Alexandre Benois' First Ballet Le Pavillon D'armide Was N

ALDEN MURRAY (San Francisco, Calif., U.S.A.)

A Problematical Pavilion: Alexandre Benois' First Ballet

Le Pavillon d'Armide was never anybody's favorite ballet. An elaborate entertainment conceived by Alexandre Benois (1870-1960) it was, to borrow a distinction from Arthur Miller's salesman, "liked, but not well liked." Yet this 1907 production, long vanished from the repertory, occupies such a secure place in theatrical history that it has never ceased to arouse curiosity and speculation. For it marked one of the rare occasions when the Mir iskusstva group managed to insinuate its taste into the increasingly Philistine confines of the Imperial Maryinskii Theatre. Benois and his circle were connoisseurs of Versailles and the art of the eighteenth century, doted on the fantastic tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, and greatly admired Tchaikovsky's masterpiece The Sleeping Beauty. Le Pavillon d'Armide reflects all three of these aesthetic preoccupations. Though already an established painter and critic, Benois was just beginning his career as a theatrical designer. His contribution involved not only the decors and costumes but the libretto as well. The choreographer was Michel Fokine, the most promising ballet master of his generation. The dream cast included the immortal Pavlova as Armida, partnered by the veteran Pavel Gerdt and, in a role especially tailored to his extraordinary talents, the seven- teen-year-old Nijinsky as her Favorite Slave. The original score was composed by Nicholas Tcherepnin, a disciple of Rimskii-Korsakov, conveniently married to Benois' niece. Sergei Diaghilev, persona non grata ever since his dismissal from the staff of the Imperial Theatres, had nothing whatever to do with the Maryinsky pro- duction. But he was quick to assess the achievement of his former Mir iskusstva colleagues and determined to take Armide to Paris. Beginning in 1906, his an- nual "Saison Russe" introduced the French capital to Russian painting and sculpture, symphonic music (1907), and Chaliapin in Boris Goudonov (1908). In 1909 it was the turn of the dance. On the historic first night of 18 May all those prior Slavic sensations were eclipsed by the launching of the "Ballets Russes," a cosmopolitan phenomenon forever identified with Diaghilev's name. Its novel formula was the combination of the best in dancing, music and stage decoration (to say nothing of new heights in the manipulation of publicity and the pursuit of patronage) to create a unified work of art. Le Pavillon d'Armide was the opening number on the initial program and thirty years later Benois was to write: "It is remarkable ... that, in spite of the great variety of my activities-I can claim a not inconsiderable output as a painter and as an author of works on the history of art, and have been, among other 24

things, curator of one of the most celebrated museums of Europe, the Hermi- tage-I am nevertheless chiefly known abroad as 'Diaghilev's collaborator,' and this mainly in the ballet."I

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The original idea for Le Pavillon dl4rmide came from Theophile Gautier's short story Omphale, ou la Tapisserie amoureuse, histoire rococo (1834) recommended to Benois by that painter of exquisite eighteenth-century sen- sibility, Konstantin Somov. Written at the height of French enthusiasm for the recently translated works of Hoffmann, it contained precisely the element of fantasy Benois was looking for. In this erotic haunted house tale the future author of Giselle (1841) gives us a Sleeping Beauty in reverse: a handsome youth goes to bed in a decrepit Louis XV pavilion and the ghost of a pas- sionate marquise wakes him up. She steps down from a Beauvais tapestry in which she is portrayed as Omphale, the legendary queen who put Hercules to work at her spinning wheel. The marquise seduces her "Cherubino" but their nightly dalliance is terminated when the boy's uncle discovers that the tapestry has been misbehaving again. He sends him home to the provinces and bundles Omphale off to the attic. Years later the hero recognizes the tapestry rolled up in an antique shop and just misses an opportunity to buy it. Gautier's treatment, light and ironic, includes many witty details: for example, the marquise always keeps her face towards the hero, walking backwards if neces- sary as if self-conscious about her two-dimensional antecedents! In his descrip- tion of the pavilion, Gautier's pen is more than a match for Benois' brush and his cynical tone seems far less dated than the silent movie histrionics of the ballet libretto.2 Benois condensed the action so that it all occurs on the same night, moved the pavilion from Paris to somewhere out in the country, threw out the uncle and the humor but kept the chiming clock, the curtained bed and "Baptiste" as the name for the manservant. As it worked out, he used Gautier's story as a framing device for characters taken from another source, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata (1575). By changing the tapestry into a Gobelins of Rinaldo and the enchantress Armida he gave the woven protagonist someone more her own age to play with and the added glamour of a romance that was a proven box

1. Alexandre Benois, Reminiscencesof the Russian Ballet, trans. Mary Britnieva (Lon- don : Putnam, 1941), p. v. 2. Benois' memory was playing tricks when he wrote: "The hero finds a lock of hair in an old chest of drawers and falls in love with the beautiful woman, portrayed on an ancient Gobelins, whose lock it turns out to have been." (Ibid., p. 225.) There is no lock of hair in Gautier. As for changingthe Beauvaistapestry into a Gobelins, the latter man- ufactory had such a reputation abroad that gobelèn entered the Russian language as a ge- neric term for tapestry.