The Hamburg Ballett
Hamburg State Opera
September 24 and 25, 2009
by Horst Koegler
copyright @ 2009 by Horst Koegler
In addition to creating new versions of the celebrated models à la “Petrushka”, “Firebird” etc., choreographed originally by Fokine, Nijinsky, Massine, Nijinska and Balanchine, Neumeier´s special interest centered from his very beginnings on the life and artistic career of Nijinsky, which had started when, as a ten-year-old schoolboy, he had discovered in a second hand bookshop back in Milwaukee a tattered volume about the famous dancer. Thus began his life-long what one can only call obsession to collect everything about Nijinsky which he could get hold of, resulting in his assembling the biggest collection of Nijinskiana, consisting of pictures, sculptures, photographs, sketches, writings, letters, books and films in the world, housed in the specially built Hamburg residence of the John Neumeier Foundation.
His very long – 195 minutes – Hamburg programme started with “The Prodigal Son”, competently produced by Patricia Neary. with Alexandre Riabko as protagonist and Anna Laudère as the Siren. Having first seen the ballet on September 4, 1952, at the New York City Ballet´s guest-stint during the West-Berlin Festival. I must admit that I never liked it. In the two programmes the company brought to the city, it stood so completely apart from the rest (“The Four Temperaments”, “The Cage”, “Swan Lake”, “Valses nobles et sentimentales/La Valse”, “Concerto Barocco”, “Firebird” and “Symphony in C”), that I thought it terribly old-fashioned and hammy, in contrast to the other Balanchines (and Robbins), which to my then-25-year-old eyes opened up a new world of dazzling beauty. And that ins pite of André Eglevsky´s brilliant performance of the Son (I don`t remember who danced the Siren on that night – could it have been Yvonne Mounsey?). It was only later when I had read more about Balanchine´s early days in St.Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad and I became aware of how much he had been influenced at that time by Lopukhov and Goleizovsky, that it dawned upon me how much the piece owed to the representatives of the then young Soviet Theatre (the so-called “Theatre Octobre”), to appreciate it as an example of that time. But I never came to really like it, not even in later years with Villella, Barsyhnikov or Nureyev - or now with Riabko as Hamburg´s spitfire protagonist. If I put on my historical spectacles, I find it rather amusing – sort of comic, especially in the scenes with the grotesque revelers, in which I always expect the Siren to get so entangled in her spectacular train to strangle herself.
And so on to “Le Pavillon d´Armide” as the main course of the Russian dinner, announced as ´Ballet by John Neumeier. after Alexandre Benois´, with choreography. stage-décor and costumes by John Neumeier – a veritable calorie bomb of a ballet: the dance is the dance is the dance! And this 65 minutes of it! Choreographed by Michel Fokine it had its first performance at the St. Petersburg Imperial Ballet Academy in 1907 and was taken in the same year into the repertory of the Maryinsky Theatre. It was this production which opened the first Paris season of Diaghilev´s Ballets Russes in 1909. Kirstein has a whole chapter on it in his “Movement & Metapher”.
This started Neumeier´s attempts to create for later Nijinsky Galas (by 2009 they had arrived at number 35) various ballets, trying to evoke the style and/or career of the `God of Dance´ (as Nijinsky had been hailed at his first Parisian appearance, thus declaring him the legitimate heir of Gaetano Vestris). One of the results was a solo piece “Vaslaw”, choreographed for Patrick Dupond to music by Bach in 1980, which materialized as a sort of ´psycho-minidrama´. It proved the germinating cell for his monumental “Nijinsky” full-length production of 2000 as a retrospective of his life, converging in his last recital as a dancer at the St. Moritz Suvretta House in 1919.
The new “Pavillon d´Armide” starts with a sort of prologue, in which we watch a couple, dressed in the fashion of the late twenties, in slow-time movements, many in profile position, crossing the stage portal from left to right. They are obviously on the point of exhaustion, and the man seems on the edge of collapsing, but his wife assists him in his efforts to continue. They are Vaslaw Nijinsky and his wife Romola on their way to Kreuzlingen in Switzerland , where he is expected at the Bellevue sanatorium as a patient to cure his mental disturbances.
I was surprised at once by the atmospheric sounds of Nikolai Tcherepnin´s score - a composer I knew only by name, and which the various dictionaries I had looked up had made me expect an epigone of Rimsky-Korsakov who had been one of his teachers. From the very first moment I was surprised by his colourful instrumentation, beautifully realized (as was the whole programme) by the Hamburg Philharmonic, conducted by Jonathan McPhee. Yes, there were undoubtedly some Rimsky-Korsakow reminiscences (plus some Tchaikovsky and even Wagner), but to me Tcherepnin sounded much more influenced by Glazunov – all those tinkling, music-box like melodies and sweeping waltzes… They held me spellbound through the whole duration of the ballet. Marvelous!
The curtain goes up and we look at a very plain hospital-room, with a huge window, furnished with a bed and on the wall a small reproduction of Benois´ painting of a park with trees and fountains and in the background the spiraled rococo pavilion looking like a mixture of French and Zarskoje architecture. Here the Doctor is nervously waiting for the arrival of the famous patient, who duly appears, accompanied by his wife, and tenderly put to bed. Some nurses enter and the whole atmosphere is of loving care. He falls aleep, but it is a very nervous sleep, he tears away his bed-cloth and starts to fantasize, while the Benois picture extends, transforming into the set, the wall with the window, though, stays put and through it enter his comrades from his school days, flying like the Spirit of the Rose, its direction, though changed from the exterior to the interior room, where they play their innocent games, while we watch in the background students practicing at the barre, among them an obiously specially gifted boy, the young Nijinsky.
A kaleidoscope of scenes follows, seamlessly blending into each other. between the dreariness of the hospital-room and Nijinsky´s real life existence as a poor and wretched creature, lovingly attended by the Doctor, and his remembrances of his dancing days with quotations from his roles as Petrushka, the Faune, in the Danse siamoise, as Solor in “Bayaderka” and so on, culminating in what was once the famous Pas de trois with Nijinsky surrounded by Tamara Karsavina and Alexandra Baldina, but here now enlarged to Pas d´action size, with Karsavina becoming Armide, the enchantress, becoming Romola, trying to seduce her Rinaldo-Nijinsky. It´s a stunning piece of choreographic stagecraft, with the additional involvement of the real (suffering patient) Nijinsky and his starry former ego. I was dumbfounded! Never in my over sixty years of regular theatre visits have I experienced anything comparable like this constant shifting between (supposed – after all it was a theatre-performance) reality and fantasy.
A second scene of sheer theatre magic happens short before the finale with a grandiose duo (pas de deux is too cliché ridden) when the Doctor undertakes a last attempt to bring Nijinsky back to reality by assuming the role of Diaghilev – which reminded me of the photo with Diaghilev, Karsavina and Nijinsky when they met after a London theatre performance in 1928. Alas, it is of no avail and he finally retreats into the night, not before taking off his clothes – transforming into the Holy Fool, which he has written about in his diary – a brother of the Simpleton in “Boris Godunov”.
This gives you just a rough sketch (short-cuts) of the scenes succeeding each other without any break for the ballet´s duration. But there is a lot more. especially the big society scenes, mostly waltzes, performed by elegantly dressed people in black, which I took for the representatives of a dying world, almost like messengers of death on the verge of a catastrophe - a bit like in Ravel´s “La Valse”. It is a true miracle how Neumeier manages the blends, for instance when he cuts from the duet of Solor and Nikya and their dallying with the veil to the Faune, stretching down on the floor and fondling the veil in the famous final pose from “L´après-midi” – outrageously daring, but performed with incredible taste.As is the whole production, its various, even contrasting styles beautifully integrated – but always danced, not once adorned with those clichéd pantomime gestures which are the horror of many modern action ballets. Actually Neumeier seems to have here invented a new vocabulary of dancing eloquence. A miracle – and the salvation of the so often maintained death of the ballet d´action. I do not hesitate to celebrate him as the legitimate heir of Noverre!
And what a company he has built up in the 37 years of his Hamburg reign to match the ´eras´of Bournonville in Copenhague, Petipa in St. Petersburg and Balanchine in “New York. Small wonder that in Hamburg guesting ballet-masters from abroad praise the troupe in the highest tones. And they dance this “Pavillon d´Armide” which in this production becomes the “Pavilion des souvenirs” from ballet-history with the creative energy which seems to have inspired the members of Diaghilev´s Ballets Russes at their Paris debut a century ago. Otto Bubenicek as Nijinsky makes us suffer so that we personally undergo all the vicissitudes of his life, while Alexandre Riabko as his former alter ego catapults us into heights which we had never thought of being able to ascend. As Romola, Karsavina and the enchantress Armide Joelle Boulogne represents just three of the multitude of aspects of the Femme eternelle, which have just one common name: L´amour, with Ivan Urban as the Doctor qualifying as the contemporary Hippokrates, in charge of the soul of his patients. And so one could continue registering the qualities of the performers, taking their technical accomplishments for granted, but admiring them much more for their humanity as dancing acteurs, including Yohan Stegli summing up centuries of Far Eastern culture in his Danse siamoise.
And what next? Well, there is still the fragment of Diaghilev´s 1915 plan for a ballet “Liturgie” on the Russian orthodox mass as a collaboration between Gontcharova, Larionov and Massine, for which Stravinsky was expected to write the music, but which never materialized. So why not perform it to some of his later religious compositions? Or to Rakhmaninov´s “Liturgya svyatovo Ioanna Zltousta” of 1910? Or even better: to commission Galina Ulstvolskaya to specially compose an appropriate Mass (which might ideally supplement Neumeier´s cyclus of religious ballets between Bach´s “St Matthew Passion” and Handel´s “Messiah”? And then there are those fabulous costume designs by G. Pojidajw from Moscow for “The Mask of Red Death”, dating from 1916/17 – couldn´t they inspire a third contribution to what then might be called Neumeier´s Russian trilogy, started so promisingly with the Czechov inspired “The Seagull” and Schnittke´s “Sounds of Empty Pages”?
Anybody wanting to see a performance of “Le Pavillon d´Armide´in the near future might book a flight to St. Petersburg, where the Hamburg Ballet guests with it at the Alexandrinsky Theatre on Octobre 12 and 13.