The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (92 page)

By 1927 she had begun to create her own dance vocabulary. She was building her dance on contemporary American subjects, as in
Revolt
and
Immigrant
, and
Poems of 1917,
which excited the ridicule of Fanny Brice in a sketch for the Ziegfeld Follies. It is not surprising that her spectators were astonished, for Martha Graham had created a modern dance, a shocking kind of anti-ballet. This novelty was recognized in 1927, when
The New York Times
appointed its first dance critic, John Martin, who would become the theorist and philosopher of the new movement. The modern dance needed such a sympathetic critic and interpreter, for it was as different from the spectacular beauties of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes as Picasso’s
Demoiselles d’Avignon
had been from the sentimental idols of the Academy. And, much as Picasso defied the conventions of “beauty” and of perspective, Martha Graham would defy the conventions of ballet. The classical ballet had refurbished the forms and traditions of court ballet, and the Romantic ballet was the freer elaboration of those forms by Fokine and others.

Like the Romantic ballet, modern dance was a kind of liberation but was still more radical. Its possibilities had been suggested by Isadora Duncan’s “Greek” dance, and Ruth St. Denis’s themes of “Oriental” dance. But Martha Graham would go further, to become the celebrated symbol and dominant influence in creating a new art of dance. The grand movement, as John Martin explained, was from spectacular dance (or ballet) to expressional dance (or modern dance). This was a simplifying revolution, which had few if any counterparts in the other arts. The extravagant productions of Diaghilev, bringing dancers together with the most celebrated musicians, painters, and dramatists, cried out for an art of simplification, which became the modern dance. And which returned to the basic movements of the human body.

The pioneers of the anti-ballet—Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham—both had their theories of the physiological basis of the dance. Martha Graham, however, sought her source not in the solar plexus but in the rhythm of breathing, inhaling and exhaling, contraction and response, “percussive” motion. What they both accomplished, however, was not the embodiment of a theory but a personalizing of the dance to express every dancer’s self. They both had set themselves an individualist American ideal.

If there had been no ballet—spectacular, grandiose, formalized—modern dance might not have seemed radical. Ballet had made a spectacle of defying gravity, and depended on the dancer’s ability to employ elegantly the canonical “positions,” but Martha Graham’s modern dance hugged the earth in bare feet. While ballet was the very model of prettiness, Martha Graham’s modern dance was stark and angular. While the ballet dancers on their toes pointed the elongated feet to provide a graceful line of the leg, Martha Graham kept her bare feet at right angles to the leg. And while the ballet’s “turn-out” tested the dancer’s ability to turn out the knees farther than in everyday life to show the legs in profile even when the dancer faced forward, the modern dancer kept feet in their normal parallel.

Modern dance claimed its special creation to be an art of movement. By contrast, what had formerly been crucial in ballet was the positions, the attitudes and poses, and their combinations. “Movement,” John Martin explained, “is the most elementary physical experience of human life … found in the expression of all emotional experiences; and it is here that its value lies for the dancer. The body is the mirror of thought. When we are startled, the body moves in a quick, short, intense manner.…” Martha Graham’s language of dance was a new vocabulary of movement. And it was her aggressive, unpretty but expressive movements that irritated the seasoned ballet audience.

Martha Graham’s creation also was a distinctively American revolution in dance. While the ballet was for and about kings and princes, she would
dance the common experience. With her own company, the Dance Group, in 1929 she turned from the exotic themes of Denishawn to simpler more familiar subjects, heralded by her
Adolescence
. And she developed American themes. For
Frontier
in 1935, her set was designed by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who used a simple section of a fence post at the rear of the stage and ropes overhead forming a broad V to suggest the boundless plains as she danced the American conquest of space. In
Primitive Mysteries
(1931), she tried to give American Indian religious rituals a universal significance. And she climaxed her Americana with her most celebrated work,
Appalachian Spring
, to Aaron Copland’s music. In the spirit of all frontiers, her high kick expressed the desire to reach out. And her
Letter to the World
(1940), which danced the two spirits—the conformist and the rebel—in Emily Dickinson, expressed a similar conflict within everyone.

Finally Martha Graham made her own marriage of the arts, dancing theatrical themes of universal significance.
Deaths and Entrances
(1943) revealed the experiences of the Brontë sisters. She choreographed numerous works from Greek sources—
Cave of the Heart
(1946) on Medea,
Errand into the Maze
(1947) on the Minotaur legend,
Night Journey
(1947) on Oedipus,
Clytemnestra
(1958), and many on biblical themes, such as
The Legend of Judith
(1962) and
Acrobats of God
(1960). So Martha Graham finally proved able to transform myths, legends, and tradition into dances revealing “the inner man.” With astonishing energy and versatility, while leading the revolution that liberated dance from the ballet, she created more than 150 of her own dances. And at last she ceased to be imprisoned in the stark simplicity of her early work. She was willing to use sets by Noguchi and other sculptors, costumes designed by the best painters, and to draw on the music of a widening variety of composers—Samuel Barber, Carlos Chavez, Gian-Carlo Menotti, and William Schuman. The style of her dance company became richly eclectic, combining avant-garde gymnastics with the themes of primitive ritual and folk dance, with some Japanese mime, some theater of the absurd, and surrealism, and even with the familiar ballet positions. Having sought ways to express emotion “directly” in movement, Martha Graham found that modern dance in America, like the nation itself, had to draw on myths and hopes from everywhere.

As the arts of music flourished—and even as American popular music sped across the world—some of the most innovative composers became estranged from the large audience. Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), often called the apostle of modernism in music, had the freedom of the self-trained amateur, and never lost his eagerness to try the new. But the works that brought him fame before he was thirty would, to his irritation, create unfulfilled popular expectations for the rest of his life. In his autobiography, written when he was forty-eight, he was already expressing his alienation from those who listened.

His first works, which established him as a major innovative composer, were still firmly rooted in the Russian folk tradition. The career that would take him away from “the great mass of listeners” was a voyage less of exile than of transplantation into Switzerland, France, and then into the United States.

Born near St. Petersburg, the third of four boys, as a son of the leading bass singer of the Imperial Opera, he would hear his father practicing arias. His boyhood memories of colorful St. Petersburg and visits to the nearby country estate of his uncle, and to rural summer fairs, stayed with him, as did the explosive temper of his father and the coldness of his mother. The first musical performance he recalled attending was Tchaikovsky’s
Sleeping Beauty
when he was only seven. At nine he was given piano lessons, but was by no means precocious. His father did secure him a pass to opera rehearsals at the nearby Maryinsky Theater, where, by the time he was sixteen, he was spending five or six nights a week. To discourage his interest in making a career in music, his parents sent him to study law at St. Petersburg University.

A desultory law student, he went on composing, still hoping to prove to his family his talent for a musical career. A fellow student was the son of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908), the Russian nationalist composer whose works Stravinsky much admired. One summer while staying with the Rimsky-Korsakov family, he asked advice on how to become a composer. Rimsky-Korsakov, not impressed at hearing Stravinsky play his own compositions, sympathetically advised him not to enter the conservatory where Rimsky-Korsakov was a professor but to pursue his studies of harmony and counterpoint and to seek private instruction. Rimsky-Korsakov himself was mostly self-educated. He had never taken an academic course in musical theory, but had received crucial advice and encouragement as a young man from Tchaikovsky. Now he would play a similar role for Stravinsky.

With the death of his father Stravinsky was liberated from the pursuit of the law. Now, he said, his mother’s “delight in torturing me seemed slightly less intense.” He joined the disciples who met weekly at Rimsky-Korsakov’s house to hear their compositions. Rimsky-Korsakov, now Stravinsky’s mentor, for three years gave him two composition lessons a week, including the principles of sonata form and orchestration. When Stravinsky married Catherine Nossenko in 1906 (despite the law banning marriage between first cousins), the witnesses were Rimsky-Korsakov’s two sons. Meanwhile Stravinsky was showing sketches for his compositions to his master for criticism and approval.

The death of Rimsky-Korsakov in mid-career in 1908 was a blow for Stravinsky, but a new patron would set the stage for his career. In February 1909, when two of Stravinsky’s works—the
Scherzo Fantastique
and
Fireworks
—were performed in St. Petersburg, the audience included Sergei Diaghilev. His art review,
Mir Isskustva
, had recently ceased, and, as we have seen, Diaghilev was moving his energies to Paris. There, offering concerts of Russian music, he had just produced the first Paris performance of
Boris Godunov
, and was planning a season of Russian ballet. When the
established composer whom he had commissioned to write a new score for the ballet on the Russian folktale of the firebird could not deliver, Diaghilev turned to the young man whose music had so impressed him. Stravinsky’s
Firebird
music drew on the young composer’s lessons in orchestration from Rimsky-Korsakov, revived folk melodies, and charmed by its distinctive rhythms and syncopations for the ballet. Stravinsky’s deft and lively score, distinguishing between the human and the magical elements in the story, delighted audiences and critics and brought him instant celebrity. This, the twenty-eight-year-old Stravinsky’s first composition for the stage, would remain his most popular work, though he still had six productive decades ahead.

Even before the production of
The Firebird
in 1910 Diaghilev saw in him “a man on the eve of celebrity.” Stravinsky joined Diaghilev’s group, whom he captivated by his enthusiasm for all the arts and his “absence of the slightest dogmatism.” The dazzling Paris galaxy of his acquaintances included Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Giacomo Puccini, Marcel Proust and Paul Claudel, and Pablo Picasso.

His next work with Diaghilev,
Petrouchka
, was also based on a Russian folk theme. This time it was the story of a puppet at a Russian country fair, how it is brought to life, then dies, but finally reappears as a ghost. The first performance on June 13, 1911, with Nijinsky as Petrouchka, was again acclaimed, doubly reassuring Stravinsky, who had a newly active role in planning the ballet. “It gave me the absolute conviction of my ear just as I was about to begin
The Rite of Spring.”

Stravinsky’s triumph with his music for Diaghilev’s
The Rite of Spring
, first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on May 29, 1913, as we have seen, created a
scandale
in the musical community, but confirmed his role as the leading modernist composer. At the end of the tumultuous evening Diaghilev had commented, “Exactly what I wanted!” Stravinsky reported himself and Nijinsky to be “excited, angry, disgusted and happy.” The shocking originality of his music for
The Rite
was Stravinsky’s unmistakable victory over his parents’ efforts to stifle his talents in an uncreative conventional life. And it was no accident that he chose the rite of
spring
, the season that Stravinsky himself remembered from his childhood on the Russian countryside as a time of sudden rebirth “that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole world cracking.”

At the age of thirty-one, Stravinsky had achieved a reputation as the musical prodigy of the twentieth century and created works that would continue to please large audiences. His next sixty years produced an encyclopedia of sometimes contradictory musical experiments. During his long and restless life he would divide himself among three nationalities. When World War I
broke out he was a European celebrity in the world of music, and for the past four years had been living in a Swiss mountain chalet, returning to Russia only for the summers. Exempted from Russian military service for reasons of health, he preferred the peace of neutral Switzerland to a nation threatened by revolution and disrupted by war. But he did not feel exiled from what interested him most—music and the arts. He kept in touch with Diaghilev, and during visits to Rome he found an affinity of spirit with Picasso. He came to know André Gide and was asked to write incidental music for Gide’s translation of Shakespeare’s
Antony and Cleopatra
. “When I suggested that the production be in modern dress,” according to Stravinsky, “he was shocked—and deaf to my arguments that we would be nearer Shakespeare in inventing something new.” In 1920, restless and ready to leave Switzerland, he first thought of moving to Italy, but decided instead to settle in France, the country of his epochal successes. There he would remain for the next twenty years, becoming a French citizen in 1934.