Margot Fonteyn on DVD 2020.i.05

DVDs

1. “The Sleeping Beauty – Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet” VAI 4295

2. “Tchaikovsky Ballet Masterpieces - Margot Fonteyn Michael Somes” ICAD 5050

3. “Margot” (Tony Palmer’s Film about) 163 minutes. NTSC

4  “Fonteyn & Nureyev – The Perfect Partnership”. Beckman Visual Publishing 1110 minutes BDV 006

5.  “An Evening with the Royal Ballet” DVD (Fonteyn Nureyev “Le Corsaire”; Fonteyn and Blair in “The Sleeping Beauty” Act Three)

6. “Nadia Nerina; Robert Helpmann; Margot Fonteyn; Rudolf Nureyev – Les Sylphides, Coppelia, Giselle Act II pas de deux” ICA classics ICAD 5058

7. “Cinderella” ICA Classics 4296.

8. “Romeo and Juliet (The Royal Ballet with Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn in)” Kultur D1183

9. “Margot Fonteyn –a Portrait”, directed by Patricia Foy, 1989.

Margot Fonteyn

Which matters more in the performing arts, the performing life onstage or the one offstage? Which is more real? In performance, from 1962 onward, Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev managed so successful a display of romantic love that there was immediate clucking. So was this an expression of their private lives?

When Tony Palmer’s documentary “Margot” was new, its most controversial ingredient was the highly speculative assertion of one Avril Bergen that Fonteyn had miscarried Nureyev’s child. Scandal! Nobody on Palmer’s documentary (long since available on DVD), however, remembers to point out that Fonteyn (1919-1991) and Nureyev (1938-1993) kept up the same thrilling simulacrum of love’s wonder onstage for more than another decade. They were artists: they knew how to make love seem real. (Meredith Daneman, Fonteyn’s biographer, believes that Fonteyn had taken steps in the 1950s to prevent any further possibility of pregnancy.)

Fonteyn’s main life was the one she had chosen in her teens, the life of dance. Offstage, yes, she had her share of sacrifices, vexations, and tragedies: Palmer’s documentary reminds us how Fonteyn’s husband, Roberto de Arias, betrayed her and of how she ended her life in poverty and pain, dying of cancer. Yet Palmer’s many film clips show us, again and again, that Fonteyn was supremely fulfilled by her dance life, as were her audiences from the mid-1930s to the late 1970s. To concentrate on Fonteyn’s losses, as Palmer’s “Margot” often does, is to miss her main achievement and her greatest importance.  

The opposite emphasis occurs in “Margot Fonteyn – a Portrait,” made at Fonteyn’s suggestion in preparation for her seventieth birthday. She herself narrates. It includes footage of Fonteyn’s life in retirement with her husband in Panama. Some of this is awkward to behold (why did Fonteyn need to be seen feeding her quadriplegic husband?), some touching (several animals, adored by Fonteyn, are at home on the veranda of their simple house). Fonteyn knew, when she was making this documentary, that she had cancer. Her husband died within months of its release, she less than two years later. She refuses to be negative, however. This is a valuable retrospective of her life with unique footage (she even re-created a long-lost solo from Frederick Ashton’s first vehicle for her, “Le Baiser de la fée”, made when she was 16 in 1935, here danced by Nicola Katrak.) Much of her dance life is here. Humanity, beauty, heart all shine through. Fragility and health are poignantly combined. Fonteyn was blest with ideally harmonious proportions. Instinctively classical, she seemed incapable of an ugly or unmusical movement.

Is ballet an unnatural or a natural activity? Some dancers are gymnasts, acrobats, freaks. Not so Fonteyn. Like many other ballerinas of her generation, she had changed her name (Margaret or “Peggy” Hookham); she also changed the lines of her hair and nose. Yet her dancing, through her long career, remained singularly free of artifice: it was poetic, courteous, natural. (After coaching some young Royal Ballet dancers at the end of her life, she remarked to her old colleague Pamela May “They’re doing steps – but they’re not dancing.”) As Robert Gottlieb observes in “Margot,” “She made you feel good.”

Check out the most famous dance of her career, the Rose Adagio in “The Sleeping Beauty.” So much happens to its heroine, Princess Aurora, that we tend to overlook why it’s called the Rose Adagio. This is a courtship ritual. Twice over, Aurora accepts single roses from each of her four suitors in succession. The first four roses are initial tokens of love, the second four are declarations. No matter how often we’ve watched it with other dancers, to return to film of Fonteyn here is to rediscover the truth of who Aurora is, why she matters, and what the roses mean to her.

Try the VAI DVD of “The Sleeping Beauty”, a Producers’ Showcase Telecast from December 12, 1955. (The cover says it’s the “Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet”. Correction: it was the Sadler’s Wells Ballet then. In 1956, it became the Royal Ballet. Its smaller, touring company went through several changes of nomenclature, using “Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet” between 1977 and 1997.)

Especially with the more intimate first series of roses, she catches the heart. The Rose Adagio has already been momentous; it will become more so. Here, however, the music is hushed, the scale of the dance small, the drama specific. Taking each rose, she executes supported pirouettes in the arms of the first prince – yet who notices pirouettes with Fonteyn, however rapid? Instead, she draws the eye only to the moments of stillness with which the turns begin and end. At first, as she prepares to turn, taking the rose with her right hand, she gives the bloom due consideration. Then, after turning, as she arrives with the rose held just above head-height, her eyes gleam as she regards it. Next, as she transfers each rose to her left hand, the turn of her head and line of her eyes to her accumulating bouquet adds a subtly different note. Details, details: these and many more play their part in making this scene a quintessentially youthful rite of passage.

It’s good to keep on analyzing Fonteyn here. Although we tend to think of dance as a response to music, her timing here shows the opposite: she anticipates the score, so that, after those turns, she and a flute arrive at the same pause together (that upheld rose). Watching, you catch your breath. And at all points, she is the epitome of enchantingly good manners. The Rose Adagios she filmed in 1959 (“Tchaikovsky Ballet Masterpieces”) and 1967 (“Margot”) – others, filmed live, exist in archives and private collections  - all have their individual excellences, but more marvellous is the stylistic consistency and theatrical élan she maintained over so many years.

You can even find (on YouTube, where it’s shown right-left instead of left-right) silent film of her dancing the Act Three wedding pas de deux with Robert Helpmann in 1936; she danced the complete three-act role between 1939 and 1973. At all points in her career, it’s worth studying how she opens the wedding adagio. (The best account is a 1962 account of Act Three, with David Blair as her partner, in the film “An Evening with the Royal Ballet”. But when you compare it to those of 1955 and 1959, all wonderful, on “The Sleeping Beauty” and “Tchaikovsky Ballet Masterpieces,” the quality remains exquisite.) Facing her prince on point and taking his hand, she slowly extends a leg toward him: she’s facing him upstage on a diagonal, so that the audience sees her wonderfully erect spine and neck. Now she stretches back towards us in a yet slower backbend, so that her face opens to the audience: the final stretch of her upper spine and neck, yielding expressively within the adagio’s strict formality while offering her full face, neck, and chest to the audience, is luxuriant. And yet the formal beauty remains: as her head arches back, so does the one raised arm that frames it, moving in complete accord with her head and neck.

She punctuates marvelously, too. Just as vital as the calm cantilena flow of that extension and backbend (lasting eleven seconds in all, in each of these performance) are the ultra-crisp movements that begin and end it. The way she snaps up onto point beforehand and the astonishingly sudden pivot after that backbend so that, in a moment, she’s upright, again with her torso and head facing front.

What’s technique? Because Fonteyn did not specialise in turns, jumps, or high extensions – the showier aspects of bravura – she was seldom known as a technician.  Yet the attack she brings to Odile in “Swan Lake” (“Tchaikovsky Ballet Masterpieces: Margot Fonteyn, Michael Somes”) is still breathtaking, as is her dangerous allure. She abounds in marvelous dynamic contrasts. Especially in Odile’s solo variation, though her feet were always thought to be her weakest zone, the brisk clarity of her footwork keeps striking the eye, with many details usually omitted by today’s interpreters (most of whom take far slower tempi). And nothing is more marvelous than her eyes, which continually find the precise points in space that completes the lines described by her movement.

The pliancy of her spine often remains breathtaking. Look at her in the ballroom solo of Ashton’s “Cinderella.” In one sequence, Cinderella dances with her back to the audience: on one beat she arches backward, while on a single point; on the next, she returns to vertical. Most Cinderellas just tip one or other part of the spine – the neck or the waist – while leaving a sense of rhythmic sketchiness. Fonteyn alone makes a true arch from waist to neck, filling the music, and then returns effortlessly to her vertical axis with equal inevitability. It’s probably the most physically astounding moment to be found in all the footage of her on screen. (To make sure we see how astounding this is, Ashton arranged the choreography so that the camera views her in profile.) Yet she makes it seem a simple gesture from the heart, just an inevitable part of the solo’s rhythm.

The 1985 documentary “Fonteyn & Nureyev – The Perfect Partnership,” made during the two stars were alive but after her retirement from ballet, does not allege pregnancies, miscarriages, or sex. It’s about their alchemy: a enthralling theatrical meeting of opposite temperaments. Their disparity was as important as their harmony: it’s most striking in the virtuoso pas de deux from “Le Corsaire” (best seen complete in “An Evening with the Royal Ballet”) and in the high-voltage melodrama of Frederick Ashton’s “Marguerite and Armand.” Though “Fonteyn & Nureyev” shows all their scenes together in “Marguerite,” it omits her most stunning moment, because he’s not visibly present. After he had publicly insulted her and swept offstage, she made a sensationally tremulous exit in the opposite direction. Her stuttering feet and wilting upper body revealed how her spirit had been broken. So did her hands and arms, incapable of classical formality now but softly holding her torso, as if shielding her broken heart.

Not all Fonteyn-Nureyev footage is wonderful. Their studio account of the pas de deux from Act Two of “Giselle” has its beauties (her style, unlike any modern Giselle, is exemplary) but feels contained. Likewise “Les Sylphides,” despite its lyrical loveliness, does not explain their legend. The film of their three-act “Romeo and Juliet” (Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography) shows much of their eloquence, yet fails to capture how she, onstage, could still look enchantingly teenage in her forties and fifties.  

Fonteyn had already had long partnerships with Robert Helpmann and Michael Somes before Nureyev rekindled her career: she was in her forties. It’s worth pointing out that this “perfect” partnership was controversial. Although Nureyev could be an exciting partner, he only sometimes made a priority of showcasing Fonteyn to her best advantage. Instead theirs was a stage relationship in which they met on equal terms, each raising the bar for the other in terms of timing, inflection, radiance.

One moment in Fonteyn’s repertory used to be known by fans, from the 1950s on, as “the most beautiful moment in ballet”: it’s the poignant passage in the first lakeside pas de deux in “Swan Lake” when the voices of solo cello and violin come most intimately together. We’re lucky that it exists in three published films of Fonteyn: the first two are with Somes (the 1954 one is in “Tchaikovsky Ballet Masterpieces”, the 1959 one is in “Margot”), the third, filmed in 1965 for the Ed Sullivan TV show, is in “Fonteyn & Nureyev.” All three performances explain the deep emotion this passage generated: it’s worth comparing them.

In each, Fonteyn dances on a tragic scale, while establishing intimacy and vulnerability. In the most pronounced of her vacillations in this adagio, Odette has broken physically away from Siegfried, as if all too diffident to trust his love and taking refuge in her former solitude. Now, however, she returns. She arrives in front of him, one leg stretched behind her in arabesque, her hands crossed before her waist. In a touch shown by no other Odette, her hands rise together like a steeple, then opening in an arc above her head: Fonteyn, raising her eyes, make the arc feel huge. Siegfried takes her wrists, slowly turns her on her vertical axis as she maintains that low arabesque, and reassures her, folding one of her arms down around her waist and then the other, then rocking her in a gently steady rhythm from side to side, his cheek coming close to hers. Even though she breaks from him again and they repeat the whole phrase of his reassurance, we can’t help feeling that she has found her haven.

With Somes, Fonteyn is yet more tragically bleak. When he rocks her in his arms, her face stays mask-like, forlorn, as if she is still isolated during this most affecting image. With Nureyev, there are more overtly romantic strokes: he is more involved in raising her arms in that steeple; and when he rocks her in his arms, she turns her cheek to his, raising her eyes in hope and need. In Fonteyn’s changes of nuance, we see the investigative spirit of a profound artist, always searching for meaning in movement. We need not choose between these great performances from long ago, but we feel how greatly they matter. They all take us to the very core of ballet as poetic music-drama.

@Alastair Macaulay, 2020.i.13.

Published on line, Gramophone.