Artist and muse: Margot Fonteyn, Frederick Ashton, and “Cinderella”

Artist and muse: I adore the composition of this 1949 photograph by Felix Fonteyn, showing his sister Margot Fonteyn, dressed as Cinderella going to the ball, with the choreographer Frederick Ashton. We can bet that the composition was by Ashton.

No ballerina was more openly self-critical than Fonteyn, as her “Autobiography” wonderfully demonstrates. She tells of how, when Ashton told her he was planning to create his three-act “Cinderella” for December 1948, she assured him that she would be unable to dance every performance. Then, however, she admits she was disconcerted when casting was announced: she was given the premiere, but with Moira Shearer alternating with her in the role. When she mentioned this to Ashton, he simply observed that she herself had said she could not dance every performance of a ballet planned for an unbroken Christmas run. She then injured herself in the world premiere of Ashton’s “Don Juan”. During her weeks of recuperation, “Cinderella” - the Sadler’s Wells Ballet’s first created three-act ballet - opened without her, and with Shearer (as Fonteyn notes) dancing every performance as Fonteyn had refused to do.

Fonteyn’s long career outlasted many of her juniors at the Sadler’s Wells (later, Royal) Ballet. In her “Autobiography”, however, this is the only period when she - then in her late twenties - admits to feeling the threat of junior ballerinas. She mentions Shearer and Beryl Grey, generously describing their great virtues.

In fact, Violetta Elvin fairly soon danced Cinderella too, as did Nadia Nerina and other ballerinas. And it was not long before Fonteyn danced the role. When she did, she at once surpassed all others, maximising the contrast between the despondent waif by the kitchen cinders and the radiant apparition who arrived at the ball. Interviewing Ashton in 1984, I asked if he had choreographed it for the injured Fonteyn in his mind’s eye. “No,” he said, in his objective, matter-of-fact way: “You can see Shearer’s style in the ballroom variation: brittle.”

Therefore Fonteyn’s skill in taking Shearer’s created role and making it her own must have been her own feat of interpretative intelligence: her way of addressing the threat posed by Shearer and Grey (who danced Fairy Winter in all three acts). Fonteyn achieved this without making enemies of either rival; both of them spoke of her with great admiration after her death in 1991, as did many other ballerinas.

To complete her triumph, it was her account of the role, not Shearer’s, that Ashton singled out in his 1984 interview with me. Her selected her entrance at the ballroom as one of the moments branded on his mind’s eye, which no other ballerina could efface. (Descending the staircase on point, she achieved an impression of enchantment by keeping her eyes slightly raised and her neck and shoulders serenely relaxed, as if uninvolved in the perilous mechanics of walking downstairs on point.)

In 1957, Ashton directed the camerawork for an American TV broadcast of “Cinderella” (now on DVD, with Kenneth MacMillan and himself as Cinderella’s stepsisters). Brilliantly, he brought the camera round to view her most astounding dance moment as if from the wings. In the third phrase of the ballroom variation, Cinderella dances with her back to the audience. In one sequence, she, while holding a balance on point in sustained retiré, arches right back from the waist, and then returns to vertical. As her devotee Keith Money observed to me from observing her in the 1960s, only those in the wings could fully appreciate the fullness of that backbend and the easy rhythm with which she timed both that and her return to vertical. Ashton, directing the camera in 1957, made sure the TV audience had the best view of this phenomenal moment.

This 1949 photograph shows choreographer and ballerina as Pygmalion and Galatea. Ashton had done much to create Fonteyn, and yet he never ceased to marvel at the beauty of her dancing. Her creation kept surpassing his conception.

Friday 16 July

1949 photograph by Felix Fonteyn of Frederick Ashton and Margot Fonteyn. She is dressed as Cinderella going to the ball in Ashton’s 1948 three-act ballet.