IT is one of those paradoxes, of which the Russian ballet is rich in examples, that the music of this fragile little poem should be Weber's "Invitation À la Valse," robustly orchestrated by Berlioz. I can imagine how sickly and pale specially written music might have been! The healthy, strong melody, the sound, marked rhythm help to create that sense of the impossible which is the abiding impression of the phantom of the rose.
0056m
Original
How this music pulsates! Its deep expectant breathing increases one's sensation that we are all dreaming—dancers and audience too. Tamar Karsavina, who in other roles shows a nervous force, a tragic power, a strange and luring grace which account even better than her dancing for her triumphant prominence, is so gentle, so modest, so suppliant in the "Spectre de la Rose," that she becomes the incarnation of snow-white youth, dreaming of a heavenly lover. And Nijinsky becomes the spirit of that dream. I feel sorry for that young girl, who perhaps will wake next day in that queer Bakst bedroom, and think of the partner who gave her the rose, not of the Rose itself, who came to her as virginal as the thought which summoned him. I don't like the idea of the remembrance of an ordinary flirtation at a ball walking in at the door of that room, out of whose window the mystical figure of the Rose flew forth into the night, which was, I am sure, day to him!
THE Russian dancers may reasonably pride themselves on their versatility. In their seven-leagued ballet shoes they travel all over the world, and beyond. They bound easily from ancient Greece to a Caucasian camp, from the East of a thousand-and-one nights to a legendary country invented for their playground. It really requires astonishing mental activity to follow them with pleasure from "Le Spectre de la Rose" to "Scheherazade." A symphonic poem of Richard Strauss after a plain-song hymn, or Wagner after Mozart, could not be a greater shock to the system. Everything in "Scheherazade" suggests violence and horror.
0058m
Original
Bakst's palace was built for dreadful deeds; no one, I am sure, could ever feel safe in it. Its color makes it vibrate on its foundations, if indeed it has any foundations. There are bad dreams as well as good ones, and the dream quality, on which I have insisted, so far, as the special beauty of these Russian ballets and mimed poems, is present in "Scheherazade." The strange thing is that this nightmare, in which sensuality and cruelty are the only emotions evoked, has a paradoxical vein of delicacy running through it. There is something almost childlike in the wiles by which the Sultan's wives, when their lord's back is turned, induce the Master Eunuch to liberate the slaves for their pleasure. The infantile joyousness with which the dark-skinned youths rush from their silver and gold cages on their loves and on their impending doom has an element of pity. The whirligig dance which follows expresses exactly the happiness, which is short, sharp and sudden, but over which destiny hangs, and for which there is no mercy. And all the time in this riot of color, this orgy of animation, we never lose sight of the negro who is the chosen of the Sultan's favorite, the negro who half an hour ago in another world was the phantom Rose! His arms, which but now were waving invisible garlands in the serene air, are ready to coil round their prey in a serpentine embrace.
0060m
Original
The lips which gave the innocent kiss of naÏve youth are now twisted in the spasms of desire. Nijinsky in "Scheherazade" is not the incarnation of evil, but its spirit.... His ghastly pallor is terrible.
Really he seems to turn white under his black skin.
0061m
Original
0062m
Original
