Swan Lake Studies 16-22
16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22. “Swan Lake” studies resumed. Can we improve upon the version of “Swan Lake” created in 1895 by Marius Petipa, Riccardo Drigo, and Lev Ivanov? I think the answer is yes; and my prime example is the andante sostenuto adagio that Drigo deleted from the opening scene’s pas de trois. In the 1950s, as Juan Bockamp recently observed, the Kirov Ballet’s Konstantin Sergueyev perceived that this music would work beautifully as an expressively Romantic solo for Prince Siegfried: since when the Kirov has had the strange practice of allocating this solo now and then to one favoured danseur or another, though generally omitting it. (I first saw it in 1987 danced by Farouk Ruzimatov.)
Rudolf Nureyev must have known the Sergueyev solo from his Kirov days: in 1963, he added his own version for the Royal Ballet production. Since Nureyev was usually a singularly feckless choreographer, we can be sure that this uncharacteristically beautiful example of lyrically cantabile male dancing - marvellously joining the music’s layers of melody, rhythm, and harmony - was made with extensive advice from Frederick Ashton (who likewise advised Nureyev that year on aspects of the Realm of the Shades in “La Bayadère”, and whose influence could be seen in the corps’s celebrated arabesques).
It was the kind of taxing exercise with which Nureyev loved to challenge himself, and yet - as silent 1963 film shows - he never danced it outstandingly. Instead, he created a vehicle that, with Anthony Dowell and others, would ideally showcase the expressive beauties of Royal Ballet masculinity. With such princes, this solo became a moving example of Keatsian or Pushkinian yearning, ideally heightening the character of Prince Siegfried. When such solos occurred for the hero in other ballets, wags nicknamed this tradition “Princes’ Lib”. (Ashton himself created a beauty in the 1968 Sarabande solo in “The Sleeping Beauty”, made for Dowell.) But adagio dancing was the original speciality of the noble genre in ballet from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Sergueyev, Nureyev, and Ashton were restoring a core facet of ballet character. In this case, Tchaikovsky had written ideal music. To this day, young male dancers who never saw Dowell perform chance upon the 1980 film of his dancing this solo: invariably their reaction is one of awe, though those of us who saw Dowell before 1978 will testify that his line and style were yet more fluent in earlier years.
These photographs, taken between perhaps the late 1960s and 1980, show Dowell (11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, by Leslie E. Apart) and David Wall (14, by Anthony Crickmay). Those two men remain the two Siegfrieds to whom I return in my mind. This dance soliloquy, always missed by those of us who knew it, enriched the dramatic poetry of “Swan Lake”.
Some ten years ago, when “Line” was the name of an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the dance critic Susan Reiter remarked “The word line always makes me think of Anthony Dowell.” Just so. With him, thanks above all to Ashton’s vision, male dancing began to acquire much of the linear and cantilena glories previously exclusive to the ballerina. Dance masculinity itself changed and came into new bloom.
Tuesday 13 July.