Spring 2008 Ball et Revi ew From the Spring 2008 issue of Ballet Review David Vaughan on Emmanuel Chabrier Cover: Marie-Jeanne in Ballet Imperial , courtesy of Dwight Godwin. © Dance Research Foundation, Inc. 4 Amsterdam – Clement Crisp 5 Chicago – Joseph Houseal 6 Toronto – Gary Smith 7 Oakland – Leigh Witchel 8 St. Petersburg, Etc. – Kevin Ng 10 Hamilton – Gary Smith 11 London – Joseph Houseal 13 San Francisco – Leigh Witchel 15 Toronto – Gary Smith David Vaughan 17 Emmanuel Chabrier et Moi 79 Daniel Jacobson 27 A Conversation with Nicolas Le Riche Joseph Houseal 39 Lucinda Childs: Counting Out the Bomb Photographs by Costas 43 Robbins Onstage Edited by Francis Mason 43 Nina Alovert Ballet Review 36.1 50 A Conversation with Spring 2008 Vladimir Kekhman Associate Editor and Designer: Joseph Houseal Marvin Hoshino 53 Tragedy and Transcendence Associate Editor: Don Daniels Davie Lerner 59 Marie-Jeanne Assistant Editor: Joel Lobenthal Marilyn Hunt 39 Photographers: 74 ABT: Autumn in New York Tom Brazil Costas Sandra Genter Subscriptions: 79 Next Wave XXV Roberta Hellman Copy Editor: Elizabeth Kattner Barbara Palfy 88 Marche Funèbre , A Lost Work Associates: of Balanchine Peter Anastos Robert Gres kovic 94 Music on Disc – George Dorris George Jackson 27 100 Check It Out Elizabeth Kendall Paul Parish Nancy Reynolds James Sutton David Vaughan Edward Willinger Sarah C. Woodcock Cover: Marie-Jeanne in Ballet Imperial , courtesy of Dwight Godwin. Emmanuel Chabrier he is thought by many to be the link between eighteenth-century French compos ers such et Moi as Rameau and Couperin, and later ones like Debussy and Ravel, both of whom revered his music, as did Erik Satie, Reynaldo Hahn, and David Vaughan Francis Poulenc (who wrote a book about him). 1 The English composer Constant Lam - Some people who know me well are aware that bert, in his “study of music in decline,” Music I adore the music of Emmanuel Chabrier. Like Ho! , wrote “As an harmonic innovator, his someone in love, I try to introduce his name influence . is no less far reaching than that into conversation whenever I can. I have what of Glinka. Above all, Chabrier holds one’s is probably one of the largest collections of affection as the most genuinely French of all records of his music in the United States, in - composers. He was the first important cluding a dozen different performances of his composer since Mozart to show that serious - piano music and three different versions each ness is not the same as solemnity, that pro - of his operas L’Étoile and Une Éducation Man - fundity is not dependent upon length, that quée. I go everywhere to see his operas: I hap - wit is not always the same as buffoonery, and pened to be at the Edinburgh Festival with the that frivolity and beauty are not necessarily Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1994 enemies.” 2 and stayed on for two Opera North produc - “Affection,” that is an important word. tions, L’Étoile and Le Roi Malgré Lui. I once took “Mu sique ador able” are the first words in Cha - a train across France to catch a production in brier’s sublime choral work Ode à la Mu sique , Strasbourg of Une Éducation Man - and Graham Johnson, in his A quée (it was terrible). I went from French Song Companion, calls him London to Paris in 1984 to see “this adorable man,” a short, jo - L’Étoile at the Opéra-Comique. In vial, rather tubby fellow of pro - 2001 going to the Glimmerglass vincial origins with a Rabe lais - Opera, also for L’Étoile , a shared ian sense of humor – passing production with New York City the asparagus to the Princesse Opera, was nothing. de Polignac at a dinner party, he So when I arrived in Paris, again warned her of the effect it would with MCDC, on December 1, have on her urine. 3 2007, and found that there was A devoted husband and father, to be a new production of this he was also very much involved opéra bouffe , again at the Opéra-Comique, my in the cultural life of his time, the friend not appetite was whetted. But I soon learned that only of other composers, but also of poets it was to open on the day we were due to leave, such as Paul Verlaine and painters such as the 13th. Then I found out more: there was Edouard Manet – Chabrier owned his great to be almost a little Chabrier festival around Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère (of which more later), this production, with an exhibition, recitals of now in the Courtauld Institute in London; his other music, readings, and a concert perfor - portrait of Chabrier is in the Fogg Museum mance of two other short operettas. There was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chabrier nothing for it – I had to come back, at Christ - can be seen among the group of flâneurs in mas but not for Christmas, for Chabrier. his Masked Ball at the Opera in the National Why this strange, inordinate passion, Gallery in Washington. (Chabrier is also seen amounting almost to an obsession, for a nine - at the piano in Fantin-Latour’s Autour du Piano , teenth-century composer of what is often con - in the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris, and sidered mere light music? Not by everybody: peering over the edge of a box at the dancers ©2008 David Vaughan 17 onstage in Degas’ painting of the orchestra Chabrier himself never composed a ballet, at the Paris Opera, in the Musée d’Orsay. )4 unlike his contemporaries Delibes, Lalo, Mas - Among my own treasured possessions is a se net, Messager, and Saint-Saëns, but there lithograph by the poster artist Jules Chéret, was a dance connection in his background: a music cover for Emil Waldteufel’s España, he was born in the region of the Auvergne, “a Suite de Valses, based on themes from Chabri - part of France,” according to his biographer er’s rhap sody of that name – but also, oddly Rollo Myers, “in which the dance has always enough, from Une Éducation Manquée . (This been cultivated . and its traditional features was given to me by James Waring.) jealously preserved,” especially the “Bourrée And, of course, there is the music itself. d’Auvergne” itself, the inspiration for the The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Bourrée Fantasque .5 Also the rhapsody España , speaks of the combination of “verve and his first big success, was informed by his tenderness” in his music, but there is also an intensive study of flamenco on a trip to Spain. undercurrent of melancholy, even of lachry - The second act of Le Roi Malgré Lui , of course, mae rerum in his sudden surprising modula - opens with the big waltz-mazurka Fête Polon - tions, which Ravel captured so truly in his aise , and there are balletic titles among the hom age À la Manière de . Chabrier . His music piano pieces, “Air de Ballet” and “Ballabile.” can be sensual, too, almost erotic, as in the (Another excerpt from Le Roi, played under the Barcarolle “O Venise la Blonde” in Le Roi Mal - title Danse Russe , is not in fact a dance num- gré Lui , with its positively coital sighs, or the ber in the opera.) “Quatuor des Baisers” (“Quar tet of Kisses”) As early as 1911 a Chabrier ballet, España , in L’ Étoile . Or it can be funny, as in the Joyeuse to the rhapsody of that name and probably Marche , which made the musicians in the first other pieces, was given at the Paris Opera orchestra to play it laugh out loud, or in Sou - half a dozen times, with Carlotta Zambelli in venirs de Munich , the Quadrille on themes from, the leading role. The libretto, a complicated of all operas, Tristan und Isolde . When Chabri - story to judge by the names of the characters, er first heard it, he experienced an epiphany, was by Jane Catulle-Mendès, presumably a but it is sig nificant that the most Chabrier - relative of the poet responsible for the lugu - esque of his compositions inspired by it is brious libretto of Gwendoline (see below), and not the quasi-Wagnerian opera Gwendoline but the choreography a joint effort by the Spanish the hilarious Qua drille. ballerina Rosita Mauri and the ever-intriguing Then there are the songs, such as the farm - Léo Staats. yard melodies, celebrating little ducks, fat tur - More promising, perhaps, was the idea pro - keys, pink pigs, and especially the delicious posed to Diaghilev by Erik Satie and Georges “Les Cigales,” with its accompaniment imi - Braque, a ballet to be called Quadrille , to the tating the continuous chirrup of the cicadas Souvenirs de Munich and the similar work that in summer in the south of France. Gabriel Fauré and André Messager, not to be A fantastic pianist, when Chabrier played his outdone, concocted on themes from The Ring, Bourrée Fantasque or just improvised, he Souvenirs de Bayreuth (not quite as funny). Un - slammed his fist or his elbow or his forearm fortunately, Diaghilev didn’t pick it up. 6 He on the keys, almost destroying the piano, like did commission Ravel’s orchestration of Cha - a forerunner of John Cage, David Tudor, or brier’s “Menuet pompeux” for a ballet to be even Nam June Paik. called Les Jardins d’Aranjuez , in 1918, to a strange He was, incidentally, the exact contemporary pot-pourri of music (the other pieces were of Tschaikovsky: they were born and died in Fauré’s Pavane and Ravel’s own Alborada del the same year. I can’t help wondering if they Gracioso) .