Sydney and Violet by Stephen Klaidman

Author:Stephen Klaidman [Klaidman, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53410-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-09-03T04:00:00+00:00

THE BIG FIVE

When Sydney and Violet Schiff awoke in their apartment at the Villa Majestic on the morning of May 18, 1922, the sun was shining and the forecast was for a clear, mild day with good weather expected throughout the evening and into the early hours of the next day. But Western Europe was on the cusp of a broiling heat wave that would give Paris its highest temperature in 116 years. Sydney and Violet however were too focused on the night to come to have noticed or cared. The evening was going to begin at the Palais Garnier, the vast and opulent Paris opera house named for its designer, Charles Garnier, a thirty-five-year-old architect who was picked from a field of 172 by Napoleon III. It was begun in 1861 and, slowed by a variety of geological and geopolitical problems including underground water on the site, war with Prussia, and the Paris Commune of 1871, completed only in 1875. Although it was of indeterminate style—Garnier told the Empress Eugénie that the extravagantly decorated building was pure Napoleon III—Claude Debussy described it as a railroad station on the outside and a Turkish bath on the inside. Nevertheless, it quickly became a Paris landmark and a favorite venue for the world’s greatest composers, singers, conductors, dancers, and choreographers. It is hard to conceive of a better launching pad for the great Schiff gala.

In 1922 the Garnier was home to the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, one of the world’s leading companies, under the direction of the imposing Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev. Its dancer-choreographers, especially Vaslav Nijinsky and Bronislava Nijinska, were among the world’s best. Sets were designed by Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Russia’s finest avant-garde painters, such as Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, and performances were staged by Michel Fokine. Diaghilev, who recognized talent early, commissioned new ballet music by young modernist composers—some of whom would achieve greatness, most notably Stravinsky, a Russian who became French and ultimately, in 1945, American. The Ballets Russes had performed his Firebird in 1910 when Stravinsky was just twenty-eight and he remembered the premiere for reasons other than the success of his music and the dancing. “The first night audience glittered indeed,” Stravinsky wrote, “but the fact that it was heavily perfumed is more vivid in my memory. The … London audience … seemed almost deodorized by comparison.” He also remembered meeting Proust. A year later his Petrushka was performed at the Garnier. Both ballets were fairly traditional and warmly received. But The Rite of Spring, which premiered in 1913, was something else altogether. It was dissonant, rhythmically radical, featured cumbersome choreography, and was both grisly and primitive in its subject matter. It provoked a full-scale riot. It also heralded the beginning of musical modernism.

The featured attraction on May 18, 1922, was a short, lighthearted Stravinsky ballet of a type sometimes called a burlesque. The music was originally commissioned in 1916 by a friend of Proust, the Princess Edmond de Polignac, formerly Winnaretta Singer, heiress to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune.

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