Venices by Paul Morand

Author:Paul Morand [Paul Morand]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781782270447
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2013-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

Serge Lifar at the exhibition celebrating twenty years of the Ballets Russes at the Pavilion de Marsan, 1939

1929

AT THE SLUICE-GATES of Venetian houses you reveal all about yourself the moment you set foot in the doorway. “A slippery city,” D.H. Lawrence said of her. I had arrived there the day after Diaghilev had died. I thought once more about the life of this brilliant impresario whose love of art had been his driving force; he was much more of a sorcerer than an impresario and he had the wizardry of an electro-magnet; his intelligence was not sufficiently developed that it outshone his sense of discovery; his secret derived from the fact that he only ever thought of his own pleasure, requiring the approval of merely a handful of people, such as Picasso, Stravinsky, Lady Ripon, Misia… totally indifferent to the fashions of the day, he never took peeps through the hole in the stage curtain; and he never took a penny on the side. Only his somnambulism can explain his temerity, his inability to foresee obstacles, his crazy improvisations and the way he was blinded to all but his own destiny (the final act of Petrushka was created only ten minutes before the curtain went up at the dress rehearsal).

I reflected on Serge’s career from that moment in 1904 when Prince Volkonsky, the director of the Imperial Theatres, parted with the services of the very young choreographer, criticising him for having staged Sylvia “with too many of his personal ideas”, up until his death in Venice; I thought about his revolutionary yet classical destiny, about this harbourer of monsters, who arrived in Paris and scattered his Muscovite seed there, giving new birth to painting, music, song and dance. I thought of the Ballets Russes which, as a humble soldier arriving by train at the Gare Saint-Lazare, I would watch from the gods at the Châtelet or the Opéra. Diaghilev slips through my past like a stag in the forest; “I caught sight of him,” say the stalkers; but how often did I catch glimpses of Serge! I had known the triumphant Diaghilev from the Châtelet in 1910 to London in 1913, before coming across him, four years later, reduced to poverty (he was never rich) in Spain; impervious to boos and catcalls, he had an Ancien Régime courtesy which storms would occasionally ruffle when some drama or other broke out in the seraglio; beneath the Russian demeanour, the Chinaman was always slumbering… Cosmopolitan in appearance, but Russian in his soul, everywhere he went he recreated that eschatological, Byzantine atmosphere of the eternal Russia; the triumphs, the downfalls, the debts, the harassment, the beloved bodies sewn into sacks and tossed into the Bosphorus; pitting Nijinsky against Fokine, Benoit against Bakst, Lifar against Massine, in a storm of champagne, delirious telegrams, fancy food and dried bread, accompanied by assurances of happiness and threats of suicide, and, finally, his fatal diabetes which was treated with ten dishes that were forbidden him; such was Serge, that tortured executioner.

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