The Complete Ballet by John Haskell

Author:John Haskell [Haskell, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-979-9
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2017-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

ACT FOUR

Swan Lake

Swan Lake is about someone getting older. Prince Siegfried is heir to the kingdom, and when the ballet begins he’s having a birthday party, with wine and food and his friends have come to celebrate on the palace lawn. The problem is, he doesn’t want to be getting older. He’s grown up in a rarefied world of violin lessons and hunting expeditions, and he knows a man his age is supposed to be married, that’s what they tell him, or his mother tells him, and he has nothing against marriage, and he likes the companionship of pretty girls, but none of the girls he knows excite him. Some of them used to, but now he’s adrift, craving not excitement as much as intensity, a deep emotional bond with another person, and never having found it he’s learned to do without it. Benno, his best friend, is drinking more wine than he normally does, enough to provoke him to mention the girl Siegfried used to take fencing classes with, but she’s long gone. Another girl, a dancer, was extremely beautiful, but either he was dating someone else, or she was, or he never worked up the nerve to take her in his hand, and now she’s gone, and the girls at the party are nice but that’s about all. Benno, seeing his friend getting depressed, in an effort to distract him, pretends to be a donkey. He puts on an orange leotard, and when he sticks out his butt he’s taunting the others to chase him and catch him, and someone has a fox tail attached to a needle, and that’s when Siegfried’s mother appears. And when she does the festivities stop. Her face is unsmiling, full of disapproval. She doesn’t have to say she finds the levity inappropriate, they know what she thinks, about them and about their influence on her boy, her only child. This is fine for children, she says, but you, she directs a reproach to her son, if you don’t get your life in order, my boy, make the changes we expect you to make, that you must want to make, then … and she gestures a gesture of something like life, some fluid thing trickling through her fingers. Tomorrow, she reminds him, is his formal birthday ball. That’s when he will have to act, have to choose the smartest or the prettiest, or whatever he wants, to be his wife. And of course he’s agreed to this, how could he not. All his tailors and horses and theater tickets are purchased with her money, making him, in an unspoken way, indebted to her. And worried. He’s worried that he won’t be able to pay her back, that he won’t and can’t and shouldn’t pretend to love someone he doesn’t love, which is what she wants. But he’s agreed to try, tomorrow night. That’s when he’ll face the decision to either obey his mother or obey his heart, and he’s afraid he’s going to

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