Death Comes to the Ballets Russes (22 page)

The musicians were now playing a series of popular and patriotic airs, including a rather mangled version of ‘Jerusalem’. Each was greeted with a wave of applause and roars of encouragement.

‘I bet they learnt that on the bloody bus on the way down,’ said Benjie. ‘The footman from inside tells me they’ve hired an actor with a huge voice to be master of ceremonies. He’s going to tell the crowd what each ballet is about before it starts. That way they shouldn’t find it too confusing. My footman friend also told me he’d be able to tell them to shut up if they got out of hand.’

Just before a quarter to three, it was as if a dam had broken by the main gates. A large number of buses from Oxford brought another crowd of ballet lovers, ushered with great care to the seats on the far side of the lake. Picnics were being packed away. A small number of hardy souls came in by the rear gate,
walking sticks in hand, wives and children straggling behind but still in attendance, the little ones frequently carried by a stronger parent.

The trumpets sounded again from the massive front door of Blenheim Palace. Diaghilev, wearing his best coat with astrakhan collar and what might have been a brand new cane, marched out of the main entrance, or waddled in Diaghilev’s case, and led a party of his senior staff towards their position on the bridge. The dancers made up the rear with Nijinsky at the very back. Diaghilev waved happily to the crowds on his route as if he were royalty – which perhaps, for this brief spell in the Oxfordshire countryside, he was. His companions, Benois, Bakst, Nouvel, the entire Diaghilev gang, also waved to the crowds, but without the élan of their master.

‘Go on Diaghilev! You show us mate!’ rang out from the football supporters’ end at the far side of the lake. It was acknowledged with a regal wave from the cane. As they took their places, a final burst of humanity swept through the main gates. The footmen were making valiant efforts to organize the standing sections of the crowd in order of height so everybody would be able to see. On the palace side the crowd were almost level with the path on top of the ridge that led from the end of Woodstock to the palace itself. On the far side they were almost level with the flat ground at the back as well. A couple of enterprising young men had climbed up a tree for a better view.

Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were on the far side of the bridge on the palace side, with a good view of the stage. They could hear the excitement coming from the slopes around the lake.

‘For God’s sake, William, whatever you do, don’t fall asleep. I’ll have nobody to talk to about it afterwards if you do.’

‘Do you think the dancers are going to jump from the musical platform onto their own?’

‘Is it true they’ve got one dancer who could leap from one end of the Palladian bridge to the other?’

‘Have you any idea what they’re going to wear?’

‘Have you ever been to a ballet before? I expect it’ll be like a circus with the humans taking the place of the wild animals.’

At ten to three, accompanied by a fanfare of four trumpets, and with a couple of footmen behind them, the Duke and Duchess, in their finest ceremonial robes, made their way arm in arm to their elevated seat on Vanbrugh’s Palladian bridge. Behind them came a man in a lounge suit, clutching a bundle of notes. The late arrivals were shown unceremoniously to the nearest standing room to the gates they had come through.

‘Who’s that bloke with the notes? Is he another bloody duke?’

‘Can’t be. He’d have the fancy dress on.’

‘Maybe he’s one of Diaghilev’s people.’

‘Shut up, we’ll find out in a minute.’

When the official party reached their seats, they all sat down. Everything seemed to have come to a complete stop. Then the bells of Blenheim Palace and the churches of Woodstock and Blaydon all struck the hour of three, not absolutely simultaneously. The man in the lounge suit stepped onto his podium.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he paused, and said it again as the muttering died down, ‘welcome to Blenheim
Palace. My name is George Foster and I am an actor from London come to act as master of ceremonies.’

It was easy to see why. The man had an enormous voice, easily capable of reaching those by the smaller gate and the football crowd on the opposite bank.

‘Let me thank, first and foremost on this glorious afternoon, the Duke and his good lady.’

Lucy Powerscourt nudged her husband in the ribs, ‘No “Her Grace”, not even today.’

‘It is thanks to their good offices,’ the master of ceremonies went on, ‘that Monsieur Diaghilev and his people are here today.’

‘Not to mention the twenty-five thousand pounds,’ Powerscourt whispered back.

‘I’m sure you all know that the Ballets Russes have already made one prodigious journey, from St Petersburg to Paris and London. They have taken another shorter journey to be here with us today.’

Foster paused and looked down at his notes. The crowd were completely silent now. ‘As most of you know, Monsieur Diaghilev and his ballet do not speak English. Let us, however, give them a very warm welcome to the heart of Oxfordshire this afternoon. And let us thank them for coming.’

Foster raised his hands as if conducting the entire crowd. Waves of applause rang out.

‘Welcome to Oxfordshire,’ they shouted.

‘Thank you for coming.’

Only one voice from the football end struck a discordant note. ‘Get on with it, mate! Bring on the naked women!’

Now George Foster turned to his right towards the palace. That seemed to be a signal. A group of footmen,
stagehands and scene shifters carried a very ornate couch across a bridge of boats and placed it carefully at the very back of the ballet stage.

Foster waved a hand at the musicians. There was a long roll of drums.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, all the way from St Petersburg, the capital of Russia, I give you: the Ballets Russes!’

Jeté

Jeté
is a jump from one foot to the other similar to a leap, in which one leg appears to be ‘thrown’ in the direction of the movement (
en avant
,
en arrière
or sideways). There are several kinds of
jetés
, such as
petit jeté
,
grand jeté
,
en tournant
,
jeté entrelacé
,
etc.

‘Our apologies, first of all, to those of you who might have seen this first ballet at the Royal Opera House. Mr Diaghilev felt that it suits the setting here particularly well.

‘So we begin today with the story of Thamar, Queen of Georgia, who rules her country in somewhat unorthodox ways. We see her first at her leisure. Then she orders a dance to lure a wandering Prince to her high castle. They dance together. They seem to fall in love. But they don’t. Thamar the Georgian Queen is played by Tamara Karsavina and the Prince by Alfred Bolm.’

Foster sat down. A small procession of ballerinas, accompanied by the Georgian Queen, made their way
onto the stage. The pale, brooding Queen languished on her couch as her maids began a dance to rouse her. Karsavina’s clothes were a dark melange of Eastern promise, her dark-brown eyebrows a bewitching glimpse of Eastern beauty. Roused from her slumbers, she too joined the dance and waved a scarf out over the lake to entice a passing suitor.

The music rose to a crescendo as her suitor was ushered onto the stage from a bridge of boats. Alfred Bolm was brought forward to greet the Queen by two of her attendants. The Prince, her suitor, was lured in by the music and the dancing attendants; he wore a conical cap of astrakhan, a thick scarf wound round his neck and a great black cloak draped around him. With regal dignity and a smiling glance full of Eastern promise, the Queen advanced to greet him. The music swelled again as they drew close and her hands, half eagerly and half in a kind of caress, darted to his throat to loosen his scarf and show his face. The Queen summoned assistance to welcome her guest, and here Powerscourt realized how well Diaghilev’s people had made use of the scenery. As she stamped her foot on the floor, two troupes of four guards, clad in Cossack uniform of red jackets with black trousers and long black boots, made their way onto the stage from the further end of the Palladian bridge.

They began a wild Caucasian dance, a blur of tossing sleeves and flashing boots. The men danced with a dagger in their right hand, whirling it up and down in a circular movement, then hurling it into the floor and leaping over it to drag out the quivering dagger and throwing it down once more. The daggers hit the floor with a thud that could be heard in the palace itself.

‘Told you it would be like the bloody circus,’ whispered a cynic a few rows in front of Powerscourt.

‘Shut up! For once in your bloody life, just shut up!’

Two more guards crossed the little pontoon to wave their swords at the dancers’ feet and make them leap even higher.

Bolm, the Prince, now performed a solitary dance to attract this Georgian Queen. It consisted of a series of leaps, each one higher than the last, one arm raised vertically above his head, his body arched like a string bow. As the dance ended, the Queen kissed her suitor on the lips and sped ashore, pursued by the Prince.

Some of the audience began muttering at this point, but the music was swelling louder and louder to tell that the end had not yet come. From opposite sides of the bridge, the Queen and her lover reappeared, the Prince staggering and gasping as he made his way back on stage. Then the Queen manoeuvred him right to the end of one of the wooden tongues that led to the pontoon. She too was menacing and wild-eyed. She slipped an arm around his neck, drew back his head and stabbed him in the chest.

A couple of the Caucasian dancers carried the body off stage, fake blood now dripping from his heart. The music stopped and the dancers bowed to the audience. Bolm, making a rapid recovery, slipped away from his guards and made his return to the stage.

Waves of applause and cheers rang out across the grounds of Blenheim Palace. Even the policemen were applauding. The football crowd were on their feet and shouting for more. There were cries of ‘Bravo!’ and ‘Well done!’ And a small boy, just next to Powerscourt, asked his mother, ‘Is that man really dead?’

‘Our second ballet,’ George Foster repeated himself so his vast booming voice reached the farthest reaches of the lake, ‘is set in ancient Greece at the shrine of Pomona, the goddess of fruit trees. The shrine is a wooded glade, rather smaller than here,’ he smiled at his own witticism, ‘where a spring feeds into a glassy pool. The story is of Narcissus.’

At this point Nijinsky pirouetted his way across the bridge of boats and bowed to the audience. ‘A beautiful and self-indulgent young man, who spurns the advances of the beautiful mountain-nymph Echo.’ Tamara Karsavina followed Nijinsky across the pontoon onto the stage and the huge pool of water surrounding it.

‘Echo appeals to the goddess to send her a bacchante, a young woman with spells, to make Narcissus fall in love with her. Under the spell of the bacchante,’ Nijinsky’s sister, Nijinska was to join the stage a little later, ‘he does fall in love; but not how Echo wanted.’

Echo was dressed in a violet robe, decorated with silver leaves, her hair loose and hanging down her back. The bacchante danced, sometimes holding a beaker of wine in one hand and a wine cup in the other, and sometimes playing with a red scarf that she held extended above her hands. All was in vain. Narcissus Nijinsky, now gazing at his reflection on one side of the lake, now on the other, now facing the bridge, now facing the town gate, was falling in love with one person only: himself. At the close he sank slowly onto his knees and leant over into the water, in love with his own reflection, eventually falling back in a sort of swoon.

‘Bravo Nijinsky,’ the football crowd hailed him as if he had just scored a hat-trick in a vital cup game.

‘Bravo!’

Sections of the audience rose to their feet to cheer. On stage the Duke was seen to rise and join the cheering.

The third ballet was to have the most dramatic denouement of them all.

The audience were settling themselves back down on their cushions or on the grass or shifting from foot to foot if they were standing. Many were still discussing the ballet they had just seen. George Foster had them in the palm of his hand now.

‘Our last ballet has a title that says it all.
The Spirit of the Rose
. A young girl, played by Tamara Karsavina, returns to her bedroom dressed in a white bonnet and ball gown. She has come home from her first ball. She holds a rose as a souvenir of the evening. She drops into a chair and falls asleep. The rose falls from her fingers to the floor. The Spirit of the Rose, Nijinsky, is seen at the window. He steps onto the floor and nears the young girl. Still asleep, she rises and dances with him. He leads her back to the chair, kisses her, then leaps through the window and into the night. The girl awakes and rises. She picks up the rose she dropped and kisses it. The curtain falls.’

The musicians began their romantic tunes and George Foster resumed his narration. ‘The young girl walks slowly into the room and takes off her cloak. Underneath she is wearing white crinoline. She sinks into a chair and looks affectionately at her lover’s gift, a red rose. She presses it to her lips, as though remembering the dances with her lover, which now seem so far away. As she relives her memories, her eyelids begin to droop and she falls asleep. The rose slips and the petals stain the floor.’

It was not the football section of the crowd but a different group on the opposite side who, as Powerscourt remarked to Lady Lucy later, must have been more accustomed to the world of panto.

‘Look behind you! Look behind you for heaven’s sake!’

The music changed. To an infectious whirl of rhythm, Nijinsky, curled up like a ball on the tongue behind the girl, rose to his feet and launched himself into the space in front of her. He was wearing rose-coloured tights and a cap and tunic of rose petals. He spun slowly round and passed his hands over the girl’s head, as if summoning her back by some magical movement. Then he drew her from her chair as though she were guided towards him by some magnetic force, and led her into an ever-quickening waltz. Round and round they went, faster and faster, the audience beginning to clap in unison to the tune of the music. Then he returned the girl to her chair and danced to the opposite end of the room. He leapt out of the stage onto one of the tongues, took two steps forward and dived full length into the lake.