7 Ballet Reborn in America: W. de Basil and His Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo
THE last of the two American tours of Serge de Diaghileff’s Ballets Russes was during the season 1916-1917.
The last American tour of Anna Pavlova and her company was during the season 1925-1926.
Serge Diaghileff died at Venice, on 19th August, 1929.
Anna Pavlova died at The Hague, on 23rd January, 1931.
W. de Basil’s Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo gave their first American performances at the St. James Theatre, New York, on 21st December, 1933.
Such ballet as America saw between Pavlova’s last performance in 1926 and the first de Basil performance in 1933, may be briefly stated.
From 1924 to 1927, in Chicago, there was the Chicago Allied Arts, sometimes described as the first “ballet theatre” in the United States, sparked by Adolph Bolm.
In 1926 and 1927, there were a few sporadic performances by Mikhail Mordkin and his Russian Ballet Company, which included Xenia Macletzova, Vera Nemtchinova, Hilda Butsova, and Pierre Vladimiroff.
From 1928 to 1931, Leonide Massine staged weekly ballet productions at the Roxy Theatre, in New York, including a full-length Schéhérazade, with four performances daily, Massine acting both as choreographer and leading dancer. In 1930, he staged Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, for four performances in Philadelphia and two at the Metropolitan Opera House, in New York, with the collaboration of Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and with Martha Graham making one of her rare appearances in ballet, in the leading role.
That is the story. Hardly a well-tilled ground in which to sow balletic seed with the hope of a bumper crop. It is not surprising that all my friends and all my rival colleagues in the field of management prophesied dire things for me (presumably with different motives) when I determined on the rebirth of ballet in America in the autumn of 1933. Their predictions were as mournful as those of Macbeth’s witches.
The ballet situation in the Western World, after the deaths of Diaghileff and Pavlova, save for the subsidized ballets at the Paris Opera and La Scala in Milan, was not vastly different. If you will look through the files of the European newspapers of the period, you will find an equally depressing note: “The Swan passes, and ballet with her”... “The puppet-master is gone; the puppets must be returned to their boxes”... and a bit later: “Former Diaghileff dancers booked to appear in revues and cabaret turns.”...
In England, J. Maynard Keynes, Lydia Lopokova, Ninette de Valois, Marie Rambert, Constant Lambert, and Arnold L. Haskell had formed the Camargo Society for Sunday night ballet performances, which organization gave birth to Marie Rambert’s Ballet Club and the Vic Wells Ballet. In 1933, the glories of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet were hardly dreams, not yet a glimmer in Ninette de Valois’ eye.
In Europe there remained only the Diaghileff remains and a vacant Diaghileff contract at Monte Carlo. This latter deserves a word of explanation. Diaghileff had acquired the name—the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo—thanks to the Prince of Monaco, himself a ballet lover, who had offered Diaghileff and his company a home and a place to work.
René Blum, an intellectual French gentleman of deep culture and fine taste, took over the unexpired Diaghileff Monte Carlo contract. Blum was at hand for, at the time of Diaghileff’s death, he was at the head of the dramatic theatre at Monte Carlo. In fulfilment of the Diaghileff contract, for a time Blum booked such itinerant ballet groups as he could. Then, in 1931, he organized his own Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. George Balanchine, who had staged some of the last of the Diaghileff works, became the first choreographer for the new company. For the Monte Carlo repertoire, he created three works. To it, from Paris, he brought two of the soon-to-become-famous “baby ballerinas,” Irina Baronova and Tamara Toumanova, both from the classroom of Olga Preobrajenska.
Early in 1932, René Blum joined forces with one of the most curious personalities that modern ballet has turned up, in the person of a gentleman who wished to be known as Col. W. de Basil.
De Basil had had a ballet company of sorts for some time. I first ran into him in Paris, shortly after Diaghileff’s death, where he had allied himself with Prince Zeretelli’s Russian Opera Company; and again in London, where the Lionel Powell management, in association with the Imperial League of Opera, had given them a season of combined opera and ballet at the old Lyceum Theatre. With ballets by Boris Romanoff and Bronislava Nijinska, de Basil had toured his little troupe around Europe in buses, living from hand to mouth; had turned up for a season at Monte Carlo, at René Blum’s invitation. That did it. De Basil worked out a deal with Blum, whereby de Basil became a joint managing director of the combined companies, now under the title of Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. A season was given in the summer of 1932, in Paris, at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées.
It was there I first saw the new company. It was then I took the plunge. I negotiated. I signed them for a visit to the American continent. A book could be devoted to these negotiations alone. It would not be believable; it would fail to pass every test of credibility ever devised.
I feel that this is the point at which to digress for a moment, in order to sketch in a line drawing of de Basil, with some of the shadows and some of the substance. Unless I do, no reader will be able to understand why I once contemplated a book to be called To Hell With Ballet!
To begin with, de Basil was a Cossack and a Caucasian. Neither term carries with it any connotation of gentleness or sensitivity. De Basil was one of the last persons in the world you would expect to find at the head of an organization devoted to the development of the gentle, lyric art of the ballet. Two more dissimilar partners in an artistic venture than de Basil and Blum could not be found.
René Blum, the gentle, cultured intellectual, was a genuine artist: amiable, courteous, and fully deserving of the often misused phrase—a man of the world. His alliance with de Basil was foredoomed to failure; for one of René Blum’s outstanding characteristics was a passion to avoid arguments, discussions, scandals, troubles of any sort. Blum commanded the highest respect from his artists and associates; but they never feared him. To them he was the kind, understanding friend to whom they might run with their troubles and problems. Blum’s sensitivity was such that he would run from de Basil as one would try to escape a plague. René Blum, you would say, was, perhaps, the ivory-tower dilettante. You would be wrong. René Blum gave the lie to this during the war by revealing himself a man of heroic stature. On the occupation of France, he was in grave danger, since he was a Jew, and the brother of Léon Blum, the Socialist leader, great French patriot and one-time Premier. René, however, was safely and securely out of the country. But he, too, was a passionate lover of France. France, he felt, needed him. Tossing aside his own safety, he returned to his beloved country, to share its fate. His son, who was the apple of his father’s eye, joined the Maquis; was killed fighting the Nazis. René Blum was the victim of Nazi persecution.
Let us look for a moment at the background of Blum’s ballet collaborator. The “Colonel” was born Vassily Grigorievitch Voskresensky. In his native milieu he had some sort of police-military career. Although he insisted on the title “Colonel,” he certainly never attained that rank in the Tsar’s army. He was a lieutenant in the Gendarmes. After the revolution, in 1918, he turned up as a captain with Bicherakoff’s Cossacks. Later on he turned naval and operated in the Black Sea.
There is an interval in de Basil’s life that has never been entirely filled in with complete accuracy: the period immediately following his flight and escape from Russia. The most credible of the legends surrounding this period is that he sold motor-cars in Italy. Eventually, he turned up in Paris, where my trail picked him up at a concert agency called Zerbaseff, which concerned itself with finding jobs for refugee artists. It was then he called himself de Basil.
At the time I met him, he had a Caucasian partner, the Prince Zeretelli whom I have mentioned, and who was a one-time manager of the People’s Theatre, in St. Petersburg. It was this partnership that brought forth the Ballet and Opéra Russe de Paris, which gave seasons at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, in Paris, and, as I have mentioned, at the Lyceum Theatre, in London.
Let me first set down the man’s virtues. De Basil had great charm. By that I do not necessarily mean he was charming. His charm was something he could turn on at will, like a tap, usually when he was in a tight spot. More than once it helped him out of deep holes, and sticky ones. He had an inexhaustible fount of energy, could drive himself and others; never seemed to need sleep; and, aiming at a highly desired personal goal, had unending patience. With true oriental passivity, he could wait. He had undaunted courage; needless, reckless courage, in my opinion; a stupid courage compounded often out of equal parts of stubbornness and sheer bravado. He was a born organizer. He intuitively possessed a flair for the theatre: a flair without knowledge. He could be an excellent host; he was a cordon bleu cook. He was generous, he was simple in his tastes.
Yet, with all these virtues, de Basil was, at the same time, one of the most difficult human beings I have ever encountered in a lifetime of management. This tall, gaunt, cadaver of a man had a powerful physique, a dead-pan face, and a pair of cold, astigmatic eyes, before which rested thick-lensed spectacles. He had all the makings of a dictator. Like his countryman, Joseph Stalin, he was completely impossible as a collaborator. He was a born intriguer, and delighted in surrounding himself with scheming characters. During my career I have met scheming characters who, nevertheless, have had certain positive virtues: they succeeded in getting things done. De Basil’s scheming characters consisted of lawyers, hacks, amateur managers, brokers, without exception third-rate people who damaged and destroyed.
It would be an act of great injustice to call de Basil stupid. He was as shrewd an article as one could expect to meet amongst all the lads who have tried to sell the unwary stranger the Brooklyn Bridge, the Capitol at Washington, or the Houses of Parliament.
De Basil deliberately engaged this motley crew of hangers-on, since his Caucasian Machiavellism was such that he loved to pit them one against the other, to use them to build up an operetta atmosphere of cheap intrigue that I felt sure had not hitherto existed save in the Graustark type of fiction. De Basil used them to irritate and annoy. He would dispatch them abroad in his company simply to stir up trouble, to form cliques: for purposes of chantage; he would order them into whispered colloquies in corners, alternately wearing knowing looks and glum visages. De Basil and his entire entourage lived in a world of intrigue of their own deliberate making. His fussy, busy little cohorts cost him money he did not have, and raised such continuous hell that the wonder is the company held together as long as it did.
De Basil’s unholy joy would come from creating, through these henchmen, a nasty situation and then stepping in to pull a string here, jerk a cord there, he would save the situation, thus becoming the hero of the moment.
I shall have more to say on the subject of the “Colonel” before this tale is told.
Now, with the contracts signed for the first American visit, we were on our honeymoon. Meanwhile, however, the picture of what I had agreed to bring was changing. Leonide Massine, his stint at the Roxy Theatre in New York completed, had met a former Broadway manager, E. Ray Goetz. Together they had succeeded in raising some money and planned with it to buy the entire Diaghileff properties. With this stock in hand, Massine caught up with de Basil, who was barnstorming through the Low Countries with his company in trucks and buses; and the two of them pooled resources. Although Massine’s purchase plan did not go through entirely, because much of the Diaghileff material had disappeared through lawsuits and other claims, nevertheless Massine was able to deliver a sizable portion of it.
As the direct result of Massine’s appointment as artistic director, a number of things happened. First of all, Balanchine quit, and formed a short-lived company in France, Les Ballets 1933, the history of which is not germane to this story. Before he left, however, Balanchine had created three works for the de Basil-Blum Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo: La Concurrence, Le Cotillon, and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Massine, as his first task, staged Jeux d’Enfants and Les Plages; restaged three of his earlier works, The Three-Cornered Hat, Le Beau Danube and Scuola di Ballo; and the first of his epoch-making symphonic ballets, Les Présages, to Tchaikowsky’s Fifth Symphony. These were combined with a number of older works from the Diaghileff repertoire, including the three Fokine masterpieces: Les Sylphides, Prince Igor, and Petroushka.
Massine had strengthened the company. There were the former Diaghileff régisseur general, Serge Grigorieff, of long memory, as stage director; his wife, Lubov Tchernicheva, a leading Diaghileff figure, for dramatic roles; the last Diaghileff ballerina, Alexandra Danilova, to give stability to the three “baby ballerinas”: Baronova, Toumanova, and Tatiana Riabouchinska, the last from Kchessinska’s private studio, by way of Nikita Balieff’s Chauve Souris, where she had been dancing. There was the intriguing Nina Verchinina, a “different” type of dancer. There were talented lesser ladies: Eugenia Delarova, Lubov Rostova; a group of English girls masquerading under Russian names. Among the men, in addition to Massine, there were Leon Woizikovsky, David Lichine, Roman Jasinsky, Paul Petroff, Yurek Shabalevsky, and André Eglevsky.
A successful breaking-in season was given at the Alhambra Theatre, in London’s Leicester Square. While this was in progress, we set about at the most necessary and vastly important business of trying to build a public for ballet in America, for this is a ballet impresario’s first job. That original publicity campaign was, in its way, history-making. It took a considerable bit of organizing. No field was overlooked. In addition to spreading the gospel of ballet, there was a Sponsors’ Committee, headed by the Grand Duchess Marie and Otto H. Kahn. Prince Serge Obolensky was an ever-present source of help.
It was a chilly and fairly raw December morning in 1933 when I clambered aboard the cutter at the Battery, to go down the Bay to board the ship at Quarantine. It is a morning I shall not soon forget. I was in ballet up to my neck; and I loved it. There have been days and nights in the succeeding two decades when I have seriously played with the notion of what life might have been like if I had not gone aboard (and overboard) that December morning.
I took with me the traditional Russian welcome: a tray of bread, wrapped in a white linen serviette, a little bowl of salt, which I offered to de Basil. I was careful to see that the reporters and camera men were in place when I did it. De Basil’s poker-face actually smiled as I handed him the tray, uncovered the bread, poured the salt. But only for a moment. A Russian word in greeting, and then there was an immediate demand from him to see the theatre. We were on our way. Driving uptown to the St. James Theatre, the arguments commenced. There was the matter of the programme. There was the matter of the size of de Basil’s name; the question of the relative size of the artists’ names; the type-face; the order in which they should be listed; what was to become the everlasting arguments over repertoire and casting. But I was in it, now.
I believed in the “star” system—not because I believe the system to be a perfect one, by any means, but because the American public, which had been without any major ballet company for eight years, and which had had practically no ballet activity, had to be attracted and arrested by something more than an unknown and heretofore unheard-of company and the photograph of a not particularly photogenic ex-Cossack.
The pre-Christmas première at the St. James Theatre, on the night of 21st December, marked the beginning of a new epoch in ballet, and in my career. It was going to be a long pull, an uphill struggle. I knew that. The opening night audience was brilliant; the house was packed, enthusiastic. But the advance sale at the box-office was anything but encouraging. Diaghileff had failed in America. The losses of his two seasons, paid for by Otto H. Kahn, ran close to a half-million dollars. I was on my own. Since readers are as human as I am, perhaps they will forgive my pardonable pride, the pride I felt sixteen years later, on reading the historian George Amberg’s comment: “If it had not been for Mr. Hurok’s resourceful management and promotion, de Basil would certainly not have succeeded where Diaghileff failed.”
But I am anticipating. The opening programme consisted of La Concurrence, Les Présages, and Le Beau Danube. Toumanova in the first; Baronova and Lichine in the second; Massine, Danilova, and Riabouchinska in the third. It was a night. The next day’s press was excellent. It was John Martin, with what I felt was an anti-Diaghileff bias, who offered some reservations.
Following the opening performance, I gave the first of my many ballet suppers, this one at the Savoy-Plaza. It was very gala. The Sponsors’ Committee turned up en masse. White-gloved waiters served, among other things, super hot dogs, as a native gesture to the visitors from overseas. The “baby ballerinas” looked as if they should have been in bed. That is, two of them did. One of them was missing, and there was some concern as to what could have happened to Tamara Toumanova. However, there was no necessity for concern for Tamara, since she, with her sense of the theatre, the theatrical, and the main chance, made a late and quite theatrical entry, with Paul D. Cravath on one arm and Otto H. Kahn on the other. The new era in ballet was inaugurated by these two distinguished gentlemen and patrons of the arts sipping champagne from a ballet slipper especially made for the occasion by a leading Fifth Avenue bootmaker.
The opening a matter of history, the publicity department went into action at double the record-breaking pace at which they had been functioning for weeks. The resulting press coverage was overwhelming and national.
But, however gratifying all this may have been, I had my troubles, and they increased daily. The publicity simply could not please all the people all the time. I mean the ballet people, of course. There was always the eternally dissatisfied de Basil. In addition, there were three fathers, nineteen mothers, and one sister-in-law to be satisfied. Then there were daily casting problems. The publicity department was giving the press what it wanted: feature stories on ballet, on artists, on the daily life of the dancer. It was then de Basil determined that all publicity must be centered on his own august person. He had a point of view, I must admit. Dancers were here today, gone tomorrow. De Basil and his ballet remained. But no newspaper is interested in running repeated photographs of a dour, bespectacled male. They wanted “leg art.” When de Basil insisted that he be photographed, the camera men would “shoot” him with a filmless or plateless camera.
In addition to having to contend with what threatened to become a chronic and incurable case of Basildiaghileffitis, I was losing a potful of money. The St. James Theatre is no better than any other Broadway house as a home for ballet. The stage is far too small either to display the décor or to permit dancers to move freely. The auditorium, even if filled to capacity, cannot meet ballet expenses. We were not playing to anything like capacity. There was a tour booked; but, thanks to a “stop clause” in the theatre contract—a figure above which the attraction must continue at the theatre—we could not leave. We had made the “stop clause” too low. There was only one thing to do in order to protect the tour. I decided to divide the company into two companies.
Forced to fulfil two sets of obligations at the end of the first month at the St. James Theatre, I opened a tour in Reading, Pennsylvania, with Massine, Danilova, Toumanova, the larger part of the corps de ballet, Efrem Kurtz conducting the orchestra, and all of the ballets in the repertoire except three.
The company remaining at the St. James had Baronova, Riabouchinska, Lichine, and Woizikovsky, with the corps augmented by New York dancers, and Antal Dorati as conductor. This company gave eight performances weekly of the Fokine masterpieces, Les Sylphides, Petroushka, and Prince Igor. The steadily increasing public did not seem to mind.
The response on the road and in New York was surprisingly good. When we finally left New York, the two groups merged, and we played a second Chicago engagement, at the marvellous old Auditorium Theatre. All were there, save for Grigorieff, Alexandra Danilova, and Dorati, who returned to Monte Carlo to fulfil de Basil’s contract with Blum for a spring season in Monaco.
There was a brief spring season in New York, preceded by a week at the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia, where Massine’s first “American” ballet had its dress rehearsals and first performances. This was Union Pacific, a four-scened work in which Massine had the collaboration of the distinguished American poet, Archibald MacLeish, on the story; Albert Johnson, on the settings; Irene Sharaff, with costumes; and a score, based on American folk-tunes, by Nicholas Nabokoff. It was the first Russian ballet attempt to deal with the native American scene and material, treating the theme of the building of the first transcontinental railway.
We gave its first performance on the night of April 6, 1934, and the cast included Massine himself, his wife Eugenia Delarova, Irina Baronova, Sono Osato, David Lichine, and André Eglevsky, in the central roles.
It was Massine’s prodigious Barman’s dance that proved to be the highlight of the work.
The balance of the company eventually returned to Europe for their summer seasons in London and Paris, and to stage new productions. Back they came in the autumn for another tour. The problem of a proper theatre for ballet in New York had not been solved; so I took the company from Europe to Mexico City for an engagement at the newly remodeled Palacio des Bellas Artes. There were problems galore. Once again I fell back on my right-hand-bower, Mae Frohman, rushed her to Mexico to clear them. Back from Mexico by boat to New York, with a hurried transfer for trains to Toronto, and a long coast-to-coast tour. The New York engagement that season was brief: five performances only. The only theatre available was the Majestic, whose stage is no less cramped, and whose auditorium provides no illusion. During this brief season a new work by Massine was presented: Jardin Public (Public Garden). It was based on a fragment from André Gide’s The Counterfeiters, in a scenario by Massine and Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke) who supplied the music. It was not one of Massine’s most successful works by any means. But the première did provide an amusing incident. Danilova was cast as a wealthy woman; Massine and Toumanova as The Poor Couple. On the opening night, Danilova, who showed her wealthy status by dancing a particularly lively rhumba, lost her underpants while dancing in the center of the stage. The contretemps she carried off with great aplomb. But, on her exit, she did not carry off the underwear, which remained in the center of the stage as a large colored blob. Danilova’s exit was followed by the entrance of Toumanova and Massine, clad in rags as befitted The Poor Couple. Toumanova, fixing her eyes on the offending lingerie, picked it up, examined it critically, and then, as if it were something from the nether world and quite unspeakable, dramatically hurled it off-stage in an attitude of utter disgust, as if it were a symbol of the thing she most detested: wealth.
Although the five performances were sold out, we could not cover our expenses. In the autumn of 1935, when the company returned for its third season, we were able to bring Ballet to the Metropolitan Opera House and, for the first time since its rebirth in America, the public really saw it at its best.
During this time we had made substantial additions to the repertoire: Massine’s second and third symphonic ballets, the Brahms Choreartium, and the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique; Nijinska’s The Hundred Kisses. In addition to Fokine’s new non-operatic version of Le Coq d’Or, which I have mentioned, there were added Fokine’s Schéhérazade, The Afternoon of a Faun, and Nijinsky’s Le Spectre de la Rose.
The gross takings of the fourth American season of the de Basil company reached round a million dollars.
By this time matters were coming to a head. All was not, by any means, well in ballet. Massine, by this time, was at swords’ points with de Basil. I was irritated, bored, fatigued, worn out with him and his entourage. Since de Basil had lost his Monte Carlo connection, he had also lost touch with the artistic thought that had served as a stimulus to creation.
It is necessary for me to make another digression at this point. The opening chapter of the New Testament is, as the reader will remember, a geneological one, with a formidable list of “begats.” It seems to me the course of wisdom to try to clear up, if I can, the “begats” of Russian Ballet since the day on which I first allied myself with it. I shall try to disentangle them for the sake of the reader’s better understanding. There were so many similar names, artists moving from one company to another, ballets appearing in the repertoires of more than one organization.
In this saga, I have called this chapter “W. de Basil and his Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo.” It is a convenient handle. The confusion that was so characteristic of the man de Basil, was intensified by the fact that the “Colonel” changed the name of the company at least a half-dozen times during our association. To attempt to go into all the involved reasons for these chameleon-like changes would simply add to the confusion, and would, I feel, be boring. Let me, for the sake of conciseness and, I hope, the reader’s illumination, list the six changes:
In 1932, it was Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo.
From 1933 to 1936, it was Monte Carlo Ballet Russe.
In 1937, it was Colonel W. de Basil’s Ballet Russe.
In 1938, it was Covent Garden Ballet Russe.
In 1939, it was Educational Ballets, Ltd.
From 1940 until its demise, it was Original Ballet Russe.
I have said earlier that the alliance between René Blum and de Basil was foredoomed to failure. The split between them came in 1936, both as a result of incompatibility and of de Basil’s preoccupation with the United States to the exclusion of any Monte Carlo interest. Blum had a greater interest in Monte Carlo, with which, to be sure, he had a contract. So it was not surprising that René Blum organized a new Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, with Michel Fokine as choreographer.
De Basil and his methods became increasingly aggravating. His chicanery, his eternal battling, above all, his overweening obsession about the size of his name in the display advertising, were sometimes almost unbearable. He carried a pocket-rule with him and would go about cities measuring the words “Col. W. de Basil.” Now electric light letters vary in size in the various cities, and there is no way of changing them without having new letters made or purchased at considerable expense and trouble. I remember a scene in Detroit, where de Basil became so obnoxious that the company manager and I climbed to the roof of the theatre and took down the sign with our own hands, in order to save us from further annoyance that day.
All of this accumulated irritation added up to an increasing conviction that life was too short to continue this sort of thing indefinitely, despite my love for and my interest and faith in ballet both as an art and as a popular form of entertainment.
As I have said, Leonide Massine’s difficulties and relations with de Basil were becoming so strained that each performance became an ordeal. I never knew when an explosion might occur. There were many points of difference between Massine and de Basil. The chief bone of contention was the matter of artistic direction. Massine’s contract with de Basil was approaching its expiration date. De Basil was badgering him to sign a new one. Massine steadfastly refused to negotiate unless de Basil would assure him, in the contract, the title and powers of Artistic Director. De Basil as steadfastly refused, and insisted on retaining the powers of artistic direction for himself.
There was, as is always the case in Russian Ballet, a good deal of side-taking. Granted that, for his purposes, de Basil’s insistence on keeping all controls over his company in his own hands, had a point. But let us also regard the issue from the point of view of ability and knowledge, the prime qualifications for the post. From the portrait I have given, the reader will gather the extent of the “Colonel’s” qualifications. This would seem to be the time and place for a sketch of Leonide Massine, as I know him.
One day there must be a book written about Massine. Not that there is not already a considerable literature dealing with him; but there is yet to appear a work that has done him anything like justice. For me to attempt more than a line drawing would be presumptuous and manifestly unjust; but a sketch is demanded.
Leonide Massine was born in Moscow in 1894. He graduated from the Moscow Imperial School in 1912. It was a year later that Diaghileff, visiting Moscow, was taken by Poliakov, the famous Moscow dramatic critic, to see a play at the Ostrovsky Theatre. It happened that Massine was appearing in the play in the role of a servant. There is no record as to what Diaghileff thought of the play or the performance. The one fact that emerges from this chance evening Diaghileff spent at a theatre is that he was impressed by the manner in which the unknown boy, Massine, carried a tray. Diaghileff asked Poliakov to take him back-stage and introduce him to the talented young mime.
Artistically, Diaghileff was in the process of moving onward from the exclusively Russian tradition that was represented by Benois, Bakst, Stravinsky, and Fokine. He was moving towards a greater internationalism, a broader cosmopolitanism. He was in need of a creative personality who would carry forward this wider concept. Diaghileff’s intuition told him this seventeen-year-old boy with the enormous brown eyes was the person. Diaghileff took Massine from Moscow into his company and fashioned him into a present-day Pygmalion. Diaghileff took over the boy’s artistic education. As part of a deliberate plan, Diaghileff pushed a willing pupil into close contact with the world of modern painting and music, with the finest minds of the period. Picasso, Larionov, Stravinsky, and de Falla became his mentors; libraries, museums, concert halls, his classrooms. The result was a great cosmopolitan choreographer, perhaps the greatest living today.
An American citizen, he will always have strong Russian roots. Some of his best works are Russian ballets; but he is no slavish nationalist. He is as much at home in the cultures of Italy, Scotland, or Spain. His was a precocious genius, discovered by Diaghileff’s intuition. Massine began at the top, and has remained there.
Massine is difficult to know, for he is shy, and he has a great wall of natural reserve that takes a long time to penetrate. Once penetrated, it is possible to experience one of life’s greater satisfactions in the conversation, the intelligence, the knowledge of the mature Massine. Massine’s poise and sense of order never leave him. There is a meticulousness about him and a neatness that indicate the possession of an orderly mind. Everything he reads which he feels may be of even the slightest value to him at some future time, he preserves in large clipping-books. About him is a calm that is exceptional in a Russian—a calm that is exceptional in any one associated with the dance, where the habit is to shout as loudly as possible at the slightest provocation, or no provocation at all, and to become violently excited and agitated over the most unimportant things. There is about him none of the superficial “temperament” too often assumed to be the prerogative of artists. He has a sharp sense of humor; but it is a sense of humor that is keen and dry. His wit can be sharp and extremely cutting. He has not always been loved by his associates; but very few of them have ever really known him.
Filled with fire, energy, enthusiasm, his constant desire is to build something better.
As a dancer, he still dances, as no one else, the Miller in The Three-Cornered Hat and the Can Can Dancer in La Boutique Fantasque. Personally, I prefer only Massine in the roles he has created for himself. No other dancer can approach him in these.
I have mentioned his long sojourn at the Roxy Theatre, in New York. Under the conditions imposed—a new work to be staged weekly, to dance four times a day—masterpieces were obviously impossible; but the work he did was of vast importance in building a dance public in New York.
There are those today who chide Massine for his all too frequent re-creations of his old pieces, and lay it to Massine’s obsession with money. It is true, Massine does have a concern for money. But, after all, he has a wife, two growing children, and other responsibilities. However, I do not believe finance is the sole reason, and I, for one, wish he would not be eternally reproducing his old works. Le Beau Danube will live forever as one of the finest genre works of all time. But it must be properly done. I remember, to my sorrow, seeing a recent production of the Danube Massine staged in Paris, with Roland Petit—with a company of only fourteen dancers. Further comment is not required.
I have a deep and abiding affection for Leonide Massine as a person—an affection that is very deep and real. As an artist, I believe he is still the greatest individual personality in ballet today—a choreographer of deep knowledge, imagination, and ability.
The composer of some sixty-odd ballets, it is the most imposing record in modern ballet’s history, perfectly amazing productivity. No one but himself is capable of restoring them. When produced or restaged without his fine hand, they are a shambles.
I should like to offer my friend, Leonide Massine, a hope that springs from my heart. I can only urge him, for his own good and for the good of ballet which needs him, to rest for a time on his beautiful island in the Mediterranean and to spend the time there in study and reflection, crystallizing his ideas. Then he will bring to us new and striking creations that will come like a refreshing breeze clearing the murky atmosphere of much of our contemporary ballet scene. If Massine would only relax his constant drive and follow my suggestion, the real Massine would emerge.
After a summer on his island, he gave us one of his most recent creations (1952), an Umbrian Passion Play, Laudes Evangelli, to religious music of the Middle Ages. An interesting side-light on it is that the very first ballet he had in mind at the beginning of the Diaghileff association was based on the same idea.
At the height of his maturity, there is no indication of age in Massine. Age, after all, is merely a question of how old one feels. I remember, in the later days of his ballet, shortly before his death, Diaghileff was planning a special gala performance. At a conference of his staff, he suggested inviting Pavlova to appear. Some of his advisers countered the proposal with the suggestion that Pavlova was too old. My reply was brief and to the point.
“Pavlova will never age,” I said. “Some people are old at twenty. But Pavlova, never; for genius never looks at the calendar.”
What was true of Pavlova, is equally true of Leonide Massine.
The growth, the development, and the appreciation of ballet in America are the result of a number of things, both individually and in combination. There may exist a variety of opinions on the subject, but one thing, I know, is certain: the present state of ballet in America is not the result of chance. In 1933 I had signed a contract with de Basil to bring ballet to America; yet there was an element of chance involved in that my publicity director, vacationing in Europe, saw a performance of the de Basil company, and spontaneously cabled me an expression of his enthusiasm. Since this employee was not a balletomane in any sense of the word, his message served to intensify my conviction that then was the time to go forward with my determination to follow my intuition. Here ends any element of chance.
The basic repertoire of the first years was an extension of the Diaghileff artistic policies. The repertoire included not only revivals from the Diaghileff repertoire, but also new, forward-looking creations. I was certain that a sound and orthodox repertoire was an essential for establishing a genuine ballet audience in this country.
In 1933, there was no ballet audience. It was something that had to be created and developed through every medium possible. I had a two-fold responsibility—because I loved ballet with a love that amounted to a passion, and because I had a tremendous financial burden which I carried single-handed, without the aid of any Maecenas; I had to make ballet successful; in doing so, willy-nilly I had the responsibility of forming a taste where no aesthetic existed.
For two decades I have had criticism levelled at me from certain places, criticism directed chiefly at my policies in ballet; I have been criticized for my insistence on certain types of ballets in the repertoires of the companies I have managed, and for my belief in adaptations and varying applications of what is known as the “star” system. The only possible answer is that I have been proven right. No other system has succeeded in bringing people to ballet or in bringing ballet to the people.
It will not be out of place at this time to note the repertoire of the de Basil company at the time of the breakdown of the relations between Massine and de Basil, which may be said to be the period of the Massine artistic direction and influence on the de Basil companies, from 1933 to 1937.
There were, if my computation is correct, and I have checked the matter with some care, a total of forty works, with thirty-four of them actively in the repertoire. Of these, there were two sound classics stemming from the Imperial Russian Ballet, creations by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanoff: Swan Lake, in the one-act abbreviation; and Aurora’s Wedding, the last divertissement act of The Sleeping Beauty or The Sleeping Princess, both, of course, to the music of Tchaikowsky. There were three Russian works, i.e., ballets on Russian subjects: Stravinsky’s Petroushka; the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor; and Le Coq d’Or, a purely balletic and entertaining spectacle, with the Rimsky-Korsakoff music rearranged for ballet by Tcherepnine. All of the foregoing were by Michel Fokine. Eight other Fokine works were included, all originally produced by him for Diaghileff: three, which might be called exotic works—Cléopâtre, to the music of Arensky and others; Thamar, to the music of Balakireff; and Schéhérazade, to the Rimsky-Korsakoff tone-poem. Five ballets typifying the Romantic Revolution: Stravinsky’s Firebird; Carnaval and Papillons, both by Robert Schumann; Le Spectre de la Rose, to the familiar Weber score; that greatest of all romantic works, Les Sylphides, the Chopin “romantic reverie.”
There were two works by George Balanchine: Le Cotillon and La Concurrence, the former to music by Chabrier, the latter to music by Auric. A third Balanchine work, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, was necessarily dropped from the repertoire because the costumes were destroyed by fire.
The largest contributor by far to the de Basil repertoire was Massine himself. No less than seventeen of the thirty-four works regularly presented, that is, fifty per-cent, were by this prodigious creator. Eight of these were originally staged by Massine for Diaghileff; two were revivals of works he produced for Count Etienne de Beaumont, in Paris, in 1932. Seven were original creations for the de Basil company. The Diaghileff creations, in revival—in the order of their first making—were: The Midnight Sun, to music from Rimsky-Korsakoff’s The Snow Maiden; Russian Folk Tales, music by Liadov; The Good-Humored Ladies, to the Scarlatti-Tommasini score; Manuel de Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat; The Fantastic Toyshop, to Rossini melodies; George Auric’s Les Matelots: Cimarosiana; Vittorio Rieti’s The Ball.
The two Beaumont works: Le Beau Danube, and the Boccherini Scuola di Ballo.
The creations for the de Basil company: the three symphonic ballets—Les Présages, (Tchaikowsky’s Fifth); Choreartium, (Brahms’s Fourth); La Symphonie Fantastique, (Berlioz). Also Children’s Games (Bizet); Beach (Jean Francaix); Union Pacific (Nicholas Nabokoff); and Jardin Public (Dukelsky).
Two other choreographers round out the list. The young David Lichine contributed four; Bronislava Nijinska, two. The Lichine works: Tchaikowsky’s Francesca da Rimini and La Pavillon, to Borodin’s music for strings, arranged by Antal Dorati. The others, produced in Europe, were so unsuccessful I could not bring them to America: Nocturne, a slight work utilising some of Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music, and Les Imaginaires, to a score by George Auric.
The Nijinska works: The Hundred Kisses, to a commissioned score by Baron Frederic d’Erlanger; the Danses Slaves et Tsiganes, from the Dargomijhky opera Roussalka; and a revival of that great Stravinsky-Nijinska work, Les Noces, which, for practical reasons, I was able to give only at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York.
The following painters and designers collaborated on the scenery and costumes: Oliver Messel, Cecil Beaton, Etienne de Beaumont, Nathalie Gontcharova, Korovin, Pierre Hugo, Jean Lurçat, Albert Johnson, Irene Sharaff, Eugene Lourie, Raoul Dufy, André Masson, Joan Miro, Polunin, Chirico, José Maria Sert, Pruna, André Derain, Picasso, Bakst, Larionoff, Alexandre Benois, Nicholas Roerich, Mstislav Doboujinsky.
For the sake of the record, as the company recedes into the mists of time, let me list its chief personnel during this period: Leonide Massine, ballet-master and chief male dancer; Alexandra Danilova, Irina Baronova, Tamara Toumanova, Tatiana Riabouchinska, ballerinas; Lubov Tchernicheva, Olga Morosova, Nina Verchinina, Lubov Rostova, Tamara Grigorieva, Eugenia Delarova, Vera Zorina, Sono Osato, Leon Woizikovsky, David Lichine, Yurek Shabalevsky, Paul Petroff, André Eglevsky, and Roman Jasinsky, soloists; Serge Grigorieff, régisseur.
In our spreading of the gospel of ballet, emphasis was laid on the following: Ballet, repertoire, personnel. Since there were no “stars” whose names at the time carried any box-office weight or had any recognizable association, the concentration was on the “baby ballerinas,” Baronova, Toumanova, Riabouchinska, all of whom were young dancers of fine training and exceptional talents. They grew as artists before our eyes. They also grew up. They had an unparalleled success. They also had their imperfections, but it was a satisfaction to watch their progress.
Ballet was by way of being established in America’s cultural and entertainment life by the end of the fourth de Basil season. On the financial side, that fourth season’s gross business passed the million dollar mark; artistically, deterioration had set in. With the feud between Massine and de Basil irreconcilable, there was no sound artistic policy possible, no authoritative direction. The situation was as if two rival directors would have stood on either side of the proscenium arch, one countermanding every order given by the other. The personnel of the company was lining up in support of one or the other; factionism was rampant. Performances suffered.
Massine, meanwhile realizing the hopelessness of the situation so far as he was concerned, cast about for possible interested backers in a balletic venture of his own, where he could exercise his own talents and authority. He succeeded in interesting a number of highly solvent ballet lovers, chief among whom was Julius Fleischmann, of Cincinnati.
Just what Fleischmann’s interest in ballet may have been, or what prompted it, I have not been able to determine. At any rate, it was a fresh, new interest. A man of culture and sensitivity, he was something of a dilettante and a cosmopolitan. When he was at home, it was on his estate in Cincinnati. His business interests, i.e., the sources that provided him with the means to pursue his artistic occupations, required no attention on his part.
Together with other persons of means and leisure, a corporation was formed under the name Universal Art. The corporation turned over the artistic direction, both in name and fact, to Massine, and he was on his own to choose the policy, the repertoire, and the personnel for a new company.
Ballet in America was on the horns of a dilemma. And so was I.