“It Must Be Preserved”: Adolph Bolm's Revival of Le Coq d'Or

Abstract

Upon the death of the impresario Serge Diaghilev in 1929, the Russian dancer-choreographer Adolph Bolm (1884–1951) penned a retrospective for an American publication, The Dance Magazine. Drawing from his tenure as premier danseur with the Ballets Russes from 1909 to 1917, he wrote of the late impresario's character, accomplishments, and influence on the art world at large. The now-familiar tropes were rehearsed: Diaghilev was an autocratic “genius of the theater,” whose persistence and unfailing taste reinvigorated ballet in the West; Diaghilev mobilized Europe's leading artistic figures for ballet, revolutionizing music and the scenic arts along the way; Diaghilev shone the spotlight on the male dancer and fostered the careers of the era's leading Russian choreographers. Bolm ended his tribute with a simple, but imperative, appeal to his readers: “Diaghileff left a great legacy to the world of art, and it must be preserved.”1How does one preserve a legacy? More crucially for Bolm, how does one preserve the legacy of a figure celebrated for his monumental impact on ballet, an artform notorious for its ephemerality? This question has long troubled dance-makers, old and new, from the fields of concert dance to folk dance.2 Diaghilev himself set up obstacles to these efforts by refusing to allow Ballets Russes productions to be filmed and failing to have the company's choreographic works routinely notated. Nevertheless, the impresario's trace remains in the vast array of musical scores, artworks, and photographs he commissioned during his career. The impressions he left on dancers, musicians, artists, and other contemporaries remain in the myriad memoirs written by those in his circle. More recently, the plethora of material in these sources, as well as countless archival collections around the globe, have been unpacked by diligent scholars, critics, librarians, museum curators, festival organizers, filmmakers, ballet directors, and balletomanes. Several Ballets Russes works have also reappeared on stages, reconstructed with archival materials by the self-described “dance detectives” Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer and creatively reimagined by choreographers such as Alexi Ratmansky. Today Diaghilev's legacy is palpable, his influence on arts and culture widely acknowledged.3For the grieving Bolm, the matter was more urgent. In his essay, he shared a hope that the Ballets Russes enterprise would carry on in the absence of its impresario, so the productions created under Diaghilev's watchful eye could survive through institutional and embodied memory. “Let us hope,” he wrote, “that his organization will continue to work and to show the latest ballets to those who have not yet had the opportunity of seeing them.”4 This, of course, did not happen. Diaghilev was the glue that held the Ballets Russes together, and without his shrewd management, his circle of dancers scattered across the globe in search of new work. This did not lead to the immediate disappearance of the company's choreographic output, nor did it blunt Diaghilev's influence, as Bolm feared. Rather, it initiated the diffusion of both. With the geographic movement of dancers’ bodies, each imprinted with his or her own unique experience and relationship to Diaghilev and his company, there was a migration of a legacy, fractured and in various forms, translated and reinterpreted for its new contexts.Bolm's own preservation work started long before the impresario's death. A graduate of Saint Petersburg's Imperial Ballet School, he had been the lead character dancer with the Ballets Russes for eight years, during which time he took such iconic (and sometimes racially and ethnically troubling) roles as Prince Ivan Tsarevich in Firebird (Fokine/Stravinsky), the Moor in Petrushka (Fokine/Stravinsky), Pierrot in Carnaval (Fokine/Schumann), and Darcon in Daphnis and Chloe (Fokine/Ravel). His most celebrated character was the virile Chief Warrior in the Polovtsian Dances from Alexander Borodin's opera Prince Igor (choreographed by Fokine); a performance of this work at the Châtelet Theater in 1909 reportedly whipped Parisian audiences into such a frenzy that they ripped out the orchestra rail. It was Bolm, not his better-known colleague Vaslav Nijinsky, who was the breakout male dancer of the Ballets Russes.5 Bolm was also the de facto male star of the Ballets Russes's first American tour, featured prominently in publicity photos and capturing the attention of American audiences until Nijinsky arrived a few months into the visit (for more on these tours and their legacies, see articles in this volume by Samuel Dorf, Julia Randel, and Mary Simonson). At that time, Bolm was much more of a household name than he is now. In 1917, at the end of the company's second American tour, the dancer opted to remain in the United States rather than join his colleagues in war-torn Europe or return home to Russia, which was in the throes of a revolution. Instead, he spent the next thirty years creating and teaching ballet in cities across the United States—New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles—and performing in the towns and communities that lay in between during extensive tours with his own companies.6A large part of Bolm's American career was devoted to restaging the Ballets Russes prewar repertoire on the nation's most prestigious stages. For this, he was more than qualified. Bolm periodically served as a Ballets Russes's régisseur, a figure in a dance company responsible for teaching and rehearsing its choreographic repertory.7 Notably, he was largely responsible for rehearsing the amalgam of dancers cobbled together for the company's American tours. Although he was never officially billed as régisseur, Bolm recollected, “[T]o me fell the arduous task of recreating the entire repertoire accumulated through the period of six years in Europe, and this with a company two-thirds new.”8 The dancer would have been well suited to these duties, for he was said to possess a fantastic memory, a quality that was noted by several of his contemporaries, specifically regarding his reproductions of Fokine works. His former Ballets Russes partner Tamara Karsavina recalled, “I saw some of Bolm's revivals of Fokine's ballets which were done very faithfully,” while Mieczyslaw Pianowski, another company dancer, stated that “he remember [sic] all the choreography of Fokine like no one else remember [sic]. He have [sic] a very good memory. Everything remembered [sic].”9 Bolm was, in a sense, a brain trust of sorts for the Ballets Russes productions mounted from its first season in 1909 to when he left the company. His restagings served to preserve, perpetuate, and reaffirm the legacy of Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes in the United States (and beyond) long after the company left its shores.10This article examines the first of these post-tour restagings: the American premiere of the opera-ballet version of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Le Coq d'Or for the Metropolitan Opera in 1918. I explore why it was uniquely possible in the United States, how it set the direction for the Ballets Russes repertory in the country, and how it kept Diaghilev alive in the American imagination. Originally created in 1914 by the choreographer Michel Fokine and the artists Alexander Benois and Natalia Goncharova, the production, based on Rimsky-Korsakov's final opera from 1907, combined dance, pantomime, and singing. I begin by unpacking how Le Coq d'Or, more than any other Ballets Russes production, required rehabilitation by Bolm. In Russia, the opera was the subject of censorship and revision, while the opera-ballet version was barred in France and subsequently removed from the Ballets Russes repertoire. Then I turn to how Bolm's act of reproducing Le Coq d'Or and other Ballets Russes productions in the United States simultaneously enabled the dancer to honor Diaghilev's mission to bring Russian artworks to the West (his so-called export campaign) and fed Bolm's own professional and personal priorities. I conclude by placing this and other Bolm restagings in the context of his American career. That these revivals were part of Bolm's objective to lay the groundwork for a distinctively American ballet tradition illustrates the complexity and dualities inherent in the émigré experience.Shortly after the Ballets Russes sailed back to Europe at the end of its second American tour, Bolm wrote to the banker Otto Kahn, a familiar face who, in his capacity as chairman of the Metropolitan Opera's Board of Directors, spearheaded the company's two American tours. “I recall that, last year in letters written to Mr. Diaghilevv [sic], you expressed interest in the possible production of the Russian Opera ‘Coq d'Or’ from Remsky-Korsakovv [sic],” he began. “A possibility has occurred to me of arranging the production of this opera in connection with the Metropolitan Ballet.”11 In Kahn, Bolm saw a powerful ally and a gateway to one of the nation's most prestigious stages. The banker was known for using his money and influence to launch the American careers of numerous Russian artists, including ballet dancers Anna Pavlova and Mikhail Mordkin. Having just settled in the United States with few resources of his own, Bolm could certainly benefit from a hand-up, especially since ballet, at least as he knew it, had yet to lay down its decidedly foreign roots in American soil. The ground was not particularly fertile, either. Deemed esoteric and elitist for its aristocratic origins, ballet was welcome as a novelty of foreign touring artists but thought to be decidedly incompatible with the American ethos. Meanwhile, decorative aspects of balletic style and aesthetics were being blended with popular dance forms by performers in vaudeville and Broadway, thereby (paradoxically) casting ballet as superfluous and lacking in artistic seriousness. Ballet, it seemed, could not be comfortably placed in the American cultural landscape. Even the Met's general manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, had a well-known distaste for ballet (but not ballerinas, apparently—he married the Met's premiere danseuse, Rosina Galli, in 1930). At least the Met had a ballet troupe, trained primarily in the Italian style, even if its role was typically marginalized to ancillary divertissements in operas.12Le Coq d'Or offered a compromise. Deemed interchangeably a choral ballet, opera-ballet, opera-pantomime, and even once a “grand opera cocktail,” the genre-blending production put dancers on stage without sacrificing the lure of the operatic voice. The production was double cast, meaning each character was represented on stage by both a singer and a dancer (save for the title character, which appeared as a wooden prop). The typical hierarchy between singers and dancers from opera was inverted, however, with the dancers taking the spotlight centerstage, while the opera stars were relegated to its margins, dressed in identical ruby-red capes to appear “as indistinct as possible.” This format was initially motivated by Fokine and Benois's (to say nothing of Diaghilev's) skepticism toward the appearance and acting abilities of singers.13 In the American setting, its function was reversed, dismantling the prejudice facing the balletic body, especially in the context of an operatic institution. Performances of Le Coq d'Or provided a rare occasion for critics to discover and revel in the artistry of the Met's dancers. “Why . . . had a stupid convention deprived us of Miss Rosina Galli?” one critic wondered. “We did not realize that Miss Galli was a great artist, fully as great an artist as nine-tenths of our operatic artists.”14Le Coq d'Or was not just novel in its upending of genre expectations. Its controversial political elements meant that it had been subject to censorship and revision in Russia and was badly in need of rediscovery, rehabilitation, and preservation. As Simon Morrison has outlined, the opera's libretto, written by Vladimir Belsky after a poem by Alexander Pushkin, was flagged by government officials for its thinly veiled satire of Russian administration.15 The allusions are obvious. The opera centers on Tsar Dodon, an indolent monarch of a fairy-tale land who is outwitted by an Astrologer and the enemy Queen of Shemanka. Through trickery and the power of seduction, they manage to overtake his empire, and Dodon meets a gruesome death by the beak of a golden cockerel, a gift given by the Astrologer at the outset of the opera. Certainly, the imagery of a blundering Tsar defeated by the oriental Other was a striking inversion of Russian operatic convention and ran counter to the message Russian officials wished to portray on the national stage. Consequently, the libretto was forced to undergo a series of revisions before it was allowed to be performed in 1909, and even then, it received its premiere by a private opera company in Moscow rather than a state-run theater. By that time, Rimsky-Korsakov had passed away, denying the composer the opportunity to see his final opera onstage.Nearly a decade later, Bolm attempted to distance the opera from its political associations in the American press by situating the work as a child-like fantasy, a “thing apart from life.” His sentiment echoes the words of the opera's Astrologer, who, in a short prologue, frames the narrative as an “old fairy tale,” and at the end of the opera reassures the audience (and the censors) that only he and the Queen are real, the other characters merely figments of a dreamscape.16 American audiences were not so easily fooled. The subtext of Le Coq d'Or was freshly palpable and took on an updated signification amid the shocking reports of Russia's political upheaval. One New York Times critic read the opera as an allegory for the current conflicts in Russia: “Old King Dodon is Nicholas; the Queen, the ideal of power; the Astrologer, liberty; the Golden Cock, the heart of the people; even the ravens on the scenery might be the Bolsheviki.” Another reviewer likened the deadly cockerel to the revolutionary faction, writing that it “spreads death like a Bolshevist brigade.”17The performance of a work that was unwelcome in its own country was sensationalized by the American press (conveniently, they failed to report that Le Coq d'Or did, in fact, appear on the stage of Moscow's state-sponsored Bolshoi Theater only two months after its private premiere). The New York Times reported a tantalizing (and dubious) story of the great and dangerous lengths that were required to obtain the score direct from Moscow. After failing to receive the score from London (where it was last performed), Morris Gest, a Russian émigré impresario who, like Kahn, was interested in importing Russian acts, was compelled to request that his brother, a soldier in the Russian army, smuggle a copy of the score to the United States. The article outlines a harrowing rescue mission intended to excite American audiences about the upcoming performance. At the same time, the tale reaffirmed the vision of a premodern Russia that had been served by the Ballets Russes: The Gest brother was forced to walk a perilous sixty-five miles on foot when his train from Petrograd to Moscow unexpectedly stopped short. To be granted permission to procure the score (presumably from the publishing firm P. Jergenson, which published the opera in 1908), he was advised to pledge that it would be used solely for Russian political propaganda. Shipping the orchestral parts back to New York was yet another arduous task, in which the solider “had to buy a peasant's horse, hitch two long poles to the saddle, and on this rude ‘drag’ or ‘trailer’ fasten the dozens of packages which he presently forwarded oversea, week by week, for months afterward.”18 The legitimacy of this story aside, the Met was projecting the great lengths it would go to have the politically ostracized opera find its way to the land of the free.If the score for Le Coq d'Or had to be liberated from Russia, the Ballets Russes production had to be saved from extinction. Fokine's adaptation of Rimsky-Korsakov's opera into an opera-ballet had initiated a messy legal battle between Diaghilev and the composer's estate. It was no secret that Rimsky-Korsakov despised ballet; he outlined six reasons for his dislike in a letter to a friend, calling the artform both “boring” and “degenerate.” His family was already annoyed that Diaghilev had utilized the composer's symphonic suite for Scheherazade in 1910, but the translation of his final opera into a genre-altering amalgam went too far, having “distorted the fundamental features of the work as an operatic composition.”19 After three performances at the Paris Opéra, Rimsky-Korsakov's family succeeded in legally forbidding Fokine's Le Coq d'Or from being produced in France. Moreover, after being part of the company's London season at Drury Lane the proceeding summer, Diaghilev was forced to forfeit the production's materials to Sir Thomas Beecham, the English impresario who underwrote the London engagements, as collateral for unpaid debts.20Le Coq d'Or had become a production without a home. That is, until it found a host in the Met.While this controversy added another layer of intrigue to the ballet, Bolm defended the reimagining of the work in American newspapers. In doing so, he echoed Fokine and Benois's sentiment that it freed the restrictions on both the singers and the dancers and reasoned that the addition of choreography was a well-intentioned and natural, if not a more complete, realization of the composer's score. “The libretto calls for color, movement, pageantry, dance,” he began. “[W]orking hand in hand with the musical score, which we have not altered, we are carrying out these demands to a logical conclusion, lending an art which is but just flowering to an artist whose vision made him foresee it and take half the steps toward it. Ours is not the vandal hand, but that of men who love the master, Rimsky-Korsakoff.”21Bolm also argued that the format was inherently modern, thereby implicitly echoing a familiar Diaghilev talking point about the Ballets Russes. Opera, the dancer posited, was “old-fashioned,” whereas the double-casting of characters, one that sang and the other that moved, was in line with “progressive musical and dramatic forms of the day.” Critics tended to agree. “It represents a move which is in sympathy with modern art” one critic reported, “for this ballet-opera is something in keeping with the most advanced movements of European art before the war.”22Even before the curtain was raised on Le Coq d'Or in the United States, it was recognized as a progressive work in crisis, rife with a history of trauma. It was censored in its homeland for subversive content, a process that the New York Times reported “hastened the death” of Rimsky-Korsakov.23 Moreover, the opera-ballet was contraband in Paris, the European city that was imagined to be the pinnacle of the liberal artistic universe, and excised from the repertoire of the era's most famous ballet company. Similar to the rhetoric about the stream of Russian émigrés passing through Ellis Island, Le Coq d'Or had to reach the United States to find its true potential.Le Coq d'Or received its American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House on March 6, 1918, under the baton of Pierre Monteux, the French conductor who led the Ballets Russes's performances in Paris and London four years earlier. Monteux, like Bolm, was known in the United States for his association with the Ballets Russes since he had conducted the company's North American tours. Bolm reprised his Ballets Russes role as King Dodon (sung by bass Adamo Didur), while the Met's leading dancers, Rosina Galli and Giuseppe Bonfiglio, interpreted the Queen (Maria Barrientos) and the Astrologer (Rafaelo Diaz), respectively. The soprano Marie Sundelius voiced the avian prop. The sets and costumes, designed by Hungarian artist Willy Pogany, were inspired by Goncharova's original designs, characterized by a rich color palette and bold floral motifs (they too, were politicized, described as being as “mad as Trotzky [sic] and twice as exhilarating”).24 Reviews of the performance largely agreed with Bolm that the combination of voice and dance created a convincing illusion. “It was impossible to believe that the dancers were not also singing,” one critic wrote, while another reported, “Mr. Bonfiglio seems to sing his way across the curtained stage.” Some, however, found the format contrived and confusing, such as Musical America's Herbert F. Peyser who described the singing as “impersonal” and claimed the separation of music and gesture “discouraged intimate or prolonged cogitation on psychological travesty.”25 Still, the production was deemed a success, and the work was programmed for four consecutive seasons with Bolm in the lead role, then, after a two-year hiatus, for four more with Alexis Kosloff (another Ballets Russes alumnus) taking over as Dodon. In total, between 1918 and 1928, Bolm's Le Coq d'Or graced the Met's stage fifty times.Just as it had in Paris and London, Le Coq d'Or offered New York concertgoers the prerevolutionary Russia of their imaginations, one full of folk tunes, bearded boyars, and exotic bric-a-brac. The opera-ballet had been a tool of Diaghilev's so-called “export campaign,” an expression penned by Benois and adopted by leading scholars of music and dance to convey the impresario's approach of presenting self-consciously Russian art abroad.26 Motivated by cautious patriotism and strategic auto-orientalism, Diaghilev's export campaign played into Western audiences’ fascination with Russia's pagan antiquity, the Mongol–Tartar influences on its medieval culture, and its Eastern orientation from the time of the Rurik rulers to the Romanovs. This meant championing the nationalist works of the Moguchaya Kuchka (the Mighty Handful), the group of five composers who crafted a musical tradition understood as distinctly Russian in the 1860s. Before the Ballets Russes, this repertoire was virtually unknown abroad, and its foreign novelty was exciting to Western ears. It also sparked the creation of new, neonational scores by a young Igor Stravinsky, namely, his early ballet trilogy consisting of Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring.27 Though Diaghilev would largely move away from this strategy after the war, turning instead to modern themes and music by contemporary French composers, Bolm had by then witnessed its success and saw potential for its deployment in the United States.Bolm had long harbored similar ambitions to Diaghilev. After graduating from the Imperial Ballet School in 1904, the dancer took his first trip to Western Europe where he was shocked to learn that the Russian culture he grew up with was barely known abroad. He recalled this pivotal moment in a memoir essay: “I am moved now by one grand passion. I wish to tell the world of our Russian art.”28 From that point on, this tenant guided Bolm's work. It started with leading the first international tour of Imperial Ballet dancers in 1908, where he partnered with Pavlova for performances in Riga, Prague, Berlin, and the Scandinavian capitals.29 It continued when he cut a second tour short to join Diaghilev in Paris in 1909; Bolm recognized that the impresario's vision aligned with his own more than the “reactionary” Imperial Theaters.30 With the Ballets Russes, he was able to expand his impact with tours that reached much of Europe, South America, and, finally, the United States and Canada.By the time Bolm staged Le Coq d'Or in New York, then, a wave of “Russomania,” a craze for all things Russian, had flooded the United States. Even before the Ballets Russes made American landfall, concertgoers got a taste of the overseas sensation in the tours of Russian artists, such as Pavlova and bass Feodor Chaliapin (among others), as well as domestic Ballets Russes imitators.31 All things deemed Russian were in vogue, and images and sounds of Russia infiltrated concert programs, fashion, theater, and films (see Simonson's contribution to this volume), especially in New York City.32 Concert and theater stages offered a glimpse into a part of the world that otherwise seemed shrouded in mystery.The Ballets Russes works that Bolm restaged in the United States kept this exoticized image of Russia in the American consciousness long after the troupe departed and Russomania had subsided. In addition to reviving Le Coq d'Or twice in the mid-1930s for the San Francisco Opera Ballet and the Los Angeles Grand Opera, Bolm also staged Petrouchka for the Met in 1919 and again in 1925 to mark Stravinsky's first visit to America. Firebird was given twice under his direction, first for the Hollywood Bowl in 1940, then in 1945 with Ballet Theatre. Scaled-down fragments of Carnaval, Scheherazade, and the Polovtsian Dances appeared regularly on programs of his own company, Ballet Intime, which itself was once described as a “miniature Diaghileff Ballet.”33 By featuring these ballets, not only did Bolm acquaint generations of Americans with the repertoire of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, but he also froze the company in time in American minds, associating it with a particular repertoire and set of aesthetics.Le Coq d'Or referenced different Slavic traditions and so was considered authentically Russian, a work that pulsed with “the life blood of the Russian people.”34 This was validated by a frequently circulated quotation in local newspapers by English scholar of Russian music Rosa Newmarch, who affirmed that the opera “recalls the simple customs and daily life of the Great Slavic people.”35 Bolm was one of these people. “It is due to his understanding of Russian art, and particularly of the Russian peasants, that the whole production is so atmospherically Russian,” critic John Howard enthused. Some of the stage decorations, which came from Bolm's personal collection of Russian artifacts, were reported to be “wrought by Russian peasants.”36Rimsky-Korsakov's score, too, checked the boxes of what Russian music was expected to sound like. Critics liked the folk tunes, brilliant orchestration, nondeveloping (“non-symphonic”) motifs, and “oriental color” they had come to expect from the Russian composers championed by the Ballets Russes. Rimsky-Korsakov was, as one journalist reminded his readers, a “significantly Russian composer,” after all.37 What listeners could not have noticed, however, was the satirical fashion the composer put these stereotypes of Russian music to use. Le Coq d'Or was written during that period of Rimsky-Korsakov's compositional career when he had become disenchanted with the nationalist compositional style that he himself helped develop. By the turn of the century, he had, to quote Marina Frolova-Walker, resolved to “abandon Russianness.” Feeling that he had exhausted the Kuchka approach to composition, he began writing operas that engaged with idioms of Italian and French grand opera, the very mold the Russian style sought to break. In Le Coq d'Or, Rimsky-Korsakov took this a step further by using the Kuchka aesthetic to poke fun at the Russian style, weaving in parodic allusions to popular Russian operas, recasting the Kuchka style as “Other,” and integrating polyphonic folk tunes in tongue-in-cheek moments.38 But American audiences, who knew nothing of the trajectory of Rimsky-Korsakov's compositional career, mistook the score as typically Russian, no different from Scheherazade. This ignorance persists, according to Richard Taruskin, and leaves audiences “unprepared to receive [Rimsky-Korsakov's music's] implicit messages,” which leads alien ears “to fasten on its suspiciously decorative packaging and what can seem like an unacceptably high (but characteristically Slavic) level of ritualized repetition or sequence.”39In choosing to stage a work embraced as a real, true representation of Russia, however misguided this perception was, Bolm simultaneously traded on and strengthened his own Russianness amid Russomania. He was able to cash in the self-othering that Natalie Zelensky argues allowed émigrés to “fulfill American expectations of this exiled Russianness.”40 It also let Bolm become the authority on Fokine's Ballets Russes repertoire before and after the older dancer settled in the United States.But Bolm's motives were not simply self-serving. He also seems to have been driven by a sincere and deep-seated desire to share the music and culture of his place of birth—hence, his response to a scathing open letter by Fokine printed on the pages of Musical America in 1922. In the letter, Fokine, a choreographer who was reportedly “extremely sensitive to what he called ‘pirated’ versions of his works,” criticized Bolm for misrepresenting and exaggerating his involvement and authorship of Le Coq d'Or.41 Bolm was not involved with the creation of the ballet, Fokine asserted; nor was he part of the original cast. “His task,” Fokine concluded, “was but to exert himself to commit to memory my ballets and utterly to forget their real author.” In his response, Bolm, obviously offended by the attack from his former colleague, assured the readers of Musical America that the press notices for Le Coq d'Or included detailed accounts of Fokine's original productions in Paris and London (they did) and that the Met's programs stated the opera-ballet was “after the original by Fokine” (they also did). True, Bolm confirmed, he was not in the original cast of the ballet, but he did take the role of Tsar Dodon in its London performances. He also reminded Fokine that he had acted as the régisseur of the Ballets Russes and was, therefore, capable of reconstructing the production as a whole.42Most strikingly, Bolm argued that the priority driving his revival of Le Coq d'Or was a selfless sense of obligation to perpetuate the art and culture of their homeland. “My sole aim has