Ashton and MacMillan
This was the basis of my Ashton and MacMillan lecture at the Royal Academy of Dancing’s 2003 conference, Revealing MacMillan.
I.
In talking of the choreographers Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan together, we speak of family matters. Most regular dance-goers who followed the Royal Ballet during Kenneth MacMillan’s lifetime – in New York as well as Britain – felt that the company was a large family. Both onstage and off, the company featured a long list of figures –Frederick Ashton, Ninette de Valois, Leslie Edwards, Julia Farron, Margot Fonteyn, Robert Helpmann, Constant Lambert, Pamela May, Michael Somes – who each bore a very loaded significance for both other dancers and the audience. The Second World War had much to do with this; those artists performed for the audience while bombs dropped in the Blitz and/or they fought in the armed services. The loyalty between audience and company became intense in the War years; today, there are still people who were branded by gratitude. But the feeling of family intimacy was already there in several Ashton ballets of the 1930s, such as Les Patineurs and A Wedding Bouquet.
The family had more than one generation. In the 1960s, that list of names came to include Deanne Bergsma, Svetlana Beriosova, David Blair, Anthony Dowell, Christopher Gable, Donald MacLeary, Monica Mason, Nadia Nerina, Merle Park, Lynn Seymour, Antoinette Sibley, Doreen Wall, David Wall. And a series of Ashton ballets from Symphonic Variations (1946) through to Enigma Variations (1968) kept creating a feeling of idyllic, quasi-familial community that became part of the company’s image – part, indeed, of its mentality.[1]
The Royal Academy of Dance’s first academic conference was about Margot Fonteyn (The Fonteyn Phenomenon, September 1999). Now, by making Kenneth MacMillan the subject of its second conference, it goes to the opposite end of the Royal Ballet family spectrum. Fonteyn’s style as a ballerina, MacMillan’s as a choreographer, were by no means in complete accord. The mention of MacMillan’s name alone, more than that of anyone else, brings to the surface certain old family tensions. But he was part of the family. Sseveral of his ballets created their own important feeling of community. At the 1997 Roehampton Conference Preservation Politics, Andrew Ward mentioned that, during his days as a dancer with the Royal Ballet, two ballets in particular gave all the dancers a sense of intensely shared purpose: Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée (1960) and MacMillan’s The Rite of Spring (1962). Nonetheless, it’s long been recognised that a key figure in a number of MacMillan ballets is The Outsider. Many of his ballets addressed - and released - the stresses that are natural within any family.
The standard picture of the relationship between Ashton (1904-1988) and MacMillan (1929-1992) is one of closet antagonism. It’s comparable to that in British theatre of the playwrights Terence Rattigan (1911-1977) and John Osborne (1929-1994). The two choreographers both served seven years each as artistic director of the Royal Ballet: Ashton from 1963 to 1970, MacMillan from 1970 to 1977. For some people, Ashton’s regime was the glorious high-water-mark of Royal Ballet history, with MacMillan considered as responsible for the decline that followed. For others, MacMillan was the person who stopped British ballet being pretty and, instead, made it serious. MacMillan is still considered a rebel, an Angry Young Man, Ashton as the senior choreographic stylist against whom he needed to rebel. Ashton today is seen as the establishment figure who can have had little or no sympathy for MacMillan’s more radical work. There are still Ashton fans today – some of them eminent - who, after more than thirty years, have never forgiven MacMillan for succeeding him.[2]
There is much to support this version of events. MacMillan emerged, after all, in the mid-1950s, bang on time with all the other classic English angries. Ashton, by contrast, seemed absolutely part of London’s pre-Osborne theatre world - the old-guard West End, dominated by the impresario Binkie Beaumont, the actor-director John Gielgud, and the playwright Rattigan: a splendid theatrical world, but characterised by privileged, quasi-aristocratic escapism, often hovering on the cusp of camp. I once heard that, when Ashton was knighted, Rattigan sent him a telegram: “Darling Freddie, I only hope that, when the Queen says ‘Rise’, you can.”[3]
Nevertheless, the picture of relations between Ashton and MacMillan deserves to be shown as considerably more complex. I speak as an outsider here. I never interviewed Kenneth MacMillan. On the very few occasions I met him, we exchanged no more than a couple of sentences. I did interview Ashton twice, and had two or three other meetings with him; but it would be wrong to suggest that I knew him at all well.
And I do want some controversy.[4] At least, I want to remind you why MacMillan seemed worthy of controversy at the time. I wasn’t one of his harshest critics, but I did find fault. And if one found fault with MacMillan, it was often because Ashton had trained one’s eye.
II.
We have spoken only a little at this conference about the choreographic influences on MacMillan. Clement Crisp has suggested that Roland Petit’s Carmen in 1948 was one such influence; I hadn’t heard that before, but it makes complete sense; I firmly believe that Petit’s work at that time had important influence on Ashton, too. Another influence is George Balanchine. MacMillan was prominent in the original 1950 Sadler’s Wells Ballet production of Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial, and there are certain Balanchinisms in some of MacMillan’s ballets: for example, in the third movement of Concerto, in the ballerina’s lunging développé back into off-centre arabesque. Then there’s Martha Graham. MacMillan’s three “spiritual” ballets – Song of the Earth (1965), Requiem (1976), Gloria (1980) – each contains whole chunks of Graham technique, virtually undigested chunks, which have been noticed by many modern dancers but by almost no critic.[5] And Antony Tudor, who anticipated MacMillan in the use of several prestigious scores (Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, Schonberg’s Verklärte Nacht), in his interest in using ballet for psychological revelation, and in his use of exprsssionist upper-body gesture.
Ashton, nonetheless, was the choreographer whose work MacMillan knew best. I propose here that Ashton was the choreographer whom MacMillan quoted without being able to help it. He by no means quoted Ashton all the time, but he may have done so without even knowing that that was what he was doing.
Certainly the relationship between Ashton and MacMillan was intricate. For it was Ashton who encouraged MacMillan as a dancer. He cast MacMillan in his new 1947 Valses nobles et sentimentales, and, in 1949, he coached him as Florestan for the famous cast of The Sleeping Beauty that would open at the New York Met with such sensational results. (Ashton had arranged the pas de trois for Florestan and his Two Sisters in 1946. The coda begins with Florestan jumping across the stage in three grands jetés, switching his head in mid-jump to look sideways across his shoulder, over a croisé front second-arabesque arm. Pamela May still recalls how Ashton coached MacMillan to switch his head sharply at the apex of the jump.[6] Years later, MacMillan would quote these head-turning jumps for the three supporting men in the final movement of his Concerto.) In 1957, Ashton cast MacMillan to act beside him as the “other” Ugly Sister in his three-act Cinderella. You can see this on a surviving television broadcast, now on DVD: the illustrious cast is led by Fonteyn, Somes, Alexander Grant, Ashton, and, yes, MacMillan. Likewise Ashton encouraged MacMillan as a choreographer during his first ten years.
Indeed, you don’t need to know much about psychology to see that their relationship had its marked father-son aspects, even to Oedipal degrees, with the father-figure jealous of the threat placed to his throne by the son, and the son ardent to supplant the oppressive father. Since Ashton wasn’t really looking for children in his life (just lovers), I don’t think this troubled him too much, though it was surely an element at times. MacMillan, however, may have been looking for parent figures all along.
The mother figure in all this was, inevitably, Ninette de Valois. The effect of “Madam”, as she was widely known, was often extremely infantilising. Not on dancers alone. After her death earlier in 2001, I was amazed, when listening to a BBC Radio 3 discussion about her, to hear the senior critic Clement Crisp say that, when attending performances at the Royal Opera House, he would always look up to see if she was sitting in the stage box; and, if she was, he would think “Everything’s all right, then”.[7] These aren’t the words of a critic; they belong to a child talking about a parent or nurse. Disconcerting though they are to hear from a veteran chronicler of the ballet, they nonetheless sum up the establishment attitude to Madam. She wielded power, she inspired affection, she embodied lifelong commitment, she terrified, she scolded, she was self-effacing, she set the standards, and she changed them.
But Madam, a famously self-contradictory human being, was often very capable also of treating people as grown-ups. Both Ashton and MacMillan needed to fend off her interference at times; at other times, both of them had great cause to be grateful to her generosity. There were, however, other figures in the Royal Ballet administration who exerted a more continuously infantilising effect. To these senior figures, almost all junior dancers were boys and girls. And not only juniors. I have interviewed former Royal Ballet dancers who, even in their seventies or eighties, have still spoken with childlike anxiety about the possibility of their causing offence within the company by speaking out of turn,[8] There are others who have never recovered from their resentment of offences that were given them fifty years ago.
Amid this climate, I believe that Ashton proved a relatively liberating figure. He had known his own difficulties with the establishment at Covent Garden. His own disagreements with de Valois are now well known.[9] He was always fighting what he regarded as the primness and stiffness of British dancers, and the comme-il-faut conservatism of the establishment was something with which he had to contend as a choreographer.[10] Only when he choreographed in 1950 for New York City Ballet, for example, did he feel free, in his ballet Illuminations, to depict a man and woman making love with full-length body contact; and he even included (then extremely shocking) a man afterwards relieving himself in an onstage pissoir. Illuminations also contained a scene where the dissident protagonist, the Poet (Rimbaud), disrupted a seemingly royal procession and knocked the crown off the “king”. Harmless as this now sounds, it felt otherwise in 1950. When New York City Ballet brought Illuminations to Covent Garden later in 1950, the royal gala premiere was attended by Princess Marina, the Duchess of Kent. The newspapers devoted much space to the jewels she wore for the occasion. According to Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of New York City Ballet, she was so offended by Ashton’s seemingly anti-monarchist gesture that her behaviour to him in her box was “glacial”.[11] I doubt that Ashton ever offended royalty again - when MacMillan did so in 1977, Ashton behaved almost as badly as Princess Marina had to him - but Ashton’s new boldness with sex became an important vein in his work of the early 1950s, a most impressionable time for the young MacMillan. (It is Ashton who was surely influenced by Roland Petit at this stage. MacMillan had not yet begun to choreograph.) In such subsequent ballets made for the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden as Daphnis and Chloë and Tiresias (both made in 1951), Ashton depicted sex and sexuality with intensity and freedom. Since MacMillan was to become famous for his depiction of sex, it’s worth recalling here that the Daphnis-Lykanion pas de deux in Daphnis and Chloë remains unsurpassed as the most sexually poetic and most poetically sexual of ballet duets; and that MacMillan, when he was artistic director of the company, always kept this ballet in repertory.
Nonetheless, Ashton was a figure of authority. His approval would have been what MacMillan sought. And, as MacMillan tried to establish his own maturity, so he needed to assert his difference from Ashton. We can see this simply in the scenarios of some of their ballets. In Daphnis and Chloë, Ashton had choreographed a ballet in which a pair of innocent young lovers learn about adult sexual desire from other people before being joyously reunited. In his 1961 The Invitation, MacMillan showed an innocent young couple learning about sex from other adults. The main narrative differences are that, whereas Chloë is never violated, the heroine of The Invitation is raped; and that Chloë’s reunion with Daphnis is sensuous, whereas in The Invitation the heroine is so traumatised that she now rejects her former boyfriend. Ashton’s ballet had been daring in the degree to which it depicted sex. Now MacMillan, the Angry Young Man, was daring in a way that went far darker.
III.
The first crucial moment when Ashton failed to give full support to MacMillan came in 1965, with the casting of Romeo and Juliet. The facts are now well known.[12] Though MacMillan conceived and created his ballet on the Juliet of Lynn Seymour and the Romeo of Christopher Gable, he was obliged to give both the first night at Covent Garden and the first night in New York to Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, the most famous duo in world ballet, then at the apex of their shared stardom. As far as I can ascertain from talking to people who were around at the time, the two figures who machinated to arrange this cast-change were Nureyev himself and the impresario Sol Hurok.[13]
But nobody comes well out of this story. MacMillan himself should have stuck up for the integrity of his conception, whatever the cost. Fonteyn, as the ballerina who had already had more glorious opening-night triumphs than any other dancer in history, could have afforded to sacrifice this one. As for Ashton, he was artistic director. He cannot be assumed to have played an entirely passive role in this. Indeed, his is the ultimate responsibility. Still, it’s worth remembering that Ashton, who had made his own version of Romeo for the Royal Danish Ballet in 1955, had given up the idea of staging his own Romeo at Covent Garden (even though it was still in repertory in Copenhagen), once MacMillan expressed interest in choreographing the Prokoviev three-act score. Nevertheless, the scars on the careers of both Seymour, the most prodigiously original ballerina since Fonteyn, and Gable, who retired from ballet two years later, went deep. And resentment on their behalf was widespread throughout the company.
Even so, it’s possible to make too much of the Romeo scandal. Ashton, notoriously devoted to his original casts, had surprised colleagues the year before by double-casting The Dream from its opening season on.[14] He and MacMillan billed Romeo in 1965 not as a vehicle for Fonteyn-Nureyev alone but for five different casts. Lest anyone is too impressed by MacMillan’s resentment, let’s recall that Fonteyn and Nureyev brought his Romeo into the Guinness Book of Records with the number and length of their curtain-calls. And every Romeo cast enjoyed huge success. In New York, one observer compared the radical advent of Seymour and Gable to that of James Dean in the previous decade.[15] Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell were adored; Merle Park and Donald Macleary also.[16] Today, MacMillan’s Romeo has long outlived Fonteyn and Nureyev. It is now the world’s dominant version of this Shakespeare-Prokoviev warhorse.
What’s strangest, though, is this Romeo’s afterlife. For all that MacMillan spoke of his original conception, the truth is that he never coached any subsequent Juliet to follow the interpretative extremes of Seymour’s vehemence. Nor did any Juliet proceed along Fonteyn’s lines either. Many other ballerinas and leading men have learnt the title roles: of those original 1964 casts, the most influential has proved the Sibley-Dowell mould. Sibley and Dowell were the golden young darlings of the Ashton regime; their stars went on rising in the mid-1960s while those of Seymour and Gable faltered; they rode the MacMillan régime of 1970-1977 like a wave, creating the leading roles in his Manon (1974). Gable retired from ballet in 1967. True, Seymour danced the role of Juliet for even more years than Sibley - Seymour danced the role till 1978, Sibley till 1976 – but Seymour’s galvanising, burningly verismo account was a one-off. As many members of the original cast have testified, MacMillan had wanted a Romeo with the tearaway informality of West Side Stor[17]y; but its roughest edges soon became smoothed away, never to be restored even under MacMillan’s regime as artistic director. Is the Sibleyfication of Juliet due to the fact that Michael Somes - the chief Ashton regisseur for many years, and Sibley’s husband in the 1960s - coached the role of Juliet until the 1980s? This conference is the first time in which Lynn Seymour been invited to coach the role of Juliet.
IV.
There are only a few MacMillan ballets that survive from his first ten years of choreography, 1953-1963. In those I have seen – Danses Concertantes (1955), Solitaire (1956), The Burrow (1958), The Invitation (1960), The Rite of Spring (1962), Diversions (1961) - I can’t say that I’ve noticed any strong use of Ashtonisms. MacMillan seemed, from Danses Concertantes on, to have discovered his own choreographic imprint. This was apparent to his admirers and opponents alike. (So much so that, when the Royal Ballet School revived Ashton’s 1967 Sinfonietta in 1979, one visiting American Ashtonophile critic sent a card to another: “Don’t worry about missing Fred’s Sinfonietta. If Jazz Calendar was Fred’s Wendy Toye ballet, this is his Kenneth MacMillan ballet.”[18] Today, however, Ashton’s Sinfonietta[19] scarcely looks like most peoples idea of a MacMillan ballet. It’s plotless, with no psychological or sexual tensions. Its outer movements abounded, however, in pert, jerky staccato steps: that dance critic felt those had characterised MacMillan’s pure-dance ballets, such as Danses Concertantes and the 1966 Concerto.)
MacMillan’s Romeo, however, does contain a good many choreographic Ashtonisms. In the ballroom, look at those low lifts in the first Romeo-Juliet pas de deux, and the episode when the characters suddenly dance in a rotating wheel formation: highly Ashtonian, both. Some of the lifts in the famous balcony scene are plainly related to those that Ashton had choreographed, four years before, in The Two Pigeons (a ballet whose first cast of lovers, please note, was Seymour and Gable). Even in the pointed grace of incidental head positions, the Royal remained highly Ashtonian in Romeo, MacMillan’s first full-length ballet.[20]
The premiere of MacMillan’s Romeo was soon followed by his period of exile in Berlin in the late 1960s: he took the post of artistic director of the Deutsche Oper Ballet, Berlin, in 1966. In 1968, however, it was decided that he would return in 1970 to succeed Ashton as director of the Royal Ballet. For many on both sides of the curtain, this succession was traumatic; and the story becomes more shocking when we hear that Ninette de Valois was instrumental in arranging Ashton’s replacement by MacMillan. The story is told in full by Julie Kavanagh in Secret Muses – the Life of Frederick Ashton.
It was, however, widely assumed that Ashton would now become free to choreograph more often. The announcement had even been made that Ashton would now choreograph one ballet a year for the Royal Ballet.[21] Ashton, however, went instead into a gigantic sulk. He did choreograph short items for galas, using just the dancers he knew already; he did supervise the odd revival of some of his ballets; he did dance an Ugly Sister when his Cinderella was revived. But, in a major display of passive aggression, he choreographed no ballet of any size for six years.
Then, in 1976, he made A Month in the Country. For the central role of Natalia Petrovna, he used Lynn Seymour, now in the high-summer second peak of her career. This reminds us how often Ashton’s muses had been MacMillan’s too. Both had choreographed one Fonteyn-Nureyev vehicle each; both had made extensive use of Seymour, Sibley, and Dowell; both had made roles for Julia Farron, Svetlana Beriosova, David Blair, Donald Macleary, Merle Park, and others. Whereas Ashton had long been at loggerheads with Ninette de Valois over their different tastes in dancers, his casting choices were far closer to MacMillan’s. Even Seymour, who remains rightly regarded as MacMillan’s most important muse, was first discovered by Ashton. At the R.A.D., it is nice to recall that Ashton singled Seymour out, while she was still one of Pamela May’s students at the Royal Ballet School, to make upon her (and also upon Pamela Moncur) the R.A.D. Solo Seal student variations. (Many dances were made upon Seymour during her career; many of them survive in repertory today. But none has had more inheritors than these Solo Seal dances, which have been danced dozens of times every year.)
V.
It’s also worth pointing out that, while MacMillan directed the Royal Ballet, one often saw Ashton/MacMillan pairings. On April 2, 1974, for example, one triple bill at Covent Garden contained MacMillan’s Rite of Spring, Ashton’s Symphonic Variations, and Nijinska’s Les Noces; I remember it well, because that was my first live experience of the Royal Ballet. Ashton and MacMillan ballets rubbed shoulders on many a programme in those years. Moreover, under MacMillan, there were many Ashton triple bills; and there was never a MacMillan season in which Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée did not return to the repertory. As artistic director, in short, MacMillan went out of his way to show that Ashton’s ballets and his were both central to the repertory.
What perhaps no one had predicted was how much some people would now resent MacMillan. Or how much he would suffer, personally and artistically. Years in which Ashton didn’t choreograph for the Royal Ballet weren’t years in which MacMillan rose to his greatest. Ballets such as Elite Syncopations (1974) and The Four Seasons (1975) were hits. But, if you accept the view often proposed by MacMillan’s closest admirers that he needed to be driven by his demons to rise to the level achieved by his finest work, these ballets showed no demonic traces. I would indeed suggest - though I did not see all the ballets that MacMillan made in that era - that those demons seldom entered into his choreography during his entire artistic directorship of the Royal Ballet between 1970 and 1977. Yet no sooner had he retired in 1977 than his demons were magnificently in evidence again in the very next piece he made at Covent Garden, the three-act Mayerling (1978), and in a number of the other ballets that then followed.
What had risen instead, during those years of his artistic directorship, was his tendency, as seen in Romeo, to use a highly Ashton-related, Ashton-based, dance language. The son, having inherited the father’s throne, found himself working more like the father than ever before. No ballet shows this more plainly than his three-act ballet Manon (1974). Bending abounds: the prime characteristic of Ashton style. And so do Ashtonian crisp changes of head position, Ashtonian use of precise, witty footwork, and an Ashtonian, keen, neoclassical sense of period style. Lescaut’s Mistress (a role made on Monica Mason) has, for example, has a phrase that ends with a very striking transfer of weight. This is hard to describe in words. At first, arriving on a flat left foot, she also thrusts her lower-body weight as far forward as possible, through her tilted pelvis and bent right knee, onto her right point; her torso leans back, with heavily épaulé arms opening forwards in a third-arabesque position. On the very next beat, she brings that back left foot up and forward to meet the right on point in fifth position; her torso now tilts diagonally forwards, with third-arabesque arms now pointing in the reverse direction. However cumbersome this is to describe -it’s memorable to see: a quick change of weight in which upper and lower body make vivid answers tp each other infull-bodied. We’ve seen it before, too – in the second ballerina variation (made on Rowena Jackson) of Ashton’s Birthday Offering (1956).
When Manon first dances with des Grieux in the first scene, their pas de deux is rich with Ashtonisms. Manon, notably, uses what I call the “Margot arabesque” line: an Ashton variant of first arabesque in which the arms continue the sloping line of the shoulders the arabesque leg is held at a diagonal exactly parallel to the back arm. (The waist is held in profile to the audience, but the torso is squared to give both shoulders maximum exposure.) Ashton used this arabesque in several ballets he made for Fonteyn between 1946 and 1952. But it occurs perhaps yet more often in MacMillan’s ballets than it does in Ashton’s. At one point, when des Grieux lifts Manon, she does perhaps the most famous Ashtonism of all – “walking on air”. She does it backwards, while holding “Margot arabesque” arms. Since the roles of Manon and des Grieux were created by Sibley and Dowell, who had now become the leading exponents of Ashton style during the previous ten years, the Ashton-MacMillan connection was unmissable.
Still, no one ballerina has been the definitive Manon. MacMillan planned Manon as he had Romeo – as a vehicle for several pairs of stars from its premiere season onwards. Sibley and Dowell were the famous first cast, but Jennifer Penney and Wayne Eagling, Merle Park and Rudolf Nureyev, also danced it early on; and soon Natalia Makarova joined the list of Manons. Quite how different Manon might appear emerged only, I would say, when Seymour first danced the title role in the 1975-1976 season, and when David Wall (who had previously danced Manon’s brother Lescaut) now swapped roles with Dowell. Dramatically speaking, Nureyev and Wall both showed aspects of des Grieux that departed from the Dowell mould; and the Seymour-Wall-Dowell cast – harsh and sexy - was the one when Manon felt most like a truly MacMillan dance drama.
But the sheer dance material made for des Grieux, especially in Act One, seemed made for the very marrow of Dowell’s bones: Ashtonian marrow. It’s a sequel to the choreographic Dowellisms that Ashton had poetically refined in a series of roles over the previous ten years – The Dream (1964), Monotones (1965), the Prince’s new dances in The Sleeping Beauty (1968), the Thaïs pas de deux (1972). Ashton had extended male style by incorporating, into his dances for Dowell, various aspects of vocabulary and style hitherto associated solely with ballerinas: flowing arabesques both penchées and sustained in fondu; the extensive use of piqué steps on half-point, and of adagio; an allegro manège of piqué and chaîné turns. Thereby Ashton, creating for Dowell, encapsulated a new 1960s view of masculinity: super-elegant and partly androgynous. Now MacMillan took this further. In Manon, before that Act One pas de deux, des Grieux addresses Manon in a solo. At one point, he dances with his back to the audience, pauses in relevé retiré, and looking over his shoulder, arches his neck and upper torso backwards. Where have we seen this before? In Ashton’s solo for Cinderella in the ballroom. MacMillan was borrowing one of the most eloquent moments from an Ashton ballerina solo – one might say he was handing a Sibley moment to Dowell - and making it absolutely expressive of the chevalier des Grieux’s youthful delicacy.
I don’t mean that these Ashtonisms demean MacMillan in any way. Choreographers do borrow from each other, especially from the previous generation. Ashton employed a great many Nijinska-isms. As for that “Margot” arabesque, he took it from Anna Pavlova – who had in turn adapted it from Isadora Duncan. Particularly in its angling of the upper body, it’s originally a Grecian dance device. You can see it, as Isadora doubtless had done, in many ancient paintings and sculptures (especially with the head raised to look ecstatically upwards) to depict maenads or bacchantes, the female followers of the wine-god Dionysus.
VI.
What became painfully apparent in these years, however, were MacMillan’s faults of craftsmanship. In Manon, I would hold up to anyone the Act Two “bracelet” pas de deux as an example of choreographic waffle. Manon’s basic gestural idea – do I want this bracelet as much as I want des Grieux? – goes on with so few significant variations that it soon palls.[22] In the original production of The Four Seasons, a basically pure-dance ballet, the essential problem was MacMillan’s idea that all the men came to this house to find all these women: it was widely assumed that the house must be a brothel. To audiences accustomed to Ashton’s Fabergé work, such flaws were hard to digest.
Then there was the problem that MacMillan, unlike Ashton, seemed instinctively tactless. Ashton, after all, was much more like a laureate than any Poet Laureate has ever been. He recovered from the offence caused in 1950 by Illuminations to become one of the Royal Family’s most evidently favoured artists. Not quite so MacMillan. One of his last tasks as artistic director of the Royal Ballet came in 1977 when the Queen celebrated her Silver Jubilee. For a stellar gala of opera and ballet at Covent Garden, both he and Ashton choreographed items. Ashton made his second Fonteyn-Nureyev vehicle, Hamlet and Ophelia, to Liszt music. MacMillan, using Seymour, choreographed the Choral dances from Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana. This alone seemed tactless to members of the audience with memories. Gloriana had been composed for the Queen’s Coronation season, and it was widely known she hadn’t cared for it then. Deborah MacMillan has said that her husband was responding to a musical suggestion made by others. Nonetheless it seemed to the general audience as if the choreographer was saying to the monarch, “Remember that opera you didn’t enjoy then? Here’s some of it now.”
His choice of music was, anyway, the smallest aspect of the problem. There was Elizabeth II, who tried to steer the Royal Family clear of the scandal of adultery or divorce for her first twenrty-five years, enjoying her silver jubilee - but here was a ballet in which Elizabeth I, wearing a sawn-off farthingale that exposed her legs to her hips, was depicted not as the Virgin Queen but with one lover after another. I wish now that we could see this dance again - I suggest it was almost the only piece of these years in which MacMillan’s demons rose to the surface - but it was only ever performed the once. MacMillan was left in no doubt that he had caused offence. Ashton, supervising the ballet part of the gala, tried at the dress rehearsal at least to arrange modifications to the Gloriana costume. Deborah MacMillan has said that, at the reception following the gala, only Denis Healey came up to congratulate MacMillan; and that Ashton behaved as huffily as anyone.[23]
The next year, 1978, Ninette de Valois turned eighty. MacMillan celebrated this with a work for Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, 6.6.78, most of which may have been the worst choreography he ever made. Unlike, say, the dance that Ashton made the next spring to mark Fonteyn’s sixtieth birthday, Salut d’amour, MacMillan’s 6.6.78 just didn’t feel like a tribute.
Pièces d’occasion were never his thing. In 1981, the Royal Ballet turned fifty. In 1956, when it had turned twenty-five, Ashton had made Birthday Offering, a diadem that scintillatingly displayed the fact that the company had no less than seven ballerinas, each with highly individual glories. That, a cornucopia of Royal Ballet style at its most intricate, had been revived at Covent Garden in 1978 and 1979. So it was easy to hope in 1981 that someone would give us something equivalent to show where the company was at after its next twentyfive years. But what did MacMillan give us for that golden-jubilee season? His two-act Isadora. Now, Isadora Duncan was a barefoot dancer who proclaimed “I am the enemy of the ballet”. She also had a series of important lovers, and her life was blighted by the death of her children. MacMillan had every right to choreograph her story. But his timing could scarcely have been more bizarre.
VII.
He had retired from his post as director of the Royal Ballet in July 1977, the month after his Gloriana choral dances. Again, Ninette de Valois was involved. She had gone behind his back to the board at Covent Garden to propose that his 1973 production of The Sleeping Beauty be replaced by a new one staged by herself, and the board had agreed. When MacMillan had discovered this, he, quite naturally, felt that he had been so outflanked that he should not remain in the post.[24] (No reason for his retirement was made public at the time.)
He then choreographed Mayerling – which had its premiere in February 1978 – and dedicated it to Ashton. Why did he dedicate Mayerling to Ashton? I’ve often wondered. Why not Manon, which has so many more Ashtonisms? Ashton, when I mentioned this to him in 1988, could not enlighten me.
Maybe it’s because MacMillan, in 1977-1978, now knew how Ashton had felt when de Valois had engineered his retirement nine years before. Maybe it’s because, when making Mayerling to music by Liszt, MacMillan would have remembered such Ashton ballets to Liszt as Apparitions (1936), Dante Sonata (1940), and Marguerite and Armand (1963). Maybe it’s because the score was arranged by John Lanchbery, who had peformed the same function on a whole series of Ashton ballets from the 1960 La Fille mal gardée through to the 1976 A Month in the Country. Maybe MacMillan simply felt that Mayerling, with its powerful sense of historical period (late nineteenth-century), owed much to Ashton’s 1968 Enigma Variations (which he had kept in repertory throughout his regime): in both ballets, women dance on point in long late-Victorian dresses.
Maybe it’s because David Vaughan’s marvellous Ashton book had come out in autumn 1977, while MacMillan was making his ballet. If you know the final scene for Crown Prince Rudolf in Mayerling, it happens before an arrangement of of three-screens. Vaughan’s Ashton book has a photograph of the 1947 Valses nobles et sentimentales, in which Sophie Fedorovitch’s use of screens is striking. And who had danced in the original Valses nobles in 1947? MacMillan had danced in the original.
But I propose something more. In each of MacMillan’s first four full-length ballets – Romeo and Juliet, Anastasia (1971), Manon, and now Mayerling – he began by showing a stage world like those in many Ashton ballets, evocatively and elegantly historical, elegant, and then shattered it. The first acts of Romeo, Anastasia, Manon, and Mayerling give you formal, decorous, elegant, charming worlds of period manners and stylish historical evocation. The rest of those ballets show you the forces that tear those societies apart and wreck the lives of their central figures. These four ballets imply that MacMillan acknowledged the beauty and charm of Ashtonian societies (while also pointing out their hypocrisies), and then went on to demonstrate that such worlds cannot endure.
Mayerling is, of all MacMillan ballets, the richest, the one in which most dramatic resonance occurs between different characters onstage, the one in which meanings from the onstage drama continue in one’s head long after the curtain’s fall. The acrobatic pas de deux are the most sensational element, but what’s most awesome about those with Mary Vetsera is their psychological penetration. You can’t miss how these two characters touch notes of endless sexual hunger, of despair with life, and of sustained, distorted physical tension that can only find release in death.
More wonderful yet is the wealth of texture around the leading characters. When the ballet was young, its most perfect scene was the fortune-telling episode for three women – the young Mary Vetsera, her mother, and Marie Larisch. Here, every passing revelation of character or change of utterance registers with enchantingly bright colours. Elsewhere there are brief connections between subsidiary characters that, as in no other MacMillan ballet, deepen the whole drama. I relish the dropcurtain scene, late in Act Two, when the Empress, who is with her lover Bay Middleton, suddenly meets the young Count Hoyos, who evidently admires her. She has been so cold with her son Rudolf (though Oedipally attached to him), and so infuriating in her public condonation of her husband’s adulterous relationship with the singer Katherina Schratt - but here we suddenly see her full allure: she’s lit up with glamorous energy, and the young man’s attention redoubles her charm. Most haunting of all is the episode in Act Three when she catches Marie Larisch in Rudolf’s bedroom and banishes her from court. Apart from the fact that we feel something very akin to sexual jealousy in the Empress’s rage here, what’s astounding is the slow, rueful curtsey that Larisch then makes to Rudolf while slyly pressing her finger to her lips. Your secret is safe; I have been crushed; I will now set history in motion; and meanwhile let us preserve appearances.
And yet a child could tell you what’s wrong with Mayerling. (When teaching dance history, I have often had to remind BA students what’s right with it.) The problem here is not just craftsmanship. If MacMillan is an expressionist, as has often been said, it’s embarrassing how often he can’t express what he wants to. The most obvious Mayerling example is the four Hungarians in Act One. As poor Prince Rudolf is making his way along the palace corridors to his bridal night, these four moustachioed officers emerge from folds in the curtains. They fix him with half-Nelsons, they lean heavily on him, they whisper threateningly into his ear. I’m afraid we really don’t think – as the programme hopes we will – that these chaps are urging the cause of Hungarian secession from the Austrian Empire. It looks all too much as if they’re blackmailing him with secrets from his past, probably a sexual past (why else grab him on his wedding night?), probably a sexual past that also involved them. Another problematic curtain scene occurs in Act Two. In a scene of sheer padding, the Emperor paces slowly in plus-fours before the ancestral portraits, in what I have always called Another Night Awake With Constipation For Franz Josef.
These blips prove trivial amid the extraordinary dramatic wealth of Mayerling, but they certainly seemed blips to an audience that had only recently been given a ballet so finely crafted as Ashton’s A Month in the Country. It’s very possible to say that Mayerling is a greater ballet than A Month in the Country, but it’s also very possible to say that it’s greatly more flawed.
I have mentioned a ballet MacMillan made a few months later: 6.6.78. One section alone deserves to be rescued from this ballet - the extensive acrobatic pas de deux for the male-female Gemini couple, danced by Marion Tait and Desmond Kelly. Why do I mention this here? Because, in the most striking passage of all, they quoted from Ashton’s “white” Monotones (1965) – Trois Gymnopédies.[25] David Vaughan, in his 1977 Ashton book, had described how the two men in Ashton’s pas de trois support the one woman as she takes high développé à la seconde; they help her bend her torso forward, down, and – amazingly – under her own leg, so that she seems to turn inside out before she arrives in supported first arabesque. This is precisely what, in 6.6.78, Tait did in Kelly’s arms. And MacMillan then took the manoeuvre one stage further, folding Tait’s torso around one more time and having Kelly raise her working leg until it met her face and chest – an image that again recalled Monotones, in this case its famous opening manoeuvre, in which the ballerina is found in the splits, holding fast to her leg, like (Ashton’s phrase) “a chicken on a spit”.
I say this admiringly. I remember watching this Gemini duet with fascination. It didn’t seem derivative; it seemed wise. I wonder what Ashton thought.[26]
Thanks to Deborah MacMillan, we do know what he thought of another of the ballets made by MacMillan in 1978 – the strange My Brother, My Sisters. In this drama to twelve-tone music by Schoenberg and Webern, one young man and four young women get up to kinky children’s games, both bookish and sexy, that involve various kinds of obsession and bullying. As in The Lord of the Flies, one child is robbed of her glasses. She dies. A second young man excludes himself from this warped family. MacMillan made this on the Stuttgart Ballet. Two years later, he staged it on the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden. It has always been controversial. At Covent Garden, it did not at first seem welcome to the repertory. But Ashton, according to Deborah MacMillan, loved it from its first London performance with the Stuttgart company. He absolutely understood the distorted world of these strange characters; he told all his friends that they must see it. What success the ballet initially had - so Deborah MacMillan has said[27] - was due to Ashton.
In spring 1980, MacMillan choreographed Gloria, to Poulenc’s oratorio. It so happens that Ashton, who had used Poulenc music before, had begun to think about choreographing this music himself. But he quietly dropped the idea as soon as he knew MacMillan wanted to use the score. [28] This is surprising; Ashton never choreographed to religious music. Ashton made no claims that MacMillan was using “his” music – whereas, later in the 1980s, MacMillan behaved far more jealously when he thought junior choreographers might employ scores in which he felt interested.[29]
What’s curious, though, is that MacMillan in Gloria seems to have Ashton on his mind. That “Margot” arabesque recurs for the leading ballerina (the role created on Jennifer Penney). He also gives her extensive walking-on-air images, not least in the Monotones-like pas de trois with her two male partners. Then there’s the most peculiar moment in Gloria, in which this ballerina and her two male partners are both lifted by the ensemble so that they hang cruciform like the three crosses at Calvary.[30] Twenty years after the premiere of Gloria, it hit me where MacMillan got the idea of his crucifixion imagery - from Ashton’s Dante Sonata, which had not one crucifixion scene but two. When Gloria was new, I and most of its audience had never seen Dante Sonata, a ballet lost after 1950. We had to wait until Jean Bedells and colleagues revived it in 2000. But MacMillan had seen it, often; it had stayed in repertory throughout his first seasons as a dancer with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. I think now that Dante Sonata, whose spiritual intensity had meant so much to British audiences during the Second World War, was in fact the main inspiration behind MacMillan’s three “spiritual” ballets – The Song of the Earth, Requiem, Gloria – though less in vocabulary than in its sheer expressionist ambition.
VIII.
Earlier in this conference, Robert Penman quoted MacMillan as saying that he was “sprung from Petipa’s loins”. That’s a highly pretentious expression on MacMillan’s part; but let’s take him seriously enough to assume that he saw Ashton as a sire in this choreographic genealogy. To most Western dance-goers of the mid-twentieth-century, Balanchine and Ashton seemed Petipa’s two chief descendants (“Petipa the Father, Balanchine the Son, and Ashton the Holy Ghost,” a wag once said). Ashton had devoted much time from the 1930s to the 1970s to coaching Petipa’s ballerina roles, as well contributing supplementary material to such ballets as Giselle, The Sleeping Beauty, and Swan Lake.
MacMillan, however, by no means looked like one of Petipa’s true descendants to those of us who watched MacMillan’s choreography in the years that followed Mayerling. The Royal Ballet, while danced his ballets wonderfully, but began to lose its way in the classics. Serving Petipa and MacMillan now seemed as difficult as serving God and Mammon.
To Ashton, Tamara Karsavina had said “You are a link in the chain”. Who could have said that to MacMillan after Different Drummer? or after half-a-dozen other ballets of this era? From 1979 on, important details of Royal Ballet style – both upper- and lower- body – began to erode; I remember the pangs I felt as I watched them vanish. The distance between Petipa’s loins and MacMillan began to feel like light-years.
Well, Ashton died in 1988. And how odd what happened next: MacMillan promptly turned back to the Petipa source. After years of talking about The Prince of the Pagodas, he finally took up work on choreographing this three-act Benjamin Britten score; and he dedicated it to Margot Fonteyn, invoking the image of her Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty to consecrate and to inspire the classicism he wished to achieve here. In practice, however, the connection here between Petipa’s loins and MacMillan proved pretty sporadic. You can feel it powerfully in some supporting soloist variations; at times you can also feel MacMillan making potent links to Balanchine and Ashton. Too often in Pagodas, however, MacMillan’s efforts at ballet classicism felt strenuous, contrived. Meanwhile any colloquy between MacMillan and his demons felt intermittent at best.
And yet in Pagodas MacMIllan really had woken up a new beauty: Darcey Bussell. Be it remembered that, during the 1980s, the Royal Ballet had had a number of ballerina might-bes whose careers had gone up in flames within the first few years of their careers. Bussell, however, was the real thing. What’s more, she was built to last. In the 1990s, the status of the Royal Ballet as a classical company became quite different from what it had been ten years before. Though still flawed, the company simply showed now far more vitality in classicism. And this new lustre came in part from what MacMillan had summoned from the depths.
He, however, moved on. In the ballets he made next – Winter Dreams (1991), The Judas Tree (1992) – he moved away again from classicism. Particularly in The Judas Tree, a ballet still controversial today, he came vividly back into communion with his demons. He died later that year. His death felt quite unlike Ashton’s not least because we felt he had much more choreography yet ahead of him.
IX.
How to conclude this complex picture of the family relations between Ashton and MacMillan? It would be easy to concentrate on the civil war between the two. I remember, for example, how I asked Ashton in February ’88, the last time I saw him, what he thought of the Ashtonisms in such MacMillan ballets as Manon and Pavane. Quick as a flash, he replied drily “I know there’s such a thing as an hommage - but there are limits!” I also can’t resist telling the story of Ashton after the premiere of Manon. Seeing David Vaughan, Ashton asked him, “What do you think?” Vaughan replied “Well, it has its longueurs.” Ashton said “Et comment!”[31]
But, while waspishness like this came all too easily to Ashton, it represented less than half the picture. I strongly believe he felt honoured by MacMillan’s choreographic use of Ashtonisms. In 1987, he congratulated Richard Alston on his Rambert choreography of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella: “You’ve illumined the music.” Alston replied, “Actually, what I’ve illumined is how many of your ballets I’ve quoted from.” Ashton replied simply, “That’s what they’re there for.”[32] When he wasn’t being wicked and defensive, he must have felt the same about MacMillan.
His admiration for My Brother My Sisters shows quite a different aspect of their relationship. Monica Mason has recently said that, though as a dancer she was not one of Ashton’s personal favourites, he always gave her credit, during his regime as artistic director, for doing well what she did well elsewhere in the repertory. “When he saw me in the corridor at Covent Garden, he’d do his favourite step from my solo in MacMillan’s Rite of Spring.”[33]
I also recall how, at my last meeting with Ashton in February 1988, I asked him which MacMillan ballet he most admired. He said, at once “Song of the Earth.” Song Of all the MacMillan ballets in repertory while Ashton was artistic director, Song owed least, in terms of craft and vocabulary, to Ashton. In singling it out, the father could see that the son had long since come of age.
[1] See Alastair Macaulay: “Gender, Sexuality, Community”, Following Sir Fred’s Steps, edited by Stephanie Jordan and Andree Grau, Dance Books, 1996
[2] Postscript 2020. I had in mind the critics Clive Barnes, Dale Harris, David Vaughan, all now dead.
[3] . Private information.
[4] In that, I succeeded. Deborah MacMillan, the choreographer’s widow, raged.
[5] A number of British modern dancers have found the Graham sections of these ballets, as danced by the Royal Ballet, paralysingly funny.
[6] Interviews with Pamela May, 1997 and 2000.
[7] BBCRadio 3 tribute to Ninette de Valois, March 2001.
[8] Leslie Edwards was a perfect example of this. In an interview with me in 1997, suxty years after he had been in the original cast of Ashton’s Les Patineurs, he could only pluck up courage to say how the choreography had changed once I had reassured him that Pamela May had done so.
[9] See Julie Kavanagh, Secret Muses – the Life of Frederick Ashton (U.S. edition, Pantheon Books, 1997). Esp. pp. 316-7, 450-1, 472-6. (The U.S. edition is preferable to the 1996 British Faber & Faber edition because further factual corrections have been made.)
Postscript 2020. See my paper Ashton and de Valois, first delievered in 2011.
[10] Frederick Ashton, in interview with Alastair Macaulay, “Ashton at Eighty”, Dance Theatre Journal, vol. 2 no 3, 1984.
[11] Lincoln Kirstein, Thirty Years - New York City Ballet. (A. & C. Black, U.S. 1978), p.114. For reviews of Princess Marina’s jewellery, see Royal Ballet archive, Covent Garden.
[12] It is nonetheless worth checking the different ways they are told by Julie Kavanagh (Secret Muses, the Life of Frederick Ashton, 1996; and Rudolf Nureyev: the Life, 2007), Meredith Daneman (Margot Fonteyn, 2001), Zoë Anderson (The Royal Ballet, the first 75 years, 2005) and Jann Parry (Different Drummer, 2009).
[13] Conversation with Keith Money, 1999. According to him, he accompaied Fonteyn to a meeting with Hurok, which she left thinking she had persuaded the impresario to give the premiere to Seymour and Gable.
[14] Alexander Grant, at the 1994 Roehampton Ashton conference Following Sir Fred’s Steps. Actually Ashton had already double-cast the lead roles of his three-act Cinderella (1948) and Sylvia (1952) from their inceptions.
[15] Arlene Croce, in conversation, 1988.
[16] Mary Clarke, Dancing Times, 1965.
[17] See, for example, Gable in Barbara Newman, Striking a Balance, 1982.
[18] Dale Harris to David Vaughan,
[19] Revived by Sarasota Ballet in 2014.
[20] Indeed, when London Festival Ballet first staged Ashton’s Romeo (the Danish 1955 version, slightly revised) in 1985 at the London Coliseum, the company proved so raw in its efforts at Ashton style that, as I remember writing at the time, this Ashton Romeo looked, ironically, less Ashtonian than the Royal Ballet’s account of MacMillan’s Romeo at Covent Garden.
See Alastair Macaulay, “Ashton amid the Alien Corn”, Dance Theatre Journal, vol. 3, no 3, 1985. See also Macaulay, Views and Reviews of Ashton’s Choreography, National Resource Centre of Dance, 1988.
[21] David Vaughan, Frederick Ashton and his Ballets, A & C. Black, 1977, p.373.
[22] In the succeeding discussion at the Revealing MacMillan conference, Antoinette Sibley eloquently defended this pas de deux, and spoke of the importance, when coaching it, of finding all its varied nuances.
[23] Interview with Deborah MacMillan, August 1998.
[24] Deborah MacMIllan, 1998.
[25] Alastair Macaulay, “Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet”, Dancing Times, November 1978.
[26] He attended its premiere. By chance, I was seated as a young critic behind him in the old Dress Circle at Sadler’s Wells.
[27] 1998 conversation with AM.
[28] Ashton to AM in June 1984.
[29] Richard Alston mentioned to the Royal Ballet c. 1983 that he was interested in choreographing Pulcinella, a score he did use with the Rambert Dance Company in 1987. MacMillan vetoed this at the Royal, insisting this score was for him. He never choreographed it. (Information from Sally Rettig.)
When Alston’s production was danced by the Rambert, with designs by none other than Howard Hodgkin, critics were invited to review it three times in its first year: at its premiere on tour, at Sadler’s Wells, and in the Big Top, Battersea Park. Clement Crisp, the critic closest to MacMillan, firmly avoided reviewing it on all three occasions in the Financial Times. When David Vaughan, the FT’s New York critic, saw it at Sadler’s Wells, he proposed to the newspaper that he reviewed it, since Crisp was not doing so. Crisp intervened to prevent his doing so. (Information from Vaughan and Crisp.)
[30] At this point, I must confess that I have never “got” Gloria.Yes, I see that its basic idea is a dance adaptation of the central idea of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem – i.e. a drama of marked irony in which voices sing the Christian Requiem Mass while images occur of First World War trench warfare and of the Lost Generation. But I’ve never seen what the second female dancer – the role created by Wendy Ellis - is doing in all those happy acrobatic numbers. Nor can I see how the leading threesome go from their essentially Testament of Youth ménage into becoming the three crosses at Calvary.
[31] David Vaughan to AM, 2002.
[32] Alston to AM, 1987.
[33] Monica Mason to AM, interview, October 2003.