Books to the Ceiling

Thursday night April 10, I took my friend Helene, a balletomane like myself, to New York City Center to see the Kirov work its magic. The program consisted of scenes from four different ballets: Le Corsaire, Diana and Acteon, Don Quixote, and La Bayadere.

How was it? Superlatives fail me. I don’t have the words, but the poets do. I keeping thinking of two passages in particular:: Romeo’s astonished declaration that “I ne’er saw true beauty till this night;” and the final lines of one of my favorite poems, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn:” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — That is all / Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.” Here’s the entire poem:

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter, therefore, ye soft pipes, play on,
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never, canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping song for ever new,
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

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As a meditation on the age-old desire to stop cruel time in its tracks, this work, for me, has no equal. I wished very powerfully that the performance we saw that night could be frozen in time, like “the marble men and maidens overwrought” on Keats’s vase. But I will cherish the memory. And there are pictures…

The corps de ballet in the exquisite La Bayadere.

Soloists in La Bayadere

Leonid Sarafanov, whose spectacular leaps and light-as-a-feather landings repeatedly thrilled the audience.* (Here’s a “head shot” of the astounding Sarafanov taken last year. Doesn’t he look as though he’s all of fourteen years old?!)

This photo of Diana Vishneva, taken by Andrea Mohin, appeared in the New York Times on Sunday April 13:

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The music, by turns robust and delicate, was played beautifully by the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre; most of the choreography was done by the great Marius Petipa. Helene and I gazed at the program in awe - such storied names…

Here is the Mariinsky Theatre’s official site. It is very oriented to the here and now - not much in the way of history, except for the acknowledgement, in tiny print, that this is there 225th season. For some interesting background, and great photos of the theater itself, see the Wikipedia entry.

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For a fascinating cultural hisory of Russia, see Natasha’s Dance by Orlando Figes. (I won’t claim to have read through this massive tome; I’ve been using it primarily as a reference work since I purchased it several years ago.)

*For more terrific portraits of ballet dancers, see Gene Schiavone’s site.

Yesterday on the way to work, I listened to the Symphony Number Four by Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky. In this symphony, threads of melody are interwoven throughout; they appear, disappear, reappear. On occasion, a sprightly piccolo tune brings a smile, however brief, to the lips of the listener. Finally, I was held captive by the fiery conclusion, where Tchaikovsky marshalls the full might of the symphony orchestra (in this case, the Utah Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Maurice Abravanel.). It was hard to move and hard to believe that anything on earth really mattered except for the raw power of this magnificent music.

This is a piece that grabs you by the throat from the first and never lets go. In his biography Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music, David Brown observes that “None of the first movements of his preceding symphonies had given warning of the scope, scale, sheer intensity, even violence of the first movement of the Fourth Symphony.” Tchaikovsky produced not only this masterpeice but also his great opera Eugenie Onegin during a time of deep personal crisis: in 1877, he had made the disastrous mistake of marrying Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova. (After several months of almost unbearable turmoil, they separated permanently.)

Tchaikovsky, a prolific, almost compulsive letter writer, confided his thoughts and feelings about this symphony to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck. Of the last movement, this man, whose genius was just only now becoming apparent, who was most probably tormented by depression and doomed, because of confused and only dimly understood desires, to spend his life “looking into happiness through another man’s eyes,” wrote:

“Rejoice in others’ rejoicing. To live is still possible!”

[Tchaikovsky's tomb at the Tikhvin Cemetery in St. Petersburg .]

In his jumbo candy box of an art history (752 pages!), Paul Johnson assigns a brief chapter to the art of Russia. This chapter is entitled, “The Belated Arrival and Sombre Glories of Russian Art.” Johnson opens by observing that this art has not penetrated Western culture to anywhere near the extent that Russian writing and music have done. He then provides a whirlwind tour, highlighting greats such as Vasily Surikov, Isaak Levitan, Ivan Shishkin, and Ilya Repin. Of these, I would guess that Repin is the best - possible the only - known name among Western art lovers, due chiefly to his stunning portraits of Tolstoy. The few paintings that are reproduced in this book convinced me that I wanted to see and know more of this art. I managed to acquire a book entitled: Russia: The Land, the People: Russian Painting, 1850-1910. (Published in 1986, this book has several contributors; apparently the “official” author is the “Ministry of Culture Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” Remember them?)

The works I particular love are the portraits and the landscapes. Isaak Levitan is especially famous for the latter and is considered by some some to be Russia’s greatest artist. Born in Lithuania, Levitan was Jewish and suffered the inevitable depradations visited upon those of his faith, at that time and in that country. Johnson states bluntly: “Levitan had no reason to love Russia or the Russians , but he did.”

One interesting aspect of Russian portraiture that I’ve noticed is that the artists seem more inclined than their Western counterparts to depict naked emotion on the faces of their subjects.

[Art: A New History by Paul Johnson was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 2003.]

The best site I have found for viewing Russian painting is www.russianartgallery.org

Some examples of Russian painting:

Top: Peter the Great Interrogating the Tsarevich Alexey, by Nicholas Ge

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Russian life and history

Above, left to right:

They Did Not Expect Him, by Ilya Repin

Barge-Haulers on the Volga, by Repin

Tsar Ivan IV with the Body of His Son Ivan on November 16, 1581, by Repin

The Morning of the execution of the Streltsi, by Vasily Surikov

Zaprozhian Cossacks of the Ukraine Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan, by Repin

Photograph of Tolstoy and Repin

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Landscapes

Above, left to right:

Golden Autumn, by Isaak Levitan

The Birch Grove, by Levitan

Footpath in the Forest, Ferns, by Levitan

Winter, by Ivan Shishkin

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Portraits

Above, left to right:

Leo Tolstoy, by Ilya Repin

Portrait of Alexander Pushkin, by Orest Kiprensky

Princess Tarakanova, by Konstantin Flavitsky

Modest Mussorgsky, by Repin

I have just finished reading Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music, by British musicologist David Brown. It is hard for me to decide where to start discussing this book. I was thinking of titling this post, “The Book That Took Over My Life.” That might give you some idea of the affect it had on me.

Brown paints a portrait of a humane and decent man who also happened to be a genius. He was generous to a fault toward family members, friends, and sometimes even strangers, if he judged them worthy. He lived a life surrounded by relations, friends, and admirers and only found himself alone when he chose to be so.

As I read this book, I listened to the pieces Brown referred to; this provided a chronology of Tchaikovsky’s musical life. And what a life! The composer had the great good fortune to be appreciated, loved, and revered during his own lifetime, a boon which is not always granted to an artist. As for the other aspects of his life, Brown’s book reads like a Russian novel. Repressed (mostly, but not always) homosexual desires (Tchaikovsky himself; also his brother Modest), morphine addiction (Sasha, Tchaikovsky’s beloved sister), out-of-wedlock births (Sasha’s daughter Tanya), threats of suicide, actual suicide, inexplicable death - all make their appearance in this larger-than-life biography. Add to this Tchaikovsky’s mysterious and wealthy patroness Nadeshda von Meck - they exchanged innumerable letters but never actually met - and you have a true tale that outstrips fiction in many respects.

When I finished Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music, I was moved to tears and felt that, with the composer’s death, something of incalculable value had passed from the world. And - I try to be neutral when it comes to people’s preferences - but I can’t imagine a life worth living without this glorious music in it!

[The above portrait of Tchaikovsky is by Nikolai Dmitrievich Kuznetsov. It is the only such portrait painted from life and currently hangs in the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.]