Nijinsky by Lucy Moore Read Free Book Online

his thoughts on ancient Slavonic fertility festivities, when the people would go into the woods and array themselves in fresh greenery before dancing and singing to celebrate the coming of spring. He believed that enduring folk customs such as ritualistic dancing when the crops were sown, or in some places stripping a girl naked and leading her on horseback through the newly planted fields before burning her effigy, were literal remnantsof Russia’s original pagan culture. What he wanted, writes the historian Nicoletta Misler, was ‘to present the power of images as the survival of memory’.
    The following year he painted a study for a mosaic for the church at Princess Tenisheva’s Talashkino estate called
The Forefathers
, which showed a man sitting on a sacred hill playing a wood or bone pipe to a group of bears hypnotised by his music – a reflection of the Slavonic tradition that men were descended from bears. Stravinsky came to work with Roerich at Talashkino where he met the singer and
gusli
player S. P. Golosov, who was also studying there. While Stravinsky composed, Roerich studied the Princess’s large collection of folk art, embroidery and clothing for inspiration for the costumes for the tribal dancers who would enact their ancient mysteries. Although Stravinsky would later claim he had tapped into ‘some unconscious folk memory ’ for the traditional melodies that he abstracted for use in
Sacre
, it is likely that Roerich and Golosov pointed Stravinsky in the direction of folk songs that were ethnologically appropriate for the piece, right for the season and the ceremony they planned to portray.
    Though the overall impression the piece would create was more important to both composer and designer than strict academic ‘correctness’ – they did not want
Sacre
to be dry or museum-like – each relied heavily on what was then seen as authentic source material. Roerich studied a three-volume history of Russian dress and the folk way of life and the folklorist Alexander Afanasyev’s monumental
The Poetic Views of the Slavs on Nature
, as well as a twelfth-century chronicle of pagan customs and Herodotus’s description of the Scythians during the Persian Wars. Stravinsky used Rimsky-Korsakov’s collection of
100 Russian Folk Songs
and an extensive anthology of Lithuanian folk tunes.
    Both men were inspired by the poetry of Sergey Gorodetsky. A few years earlier Stravinsky had composed music to accompany some of his poems. The 1907 poem ‘Yarila’ described an ancient wise man attended by two young girls, one of whom he kills with a flint axe by a pale lime tree in the spring as a sacrifice to the sun god, Yarilo: ‘a white bride’ who springs out of her bloodstains to become ‘a new god’. This imagery isrepeated in a letter from Roerich to Diaghilev describing a tribe gathered at ‘the foot of a sacred hill, in a lush plain … to celebrate the spring rites … there is an old witch … a marriage by capture, round dances … the wisest ancient [imprints] his sacred kiss on the new-flowering earth’. Then the young virgins dance before choosing one of their number to be ‘the victim they intend to honour’.
    The titles of the sections Stravinsky used as he began composing echoed these visions: ‘Divination with Twigs’ (he told Roerich that ‘the picture of an old woman in a squirrel fur … is constantly before my eyes as I compose’); ‘Khorovod – Round Dance’; ‘The Kiss of the Earth; ‘Game of Abduction’; ‘Round Dances’; ‘Secret Night-games’ (which would become ‘Mystic Circles of the Young Girls’); and ‘Holy Dance’. By January 1912 he had finished Part One, and on 17 March he wrote to tell his mother that when he had played the completed sections to Diaghilev and Nijinsky in Monte Carlo, ‘they were wild about it