the term. It was the last that was of immense value to him as Chairman of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society in building it into one of Britain’s outstanding symphonic bodies. It is understandable that there was a certain amount of pardonable pride in the accomplishment, since Webster is himself a Liverpudlian.
At the end of the war, in a shell-shocked, bomb-blasted London, Webster was invited to take over the post of General Administrator at Covent Garden when the Covent Garden Opera Trust was formed at the time of the Boosey and Hawkes leasehold. Since 1946, David Webster has been responsible for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden: for the Opera entirely, and for the Ballet, in conjunction with Ninette de Valois.
During this time, he has restored the historic house to its rightful place among the leading lyric theatres of the world; where private enterprise and the private Maecenas failed, Webster has succeeded. By his policies, the famous house has been saved from the ignominy of a public dance-hall in off-seasons, for now there are no longer any “off-seasons.”
David Webster is uniquely responsible for a number of things at Covent Garden. Let me try to enumerate them. He has succeeded in establishing and maintaining the Royal Opera House, Covent Carden, as a truly national opera house, restoring this great theatre and reclaiming it as a national center for ballet and opera, on a year-round basis. He has succeeded in shaking off many of the hidebound traditions and conventions of opera production. While the great standard works of opera are an essential part of the operatic repertoire, he initiated a broad policy of experimentation both in the production of standard works and in new, untried operas. He has succeeded, through his invitation to the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, in making ballet an integral and important part of the Opera House and has helped it to become a truly national ballet. In addition to striking national operas by Bliss and Vaughan Williams, it was Webster’s courage that has provided a home for three unique operas, Peter Grimes, Billy Budd and Gloriana, great works by that brilliant young British composer, Benjamin Britten. While it is true the original commission for the former work came from the Natalie Koussevitsky Foundation in America, it was Webster who had the vision and courage to mount both great modern operas grandly. It was Webster who had the courage to mount the latter, based on Herman Melville’s immortal story, with Britten as conductor; and a magnificent one he turned out to be.
Britten is indisputably at the very top among the figures of contemporary music. He is a young man of exceptional gifts, and it is Webster and the permanent Covent Garden organization that have provided the composer with exceptional opportunities for the expression of them. This is only possible through the existence of a national opera house with a permanent roof over its head.
As is the case with all innovators, it has not been all clear sailing for Webster; there were sections of the press that railed against his policy. But Webster won, because at the root of the policy was a very genuine desire to break away from stale conventions, to combat some of the stock objections and prejudices that keep many people away from opera. For Webster’s aim is to create a steady audience and to appeal to groups that have not hitherto attended opera and ballet, or have attended only when the most brilliant stars were appearing.
In London, as in every center, every country, there are critics and critics. Some are captious; others are not. One of the latter variety in London once tackled me, pointing out his dislike for most of the things that were going on at Covent Garden, his disagreement with others. I listened for a time, until he asked me if I agreed with him.
My answer was simple and short.
“Look here,” I said. “A few years ago this beautiful house had what? Shilling dances. Who peopled it? Drunken sailors, among others. Bow Street and the streets adjoining were places you either avoided like the plague; or else you worried and hurried through them, if you must.
“Today, you have a great opera house restored to its proper uses. Now you have something to criticize. Before you didn’t.”
It has been thanks to David Webster’s sympathetic guidance that ballet has grown in popularity until its audiences are larger than are those for opera.
A man of firm purpose, few words, eclectic taste, and great personal charm, David Webster is a master of diplomatic skill. I can honestly say that some of the happiest days of my life have been spent working closely with him. Had it not been for his warm cooperation, his unquenchable enthusiasm, America might easily have been denied the pleasure and profit of Sadler’s Wells, and our lives would have been the poorer.
The last time I was in Webster’s office, I remarked, “We must prepare the papers for the next tour.”
Webster looked up quickly.
“No papers are necessary,” he said.
For the reader who has come this far, it should not be necessary for me to underline the difference between negotiations with the British and the years of wrangling through the intrigues and dissimulations of the Russo-Caucasian-Eastern European-New England mazes of indecision.
My respect for and my confidence in David Webster are unlimited. He is a credit to his country; and to him, also, must go much of the credit for the creation of a genuine national opera and for the solid position of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet.
ROBERT HELPMANN
It was towards the end of the San Francisco engagement of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet that there occurred a performance, gala so far as the audience was concerned, but which was not without its sadness to the company, to me, and to all those who had watched the growth and development, the rise to a position of pre-eminence on the part of British ballet. The public was, of course, completely unaware of the event. It is not the sort of thing one publicizes.
Robert Helpmann, long the principal male dancer, a co-builder, and an important choreographer of the company, resigned. His last performance as a regular member of the organization took place in the War Memorial Opera House. The vehicle for his last appearance was the grand pas-de-deux from the third act of The Sleeping Beauty, with Margot Fonteyn. It was eminently fitting that Helpmann’s final appearance as a regular member of the company was with Margot. Their association, as first artists with the company, encompassed the major portion of its history, some fifteen years.
During this period, Helpmann had served in two capacities simultaneously: as principal dancer and as choreographer. An Australian by birth in 1909, his first ballet training came from the Anna Pavlova company when Pavlova was on one of her Australian tours. For four years he danced “down under,” and came to Britain in 1933, studying with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School, while dancing in the corps de ballet. His first important role was in succession to Anton Dolin as Satan, in the de Valois-Vaughan Williams Job. From 1934, he was the first male dancer of the Sadler’s Wells organization. Helpmann often took leaves of absence to appear in various plays and films, for he is an actor of ability and distinction. As a choreographer, his Hamlet and Miracle in the Gorbals are distinctive additions to any repertoire.
“Bobby” Helpmann has not given up ballet entirely. When he can spare the time from his theatrical and film commitments, he is bound to turn up as a guest artist, and I hope to see him again partnering great ballerinas. Always a good colleague, he has been blessed by the gods with a delicious sense of humor. This serves him admirably in such roles as one of the Ugly Sisters in Cinderella—I never can distinguish which one by name, and only know “Bobby” was the sister which “Freddy” Ashton was not. Both Hamlet and Miracle in the Gorbals revealed his serious acting qualities.
Man of the theatre, he is resourceful. On the first night of The Sleeping Beauty, at the Metropolitan Opera House, there were a few ticklish moments at the beginning of the Transformation Scene, due to technical difficulties. The orchestra under Lambert went straight on. But the stage wait was covered by Helpmann’s entrance, his sure hand, his manner, his style, his “line,” his graciousness.
I have mentioned some of Helpmann’s warm personal qualities. He is one of those associated with Sadler’s Wells who has helped to number my Sadler’s Wells’ associations among my happiest experiences. Helpmann is one of those who, like the others when I am with them, compel me to forget my business interests and concerns and all their associated problems: just another proof that, with people of this sort, there is something else in life besides business.
There has been, perhaps, undue emphasis placed upon Helpmann, the actor, with a corresponding tendency to overlook his dancing abilities. From the point of view of sheer technical virtuosity, there are others who surpass him. But technical virtuosity is not by any means all of a dancer’s story. I happen to know of dancers who, in my opinion, have excelled Nijinsky and Pavlova in these departments, but they were much lesser artists. It is the overall quality in a dancer that matters. Helpmann, I feel, is a dancer of really exceptional fluency, superb lightness, genuine musicality, and admirable control. He is one of the rare examples among male dancers to be seen about us today of what is known in ballet terminology as the danseur noble. It is the danseur noble who is the hero, the prince, of classical ballet. As a mime and an actor in ballet he may be compared with Leonide Massine, but the quality I have mentioned Helpmann as having is something that has been denied Massine, who is best in modern character ballets.
Sir Arthur Bliss, one of Britain’s most distinguished composers, and the creator of the scores to, among others, Checkmate and Miracle in the Gorbals, has said: “Robert Helpmann breathes the dust of the theatre like hydrogen. His quickness to seize on the dramatic possibilities of music is mercurial. I was not at all surprised to hear him sing in Les Sirènes. It would seem quite natural to see him walk on to the Albert Hall platform one day to play a violin concerto.”
It is always a pleasure to me to observe him in his varied roles and to watch him prepare for them. He leaves absolutely nothing to chance. His approach is always the product of his fine intelligence. He experiments with expression, with gesture, with make-up, coupling his reading, his study of paintings, with his own keen sense of observation.
“Bobby” Helpmann and I have one great bond in common: our mutual adoration of Pavlova. Pavlova has, I know, strongly influenced him, and this influence is apparent in the genuine aristocracy of his bearing and his movement, in the purity of his style.
There is a pretty well authenticated story about the first meeting between Helpmann and Ninette de Valois, after the former had arrived in London from Australia, and was looking for work at Sadler’s Wells. It was an audition. The choreographer at such times is personally concerned with the body of the aspirant, the extremities, the quality of movement, the technical equipment of the applicant, some revelation of his training and his style, if any. It is characteristic of Ninette de Valois’ tendency to do the unexpected that, in Helpmann’s case, she found herself regarding the “wrong end” of her subject. Her comment on this occasion has become historic.
“I can do something with that face,” she said.
She did.
It has been a source of regret to me that on the 1953 American visit of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, “Bobby” Helpmann is not a regular member of the company. It is not the same without him.
I have said that perhaps undue emphasis has been put on Helpmann, the actor. If this is true, it is only because of “Bobby’s” amazing versatility: as dancer, as choreographer, as actor, as stage-director. He can turn at will from one medium to the other. As actor, it should not be forgotten that he has appeared with equal success in revues (as a mimic); in Shakespeare (both on stage and screen); in plays ranging from Webster and Bernard Shaw to the Russian Andreyev.
Most recently, he has acted with the American Katherine Hepburn, and has scored perhaps his most outstanding directorial success to date in his superlatively fine mounting of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, at the Old Vic.
I am looking forward to bringing “Bobby” to America in the not too far distant future in a great production of a Shakespeare work which I am confident will make theatrical history.
“Bobby” Helpmann, as I have pointed out, is more than a dancer: he is a splendid actor, a fine creator, a distinguished choreographer, an intelligent human being.
His is a friendship I value; he is alive and eager, keen and shrewd, with a ready smile and a glint in his eye. For “Bobby” has a happy way with him, and whether you are having a meal with him or discussing a point, you cannot help reacting to his boyish enthusiasm, his zeal for his job, his flair for doing it. My memories of dinners and suppers with the “inseparables,” to which I have often been invited, are treasured. The “inseparables” were that closely-linked little group: Fonteyn, Ashton, Helpmann, with de Valois along, when she was in town and free. The bond between the members of the group is very close.
It was in Chicago. It was mid-tour, with rehearsals and conferences and meetings for future planning. We were at breakfast. “Madame” suddenly turned to Helpmann.
“Bobby,” she said, with that crisp tone that immediately commands attention. “Bobby, I want you to be sure to be at the Drake Hotel to give a talk to the ladies at one o’clock sharp. Now, be sure to come, and be sure to be there on time.”
“How, in heaven’s name,” replied Helpmann, “can I possibly be in two places at one time? You told me I shall have to be at the Public Library at one sharp.”
De Valois regarded him for a long moment.
“You astound me, Bobby,” she finally said. “Did I tell you that? Very well, then, let it be the Public Library. I shall take the Drake Hotel. But watch out, make sure you are there on time.”
Ninette de Valois not only did something with “that face.” She also made good use of that intelligence.
I last saw “Bobby” Helpmann dance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on Coronation Night, when he returned as a guest artist with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, to appear with Margot Fonteyn in Le Lac des Cygnes, Act Two.
What a pleasure it was to see him dancing once more, the true cavalier, with his perfect style and the same submerging of technique in the ebb and flow of the dance. I am looking forward to seeing him again, and, I hope, again and again.
ARNOLD L. HASKELL
Among my cherished associations with this fine organization, I cannot fail to acknowledge the contribution to ballet and the popularity of it, made through the media of books, articles, lectures, by the one-time ballet critic and now Director and Principal of the Sadler’s Wells School, Arnold L. Haskell.
Haskell, the complete balletomane himself, has done as much, if not more, to develop the cult of the balletomane in the western Anglo-Saxon world as any one else I know. Devoted to the cause of the dance, for years he gave unsparingly of his time and means to spread the gospel of ballet.
In the early days of the renaissance of ballet, Haskell came to the United States on the first visit of the de Basil company and was of immense assistance in helping to create an interest in and a desire to find out about ballet on the part of the American people. He helped to organize an audience. Later, he toured Australia with the de Basil company, preaching “down under” the gospel of the true art with the zeal of a passionate, proselyting, non-conformist missionary.
From his untiring pen has come a long procession of books and articles on ballet appreciation in general, and on certain phases of ballet in particular—books of illumination to the lay public, of sound advice to dancers.
Arnold Haskell’s balletic activities can be divided into five departments: organizer, author, lecturer, critic, and educator. In the first category, he, with Philip J. S. Richardson, long-time editor and publisher of the Dancing Times (London), was instrumental in forming and founding the Camargo Society, after the death of Diaghileff. As lecturer, he delivered more than fifteen hundred lectures on ballet for the British Ministry of Information, the Arts Council, the Council for the Education of His Majesty’s Forces. As critic, he has written innumerable critical articles for magazines and periodicals, and, from 1934 to 1938, was the ballet critic of the Daily Telegraph (London).
As critic, Haskell has rendered a valuable service to ballet. His approach is invariably intelligent. He has a sound knowledge of the dancer as dancer and, so far as dancers and dancing are concerned, he has exhibited a fine intuition and a good deal of prophetic insight.
The fifth department of Arnold Haskell’s activities, educator, is the one on which he is today most successfully and conspicuously engaged. As the active head of the Sadler’s Wells School, established in its own building in Colet Gardens, Kensington, Arnold Haskell is in his element, continuing his sound advice directly; he is acting as wise and discerning mentor to a rising generation of dancers, who live together in the same atmosphere for at least eight years.
I have a feeling of warm friendship for Arnold Haskell, an infinite respect for him as a person, and for his knowledge.
The School of which he is the head, like all other Sadler’s Wells activities, is carried on in association with the British Arts Council, thus carrying forward the Council’s avowed axiom that the art of a people is one of its signs of good health. So it has always been in the world’s history from Ancient Greece to France at the time of the Crusades, to Renaissance Italy and Elizabethan England. Each one of those earlier manifestations, whatever its excellence, was confined to a limited number of people, to the privileged and the elect. The new renaissance will inevitably be the emergence of the common man into the audience of art. He has always been a part of that audience when he has had the opportunity. Now the opportunity must come in such a way that none is overlooked and the result will be fresh vigour and self-confidence in the people as a whole.
The Sadler’s Wells School is, of course, under the direct supervision of Dame Ninette de Valois, D.B.E. Its Board of Governors, which is active and not merely a list of names, numbers distinguished figures from the world of art, music and letters.
The School was founded by the Governors of the Sadler’s Wells Foundation, in association with the Arts Council, in 1947, to train dancers who will be fitted to carry on the high tradition of Sadler’s Wells and generally to maintain and enhance the prestige of British Ballet. Over eighty-five per cent of the members of the ballet companies at both the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre are graduates of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School. The School combines a full secondary education and a highly specialized vocational training. Boys and girls are taken from the age of nine. Pupils are prepared for what is the equivalent on this side of the Atlantic of a complete High School education; in Britain, the General Certificate of Education, and the curriculum includes the usual school subjects of English language and literature, French, Latin (for boys only), history, geography, Scripture, mathematics, science, handicraft, music, and art work. The dance training consists of classical ballet, character dances, mime. Importance is attached to character formation and to the self-discipline essential for success on the stage.
There is also an Upper School, which is open to boys and girls above school-leaving age. After taking the General Certificate of Education, the American equivalent of graduation from high school, students from the Lower School pass into the Upper School if they have reached a standard which qualifies them for further training in the senior ballet classes. The Upper School is also open to students from other schools. Entry is by interview, and applicants are judged on general intelligence, physical aptitude, and standard attained. Entrants are accepted on one term’s trial. Here the curriculum includes, in post-education: classes in English and French language and literature, history, art, music, lecture courses, and Dalcroze Eurhythmics. In ballet—the classical ballet, character dances, mime, tuition in the roles of the classical ballets and modern works in the repertoire of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Companies. It is important to note that all ballet classes for boys are taken by male teachers.
The School is inspected by Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools, and is licensed as a first-class educational institution. The pupils number about one hundred ten in the Lower School, with about thirty in the Upper School.
So splendidly has the School developed that now a substantial physical addition is being made to the premises in Colet Gardens, in the form of a new building, to provide dormitories and living quarters so that it may become a full-time boarding school, as well as a day-school; and thus obviate the necessity for many students to live outside the school, either at home or, as so often the case if the students come from distant places, in the proverbial London “digs.”
One of the most interesting and significant things about the School to me is the number of boys enrolled and their backgrounds. Such is the feeling about male dancing in our Anglo-Saxon civilization that many of the boys have had to be offered scholarship inducements to enroll. The bulk of the boys come out of working-class families in the North of England and the Midlands. They are tough and manly. It is from boys such as these that the prejudice against male dancing will gradually die out, and the effeminate dancer will become, as he should, a thing of the past.
MOIRA SHEARER
Although, to my regret, due to personal, family, and artistic reasons, Moira Shearer is not present with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet on its 1953-1954 North American tour, I know her devotion to the Sadler’s Wells institution remains unchanged.
The simple fact is that Moira Shearer is preparing to enter a new and different aspect of the theatre, a development with which I hope I shall have something to do in the near future.
Among the personalities of the company during the first two Sadler’s Wells tours, American interest and curiosity were at their highest, for obvious reasons, in Moira Shearer. The film, Red Shoes, had stimulated an interest in ballet on the part of yet another new public, and its ballerina star had acquired the questionable halo of a movie star. This was something that was anything but pleasing to the gentle, intelligent Moira Shearer; and was, moreover, something she deplored.
Born in Dunfermline, Fifeshire, Scotland, in 1926, Moira Shearer came to ballet at an early age, having had dance lessons in Rhodesia as a child at the hands of a former Diaghileff dancer. It was on her return to England, when she was about eleven, that her serious studies began with Madame Nadine Nicolaeva-Legat. In 1940 she joined the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School, remaining briefly, however, because of the blitz. But, early in 1941, she turned up with the International Ballet, another British ballet organization, dancing leading roles at the age of fourteen, another example of the “baby” ballerina. In 1942, she left that company to rejoin Sadler’s Wells School.
In 1943, Shearer became a member of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, achieving an almost instant success and a marked popularity with audiences. What impresses me most about Moira Shearer, the dancer, is a fluidity of movement that has about it a definite Russian quality; she has a fine polish in her style, coupled with great spontaneity and a gentle, easy grace.
Distinctive not only for her Titian-coloring and her famed auburn-haired beauty and her slender grace, Shearer is equally noteworthy for her poise and an almost incredible lightness; for her assurance and classical dignity; for her ability to dominate the stage. The “Russian” quality about her dancing I have mentioned, I suspect stems from her early indoctrination and her training at the hands of Madame Legat; there is something Russian about her entrances, when she immediately commands the stage and becomes the focus of all eyes. All of these qualities are particularly apparent in Cinderella.
Moira Shearer’s reputation had preceded her across the United States and Canada, as I have pointed out, because of the exhibition of spontaneity, beauty and charm that had been revealed to thousands in the motion picture, Red Shoes. There is no denying this film was highly successful. I suppose it can be argued successfully that Red Shoes brought ballet to a new audience, and thus, in that sense, was good for ballet. Whatever it may have been, it was not a true, or good, or honest picture of ballet. I happen to know how Moira Shearer feels about it, and I share her feelings. Although she dislikes to talk or hear very much about Red Shoes, and was not very happy with it or about it, she was, I fancy, less disturbed by her role in The Tales of Hoffman, with “Freddy” Ashton, “Bobby” Helpmann, and Leonide Massine. Best of all her film excursions, Moira feels, was her sequence in My Three Loves, which Ashton directed for her in Hollywood.
Once, on introducing her to one of those characteristic, monumental California salads, her comment was: “My, but it’s delicious; yet it looks like that Technicolor mess I should like to forget.” Shearer feels Red Shoes was rather a sad mess, a complete travesty of the ballet life which it posed as portraying; that it was false and phoney throughout, and that, perhaps, the phoniest thing about it was its alleged glamor. On the other hand, she does not regard the time she spent making it wasted, for, as she says, she was able to sit at the feet of Leonide Massine and watch and learn and observe the concentration with which he worked, the intelligence he brought to every gesture, and the vast ingenuity and originality he applied to everything he did.
I happen to know Shearer has no illusions about the film publicity campaign that made her a movie star overnight. She was amused by it, but never taken in, and was hurt only when the crowds mobbed for autographs and Americans hailed her as “the star” of Sadler’s Wells.
Cultured and highly intelligent, Moira Shearer is intensely musical, both in life and in the dance. This musicality is particularly apparent in her portrayal of the Princess Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty, and in the dual role of Odette-Odile in Swan Lake. Again it is markedly noticeable in a quite non-classical work, for of all the dancers I have seen dance the Tango in Façade, she is by far the most satiric and brilliant. She is well-nigh indispensable to Wedding Bouquet.
Aside from the qualities I have mentioned, there is also a fine romanticism about her work. Intelligence in a dancer is something that is rare. There are those who argue that it is not necessarily a virtue in a dancer. They could not be more wrong. It is, I think, Moira Shearer’s superior intelligence that gives her, among other things, that power of pitiless self-criticism that is the hallmark of the first-class artist.
Moira Shearer has been as fortunate in her private life as in her professional activities. She lives happily in a lovely London home with her attractive and talented writer-husband, Ludovic Kennedy. During the second Sadler’s Wells American tour, her husband drove across the continent from New York to Los Angeles to join Moira for the California engagement, discovering, by means of a tiny Austin, that there were still a great many of the wide-open spaces left in the land Columbus discovered.
In her charming London flat, with her husband, her books, her pictures, and her music, she carries out one of her most serious ambitions: to be a good mother; for the center of the household is her young daughter, born in midsummer, 1952.
The depth of Moira Shearer’s sincerity I happen to know not only from others, but from personal experience. It is a genuine and real sincerity that applies to every aspect of her life, and not only in art and the theatre.
A loyal colleague, she has a highly developed sense of honor. As Ninette de Valois once remarked to me: “Anything that Moira has ever said or promised is a bond with her, and nothing of a confirming nature in writing is required.”
A splendid artist, ballerina, and film star, it is my profound hope that Moira may meet with the same degree of success in her new venture into the legitimate theatre.
There seems little doubt of this, since I am persuaded that she will make good in anything she undertakes.
BERYL GREY
Another full-fledged ballerina of the company, is Beryl Grey, who alternates all ballerina roles today with Fonteyn, Violetta Elvin, Nadia Nerina and Rowena Jackson. Beryl Grey’s American success was assured on the opening night of the first season at the Metropolitan Opera House, with her gracious and commandingly sympathetic performance of the Lilac Fairy in The Sleeping Beauty.
In a sense, Grey’s and Shearer’s careers have followed a similar pattern, in that they were both “baby ballerinas.” Born Beryl Groom, at Muswell Hill, in London’s Highgate section, in 1927, the daughter of a government technical expert and his wife, Beryl Grey’s dancing studies began very early in life in Manchester, and at the age of nine, she won a scholarship at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School. In 1941, she joined the company, and so rapid was her growth as an artist that she danced leading roles in some half-dozen of the one-act ballets in the repertoire, in place of Margot Fonteyn who had been taken ill. Even more remarkable is the fact that she danced the full-length Swan Lake in London on her fifteenth birthday.
The term, “baby ballerina,” has become a part of ballet’s language, due to its association with the careers of Baronova and Toumanova in the early ’thirties. In Grey’s case, however, she was privileged to have a much wider experience in classical ballets than her émigré Russian predecessors. She was only seventeen when she danced the greatest of all classical roles in the repertoire of the true ballerina, Giselle.
My feeling about Beryl Grey, the dancer, is that she possesses strikingly individual qualities, both of style and technique. She has been greatly helped along the path to stardom by Frederick Ashton who, as I have pointed out, likes nothing better than to discover and exploit a dancer’s talents. It was he who gave Grey her first big dramatic parts.
Beryl Grey is married to a distinguished Swedish osteopath, Dr. Sven Svenson, and they live in a charming Mayfair flat in London. Here again one finds that characteristic of fine intelligence coupled with an intense musicality. Also rare among dancers, Grey is an omnivorous reader of history, biography, and the arts. She feels, I know, that, apart from “Madame” and Ashton, who have been so keenly instrumental in shaping her career, a sense of deep gratitude to Constant Lambert for his kindness and help to her from her very early days; for his readiness to discuss with her any aspect of music; and she gratefully remembers how nothing was too inconsequential for his interest, his advice and help; how no conductor understood what the dancer required from music more than he did. She is also mindful of the inspiration she had from Leonide Massine, of his limitless energy, his indefatigable enthusiasm, his creative fire; she learned that no detail was too small to be corrected and worked over and over. As she says: “He was so swift and light, able to draw with immediate ease a complete and clear picture.” Also, she points out, “He was quiet and of few words, but had a fine sense of humor which was often reflected in his penetrating brown eyes. His rare praise meant a great deal.”
Beryl Grey is the star in the first three-dimensional ballet film ever to be made, based on the famous Black Swan pas de deux from Le Lac des Cygnes.
From the point of view of a dancer, Beryl Grey had one misfortune over which she had to triumph: she is above average height. This she has been able to turn into a thing of beauty, with a beautifully flowing length of “line.” Personally, she is a gentle person, with a genuine humility and a simple unaffected kindliness, and a fresh, completely unspoiled charm. Her success in all the great roles has been such as to make her one of the most popular figures with the public.
I find great pleasure in her precision and strength as a dancer, in her poised, statuesque grace, in her clean technique; and in her special sort of technical accomplishment, wherein nothing ever seems to present her any problems.
During the American tours of Sadler’s Wells, she is almost invariably greeted with flowers at the station. She seems to have friends in every city. How she manages to do this, I am not sure; but I feel it must be a tribute to her genuine warmth and friendliness.
VIOLETTA ELVIN
Violetta Elvin, another of the talented ballerinas of the “fabulous” Sadler’s Wells company, is in the direct line of Russian ballet, for she is a product of the contemporary ballet of Russia.
The daughter of a pioneer of Russian aviation, Vassili Prokhoroff, and his wife, Irina Grimousinkaya, a Polish artist and an early experimenter with action photography, Violetta Prokhorova became a pupil at the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, at the age of nine. It is interesting to note that she was one of a class of fifty accepted out of five hundred applicants; it is still more interesting, and an example of the rigorous Russian training, that, when she finished the course nine years later, out of the original fifty there were only nine left: three girls and six boys. Of the three girls, Prokhorova was the only one who attained ballet’s coveted rank of etoile.
Violetta finished her training at the time Moscow was being evacuated against the Nazi invasion, and was sent on a three-thousand mile journey to be a ballerina at the ballet at Tashkent, Russian Turkestan. Here, at the age of eighteen, she danced the leading roles in two works, The Fountain of Bakchissarai, based on Pushkin’s famous poem, and Don Quixote, the Minkus work of which contemporary American balletgoers know only the famous pas de deux, but which I presented in America, during the season 1925-1926, staged by Laurent Novikoff, with settings and costumes by the great Russian painter, Korovin.
Another point of interest about Elvin is that she was never a member of the corps de ballet, for she was transferred from Tashkent to the Bolshoi Ballet, which had been moved, for safety reasons, to Kuibyshev, some five hundred miles from Moscow. In the early autumn of 1943, when the Nazi horde had been driven back in defeat, the Ballet returned to the Bolshoi, and Prokhorova danced important roles there.
It was in Moscow, in 1945, that Violetta Prokhorova married Harold Elvin, an architect associated with the British Embassy, and came with him to London. On her arrival in London she became a member of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, first as a soloist, and later as ballerina.
My own impressions are of a vibrant personality and a great beauty. Her feet are extraordinarily beautiful, and, if I am any judge of the female figure, I would say her body approximates the perfect classical proportions. In her dancing, her Russian training is at all times evident, for there is a charm of manner, a broad lyricism, coupled with a splendid poise that are not the common heritage of all western dancers.
It begins to sound like an overworked cliché, but again we have that rare quality in a dancer: intelligence. Once again, intelligence coupled with striking beauty. Elvin’s interests include all the classics in literature, the history of art, philosophy, museums, and good Russian food.
Already Elvin has had a film career, two motion pictures to date: Twice Upon a Time, by the makers of Red Shoes, and the latest, the story of the great British soprano, Nellie Melba, the title role of which is played by Patrice Munsel.
While engaged on the second American tour of the Sadler’s Wells company, Violetta met an American, whom she has recently married.
Talented far beyond average measure, Elvin is a true ballerina in the tradition of the Russian school and is ever alert to improve her art and to give audiences something better than her best.
NADIA NERINA
I cannot fail to pay my respects to the young Nadia Nerina, today another of the alternating ballerinas of the company, with full ballerina standing, whom I particularly remember as one of the most delightful and ebullient soloists of the company on its two American visits.
An example of the wide British Commonwealth base of the personnel of the Sadler’s Wells company, Nadia Nerina is from South Africa, where she was born in 1927. It was in Cape Town that she commenced her ballet studies and had her early career; for she was a winner of the South African Dancing Times Gold Medal and, when she was fifteen, was awarded the Avril Kentridge Shield in the Dance Festival at Durban. Moreover, she toured the Union of South Africa and, when nineteen, went to London to study at the Sadler’s Wells School. Very soon after her arrival, she was dancing leading roles and was one of the ballerinas of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet.
Such was her success in Rosebery Avenue, and such the wisdom of Ninette de Valois, that, within the year, Nerina was transferred to Covent Carden. Today, as I have pointed out, she has been promoted to full ballerina status.
It is a well-deserved promotion, for Nerina’s development has been as sure as it has been steady. I have seen her in Le Lac des Cygnes since her ascendancy to full ballerina rank, and have rejoiced in her fine technical performance, as I have in the quality of her miming—something that is equally true in Delibes’ Sylvia.
It is characteristic of Ninette de Valois that she gives all her ballerinas great freedom within the organization. One is permitted to go to Denmark, Norway, Sweden. Another to La Scala, Milan. Yet another to films. An example of this desire on “Madame’s” part to encourage her leading personnel to extend their experience and to prevent any spirit of isolation, is the tour Nerina recently made through her native South Africa, in company with her Sadler’s Wells partner, Alexis Rassine, himself a South African.
The outstanding quality in Nerina’s dancing for me is the sheer joy she brings to it, a sort of love for dancing for its own sake. In everything she does, there is the imprint of her own strong personality, her vitality, and the genuine elegance she brings to the use of her sound technique.
ROWENA JACKSON
During the first two American tours of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, a young dancer who attracted an unusual amount of attention, particularly in the Ashton-Lambert Les Patineurs, for her remarkable virtuosic performance and her multiple turns, was Rowena Jackson.
Today, Rowena Jackson is the newest addition to the Sadler’s Wells list of ballerinas.
Rowena Jackson is still another example of the width of the British Commonwealth base of the Sadler’s Wells organization, having been born in Invercargil, New Zealand, on the 24th March, 1926, where her father was postmaster. Her first ballet training was at the Lawson-Powell School, in New Zealand. It was in 1947 that the young dancer joined the Sadler’s Wells Ballet.
This rise of the British dancer more than fulfils the prophecy of The Swan. It was thirty years ago that Pavlova said: “English women have fine faces, graceful figures, and a real sense of poetry of dancing. They only lack training to provide the best dancers of the world.” She went on: “If only more real encouragement were given in England to ballet dancers the day would not be far distant when the English dancer would prove a formidable rival to the Russians.”
Now that the British dancer has been given the encouragement, the truth of Anna Pavlova’s prophecy is the more striking.
As I have said, Rowena Jackson attracted attention throughout North America in Les Patineurs, gaining a reputation for a surpassing technical brilliance in turns. These turns, known as fouetées, I have mentioned more than once. Legend has it that Jackson can do in excess of one hundred-fifty of them, non-stop. It is quite incredible.
Brilliance is one thing. Interpretation is another. When I saw Jackson in Le Lac des Cygnes, my admiration for her and for Ninette de Valois soared. Jackson’s Swan Queen proved to me that at Sadler’s Wells another ballerina had been born. (I nearly wrote “created”; but ballerinas are born, not made). As the Swan Queen she was all pathos and softness and tenderness and protectiveness; to the evil Black Swan, Odile, she brought the hard brittleness the role demands.
Rowena Jackson’s future among the illustrious of the world of ballet seems assured, and I shall watch her with interest, as I am sure will audiences.
SADLER’S WELLS THEATRE BALLET
While I was in London after the close of the first American tour of the Sadler’s Wells Covent Garden Ballet, I paid a visit to the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, the cradle of the organization.
The Sadler’s Wells Theatre is in Rosebery Avenue, in the Borough of Islington, now a middle-class residential section of London, but once a county borough. For nearly three hundred years, the site of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre has been used for entertainment purposes. Several theatres have stood on the site, and while the dance has always been prominent in its history, everything from tight-rope and wire-walking exhibitions to performing dogs and dance troupes has been seen there.
It was in 1683 that a certain Thomas Sadler, who was, apparently, a Highway Surveyor, lived there in what was then Clerkenwell, and found a well, actually a spring, having medicinal properties, in his garden. It soon was regarded as a holy well, with healing powers attributed to it. Hither came the halt, the blind and the sick to be cured, and Mr. Sadler determined to commercialize his property. On his lawn he built his Musik House, a long room with a stage, orchestra and seats for those partakers of the waters who desired refreshments as well during their imbibing—and he also provided entertainment. The well is still there today, preserved under the present theatre, but is no longer used, and the theatre’s water supply is from the municipal mains.
Rebuilt, largely by public subscription, the present theatre was opened in 1931, alternating opera and Shakespeare with the Old Vic, but eventually it became the exclusive home and base of the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company and the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company. In 1946, when Ninette de Valois accepted the invitation of the Covent Garden Opera Trust to move the Sadler’s Wells Ballet company to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, another company (actually the revival of another idea, the Sadler’s Wells Opera Ballet) was established at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, and called the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet.
Here, in a fine, comfortable, modern theatre, I saw a fresh young company, with seasoned artists, first-class productions, and some first-rate dancing: a company I felt America should know.
There was an extensive repertoire of modern works by Frederick Ashton, Ninette de Valois, and the rising young John Cranko, and others. The Ashton works include Façade, the Ravel Valses Nobles et Sentimentales; Les Rendez-Vous, to Auber music arranged by Constant Lambert; and the charming Capriol Suite, to the music by Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock), inspired by Arbeau’s Orchesographie. There were three works by Andrée Howard: Assembly Ball, to the Bizet Symphony in C; Mardi Gras; and La Fête Etrange. Celia Franka had an interesting work, Khadra, to a Sibelius score, with charming Persian miniature setting and costumes by Honor Frost. The young South African John Cranko, who had been a member of the Covent Garden company in the first New York season, had a number of extremely interesting works, including Sea Change; and Ninette de Valois had revived her The Haunted Ballroom, to a Geoffrey Toye score, and the Lambert-Boyce The Prospect Before Us. There were also sound classics, including Swan Lake, in the second act version.
The company, under the direction of Ninette de Valois, had a fine dancer, Peggy van Praagh, as ballet mistress.
It occurred to me that, by adding new elements and reviving full length works, it would be an excellent thing to bring the company to the United States and Canada for a tour following upon that of the Covent Garden company.
I discussed the matter with Ninette de Valois and David Webster, both of whom were favorable to the idea; and, since it was impossible for the Covent Garden company to come over for a third tour at that time, they urged me to give further consideration to the possibility.
On my next visit to London, I went over matters in detail with George Chamberlain, Clerk to the Governors of Sadler’s Wells, and himself the opposite number at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre to David Webster at Covent Garden. I found Chamberlain equally cooperative and helpful, despite the fact he has a wide variety of interests and responsibilities, including the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company, the Old Vic, and the Sadler’s Wells School. We have become close friends. Following our initial conferences, we went into a series of them, in conjunction with Ursula Moreton, at the time “Madame’s” assistant at Sadler’s Wells, and Peggy van Praagh, the company’s ballet mistress.
As a result of these discussions, it was agreed to increase the size of the dancing personnel of the company from thirty-two to thirty-six, and to bring to North America a repertoire of fourteen ballets, including one full-length work, and to add to the roster one or two more principal dancers.
Handshakes all round sealed the bargain, and a contract was signed for a twenty-two week season for 1951-52.
It was on my return to London, in March, 1951, that I saw the première of the first of their new productions, Pineapple Poll, a ballet freely adapted from the Bab Ballad, “The Bumbeat Woman’s Story,” by W. S. Gilbert, with music by Arthur Sullivan, arranged by a young Australian, Charles Mackerras, a conductor at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre. The scenery and costumes were by Osbert Lancaster, noted architectural historian and cartoonist, and the choreography by John Cranko, who had worked in collaboration with Lancaster and Mackerras.
The work had its first performance at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre on the 13th March, 1951. The entire programme I saw that night was made up of Cranko works, and I found myself seated before a quartet of works, highly varied in content and style, all of which interested me, some, to be sure, more than others. The evening commenced with Cranko’s Sea Change. A tragic work in a free style, a character ballet whose story was moving, but a ballet in which I never felt music and movement quite came together. The score was the orchestral piece, En Saga, by Jan Sibelius.
The new work, Pineapple Poll, was the second ballet of the evening. I was enchanted with it. I had always been a Sullivan admirer, and here were pieces from nigh on to a dozen of the Sullivan operas, woven together with great skill and brilliant orchestration into a marvelous integral whole by Charles Mackerras, a complete score in itself, as if it might have been directly composed for the ballet. I watched the dancers closely, and it was impossible for me to imagine a finer interpretation. Elaine Fifield, in the title role, was something more than piquant; she was a genuine ballerina, with a fascinating sense of character, her whole performance highly intelligent. There was no “mugging,” no “cuteness”; on the contrary, there were both humor and wit, and I noted she was a beautifully “clean” dancer. David Blair was a compelling officer, and his “hornpipe” almost on points literally brought the house down. Three other dancers impressed me: Sheillah O’Reilly, Stella Claire and David Poole. Osbert Lancaster’s sets were masterful, both as sets and as architecture. This, I decided, was a Cranko masterpiece, and it impressed me in much the same way as some of Massine’s gay ballets.
Pineapple Poll was followed by a delicate fantasy by Cranko, Beauty and the Beast, an extended pas de deux, set to some of Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, and beautifully danced by Patricia Miller and David Poole, who were, I learned, a pair of South Africans from the Sadler’s Wells School.
The closing piece on the programme was another new ballet by Cranko, Pastorale, which had been given its first performance earlier in the season, just before Christmas. It was the complete antithesis of the Sullivan ballet. This was a Mozart work, his Divertimento No. 2, and choreography was Mozartian in feeling. It was a work of genuine charm, delicacy and real humor that revealed to me the excellence of a half-dozen of the principals of the company: Elaine Fifield and Patricia Miller, whom I have already mentioned, and young Svetlana Beriosova, the daughter of Nicholas Beriosoff, a former member of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Svetlana was born in Lithuania in 1932, and had been brought to America by her parents in 1940, when, off and on, she toured with them in the days of my management of the Massine company, and frequently appeared as the little child, Clara, in The Nutcracker. Now rapidly maturing, she had been seen by Ninette de Valois in a small English ballet company, and had been taken into the Sadler’s Wells organization. The three ballerinas had an equal number of impressive partners in Pastorale: Pirmin Trecu, David Poole and David Blair.
I decided that Pineapple Poll, Pastorale and Beauty and the Beast must be included in the repertoire for America, and that the first of these could be a tremendous American success, a sort of British Gaîté Parisienne.
In further conversations and conferences, I pressed the matter of a full-length, full-evening ballet. The work I wanted was Delibes’ Sylvia. This is the famous ballet first given in Paris in 1876. I recognised there would be problems to be solved over the story, but the Delibes score is enchanting, delicate, essentially French; and is it not the score which Tchaikowsky himself both admired and appreciated? Moreover, a lot of the music is very well-known and loved.
We agreed upon Sylvia in principle, but “Freddy” Ashton, who was to stage it, was too occupied with other work, and it was at last agreed to substitute a new production of Delibes’ Coppélia, in a full-length, uncut version, never seen in North America except in a truncated form. It was, however, difficult indeed to achieve any progress, since every one was occupied with work of one kind or another, and continuously busy. Moreover, Dame Ninette was away from London in Turkey and Jugoslavia, lecturing, teaching, and checking on the national ballet schools she has organized in each of those countries, at the request of their respective governments, with the cooperation of the British Council.
It was not until three o’clock one morning several weeks later that we all managed to get together at one time and place to have a conference on repertoire. The following day I saw another performance at the Wells, and was a bit distressed. It was clear to me that it was going to be necessary to increase the size of the company still further, and also to be more selective in the choice and arrangement of the repertoire.
There followed a period of intense preparation on the part of the entire organization, with all of its attendant helter-skelter, and with day and night rehearsals. Meanwhile, I discussed and arranged for the production of a two-act production or version of The Nutcracker. The opening scene of this Tchaikowsky classic has always bothered me, chiefly because I felt it was dull and felt that, during its course, nothing really happened. There is, if the reader remembers, a rather banal Christmas party at which little Clara receives a nutcracker as a present, goes to bed without it, comes downstairs to retrieve it, and is forthwith transported to fairyland. I felt we would be better off to start with fairyland, and to omit the trying prologue. Moreover, I felt certain the inclusion of the work in this form would give added weight to the repertoire for the North American tour, since The Nutcracker and Tchaikowsky are always well-liked and popular, as the box-office returns have proven.
On this visit I spent three weeks in London, flying back to New York only to return to London three weeks later, to watch the company and to do what I could to speed up the preparations so that the company might be ready for the Canadian opening of the tour, the date of which was coming closer and closer with that inevitability such matters display.
The Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet and its entire organization showed really tremendous energy and application, and did everything possible to prepare themselves to follow the great American success of their sister company, something that was, admittedly, a very difficult thing to do.
Just before the company’s departure for the North American continent, it gave a four-week “American Festival Season” at Sadler’s Wells, consisting of the entire repertoire to be seen on this side of the Atlantic. This season included another Cranko work I have not before mentioned. It is Harlequin in April, a ballet commissioned for the Festival of Britain by the Arts Council. While I cannot say that it is the sort of piece that appeals to audiences by reason of its clarity, there is no gainsaying that it is a major creation and a greatly to be commended experiment, and, withal, a successful one. The choreographic work of John Cranko, in collaboration with the composer, Richard Arnell, and the artist-designer, John Piper, it was that much desired thing in ballet: a genuine collaboration between those individuals responsible for each aspect of it.
Although there was no attempt to use it as a plot idea, for it is in no sense a “literary” work, the idea for Harlequin in April presumably stemmed from the following lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain....
I could not attempt to explain the work which, to me, consists solely of atmosphere. I liked Richard Arnell’s score; but the ballet, as a ballet, is one I found myself unable to watch very many times. Perhaps the simplest answer is that it is not my favorite type of ballet. Nevertheless, the fact remains it is a work of genuine distinction and was warmly praised by discriminating critics.
The first nights of the two classical works came a week apart. Coppélia was the first, on the night of the 4th September. It was, indeed, a fine addition to the repertoire. There were, in the Sadler’s Wells tradition, several casts; the first performance had Elaine Fifield, as Swanilda; David Blair, as Frantz; and David Poole, as Coppelius.
I was not too happy with the three settings designed by Loudon Sainthill, the Australian designer who had a great success at the Shakespeare Festival Theatre, always feeling they were not sufficiently strong either in color or design. However, as the first full-length, uncut version of the Delibes classic, it was notable, as it also was notable for the liveliness of its entire production and the zest and joy the entire company brought to it. Elaine Fifield was miraculously right as Swanilda, in her own special piquant style; David Blair was a most attractive Frantz; and David Poole was the first dignified Coppelius I had ever seen, with a highly original approach to the character. Alternate casts for Coppélia included Svetlana Beriosova as a quite different and very effective Swanilda, and Maryon Lane, another South African dancer of fine talent, with a personality quite different from the other two, as were Donald Britton’s Frantz and Stanley Holden’s Coppelius.
The 11th of September revealed the new Nutcracker I have mentioned. Actually, without the Prologue, it became a series of Tchaikowsky divertissements, staged with skill and taste under, as it happened, great pressure, by Frederick Ashton. It was a two-scene work, utilizing the Snow Flake and the Kingdom of Sweets scenes. Outstanding, to my way of thinking, were Beriosova as the Snow Queen; Fifield and Blair in the grand pas de deux; Maryon Lane in the Waltz of the Flowers. The most original divertissement was the Danse Arabe.
Following the first performance of The Nutcracker, I gave a large party in honor of both companies: the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden Company and that from the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, at Victory Hall.
In this godspeed to the sister company, Margot Fonteyn was, as usual, very much on the job, always the good colleague, wishing Fifield and Beriosova the same success in the States and Canada as she and her colleagues of the Covent Garden company had enjoyed. From Covent Garden also came David Webster, Louis Yudkin, and Herbert Hughes, “Freddy” Ashton, and Robert Irving, the genial and able musical director of the Ballet at Covent Garden, all to speed the sister company on its way, to give them tips on what to see, what to do, and also on what not to do.
The reader will, I am sure, realize what a difficult thing it was for the sister company to follow in the footsteps and the triumphant successes of the company from Covent Garden. A standard of excellence and grandeur had been set by them eclipsing any previously established standards that had existed for ballet on the North American continent.
It is a moot question just what the public and the press of America expected from the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet. For more than a year, in all publicity and promotion, with all the means at our command, we emphasized the differences between the two companies: in personnel, in principal artists, in repertoire. We also carefully pointed out the likenesses between them: the same base of operations, the same school, the same direction, the same moving spirit, the same ideals, the same purpose.
The success of the company throughout the entire breadth of the United States and Canada magnificently proved the wisdom of their coming. The list of cities played is formidable: Quebec, Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Buffalo, Rochester, Cleveland, Detroit, East Lansing, Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Omaha, Des Moines, Denver, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, B.C., San Francisco, San José, Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Waco, Houston, Dallas, Shreveport, Little Rock, Springfield, Mo., Kansas City, Chicago, St. Louis, Nashville, Knoxville, Atlanta, Birmingham, Montgomery, New Orleans, Daytona Beach, Orlando, Miami, and Miami Beach, Columbia, Greensboro, Durham, Raleigh, Norfolk, Richmond, Washington—where for the first time ballet played in a proper theatre—Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Toledo, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Syracuse, Troy, White Plains, Providence, Hartford, Boston, and New York City. Perhaps the most characteristic tribute to the company came from Alfred Frankenstein, the distinguished critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, who wrote: “This may not be the largest ballet company in the world, but it is certainly the most endearing.” There is no question that the mounting demand for the quick return of the company on the part of local managers and sponsoring organizations and groups throughout the country is another proof of the warmth of their welcome when they next come.
The musical side of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet revealed the same high standards of the organization, under the direction of that splendid young British conductor, John Lanchbery. Lanchbery, a thorough and distinguished musician, not only was a fine conductor, but an extremely sensitive ballet conductor, which is not necessarily the same thing. So admired was he by the orchestra that, in San Francisco, the players presented him with a lovely gift in a token of appreciation.
During the entire association with the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet there was always the warm cooperation of George Chamberlain, and the fine executive ability and personal charm of their tour manager, Douglas Morris.
It is my sincere hope that, following the season 1953-54, they will be able to make an even more extended tour of this continent. By that time, some of the company’s younger members will have become more mature, and the repertoire will have been strengthened and increased by the accretion of two years.
There is the seemingly eternal charge against ballet dancers. They are either “too young” or else “too old.” The question I am forced to ask in this connection is: What is the appropriate age for the personnel of a ballet company, for a dancer? My answer is one the reader may anticipate from previous references to the subject in this book: Artistry knows and recognizes no age on the stage. Spiritually the same is true in life itself.
It is, of course, possible that, by that time, there may be some who will refrain from referring to the members of the company as “juniors,” and will realize that they are aware of the facts of life. Three years will have elapsed since their first visit. During all this time they will have been dancing regularly five or six times a week; will have behind them not only London successes, but their Edinburgh Festival and African triumphs as well.
At the close of the American Festival Season in Rosebery Avenue, the company entrained for Liverpool, there to embark in the Empress of France. It was a gay crossing, but less gay than had been anticipated. Originally, the Empress was to have carried H.R.H. Princess Elizabeth, and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, on their Royal Visit to the Dominion of Canada. The ship’s owners, the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company, had constructed a specially equipped theatre on the top deck, where the company was to have given two performances for the Royal couple. H.R.H., Princess Margaret is the Honorary President of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet, and there is considerable royal interest in ballet. Unfortunately, the serious illness of the King, and his operation, necessitated a last moment change of plans on the part of Princess Elizabeth and her husband, who made their crossing by plane. At the last moment before sailing, the theatre was dismantled and removed.
Two members of my staff made a long journey down the St. Lawrence, to clamber aboard the Empress at daybreak and to travel up the river with the company to Quebec, the opening point of the tour. I had gone on to Quebec to greet them, as had our American staff and orchestra from New York. This was the same orchestra, the “American Sadler’s Wells Orchestra,” that had constituted the splendid musical side of the Covent Garden company’s two American seasons. There was no cutting of corners, no sparing of expense to maintain the same high standards of production. For those with an interest in figures, it might be noted that the orchestra alone cost in excess of $10,000 weekly.
Heading the company, and remaining with it until it was well on its way, were Dame Ninette de Valois and George Chamberlain, with Peggy van Praagh as “Madame’s” assistant, and ballet-mistress for the entire tour.
There were three days of concentrated rehearsal and preparation before the first performance in Quebec. Some difficulties had to be overcome, for Quebec City is not the ideal place for ballet production. Lacking a real theatre or opera house, a cinema had to be utilized, a house with a stage far from adequate for a theatre spectacle, an orchestra pit far too small for an orchestra the size of ours, and cramped quarters all around. Nevertheless, a genuine success was scored.
Following the Quebec engagement, the company moved to Ottawa by special train—this time the “Sadler’s Wells Theatre Special.” The night journey to Ottawa provided many of the company with their first experience of sleeping-car travel of the American-type Pullman. Passing through one of the cars on the way to my drawing-room before the train pulled out, I overheard one of the corps de ballet girls behind her green curtains, obviously snuggling down for the night, sigh and say: “Oh, isn’t it just lovely!... Just like in the films!”
Ottawa was in its gayest attire, preparing for the Royal visit. The atmosphere was festive. The Governor General and the Viscountess Alexander of Tunis entertained the entire company at a reception at Government House, flew afterwards to Montreal officially to welcome the Royal couple, and flew back to attend the opening performance, as the official representative of H.M. the King. Hundreds were turned away from the Ottawa performances, and a particularly gay supper was given the company after the final performance by the High Commissioner to Canada for Great Britain, Sir Hugh and Lady Clutterbuck.
Montreal, with its mixed French and English population, gave the company a wholehearted acceptance and warm enthusiasm, by no means second to that accorded the sister company.
So the tour went, breaking box-office records for ballet in many cities, including Buffalo, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver (where, for the eight performances, there was not a seat to be had four weeks before the company’s arrival), Los Angeles, the entire state of Florida, and Washington, where, as I have said, I had been successful in securing a genuine theatre, Loew’s Capitol, and where, for the first time ballet was seen by the inhabitants of our national capital with all the theatrical appurtenances that ballet requires: scenery, lights, atmosphere, instead of the mausoleum-like Constitution Hall, with its bare platform backed only by a tapestry of the Founding Fathers.
So the tour went for twenty-two weeks in a long, transcontinental procession of cumulative success, with the finale in New York City. Here, because of the unavailability of the Metropolitan Opera House, since the current opera season had not been completed, it was necessary to go to a film house, the Warner Theatre, the former Strand, where Fokine and Anatole Bourman had, in the early days of movie house “presentations,” staged weekly ballet performances, sowing the seeds for present-day ballet appreciation.
The Warner Theatre was far from ideal for ballet presentation, being much too long for its width, giving from the rear the effect of looking at the stage through reversed opera glasses or binoculars. Also, from an acoustical point of view, the house left something to be desired as it affected the sound of the exceptionally large orchestra. But it was the only nearly suitable house available, and Ninette de Valois, who had returned to the States for the Boston engagement, and had remained through the early New York performances, found no fault with the house.
Among the many problems in connection with the presentation of ballet, none is more ticklish than that of determining on an opening night programme in any metropolitan center, particularly New York. Many elements have to be weighed one against the other. Should the choice be one of a selection of one-act ballets, there is the necessity for balancing classical and modern and the order in which they should be given, after they have actually been decided on. In the case of the Sadler’s Wells companies, featuring, as they do, full-length works occupying an entire evening in performance, there is the eternal question: which one?
The importance of the first impression created cannot be overrated. More often than not, in arriving at a decision of this kind, we listen to the advice of everyone in the organization. All suggestions are carefully considered, and hours are spent in discussion and the exchange of ideas, and the reasons supporting those ideas.
What was good in London may quite well be fatal in New York. What New York would find an ideal opening programme might be utterly wrong for Chicago. San Francisco’s highly successful and popular opening night programme well might turn out to be Los Angeles’ poison.
Whatever the decision may be, it is always arrived at after long and careful thought; and, when reached, it is the best product of many minds. It usually turns out to be wrong.
If, as is often the case, the second night’s programme turns out to be another story, there is the almost inevitable query on the part of the critics: “Why didn’t you do this last night?” Many of them seem to be certain that there must have been personal reasons involved in the decision, some sort of private and individually colored favoritism being exercised....
I smile and agree.
The only possible answer is: “You’re right.... I’m wrong.”