Read Online Nijinsky by Lucy Moore - Free Book Online

system, which she thought had nothing to teach classical dancers. After his furious response to her pregnancy she avoided him altogether, even though she longed to tell him how much she admired
Sacre
’s choreography and realised ‘how exhausting and fatiguing it was for him to be surrounded by uncooperative artists and try to create a ballet in such a hostile atmosphere … what an effort it cost him to obtain from the artists such exactness in the execution of a choreography they did not understand’.
    Diaghilev, Nijinsky and the ballet travelled to Paris for their final rehearsals before the season began, but the news that Isadora Duncan’s two children had been drowned in the Seine on 19 April cast a dark shadow over their arrival. Their driver had left the car in gear when he got out to crank the engine and, when it started, it shot off the road, plunging into the river. It was impossible to reach the two children and their governess who were trapped inside. Vaslav, who had known the children, was very distressed by this tragedy.
    Just as in 1909, the theatre they were using was under construction, so they were having to rehearse alongside all the dusty commotion of builders. But the atmosphere was very different from the holiday feel of four years earlier. With
Jeux
still unfinished and so much riding on
Sacre
, the overwrought Nijinsky was furious at any distraction from his work and the entire company was picking up its mood from him and Diaghilev.
    The Théâtre des Champs-Elysées was Gabriel Astruc’s baby, a vast new building intended to be a temple to modern dance and music. The sculptor Antoine Bourdelle had even used Nijinsky, alongside Isadora Duncan, as his inspiration for the bas-reliefs that adorned the monumental exterior, showing Vaslav tearing ‘himself away with a wild leap from the marble still holding him fast’. He called Nijinsky ‘more than human … [with] something of the sacred animal’ about him.
    Astruc was so determined to have the Ballets Russes as his opening programme that he promised Diaghilev an astronomical fee for the season: 25,000 francs a night for twenty nights (when in earlier years he had received less than half that for a night’s performance), as wellas extra money for supplementary expenses – electricians, coiffeurs, costumiers, stage hands and so on. Diaghilev couldn’t have accepted less. His existing debts and the number of rehearsals Nijinsky and Monteux needed for
Sacre
were crippling him. Even though the front row of seats had already been installed – and the tickets for them sold – when Stravinsky, ‘in that sad delightful Slav voice of his’, insisted that they be ripped out to make space for the extra musicians he needed for
Sacre
(‘You know, old friend, it’s done with the utmost ease nowadays by that powerful machine they have for cutting steel and reinforced concrete. And the upholsterers will patch up the damage very quickly’), Astruc had agreed.
    It is to this period of their time together that Vaslav’s most eviscerating memories in his diary about Diaghilev belong: his false smiles, the black hair-dye that stained his pillowcase, his two false front teeth which moved when he touched them nervously with his tongue, and which reminded Vaslav of a wicked old woman. ‘I realised that Diaghilev was deceiving me. I trusted him in nothing and began to develop by myself, pretending that I was his pupil … I began to hate him quite openly, and once I pushed him on a street in Paris … because I wanted to show him that I was not afraid of him. Diaghilev hit me with his cane because I wanted to leave him.’
    Misia Sert’s letters to Stravinsky in the late spring of 1913 confirm the misery and unpleasantness between them. Diaghilev was ‘going through a dreadful period ’ in which creditors were threatening to sue him and an insufferably rude Nijinsky