Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [217]
In 1908 in Paris the Russian Ballet company of Sergei Diaghilev burst like a gorgeous tropical bird upon the Western world. Its season was a triumph of wild throbbing exotic splendor, another “flash of lightning out of the North.” Instead of the tired routines of classical ballet it brought fresh excellence of music by contemporary Russian composers, new librettos, imaginative choreography and brilliant modern stage design, all assembled like a bed of jewels to set off a blaze of dancing that was virile and superb. The male dancer was the star, no longer a mere porteur to lift the ballerina, but a wind who brought vitality and zest sweeping onto the stage. Above all the rest was one, Vaslav Nijinsky. When he appeared with an astonishing leap into the air and seemed almost to pause there, people felt the excitement of perfection and knew they were seeing the greatest ballon dancer who ever lived. He was an angel, a genius, an Apollo of motion. He took possession of all hearts. The whole ensemble took Paris by storm. Devotees predicted the downfall of opera. “It was as if,” wrote the Comtesse de Noailles, “something new had been added to the creation of the world on its seventh day.”
New movements in the arts were erupting everywhere. At the Salon d’Automne in 1905 and 1906 the Fauves (Wild Beasts) led by Matisse exhibited in riotous color and distorted line their credo of painting independent of nature. In 1907–8 Picasso and Braque, discovering essential reality in geometrical forms, created Cubism. In its terms Léger celebrated the machine and a train of other artists followed. In Germany the new idea broke out in a school of Expressionists who searched for emotional impact through exaggeration or distortion of nature. Two Americans broke old molds: Frank Lloyd Wright at home and Isadora Duncan, who, touring Europe in the years 1904–8, introduced emotion into the dance. Rodin, speaking for his own métier but voicing a new goal for all the arts, had already said, “Classical sculpture sought the logic of the human body; I seek its psychology.” Seeking it too, Marcel Proust in 1906 shut himself up in a cork-lined room to embark upon Remembrance of Things Past. Thomas Mann took up the search in Death in Venice. In Bloomsbury, Lytton Strachey prepared a new kind of biography. The Moscow Art Theatre demonstrated a new kind of acting. The Irish Renaissance flowered in Yeats and in J. M. Synge, who in Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World proved himself the only writer since Shakespeare to produce an equally fine tragedy and comedy. The time vibrated with a search for new forms and new realms. When on July 25, 1909, Blériot flew the Channel, confirming what the Wrights had begun, he seemed to mark a wiping out of frontiers, and everyone in Europe felt in his triumph “a soaring of feelings no less wonderful than that of the planes.”
All the fever and fecundity of the hour seemed captured by the Russian Ballet. That it should come out of Imperial Russia, considered at once barbaric and decrepit, was as surprising as had been the summons to disarmament by the Czar. A great interest in things Russian aroused by the Franco-Russian Alliance and the Exposition of 1900 had inspired the enterprising Diaghilev to bring an exhibition of Russian art to Paris in 1906. Paintings and sculpture, ikons, priestly brocades and the jeweled marvels of Fabergé lent by the Imperial and private collections and by museums filled twelve rooms under the patronage of the Grand Duke Vladimir, Ambassador Izvolsky of Russia and Mme Greffulhe. The next year Diaghilev brought Russian music in a series of dazzling concerts with Rimsky-Korsakov conducting his own work, Rachmaninoff playing his own piano concerto, Josef Hofmann playing a concerto by Scriabine, and the magnificent basso Chaliapin singing excerpts from Borodin’s Prince Igor and Moussorgsky