St Petersburg полностью

But from Balanchine’s friend Slonimsky we know that the Dmitriev group gradually grew disenchanted with Goleizovsky. Another comparatively brief surge of interest came for the dance experiments of two other Muscovites—Lev Lukin (who, like Goleizovsky, choreographed erotic numbers to avant-garde music like Prokofiev’s “Sarcasms”) and Nikolai Foregger. Resembling the film actor Harold Lloyd in his horn-rimmed glasses, the tranquil and elegant Foregger gained fame as a creator of “mechanical dances,” or “dances of machines,” in which the performers imitated the work of complex, fantastic mechanisms. The lasting impressions from Foregger’s productions undoubtedly were reflected later in Balanchine’s Prodigal Son, with music by Prokofiev, which was premiered by the Diaghilev company in Paris in 1929.

But Balanchine soon had a new idol—the Petrograd choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov. Slonimsky wrote,

The revolution brought Lopukhov out of anonymity. If not for the revolution, Lopukhov would have perished in the stifling atmosphere and stagnation of the imperial theater of the early twentieth century.100

In 1922, when it became clear that Fokine, who had emigrated to the West, would not return to the Maryinsky Theater, Lopukhov became the artistic director of the ballet troupe. An enthusiast and dreamer always in pursuit of one idea or another, Lopukhov tried to involve the whole company in his bold experiments:

In the evenings, at the theater, he got into fierce arguments with young people in the artists’ box or sat backstage on a stepladder like a huddled, skinny bird, and reacted violently to what was happening: approving some, encouraging others, ruthlessly criticizing those who made even trifling mistakes.101

Lopukhov, whose sister, Lydia, was a star in the Diaghilev ballet and married the famous economist Lord Keynes, was a quintessential Petersburg avant-gardist, that is, the desire “to change everything” coexisted within him with a profound respect for the old masters, especially Petipa, whom Lopukhov adored. Lopukhov began his career as head of the Maryinsky ballet with a revival of the Petipa-Tchaikovsky Sleeping Beauty, and the following year he revived The Nutcracker. He introduced some changes in both productions, and the debates about the suitability of those changes polarized Petrograd’s ballet world.

Balanchine naturally sided with Lopukhov. Besides, even the head of Mir iskusstva, Benois, wrote an article called “Piety or Sacrilege,” reflecting the heat of the debate, in which he announced that the old ballets must not be treated like “embalmed remains.” Benois, a passionate fan of Sleeping Beauty, had been rather pleased: Lopukhov’s pastiches were so close to the original that to this day some of them (for instance, the Lilac Fairy’s variations) are performed throughout the world as the work of Petipa himself.

Volynsky, who plotted in vain to have Lopukhov dismissed from his position in order to take his place, responded to Lopukhov’s revisions of Petipa’s ballets with a vitriolic article entitled “Lousy House Painter,” referring to Pushkin’s famous lines:

It’s not funny, when a lousy house painter

Ruins Raphael’s Madonna for me.

Volynsky spewed forth even greater invective over Lopukhov’s Grandeur of the Universe, to the music of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony—a unique attempt at a new ballet genre, which the choreographer called tantssimfonia (dance symphony). Lopukhov’s idea, which he had started to work on in 1916, was that the leading elements of ballet should be the classic dance in its most intricate and complex form, based on great symphonic music without resorting to what Lopukhov considered distracting literary plots, elaborate scenery, and sumptuous costumes. Balanchine later introduced similar asceticism in his New York productions.

Lopukhov began rehearsing his tantssimfonia in the summer of 1922 with a group of young enthusiasts that included Balanchine, Danilova, and Pyotr Gusev. His production brought out, to the music of Beethoven’s opening adagio, eight young men bathed in blue light, who slowly walked past the viewers, one hand covering their eyes, the other extended forward. A chain of eight young women followed the men. Lopukhov explained that this symbolized “The Birth of Light.” Then came “The Birth of the Sun.” Later in tantssimfonia Lopukhov commented on the idea of evolution with rather abstract dance patterns of the “Pithecanthropuses,” “Butterflies,” and “Birds.” The Grandeur of the Universe ended with “Perpetuum Mobile,” in which all the participants, now in red light, formed a spiral symbolizing the universe.