Lopukhov did not try to use dance to illustrate literary concepts. He was inspired primarily by Beethoven’s music and followed the unfolding of the large symphonic canvas, creating parallels and counterpoint to it through bold, abstract movements. Balanchine used some of Lopukhov’s innovative ideas in his first American ballet, Serenade, which eventually won immense popularity.
Tantssimfonia had a different fate. It was shown only twice—first in September 1922 in the rehearsal hall of the Maryinsky Theater for specially invited colleagues and friends and then on March 7, 1923, at a benefit for the corps de ballet, after Swan Lake. Besieged by doubts, Lopukhov wrote in the margins of his libretto, “Won’t there be even one person who understands me?”
He could have found the answer to this bitter question at rehearsal, where Balanchine, enthralled by the avant-garde concepts of his mentor, enthusiastically explained to the worried dancers how best to realize the choreographer’s innovations. One of the participants in tantssimfonia recalled, “All the rehearsal work, all the finishing and detailing was done by the performers. Lopukhov would come and just sit there happily, observing the embodiment of his dream … he burned, glowed, and was as pleased by every successful trifle as a child.”102
Dmitriev’s group came to the closed viewing of The Grandeur of the Universe, in which Balanchine had taken such an active part, in full complement and supported Lopukhov vociferously. At the ensuing discussion, Petrograd’s leading avant-garde critics, Asafyev and Sollertinsky, both recognized the immense importance of tantssimfonia. But at the performance for the regular audience of the Maryinsky Theater, the reaction was just the opposite: “Instead of the usual roar of applause, there was deathly silence. The audience did not applaud, or laugh, or boo—it was silent.”103 Lopukhov’s political enemies took advantage of this failure, and The Grandeur of the Universe vanished from the repertoire.
Sollertinsky tried to excuse the lack of success of Universe with the mass audience as follows: “The form seemed too abstract and scholarly; the added-on murky metaphysics with cosmic circles and world hierarchy completely mixed up the viewers.”104 Sollertinsky insisted that compared with the experimentation of Fokine, Lopukhov’s work had made an important step forward:
As opposed to the intuitive Fokine, Lopukhov is a rationalist to his bone marrow. Starting off with a music score, Fokine was inspired by its pathos and emotional flight. Lopukhov, on the contrary, takes it apart to the smallest units, and carefully invents appropriate primary choreographic movements for them.105
This could just as well be an analysis of Balanchine’s future productions in New York.
To explain the lasting influence of The Grandeur of the Universe on Balanchine’s work, it is important to understand that Lopukhov, as opposed to Goleizovsky, continued to use classical dance. In the work of Lopukhov, even when he was introducing heretofore unheard-of acrobatic tricks into ballet, the general silhouette of the dance remained Petersburgian: severe, finished, elegant. That is why some Russian dance historians consider Lopukhov’s Grandeur of the Universe the first neoclassical production in ballet theater.
In review of the post-premiere discussion of the tantssimfonia, the author’s speech was summarized: “Lopukhov believes that this idea will not die.”106 That faith was not unwarranted; Yuri Slonimsky, the Dmitriev’s group leading theoretician, later recalled, “The tantssimfonia became the main stimulus in the life of the younger generation, and personally in Balanchivadze’s. Other Lopukhov productions too. The revival of the complete Sleeping Beauty, too.”107 But it was a long way to that belated admission, and when it came, Lopukhov was merely a shadow of his idealistic, energetic, and prophetic young self.
The persecution began right after the premiere of the tantssimfonia. The attack was headed, alas, by Volynsky, who began his devastating review of The Grandeur of the Universe this way: “Once a promising staff scribbler dreamed of the grandeur of the universe,” and so on in that mocking tone. Furious, Balanchine retaliated with a review of the graduating concert of a private ballet school headed by Volynsky. In the fashion of the times, Balanchine used a literary allusion in his title, filled with heavy irony: “The junior officer’s widow, or How A. L. Volynsky whips himself” (a reference to a character in Gogol’s comedy The Inspector General). Balanchine was no less sarcastic than his foe Volynsky; he described the students of the school as “provincially saccharine shop clerks with pretensions to solo roles.”
