The Atlantic Serial: Sergei Diaghilev

7

DIAGHILEV had never written a single piece of music, yet he knew more music, and in a way more about music, than many an erudite musician. Since his early youth he had developed a voracious appetite for all kinds of music — light and serious, old and new, romantic and classical. As a result of this profuse and polyglot diet he had accumulated a vast store of data (he knew a staggering number of compositions of various styles and historical periods) and had acquired a professional’s grasp of musical techniques. What was quite exceptional in his knowledge was its intuitive, its immediate aspect; after hearing a new work only once he was able to make up his mind unhesitatingly and appraise the specific qualities or defects of the work with masterful precision.

I remember arguing with him about my own ballet after I had played it for him for the first time in the midsummer of 1927. The subject of the ballet was taken from a poem—an “Ode to the Majesty of God on the Occasion of the Appearance of the Great Northern Lights”—by the eight - eenth-century court poet and physicist Mikhail Lomonossov (referred to in Russia as the “father of Russian science”). It is a famous example of Russian didactic and “encyclopedist ” court poetry inspired by French and German examples. Written in the flamboyant and archaic Russian of that period, it represents a thinly veiled allegory on the enthronement of Empress Elizabeth - the Aurora Borealis of the poem.

Diaghilev, of course, knew the poem and liked its oddly baroque metaphors and its resonant language (although normally he was quite indifferent to poetry); but chiefly what pleased him in it was its reference to Empress Elizabeth. According to a rumor (which he may well have started himself) Diaghilev was, on his mother’s side, a descendant of Elizabeth — a great-great-grandson of one of the Empress’s natural children. He was flattered by this illicit relationship to the Imperial house of Russia; it made him a direct descendant of Peter the Great, and gave him a kind of “morganatic” halo. There was, in effect, a slight physical resemblance between him and the puffy-faced daughter of Russia’s first Emperor. As for Diaghilev’s character, what could be more like that of the dynamic, quick-tempered, and despotic Peter?

But quite apart from this, Diaghilev liked the whole idea of a Russian “period piece.” Boris Kochno - Diaghilev’s secretary and official librettist - and I concocted a two-act ballet libretto, the second act of which was supposed to represent the “Feast of the Northern Lights”—in other words, the coronation of Empress Elizabeth. I had written a short introduction to this second act; Diaghilev wanted a longer and more “ample” one. He objected to my introduction and called it a “meager pot of Conservatory porridge.” I felt hurt, and defended myself by saying that the way I had written it was right, that it was a good fugato in the style of the eighteenth-century French overtures. Diaghilev smiled mockingly and replied, “Maybe, mon cher, it is a fugato, maybe even a fugue, but it certainly isn’t any good. You know I don’t really care whether you write a fugue or a fugato, a French or a Brazilian overture; what matters is that you write good music.” He concluded, “This goes equally for Richard Strauss and the waltz-Strauss, for Bach and Offenbach. It is a simple but a very golden rule.”

On another occasion I remember him discussing a new ballet score by a young protégé of Prokofiev. Prokofiev, Diaghilev, and I had just finished listening to it in the rehearsal room of the Monte Carlo theatre. Diaghilev was in one of his most explosive moods; he ranted and shouted at Prokofiev, “How can you like this, Seryoja? Don’t you see that it’s dribble? It’s stupid, it’s dull; worse than that, it’s ecly and slimy; it sounds like Arensky. There is only one page of it that seems acceptable. Here, give it to me.” He took the score out of Prokofiev’s hands and started to turn the pages angrily. “Here it is. You see . . . this melody. It’s the only piece of light in this dusty piece; but unfortunately it only lasts five measures.”

Many years later Prokofiev and I played that piece over again; it was utterly inept and dull. When we came to the page which Diaghilev had pointed out, Prokofiev muttered, “Damn it, Diaghilev was right. This is certainly very ‘dusty’ stuff.”

1 remember the way Diaghilev listened to a new work, always earnest and respectful. If he liked it, he would discuss it page by page and point by point, and make you play sections of it over and over again. If, on the contrary, he did not like the piece, his face would immediately take on a sour and worn expression; he would look bored and sleepy. As soon as the composer had finished playing, Diaghilev would thank him with that icy, exaggerated politeness with which French seigneurs brushed off importune commoners, and leave the room without saying another word. Sometimes he would interrupt in the middle of the performance and shout, “Wait, wait! Play that over again!” And having heard it once more, he would say, “This comes straight from the tenor aria of X’s opera.” If you disagreed, or said that you did not know the opera or the particular passage, he would order one of his minions to get the score, and then he would make you play the aria. He was usually correct; the measures he had pointed out and the aria would bear a noticeable resemblance. His remarks about music were always clever and penetrating and revealed a profound understanding of the particular characteristics of certain composers.

I once arrived unnoticed in the apartment of Missia Sert (the wife of the Spanish painter) and found Diaghilev at the piano, with his glasses on, painstakingly deciphering Davidsbuendler by Schumann. When I asked him why he was playing this particular piece, he said, “I always wonder what makes Schumann’s music hold together. Look how he repeats and repeats the same phrase,” and he started playing the third part of the piece very slowly and clumsily. “And yet, you see, it is never dull. It is filled with a peculiar kind of lyric nervousness. Of course, I am only talking about his piano music; his symphonies are at times terribly dull and boringly repetitious.” He looked at the music again and added pensively, “Schumann’s music is best when it is played in a very small room with no people in it at all, when it is just between you and him.”

8

IT sometimes seemed to outsiders (and even to some of his collaborators) that Diaghilev’s taste for music was too eclectic, too lacking the indispensable “positive partisanship” to make a real dent in the annals of music history. It is true that the musical inventory of his ballet company for the twenty-five years of its existence represents a remarkable mélange. It is a hodgepodge of styles, of musical traditions, and of aesthetic attitudes. In it, you jump from the musical perfection of Stravinsky’s Les Noces or his Apollo down to the grotesque inanities of a score like Cleopatra (an Egyptian extravaganza of about 1909-1910 made up of stale tidbits from the music of eight-odd Russian composers) and from the admirable pages of Prokofiev’s moving and profoundly lyrical Prodigal Son to the banalities of Georges Auric’s Pastorale.

This lack of a specific line in the choice of music was quite disconcerting at times and made one think of Diaghilev as a kind of director of a musical zoo, as someone who wanted to own every species of animal under the sun from the platypuses to the pandas. Yet Diaghilev had a very definite personal musical taste, different from, if not contrary to, those of some of his younger contemporaries.

During one of my last conversations with him in the winter of 1928, he vituperated against the light and easy musiquette of young Parisian composers. “All this fake little music,” he shouted, “doesn’t mean anything at all. I’ve had enough of it. Merci! I can have a ballet by X every year, and next year it will be as stale as an old blin (Russian pancake]. Only the snobs and les limités [a favorite expression of his] like that. No, no. There is no one now who has le souffle, l’élan of Wagner, of Tchaikovsky, or of Verdi — those were real, fullblooded, great men.”

“But Sergei Pavlovitch,” I asked, “what about Stravinsky and Prokofiev? And what about your new ‘discovery,’ Paul Hindemith?” (He had just commissioned Hindemith to write him a ballet.)

“Hindemith . . . yes, probably he is good . . . perhaps very good . . . but we’ll hear him and judge him next year.”

To Diaghilev a contemporary composer existed only by virtue of his having written music for the Ballet Russe. His peculiar egocentricity and megalomania made it seem that a composer who had not written for his ballet company was a composer whom he did not want, either because he considered his music bad or because the composer had not come around to be given a commission. Even if this were not the case, he wanted it always to appear as if he had “discovered" his composer, which in the case of Hindemith (who by then was already a famous man) seemed particularly comical.

“And Stravinsky?" I asked.

“Stravinsky is a great composer . . . the greatest of our time: even the stupid British critics have learned their lesson and know that Stravinsky’s greatness is a settled issue. To me, however, his best works are those of the beginning, those which he wrote before Pulcinella; I mean Petrouchka, Le Sacre, Les Noces. This does not imply that I don’t admire Oedipus Rex and adore Apollo; both are classically beautiful and technically perfect. Who else can write like that nowadays? But you see - ” He stopped abruptly and changed the subject. “You were speaking about Prokofiev?" he said in the tone of a man who is answering his own question. “Yes, of course, his Prodigal Son is in its way a masterpiece; it has a lyrical quality new to Prokofiev, and what is particularly good about it is that it is his own and no one else’s.”He underscored each word by knocking the floor with his cane. “Have vou heard it?" he continued. “Did he play it for you?" And without waiting for an answer he said, “You know, Prokofiev is furious at me for wanting to cut a few pages. Did he speak to you about it ?”

Few things seemed to give Diaghilev more pleasure than to make cuts in a new score; it was a kind of delightful ritual with him, and he surrounded the “operation" with exquisite politeness and princely formalities. Usually he would invite the composer to lunch; then, using all his charms, he would tell the story of how he cut eighteen pages of RimskyKorsakov’s Schéhérazade and x pages of Richard Strauss’s Joseph’s Legend. After reciting a list of equally famous musical appendectomies, he would finally come to the point. “Don’t you think,”he would say, “that the second act of your ballet is too long? Don’t you think it should be cut?" And before you could say yes or no, one of his helpers would hand him the score and he would point to the spot he wanted cut, saying, “I looked at it carefully yesterday and I think the cuts should be made here and here . . . don’t you agree?" All the questions in this speech were purely rhetorical and, together with the unusually sumptuous lunch, provided the preparatory anesthetic before the inevitable operation.

“Few composers today,” Diaghilev went on, “have Prokofiev’s gift of inventing personal melodies, and even fewer have a genuine flair for a fresh use of simple tonal harmonies. You know, Prokofiev has never fallen prey to all such rubbish as atonality, polytonality, and ‘tout ce fatras de l’Europe Centrale.' He is much too talented and much too genuine for that. He doesn’t need to hide behind inane theories and absurd noises. His nostrils are big and open; he is not afraid of breathing fresh air wherever he finds it. He does not have to sit in cluttered rooms and invent theories. But even in Prokofiev’s music there is a lack. I don’t know what it is, but something is incomplete . . . some measure of greatness is absent.”

Yet it appears that during the last days of Diaghilev’s life, in a hotel room on the Lido, he returned completely to the musical passions of his adolescence. He spoke with excitement and fervor of the greatness of Wagner’s Parsifal and Tristan and the majestic splendor of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and he hummed the familiar tunes of his beloved Pathétique of Tchaikovsky.

These, then, were the true musical loves of Diaghilev throughout his life. He certainly admired and loved classical music, but his unswerving devotion went to the massive works of the masters of the Romantic period; it was their art which had formed his taste and in many ways molded his approach to music.

9

THE Gare de Lyon was crowded and noisy when in the early days of April, 1928, I boarded a second-class car of the 21.30 o’clock rapide - “Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Vintimille.” I always enjoyed the immutable ritual of French departures. The bustle and confusion, the fight for porters and window seats, the squeeze through the narrow corridors of railroad cars, and the little game of deception (in which I always participated) which most French travelers play when they try to prevent a late-comer from getting a seat by covering all the available space with their own bags, bundles, coats, and lunch boxes. Russians and Frenchmen have at least these things in common: both are addicts of the pagaille (mess and bustle) of departures and both travel with thousands of pieces of the most eccentric-looking luggage.

But on that damp and foggy April evening of 1928 the whole ritual of departure seemed doubly pleasant to me. I was traveling second class (instead of third), I was going to Monte Carlo at Diaghilev’s invitation and expense, and I was going to work there on the production of my ballet — my first commission, my first important work. “Tomorrow,”I said to myself, “I shall be walking on the warm, crackling gravel of the jetée du Casino, the promontory behind the Casino, looking at the gentle carpet of the Mediterranean and the equally gentle silky sky. Tomorrow will begin my collaboration with the most famous artistic enterprise of Europe.”

I felt exhilarated and proud. I thought of the talks and discussions I should have with Diaghilev and his associates, with the many composers, painters, poets, and choreographers who would be in Monte Carlo at the time Diaghilev was preparing his new productions for the coming Parisian season. I thought of working with Léonide Massine and Pavel Tchelitchev, whom Diaghilev had selected to do the choreography and the décor for my ballet; I imagined the excitement of rehearsals, the pleasure of seeing my composition take shape and form.

Valichka Nouvel, Diaghilev’s lifelong friend and collaborator, had come to the station to see me off. He gave me the name of the hotel I was to go to in Monte Carlo and handed me a check - the second installment of my ballet commission. “Don’t you get in a row with him,”he said with a smile, “and come back in despair. It has happened, you know.” But I was not going to let it happen; I was sure that everything was going to work out well and that by the time I returned to Paris the ballet would be spick-and-span for its Parisian première.

Night trips in French coaches both soft and hard are a delight to those who love comedy; there is always a funny face or a comic scene in store for you. But to those whose legs are long, whose nostrils are sensitive, and who believe in the use of soap and water they represent an acute and intense discomfort . The average Gallic stature is no more than five and a half feet; hence the benches in French railroad cars are painfully low and narrow. As soon as the train pulls out of the station, one of your seven-odd companions — so often a determinedlooking mother of a brood of fidgety children — is sure to shut the door and close the window (leaving a tiny crack to let in the soot). Next, everyone settles down to a highly odoriferous meal: hardboiled eggs halved with a penknife (sulphur); tough, granite-textured sausages (garlic); vicious Roquefort cheese (feet). Red wine spills on the floor, and oranges squirt in your eye. Occasionally a Vichy bottle of lukewarm coffee is passed down the line (excepting the one-year-old). This adds the chicory touch to the intense and aggressive bouquet. In the early hours of the morning, when the priest starts mumbling his prayers (there is always a priest in a second-class French compartment), the ladies, obeying ancient custom, take out small bottles of Eau de Cologne, pour a few drops of it on a piece of cotton, and rub their necks, foreheads, ears, cheeks, and chins with it until the cotton gets black and the faces start to glisten like Wagnerian armor; la toilette is completed.

These night-long ordeals in French trains have always had a peculiar kind of charm and attraction for me. But this time I was not observant, nor was I amused by my companions; in fact, I was oblivious of their presence. Standing at the open window in the corridor, I thought about my Ode and what would happen to it in the immediate future.

10

THERE had been a considerable amount of internecine argument about the whole project. Boris Kochno, the librettist, was eager to have Balanchine do the choreography of Ode; I myself was inclined in favor of Balanchine. But I had little to say about these matters; I was a newcomer to the Ballet - one of Diaghilev’s perennial “foundlings" and I knew that Balanchine had already been engaged to do the choreography of Stravinsky’s new ballet, Apollo. Thus, very much against the wishes of Kochno, Ode was delegated to Léonide Massine. Fortunately Massine liked my music at once and seemed to understand its somewhat sentimental, lyrical spirit.

As for Diaghilev, although he liked very much the whole pageant side of Ode, he seemed at first not entirely convinced by my music. He was also worried about the excessive expense of its production; my score required not only a very large orchestra but also an equally large choir and two solo singers besides. When, during the previous summer, I had played him the piece in its entirety, Diaghilev had seemed enthusiastic about most of it. But certain sections he did not like at all; he found them weak and incompatible with the rest of the music, and wanted me to change them by writing three new dance-movements which would be incorporated into the second act.

It goes without saying that I made all the changes and wrote the new pieces as quickly as possible; they were ready by October, 1927. Still, Diaghilev would not commit himself definitely to the production of Ode and would not sign a contract with me.

I have the impression that it was Stravinsky’s liking my music that decided Diaghilev in favor of Ode, for it was shortly after my first encounter with Stravinsky, when I played him my piece, that Diaghilev told Valichka Nouvel to draw up a contract. The meeting with Stravinsky was of course arranged by Diaghilev and was part of a carefully planned and slightly feudal ritual. I felt that I was following in the footprints of many a young composer whom Diaghilev had “discovered” before me. First the “foundling" was tested for several months by the closest members of His Majesty’s Household; these included Roger Desormière, the eminent French conductor, Boris Kochno, Valichka Nouvel. Then, after he had passed the preliminary “household test,” he was to meet the great ones; Stravinsky, Picasso. Next came the influential friends and patrons of Diaghilev : Princesse de Polignac (Singer sewing machines), Lord Rothermere (British yellow press), Coco Chanel (haute-couture), and Missia Sert, the clever, warm, and attractive friend of Diaghilev and of two generations of famous painters and musicians. The ritual also included drawing up a list of people the “foundling” was advised not to see. At my time this list was headed by Jean Cocteau, with whom Diaghilev had quarreled, and Ida Rubinstein, the dancer who with the help of Lord Guinness’s money (stout) was starting a rival ballet season at the Paris Opera.

Only after these preliminaries had taken place would the “foundling’s” name be announced to the outer world. He would be presented as a new Diaghilev find, a young man who merited extraordinary attention by virtue of the great future Diaghilev held in store for him. And then the ballyhoo would begin: the “foundling” would immediately become the object of everybody’s attention, he would have five lunches and three dinners per day to choose from, his name and photographs would appear in magazines and newspapers. He would be asked on every possible and impossible occasion to play his ballet music, and Parisian artistic circles would heatedly discuss the merits and defects of his score.

A further element complicated the plans for Ode’s production. For many years Diaghilev wanted to have a ballet by the painter Pavel Tchelitchev, then still a very young man, who was having an extraordinarily brilliant success. Diaghilev had seen his work in the early twenties in the Berlin theaters and admired it very much. He urged him to come to Paris and work for him. But Tchelitchev, one of the few authentic geniuses of the theater, had at that time turned his back on it and was deeply involved in painting pictures. Like many imaginative and highly gifted artists, he believed that the theater only detracted the painter from the real problems of his art. Me preferred to abandon the more lucrative and successful career of a theatrical designer and give himself completely to his own painting.

Finally, in the fall of 1927, Diaghilev and Kochno persuaded Tchelitchev to design the sets and costumes for my Ode. In the meantime, through pictorial experimentation, Tchelitchev had discovered a completely new approach to the problem of stage design — an approach in which light and motion played an unusually important part; moreover, he was preoccupied by modern problems such as the relation between the factual experience (with its crude and clumsy logic perceived and transmitted to the mind by normal physical senses) and the experience of the unreal (or suprareal) with all its hidden, unlogical laws and its “journey to the end of the night.”

Tchelitchev was engaged in the surrealist experimentation of the period and, although he did not belong to the official group of surrealist painters (Dali, Max Ernst, Tanguy, and the others), by 1927-1928 he was regarded, for all intents and purposes, as one of the founders of that broad and fashionable trend. On the other hand, he was one of the first to express in his art that new lyricism of the late twenties, a lyricism restrained in its mode of expression and untarnished by grandiloquence. Later this became broadly popularized by the work of the late Christian Bérard and a few other European and American painters, but it was actually Tchelitchev who was one of its initiators.

But all these pictorial experiments of Tchelitchev and all his new ideas about stage design had little in common with the whole project of the ballet Ode, with my music, and with the didactic-allegorical ballet story cooked up by Boris Kochno. Tchelitchev seemed to like my music, but not the story; or at least he did not like the allegorical allusions to Diaghilev’s “Imperial great-greatgrandmother.” He thought that the story had nothing to do with what my music was “really” expressing and that the whole piece should be treated as a surrealist vision of a mysterious phenomenon of nature, the Aurora Borealis. Thus from the outset there were three different and in a way irreconcilable points of view involved in the Ode project. First there was Diaghilev’s notion about a grand Elizabethan period piece, a tribute to the epoch of the great Russian court-poet Lomonossov; second there was Tchelitchev’s view of Ode as a modern surrealist experiment; and third there was my music, which did not fit into either of the two categories.

11

THE music of Ode was essentially tender, gentle and lyrical, and in its lyricism it was kin to the music of Russian composers like Glinka, Dargomijsky, and Tchaikovsky, especially to their songs. To me those composers were always particularly attractive when they wrote their charming little vocal pieces, mixtures of the nineteenth-century German lied and the Franco-Italian romance sentimentale. In these pieces they blended in a superb way the native Russian melodic inflections with the warm and suave beauty of the Italian vocal line.

Few people abroad know these pieces, the songs of Gurilev, Alyabiev, Glinka, Dargomijsky, all of them nineteenth-century composers of the RussoItalian school. Even Tchaikovsky’s songs are little known abroad, with the exception of None but the Lonely Heart. Yet to me these Russian songs were a treasure of intimate lyrical invention which reflected so well the moods and longings of that period — one to which I felt myself closely attached and which I have never ceased to admire. During my childhood many of these lieder became daily companions of my life; we hummed them in the woods and in the streets, we sang them alone and in chorus, we played them on our instruments and listened to them in concert recitals. By the time I left Russia in 1920 I know hundreds of them and cherished them with the nostalgic devotion with which one cherishes tender memories and lost hopes. They became somehow like human beings, like those lost companions of my Russian adolescence whose features remain fixed and vivid in my memory and who have become the inexorable symbols of exile.

In Ode I attempted to evolve a larger choral piece from these small lieder forms and to write a full-scale oratorio based on a series of such pieces bound together by a common idea and a common lyrical mood. Thus what excited me in composing Ode was the attempt to produce a first Russian oratorio, formally and stylistically tied to the grand tradition of the Russo-Italian school.

But besides this “Russian nostalgia,” Ode had of course a French, a Parisian side (at least I hoped it had). In 1923 I got acquainted and quickly fell in love with the music of Erik Satie and what Erik Satie represented (and still represents) to many modern composers. His “pupils” and ardent admirers, Henri Sauguet (one of the leading French composers), Roger Desormière, and later his great friend Darius Milhaud, led me into the orbit of the extraordinary halo of new ideas, actions and reactions, agonisms and antagonisms, which had emanated from Satie during his lifetime and which was still burning bright in 1927, two years after his death. Satie’s art and his ideas taught me how to exercise a restraint and an economy of means in my own music, to prefer brevity and conciseness of musical discourse to the ramblings and rumblings of impressionism; how to limit myself to the absolutely indispensable, the minimum needed for an adequate formulation of a musical sentence and reject the camouflage of floridity and grandiloquence. Above all, Satie’s art taught me that one should not be ashamed of being simple, intimate, “puerile,” and even naïve to the point of appearing childish (provided one remains sincere), and to regard all these qualities as virtues rather than as vices.

Some of these virtues, I hopefully believed, I had incorporated into my Ode, and as a result the music of Ode had indeed very little to do with an Imperial Russian pageant or with the presentation of “nature’s mysteries” expressed in modern surrealist terms.

12

AS the train puffed along the Mediterranean and from Cannes on started making its brief courtesy calls at every little resort town on the “Azured Coast,” my excitement mounted. “Who is going to meet me at the station?” I was asking myself. “Boris Kochno, Massine, Lifar? Or maybe even . . . Diaghilev himself? Will there be a rehearsal today? Shall I have supper with Diaghilev?”

Approaching Monte Carlo from Nice, the train started to worm its way past Cap-Ferrat and around the Bay of Villefranche. Then, after one last smoke-filled tunnel, it slowed down, and suddenly on the south side of the tracks appeared the life-size version of the famed colored scenic postcard — the Monaco peninsula topped by its medieval castle, with a cluster of quaint houses descending to the marcelled, lapis lazuli harbor.

We pulled into the Gare de Monaco et Monte Carlo, and leaning out the window I looked anxiously for a familiar face. But among the gay crowd of welcomers in exaggerated resort-type clothes there was no one I knew. I pushed to the exit — my good humor somewhat impaired by the absence of a welcoming committee.

I took a cab and went to the Hotel Excelsior; there another disappointment awaited me — no reservations, no rooms. The hotel was full. Feeling hurt and neglected, I telephoned Diaghilev’s hotel. No one there. “Monsieur de Diaghilev est sorti. . . . Il est an Théâtre du Casino.”

I called the theater and tried to get Grigorieff, the company’s stage manager, on the telephone. Finally, after a great deal of waiting, Grigorieff’s assistant came to the phone, yawned, and said in a surly voice, “They are all on the plateau . . . rehearsing. I can’t disturb them.” When I told him who I was, and what I wanted, he woke up a bit and mumbled, “Oh yes, I heard something about it from Grigorieff . . . they couldn’t get you a room at the Excelsior. . . . He said something about another hotel, but I’ve forgotten the name.” Just as I was on the point of hanging up, he suddenly turned cheerful and shouted into the receiver, “Wait a minute! I remember ... it is the Hôtel de la Côte d’Azur. Go there and ask for a room reserved by Grigorieff.”

The cab drove uphill through the hotel-infested area of central Monte Carlo and stopped in front of an old-fashioned, pinkish building. Yes, there was a room for me, even with a salle de bain. I climbed five stories to the room and found it of strange oblong proportions, but bright, large, and clean. The floor was covered with the familiar brown tiling of old Southern French houses, and its tiny balcony faced south, disclosing a panorama of Monte Carlo, Monaco, and the blue, blue sea. But what grafted itself most strongly on my memory was the budding wisteria vine on the ramp of the balcony, which later, a week before I left Monte Carlo, fell into rich violet bloom and scented the room day and night, bringing back tender memories of other Southern springs — springs in the Crimea, in Sebastopol, in Yalta, and all along the northern shores of the black Scythian sea.

I washed, ate a sandwich at the corner buvette, and walked down to the Casino. The Théâtre du Casino is conveniently located in the same building as the Casino, behind the gambling rooms of this gambling citadel of Europe. Behind the Théâtre are several large rehearsal rooms and storage halls for scenery and costumes. Still further lies the jefée du Casino overlooking the Bay of Monaco. From it, the desperate losers of the Casino put a stop to their ill luck (at the rate of two or three a year) by leaping several hundred feet down to the tracks of the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railroad.

After a little questioning and searching I made my way through the labyrinth of gambling rooms, corridors, and rehearsal halls and stepped onto the stage. Diaghilev was sitting on the left side near an upright piano, his back turned to the empty theater. On a chair next to him sat a funny-looking man with thick glasses, in disorderly dress and endowed with a crooked goatee. Behind him, leaning against the piano, stood the massive figure of André Derain, who, hearing me creep up, turned his head, smiled, and signaled me to come and stand near him. So did Rika, the dark-haired, beaked lady at the piano, whom I had met before in Paris and who inevitably reminded me of an ingrown toenail. But she beckoned me with her head, her hands being occupied with the wide, difficult chords of a piece unfamiliar to me but which I easily guessed to be Stravinsky’s Apollo.

Diaghilev couldn’t see me; his back was turned, and he seemed absorbed by what was going on on the stage. There, in the center of it, a group of three ballerinas were clustered around and over a male dancer. The ballerinas were Tchernicheva, Doubrovska, and Nikitina, three of the best prima ballerinas of the company. The male dancer was Serge Lifar. That group’s pose has since become famous in the annals of choreographic classicism: Lifar knelt between the three ballerinas, who were in an arabesque figure; each had one leg up in the air; their bodies dipped forward and their necks stretched upward so that they looked like three drinking swans whose precarious balance was maintained by a trembling hand firmly clutching Lifar’s shoulder. In front of the group stood its inventor, the slight and incredibly young-looking George Balanchine, Diaghilev’s recent discovery, his new choreographic genius.

“Did you see Boris and Alexandrine?” whispered Derain in my ear. “They went to meet you just half an hour ago.”

I said that I had not, and was about to ask the identity of the man who was sitting next to the patron, when Diaghilev turned around, evidently to say something to Derain. He saw me, and an ironic smile came over his face. He said in a teasing voice, “Ah, Nika, why are you so late? Where have you been all these weeks? Everybody has been waiting for you to start working,” and without waiting for an answer he pointed at Balanchine and said to Derain, “What he is doing is magnificent. It is pure classicism, such as we have not seen since Petipas.” Then he turned his back on us again and continued watching the dancers on the stage.

While Diaghilev was talking to me the little man with the beard had also turned around and was examining me intently. Then, without apparent reason, he let out a bleating giggle. I was startled, and felt abused at Diaghilev’s rude reception. It was unfair and unjust; no one had told me that everyone was waiting for me in Monte Carlo to start working. On the contrary, I had been waiting for more than two weeks to hear from Diaghilev But no news had come. Finally it had been Valichka Nouvel who decided to send me off, to get the tickets and put me on the train. As I stood there getting madder every minute and somehow centering my anger on the silly-looking giggler, Derain bent over and murmured, “ Ne vous en faites pas, he is in a bad humor. Something went wrong between him and this man,” and he nodded in the direction of the giggler. “ Besides, he has been very ill-tempered lately.”

“Who is that man?” I finally asked Derain.

“Oh, he’s quite a character. He’s Bauchant, the painter. He’s doing the décors for Stravinsky’s Apollo.”

Soon the rehearsal came to an end. Diaghilev got up and told me to come along with him to the hotel. “Ah, haven’t you met?” he said, as Bauchant was trying to introduce himself. “This is the young composer of Ode, Nicolas Nabokov, and this is Monsieur Bauchant.”

“Bauchant-jeune,” corrected the odd little man. “I am pleased to meet you, and please forgive me for laughing at you a moment ago,” he continued in a jolly patter, “but you see, your face ... it looked so funny when he” — he pointed at Diaghilev — “greeted you. Besides, you know, his annoyance was really addressed to me. I irritate him. . . . Isn’t it funny?” and the man bleated again. Diaghilev chuckled, but I didn’t find it funny at all; I wanted to shake off the importune gabbler.

As we came out into the sunshine of the jetée and started walking towards the Hôtel de Paris, Diaghilev said, “Come on, Nika, I have to talk with you.” He began by telling me that Ode was getting to be a problem, that no one really cared about it, and that everything was being mishandled from the very start. “Boris doesn’t know what he wants to do with it and Massine knows even less. As for Tchelitchev, I can’t make head or tail of his experiments, but I do know one thing: they have nothing to do with the original conception of Ode.” He reproached me for showing no interest in my own work: “You should be here all the time and you shouldn’t think that once the music is written your task is over.” He said that the only reason he decided to do Ode against his better judgment was that Seryoja Lifar liked the music and wanted to have a second ballet for the coming season — “to satisfy his enormous vanity. . . . You know Seryoja hasn’t a brain in his head, and the fact that he likes your music is therefore nothing to boast about.”

While he was talking he got consistently more irritated and the adjectives he used became more abusive and unprintable. Finally, as we reached the doors of the Hôtel de Paris, he said in his most exasperated tone, “If all of you continue to be indolent and lazy nothing will come of your Ode. I can’t do anything for you. I simply won’t. I will wash my hands of the whole business like Pontius Pilatus. You had better go and find ces coureurs, Boris and Seryoja, and start working at once.” Then, abruptly, he turned his back on me and went to the door. But before he started revolving he shouted at me once more, “If all of you finally decide to start working, don’t pull the cart in three different directions. It will get stuck and I’m not going to help you pull it out of your mud!" And with a curt “Au revoir, I’ll see you tomorrow,” he disappeared in the door.

13

IT WAS only natural that, as a result of this monologue (it was the first time I had seen Diaghilev in a tantrum), my first evening in Monte Carlo, in the bosom of the “greatest artistic enterprise in Europe,” was a melancholic flop. If it had not been for the warmth of Alexandrina’s and Boris’s welcome (I met them in front of the Casino right after my encounter with the vituperative patron, as they were returning from their abortive attempt to meet me) and the charm of Derain’s conversation, I would have taken the next train to Paris as the only way out of what seemed a hopeless mess.

Alexandrian, Boris, and I dined at the tiny restaurant of the Hôtel Belli, which lay beyond and below the jetée du Casino on the other side of the railroad tracks. Hôtel Belli was Alexandrina’s residence; hence it was the center of all ballet gossip, for Alexandrine, Diaghilev’s female secretary, was an incessant collector of gossip, rumor, and love lore about everyone connected with the ballet. She was a warmhearted, gentle, and unattractive Russian girl in her early thirties, who had at one time aspired to become a ballerina. Alexandrina was as completely muddleheaded as she was devoted to “the cause" of the Ballet Russe, and she lived in constant dread of Diaghilev, who teased her at every opportunity.

Boris and Derain tried to cheer me up. They said that Diaghilevés sortie was just another one of those flurries of ill-temper which had become routine that spring. Boris assured me that everything was working out well, that Tchelitchev had invented marvelous sets for Ode, that Massine liked them and was anxiously waiting for me to start working. “Of course,” he said, “all will be ready by the time we leave Monte Carlo. Diaghilev is angry because he doesn’t seem to grasp our ideas about the ballet. He isn’t sore at you or at me but really at himself.”

“Besides,” said Derain, “this morning he had a run-in with ce drôle de type — Bauchant. Alexandrine will tell you all about it. You know, Bauchant walks around the place with his pockets bulging with photographs of his own work. If someone says something in his presence about a cucumber, Bauchant immediately pulls out a photo and says, ‘Here’s a nature morte of mine with a cucumber. Won’t you buy it ?‘ ”

I had heard very little about Bauchant before coming to Monte Carlo; I knew that he was one of the several “modern primitives” whom the Parisian picture dealers had been tracking down after Vollard had made so much money with Henri Rousseau’s pictures. I was amused to hear Derain’s and Alexandrina’s story about the bleating giggler who had made me so mad.

It appeared that on the morning of my arrival Diaghilev walked into the studio where Bauchant was supposed to be painting the sets for Apollo. He found Bauchant putting the last touches on a nature morte of his own. Looking about, Diaghilev saw a few other “contraband” natures mortes. There wasn’t a trace of Apollo around. Bauchant proudly acknowledged having painted the pictures since his arrival two weeks previously in Monte Carlo. Diaghilev got furious; he informed Monsieur Bauchant-jeune that he had not been invited to Monte Carlo to paint pictures but to prepare sets; that he, Diaghilev, was not a provider of free studios for Monsieur Bauchant-jeune and that Monsieur Bauchant-jeune had better stop painting his silly pictures immediately. Bauchant listened carefully to this diatribe and “riposted" with indignation. He said that his pictures weren’t silly at all and that if Monsieur de Diaghilev did not understand them it was the fault of that “saltimbanque” Picasso and all the Russian barbarians around Monsieur de Diaghilev in his ballet troupe. Naturally they could not like his pictures, because one has to understand the whole tradition of French painting to understand what he, Bauchant, does. But the real public enjoys his pictures and they sell very well. . . .

We laughed at the story and at many similar stories and gossip of which Alexandrina’s memory was a storehouse. By the time the dinner was over I felt happy and gay. But I was sleepy after my night in the train and the inhospitable reception in Monte Carlo; yet it was long past midnight when Derain finally walked me to my hotel, past the last open cafés near the Casino and through the silent, steep streets of the upper reaches of the town. “Cheer up,” he said as we parted, “ ça va marcher.”

(To be concluded)