St Petersburg полностью

The first thing Diaghilev asked Balanchine after his dancers had shown the veteran impresario a few of the numbers they had brought from Russia was this: could the young choreographer quickly stage dances for opera? Balanchine replied without hesitation in the affirmative. And so Diaghilev established easy working relations with Balanchine based not on favoritism but mutual trust. The source of the trust was the Petersburg culture both men shared, which overcame differences in age, status, and sexual orientation.

Boris Kochno, in those years one of Diaghilev’s closest aides, recalled his impression that Balanchine had appeared before the skeptical impresario pretty much formed as an artist, with his own understanding of music and its choreographic potential. Diaghilev’s early misapprehension disappeared quickly. A particularly pleasant surprise for him was Balanchine’s firm grasp of Stravinsky’s music. Balanchine’s choreographic debut in the Diaghilev seasons was the ballet Nightingale’s Song, to music by Stravinsky, which he knew well; in Petrograd Balanchine had participated in Meyerhold’s rehearsals for Stravinsky’s opera The Nightingale, from which the music for the ballet came.

Balanchine’s early understanding of Stravinsky’s music was the result of many influences. Balanchine was familiar with Stravinsky’s ballets Firebird and Petrouchka from the Maryinsky. But the composer’s symphonic and chamber works were often played in Petrograd in the early twenties; Stravinsky’s emigre status at that time was not yet enough to remove his works from the repertoire.

Stravinsky’s ardent admirers were Balanchine’s friends. Watching Vsevolodsky’s experiments in Russian folklore prepared Balanchine for an innovative, “defamiliarized” interpretation of that same folklore by Stravinsky in his Les Noces and Renard. Finally, in the early twenties Balanchine had choreographed a number to Stravinsky’s Ragtime, and just before leaving Petrograd he had started working on his Pulcinella. Thus, his involvement in Stravinsky’s music of various periods and genres was a professional one, from the inside.

Balanchine’s background, aesthetic inclinations, and temperament prepared him well for becoming Stravinsky’s ideal collaborator. Their first important joint effort was the ballet Apollon Musagète for Diaghilev in Paris in 1928. This ballet, with its mythological story of three muses, Calliope, Polyhymnia, and Terpsichore, competing for the attention of their leader, the young god Apollo, was used as a pretext for the music and choreography that corresponded to it ideally—outwardly restrained but dramatic in its peculiarly linear way; with hindsight it seems like an ideal manifesto of the neoclassical movement between the two world wars. Neoclassicism flourished then in Germany, Italy, France, and the United States, but the émigrés from Petrograd played a special role in its development.

Paul Valery and T. S. Eliot had expressed important ideas for classicism, and by 1915 Picasso was drawing in the style of Ingres. For Picasso, however, this was only temporary, as were many of his enthusiasms. Stravinsky’s neoclassical period lasted no fewer than thirty years, from the early twenties to the early fifties. And the most loyal ally of Stravinsky for that entire period was Balanchine, whom the composer esteemed highly as a refined musician and unique interpreter of his compositions.

Many historians link the appearance of neoclassicism with the aftershocks of World War I, when people tried to find a haven from the dislocation in an art that was clear, balanced, and majestic. Russian refugees from the Bolsheviks in Europe reacted acutely to the perceived triumph of barbarism and the collapse of the world order.

Petrograd culture tended toward neoclassicism even before the revolution; for example, there was a strong classicist tendency inside Mir iskusstva. The manifestoes of the acmeists in the years before World War I called for simplicity, clarity, precision, and economy in the selection of words; many of the poems of Kuzmin, Gumilyov, and Mandelstam were quintessentially classical. Before the revolution this orientation was presumed to be primarily aesthetic, with reference to Petersburg traditions. After the Bolshevik seizure of power the political underpinnings of neoclassicism suddenly became much clearer.