Guthrie, K. (2015). Awakening 'Sleeping Beauty': The Creation of National Ballet in Britain. Music and Letters, 96(3), 418-448. https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcv067 Peer reviewed version Link to published version (if available): 10.1093/ml/gcv067 Link to publication record in Explore Bristol Research PDF-document This is the author accepted manuscript (AAM). The final published version (version of record) is available online via Oxford University Press at https://academic.oup.com/ml/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/ml/gcv067. Please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. University of Bristol - Explore Bristol Research General rights This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/red/research-policy/pure/user-guides/ebr-terms/ https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcv067 https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcv067 https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/1ee636d7-0bbc-4a39-b045-83ac358d17be https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/1ee636d7-0bbc-4a39-b045-83ac358d17be For R eview O nly Awakening The Sleeping Beauty: The Creation of National Ballet in Britain Journal: Music & Letters Manuscript ID: ML-2014-089.R1 Manuscript Type: Article Keywords: Britain, Twentieth century, Music, Ballet, Middlebrow https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters For R eview O nly Awakening The Sleeping Beauty: The Creation of National Ballet in Britain For the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden 1946 began with a flurry of activity, as the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company hastily put together a new production of Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty.1 Its premiere would mark the building’s postwar re-opening, as well as the troupe’s inaugural performance as its resident ballet company. This prestigious event was supported by a huge – £10,000 – grant from the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), with which new costumes and sets were commissioned from eminent stage designer Oliver Messel.2 If the significance of the occasion contributed to the industrious atmosphere, recent events had created more work than was usual even for a new production. For the past six years, the Opera House, on lease to Mecca Cafés, had ‘done its bit’ for the war effort as a dance hall: arias had been replaced by the dulcet strains of Glenn Miller, divas by soldiers dancing away the horrors of war. Restoring its former glory was no small undertaking. The dance floor and two bandstands had to be removed, the red silk chairs brought out of storage and the building repainted. At the same time, postwar shortages made it hard to source the materials required for Messel’s extravagant new designs. The set had to be created from camouflage paint, while costumes and lampshades were cobbled together from the staff’s clothing coupons. Pressed for time and unfamiliar with the large venue, ballet company and orchestra rehearsed simultaneously in the main auditorium, surrounded by seamstresses and set constructors. The shortage of male dancers also meant that the company’s principal male ballerina, Robert Helpmann, had to dance two roles, Carabosse and Prince Florimund. For the guardians of elite culture, the Opera House’s wartime conscription as a 1 The Sadler’s Wells Ballet was originally known as the Vic-Wells Ballet (1931-1939) and later as the Royal Ballet (1956 onwards). There was also a Sadler’s Wells Opera Company, similarly named after the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in Islington, London. Here, ‘Sadler’s Wells’ refers to the ballet company, unless otherwise indicated. 2 In 1945-1946, CEMA allocated £25,000 to Covent Garden, which suggests how generous the budget for Sleeping Beauty was. Paul Kildea, Selling Britten: Music and the Market Place (Oxford, 2002), 119. Page 1 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly dance hall had been nothing short of tragic; so when the building finally re-opened on 20 February 1946 in ‘its rightful role’, they were quick to proclaim a triumph.3 The idea of performing Sleeping Beauty had come from John Maynard Keynes – the celebrated economist and onetime chairman of CEMA and the Covent Garden Committee.4 The ballet held a personal significance for Keynes, not least because the Ballets Russes’s 1921 production had provided a ‘gilded backdrop to the first weeks of [his] love affair’ with Lydia Lopokova, whom he later married.5 By all accounts, Sadler’s Wells founder Ninette de Valois eagerly supported his proposition, claiming that she had been ‘haunted’ by the ballet’s ‘beauty’ since childhood.6 In the event, it seemed that a more topical ballet could not have been chosen. The Opera House’s transformation appeared magical: having survived ‘the grimmest sequel of nights that it had known’, the building could finally ‘awaken […] from its long sleep’.7 The Sadler’s Wells’ circumstances made the choice of Sleeping Beauty all the more appropriate. The move to Covent Garden signified the company’s coming of age and consolidated Margot Fonteyn’s place at its head.8 In the words of de Valois, it could ‘awaken at last, in a sumptuous court: fitting reward for years of regal patience in adversity’.9 As luck would have it, the company’s final 3 ‘Swing to Ballet’, News Review (28 February 1946), Royal Opera House Archive, Sadler’s Wells Ballet Cuttings 1942 – 1946, ROH/RBB/4/5 (henceforth ROH/RBB/4/5). 4 Webster, ‘Lord Keynes’, Covent Garden Books, vol.1: Ballet, 1946-1947 (Norwich, 1948), 10 & 63. 5 What is more, Keynes reportedly subsidised a 1931 production of Aurora’s Wedding, staged by members of the Ballet Rambert and the Vic-Wells: Judith Chazin-Bennahum, The Ballets of Antony Tudor: Studies in Psyche and Satire (Oxford, 1994), 26; Judith Mackrell, Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs John Maynard Keynes (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008), 395. 6 Ninette de Valois, Come Dance With Me: A Memoir 1898-1956 (London, 1957), 167. 7 Elizabeth Frank, Margot Fonteyn (London, 1958), 66. 8 Margot Fonteyn danced the lead role in alternation with Pamela May, Beryl Grey and Moira Shearer. Cyril W. Beaumont, The Sleeping Beauty as Presented by the Sadler’s Wells Ballet (London, 1946), provides a detailed account of this event, including photographs. A full cast list can be seen at ‘The Sleeping Beauty (1946)’, Royal Opera House Collections Online. Available at [accessed 6 August 2013]. 9 De Valois, Come Dance, 167. Page 2 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly pre-war performance had been Aurora’s Wedding, an excerpt from the third act of Sleeping Beauty, which made the parallel even stronger.10 The audience, only too ready to be relieved of postwar austerity, dressed up for the occasion.11 Indeed, for Britain’s moneyed elite, the opulence on stage and in the auditorium assuaged a widespread fear that ‘all the grace and elegant things from the old world had passed permanently away’: as Keynes explained, ‘it caused an extraordinary feeling of uplift when it was suddenly appreciated that perhaps they had not entirely vanished’.12 Even the ‘strong scent of mothballs’ would not mar this prestigious event.13 If this was a landmark in both the Opera House’s and the Sadler’s Wells’ history, it was also recognised as a turning point for British art.14 From the outset, plans to re-open the building as a high art venue were bound up in the period’s broad concern with the pursuit of a national culture. Not only did the initiative have financial support from government-funded CEMA, but the management had made explicit their desire to establish Covent Garden as a ‘permanent home for British opera and ballet’.15 On the opening night, the nationalist atmosphere was reinforced by the presence of the royal family and singing of the national anthem.16 This agenda was more radical than it might sound. For one thing, prior to this, CEMA’s principal focus had been on facilitating amateur music making, drama and 10 Ibid. See also Alexander Bland, The Royal Ballet: The First 50 Years (London, 1981), 53, 56. 11 The London Evening News reported that ‘nearly everyone was in full evening dress’. Stephen Williams, ‘The Garden Blooms Again’, Evening News, ROH/RBB/4/5; see also ‘Dinner at 11’, Evening Standard, ROH/RBB/4/5. 12 Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946 (London, 2000), 463. David Cannadine has explored the decline of the British aristocracy during the twentieth century: The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven and London, 1990), especially 606-36. 13 Frank, Fonteyn, 65. 14 The conflation of British and English was common during the 1940s, although a growing number of people objected to the slippage. It is beyond the scope of this article to explore England’s complicated relationship with ‘Britain’ in any detail. Suffice it to observe that, in the discussions about national ballet, critics frequently slipped between ‘British’ and ‘English’, often using the latter in relation to dancers or style, and the former to denote the art form they sought to establish. In general, I use ‘English’ only when it is in contemporary sources. 15 ‘British Ballet’, Manchester Guardian (26 October 1945), ROH/RBB/4/5. 16 John Shand, ‘Covent Garden Restored: A Theatre of Magnificent Tradition’, Manchester Guardian (20 February 1946), 4. 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It was only following John Maynard Keynes’s appointment as Chairman in April 1942 that its approach began to shift to reflect Keynes’s own priorities, namely the funding of professional companies (especially ballet companies) whose presence in the capital might transform it into ‘a great artistic metropolis’.17 For another, in the past, London’s most celebrated theatres had primarily been reserved for foreign companies, not least because of the public’s long-standing belief that Britain was – as ballet critic Arnold Haskell put it – ‘a fundamentally inartistic nation’.18 The high regard in which audiences held foreign art complicated notions about what the establishment of a British national culture might mean. In particular, it provoked a tendency to conflate the epithet ‘national’ with international renown. Writing for The Listener in 1940, for example, E.M. Forster offered the ‘supremacy’ of German music as evidence that when ‘a culture is genuinely national, it is capable […] of becoming super-national’.19 For the likes of Keynes, this slippage made the pursuit of international prestige a priority – and in the 1940s, the Sadler’s Wells’ recent ascendancy made ballet the most promising vehicle. 17 John Maynard Keynes, ‘The Arts Council: Its Policy and Hopes’, The Listener 34 (12 July 1945), 31-2; Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 291. CEMA was founded shortly after the onset of war to ensure the continuation of cultural activities for the duration. It partnered with the Sadler’s Wells in January 1943, paving the way for the ballet company’s eventual move to Covent Garden in 1946, after Keynes had secured the building’s lease. Numerous scholars have charted CEMA’s increasingly elitist outlook. For example, see F.M. Leventhal’s seminal article, ‘“The Best for the Most”: CEMA and State Sponsorship of the Arts in Wartime, 1939-1945’, 20th Century British History 1 (1990): 289-317; and Kildea, Selling Britten, 117-47. Keynes’s personal interest in ballet, and comparative disinterest in opera, has also been widely remarked: see above, p.2; Norman Lebrecht, Covent Garden: The Untold Story (London, 2000), 46-8. 18 Arnold Haskell, The National Ballet: A History and a Manifesto (with an overture by Ninette de Valois) (London, 1947), 67. 19 Forster characterized such super-national culture as having ‘generosity and modesty, it is not confined by political and geographic boundaries, it does not fidget about purity of race or worry about survival, but, living in the present and sustained by the desire to create, it expands wherever human beings are to be found’. He went on to suggest that the Nazi’s suppression of creative freedom would stifle national art, making it impossible for German culture to ‘become super-national or contribute to the general good of humanity’. E.M. Forster, ‘Three Anti-Nazi Broadcasts’, in Two Cheers for Democracy (Frome and London, 1951), 43-54; 45-6. See also ibid., ‘Two Cultures: The Quick and The Dead’, The Listener (26 September 1940), 446-7. Page 4 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly To put all this another way, those pursuing a national culture trod an uncertain path: between the belief that it should somehow ‘spring naturally’ from the people; and that, in its most developed form, a national art would secure Britain’s place at the forefront of an international culture.20 Accounts of Covent Garden’s re-opening have tended to share an assumption that the two approaches – the former characterised as populist, the latter as elitist – were incompatible. Within this dualistic framework, it is small wonder that this event has been viewed as a defining moment in the Keynsian administration’s turn away from amateur organisations towards professional ones: as evidence, in Paul Kildea’s words, of its ‘narrow vision of British culture’.21 Even when scholars have attempted to account for the variety of Arts Council activities in postwar Britain, Covent Garden’s position remains uncontested: seemingly the paradigm of high culture, it offers an easy example of the elite end of the spectrum.22 That Keynes died just a few weeks after the re-opening has also contributed to the tendency to view this occasion as part of his legacy.23 In this article, I explore an alternative perspective – one inspired by recent scholarship that has used the idea of middlebrow culture to uncover the messy relationship between lowbrow and highbrow, popular and elite.24 By re-situating the events that led up to 20 February 1946 within the broader history of mid-century British ballet culture, I demonstrate that the vision of a grand opera house as a centre 20 Forster, ‘Two Cultures’, 446. 21 The chapter on the Arts Council in Kildea’s Selling Britten is typical of this one-sided approach: ‘The Arts Council’s Pursuit of “Grand Opera”’, 117-47. 22 For instance, see Richard Weight, ‘“Building a new British culture”: The Arts Centre Movement, 1945-53’, in ‘The Right to Belong’: Citizenship and National Identity in Britain, 1930-1960, eds. Weight and Abigail Beach (London and New York, 1998), 157-80; 160. 23 Keynes’ deteriorating health famously led to his collapse just before the premiere, leaving his wife to play host to the various dignitaries. His untimely death came barely a month later. 24 In particular, see Christopher Chowrimootoo’s work on Britten’s operas: ‘Bourgeois Opera: Death in Venice and The Aesthetics of Sublimation’, Cambridge Opera Journal 22, 2 (July 2010): 175-216; ‘The Timely Traditions of Albert Herring’, Opera Quarterly 27, 4 (2011): 379-419; and Laura Tunbridge, ‘Frieda Hempel and the Historical Imagination’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, 2 (2013): 437-74. Page 5 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly for national culture had a more complicated relationship with the notion of populism than historians have acknowledged.25 In particular, I suggest that the desire to satisfy elite audiences remained in uneasy tension with the period’s heightened concern for the artistic needs of the general public. In advancing such an argument, I hope to do more than simply offer a revisionist reading of Covent Garden’s postwar Sleeping Beauty. I also want reveal why the medium of ballet proved so awkward to appropriate as a vehicle for national culture – a question that involves not only this art form, but one that also helps to nuance our understanding of how the European art music canon contributed to the pursuit of ‘national culture’ in mid-century Britain. The Sleeping Beauty Revisited The re-opening of the Opera House was undeniably an extravagant affair. Between the ‘sumptuous production’, elegant evening dresses and ‘high, unbashful voices of the type that used to be heard only at Covent Garden and the Royal enclosure at Ascot’, the event had all the trappings of the ancien 25 Populism is a notoriously slippery concept. For one thing, it is difficult to pin down exactly what constitutes ‘the people’; for another, ‘populism’ is most often used in a derogatory way, with the result that even its most obvious proponents rarely self-identify as populist. See the editors’ ‘Introduction: The Sceptre and the Spectre’ in Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European Democracy, eds. Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell (Basingstoke, 2008). The idea of ‘cultural populism’ is similarly nebulous, no more so than in its relation to art music. While Jim McGuigan argues that ‘[a]ny form of culture that appeals to ordinary people could reasonably, in my view, be called “populist culture”’, he also observes that ‘[t]he popularisation of classical music […] is a very particular case since, by and large, the most popular forms of culture are not generally disseminated from “high” to “low” in such a way’. Jim McGuigan, Cultural Populism (London, 2002), 2-3. For the purposes of this article, I use the word in its broadest sense to refer to ‘support for or representation of ordinary people or their views; speech, action, writing, etc., intended to have general appeal’, with the caveat that the attempts to ‘support’ or ‘represent’ the public discussed here represent intellectual aspirations for a populist culture, as much as they reflect the public’s cultural preferences. ‘populism, n.’, OED Online. Available at [accessed November 7, 2013]. Page 6 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly régime.26 But behind this ostentatious exterior, some important administrative changes had taken place. In particular, the new management had lowered tickets prices, reduced the number of boxes and implemented a more flexible dress code (invitations to the opening night specified ‘evening dress, uniform, or day clothes’27) – policies that proved controversial with patrons of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet and Opera House alike. Speaking on behalf of the former, K.M. Howick wrote to the London Evening News a few days before the opening night, decrying the manager’s idea of ‘popular’ prices.28 His objection was twofold. First, that the affordable seats – the gallery and the slips – were those that offered, at best, a poor or restricted view. Second, that in the past the same company could have been enjoyed without causing such damage to the bank balance: at the Sadler’s Wells, gallery seats cost 1s (and, in the smaller theatre, were closer to the stage), while 9s could buy a seat in the stalls; equivalent seats in the Opera House were priced at 2s 6d and 16s respectively.29 At the same time, Opera House gallery regulars expressed disappointment at the decision to make this part of the auditorium bookable; meanwhile the wealthier members of the audience objected to ‘the well-worn statements of inverted snobbery’ that welcomed an informal dress code.30 (In the event, the audience seem largely to have ignored the dress-down code: while reports of ornate evening wear abounded, the Daily Express alone alleged that ‘three-quarters of the audience were in day clothes. And in the stalls there were women 26 Williams, ‘The Garden Blooms Again’. 27 ‘Covent Garden Opera And Ballet Restored’, The Times (19 February 1946), 2. 28 K.M. Howick, ‘Ballet for All’, Evening News (15 February 1946), ROH/RBB/4/5. 29 During the war, the Arts Theatre Club in Great Newport Street also offered lunchtime ballets at a shilling a time. ‘Shilling Ballet’, Picture Post (5 October 1945), 26-9. In its seminal years, CEMA was also committed to low ticket prices: at its second meeting, the Council agreed that organisations would only be eligible for funding if they guaranteed that ‘not less than twenty-five per cent of the tickets at each concert should be sold for 1/- or less’. C.E.M.A.: Minutes of the Second Meeting (18 January 1940), Arts Council of Great Britain: Records, 1928-1997, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive, London (henceforth ACGB Records), EL1/3: Minutes for 1st-6th meetings of the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, January 1940-March 1940. 30 Regulars asserted that ‘the friendships made in a Covent Garden queue are among the most important in life’. ‘Opera at Covent Garden’, The Times (10 January 1946), ROH/RBB/4/5; ‘Re-opening of Covent Garden’, Truth (15 February 1946), ROH/RBB/4/5. See also ‘The Clubbable Queue’, The Times (20 February 1946), ROH/RBB/4/5. Page 7 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly without stockings’.31) That the management went ahead with their reforms in spite of these objections points to the fact that their primary motivation was ideological rather than commercial.32 In the words of a Times journalist, such changes were designed to ‘usher in a new and democratic era in the history of the famous opera house without losing any of its traditional splendour’.33 Nevertheless, the opulence both on- and off-stage came under fire from multiple angles. The ‘galleryites’ attacked the Opera House’s wealthier patrons, asserting that their ‘expensive seat[s] and expensive clothes’ belied a true appreciation of art.34 A letter to The Manchester Guardian similarly questioned the cultural integrity of the rich, as the author voiced concern that the Sadler’s Wells’ relocation would leave it ‘as commercial as any glittering nitwittery on Shaftesbury Avenue’.35 Meanwhile, an Observer critic compared the general public’s interest in ballet to their enthusiasm for a ‘full dollarful of Virginian “fags” and Hollywood’s lovey-dovey’. Sleeping Beauty’s appeal, the author maintained, was its promise of ‘Escape and yet again escape!’: No shadow of [Benedick’s “February face”] hangs over the magic toy-shop of the dance, where queue-weary and justly fractious housewives may, for an hour or two, be transmuted into good-humoured ladies. In our drab, unpainted towns we besiege our painted stages.36 Indeed, in the eyes of many contemporary commentators – and contrary to what scholars have 31 ‘No Stockings in Ballet Stalls’, Daily Express (22 February 1946), ROH/RBB/4/5. 32 Money, however, also came into it: as Richard Witts explains, by the middle of the war, the aristocracy ‘no longer had the means to sustain through exorbitant subscriptions the kind of sparkling international seasons Beecham had presented in the thirties’. Richard Witts, Artist Unknown: An Alternative History of the Arts Council (London, 1998), 132. 33 ‘Covent Garden Opera And Ballet Restored’, The Times (19 February 1946), 2. 34 ‘Re-opening of Covent Garden’, Truth (15 February 1946), ROH/RBB/4/5. 35 Shaftsbury Avenue is the heart of London’s West End, a theatre district that by the 1940s was renowned, among other things, for spectacular musical productions. T.F. Lodge, ‘Covent Garden’, The Manchester Guardian (4 February 1946), ROH/RBB/4/5. 36 ‘Comment’, The Observer (17 February 1946), 4. ‘Benedick’s February Face’ is a reference to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Page 8 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly subsequently claimed – the management’s attempt to mediate between populist and elitist demands was reflected both in the balletic medium (of which more later), and in de Valois’s particular choice of ballet. On the one hand, as a product of Russia’s imperial past, Sleeping Beauty harked back to a pre-democratic era of aristocratic extravagance.37 On the other hand, by the 1940s it also had a populist resonance which, although discussed in less overt terms than the changes to ticket prices and dress code, nevertheless drew criticism from certain quarters. A point of particular contention was the accessibility of Tchaikovsky’s music, a characteristic that, since the turn of the century, had secured its popularity with Britain’s emerging middlebrow public, while contributing to its low reputation in intellectual circles. His balletic compositions – not helped by their theatrical context – epitomised his shortcomings. Perhaps the biggest issue was his reliance on melodies that, at least in the eyes of his detractors, were ‘too “catchy”’, uncomfortably sentimental, even effeminate.38 As Sadler’s Wells music director Constant Lambert noted, Tchaikovsky was often ‘regarded as a cross between a sentimental woman novelist and a painter of Academy problem pictures’.39 To make matters worse, when such melodies were repeated multiple times in the same movement (as they frequently were), it seemed to draw attention to the sectional nature of the music, undermining the sense of large-scale formal development associated with the highly prized German symphonic tradition. ‘Tchaikovsky’s melodies,’ one writer 37 Recent political events surely heightened the significance of this gesture to the past. Even after Britain and Russia had become allies in 1941, the British government remained highly suspicious of Communism – so much so that it took steps to limit its influence in Britain. For example, once Russia became an ally, the BBC had cancelled its weekly broadcast of allies’ national anthems, to avoid having to add the Internationale to their number. Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (London, 1975), 134. 38 Lambert, ‘Tchaikovsky and The Ballet’, in The Sleeping Princess: Camera Studies, ed. Gordon Antony (London, 1940), 15. 39 Constant Lambert, ‘Tchaikovsky Today’, The Listener 23 (2 May 1940), 905. In vogue during late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, problem pictures were ambiguous scenes from modern life that sought to stimulate discussion through the diversity of their possible meanings. Art critics usually dismissed the genre on account of its aesthetically conservative style, reliance on narrative and popularity with women. Pamela M. Fletcher, ‘Masculinity, Money and Modern Art: The Sentence of Death by John Collier’, in English Art 1860-1914: Modern Artists and Identity, eds. David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry (Manchester, 2000), 84-99. Page 9 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly explained ‘are essentially tunes rather than symphonic themes. They are direct and final statements, not the premises of a lengthy argument’.40 One passage in Sleeping Beauty that invited such critique was the Pas d’Action from Act II, in which the Prince sees a vision of Princess Aurora. The number opens with a lilting melody in 6/8, scored for a solo cello accompanied by minimal strings and woodwind (Example 1), which is notable for its similarity to the second subject of the slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.5 (Example 2).41 The theme is built of two memorable motifs: an opening gesture, which outlines a descending tonic triad before coming to rest on a dominant seventh (bb.3-4); and a syncopated scalic figure (bb.5-6). After 8 bars, the phrase dovetails with a second, modified statement of the theme. While much of the number’s melodic material is derived from these opening bars, the theme itself is heard only twice more during the Pas d’Action: during bb.68-82, where it is scored first for unison cellos and clarinet, and then for the same plus violins, violas and oboes. Despite this, commentators went to some lengths to contrast the theme’s repetitive treatment in the ballet with its supposed evolution in the Symphony. One critic, for example, described the balletic version as ‘a melody simply stated and then repeated with various instrumental elaborations, but never developed symphonically’, whereas in the Symphony, he claimed, it ‘is worked out at length and brought to a great climax’. Somewhat unusually, for this writer the lack of development in the former was grounds for praise: it reflected the composer’s sensitivity to the ‘limitations of his medium’. But while lauding the ballet music’s ‘aptness of characterization’, he also accused it of being formulaic: ‘one is astonished to find that the movements nearly all conform to one of two or three stereotyped patterns of the simplest type’.42 The political climate of the 1940s added an interesting twist to this critical malaise. Earlier in the century, commentators had often denounced Tchaikovsky’s music as insufficiently Russian – a 40 Lambert, ‘Tchaikovsky and The Ballet’, 20. 41 Critics often noted the similarity. For example, see Ibid., and Dyneley Hussey, ‘The Composer and The Music’, in The Sleeping Beauty, ed. Sacheverell Sitwell (London, 1949), 45-6. 42 Hussey, ‘The Composer and the Music’, 45-6 & 50. Page 10 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly ‘superficial’, ‘vulgar’ imitation of Western bourgeois culture.43 Now, however, his advocates sought to redeem his melodic lyricism on the grounds that it distinguished the composer from the German tradition. One such was music critic Edwin Evans, who suggested that ‘[i]t shows how far removed Tchaikovsky was from German pedantry, which dismisses as Kitsch, or mere ear-tickling, any music with a captivating tune’: It implies that Tchaikovsky regarded, as every musician should, the distinction between good and bad as cutting deeper than any antithesis of serious and light – or, to put it colloquially, “classical” and “popular” – music. It explains how his ballet music came to be, not only among the best of its kind, but among the best he wrote.44 Reviving an old trend, Evans styled the music’s emotional appeal as evidence of the composer’s Russianness, and then used this as grounds for praise.45 His argument was characteristic of an emerging body of criticism that sought ‘at last’ to take ‘the man and his music seriously’.46 Beyond the obvious political motivations for such re-appraisals, this trend might also have been motivated by a need to elevate Tchaikovsky’s music so that it could pass as suitable fare for a national company. The lyrical melodies were not the ballet score’s only aesthetic issue: equally problematic was its heightened theatricality. The orchestral introduction was a case in point. The ballet opens with a noisy 43 Constant Lambert, ‘Tchaikovsky and The Ballet’, 15. This lengthy article is a defence of Tchaikovsky, in which Lambert challenges accepted stereotypes of the composer’s music. 44 Evans, ‘The Ballets’, 185. 45 Lambert similarly claimed that Tchaikovsky was now ‘regarded by many people as not only the most important of the Russian composers but also as the most Russian of them at heart’: ‘Tchaikovsky Today’. 46 Martin Raymond, ‘Music, The Observer (3 March 1946), 2. In addition to the Lambert and Hussey articles on Tchaikovsky’s ballet music already cited, this change of heart was reflected in the publication of two broader book- length studies: Abraham’s edited volume Tchaikovsky, which provided an introduction to the composer’s lesser-known works; and Herbert Weinstock’s Tchaikovsky (London, 1946), which claimed to be the ‘first full-length biography’ of the composer in English. For the history of Tchaikovsky’s reception in Britain, see Gareth Thomas, ‘The Impact of Russian Music in England 1893-1929’ (Ph.D. thesis, The University of Birmingham, 2005), 5-13, 30-7. Page 11 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly allegro vivo, during which a full orchestra (minus the harp) plays repeated fff chromatic chords and arpeggios. The prominent timpani rolls and syncopated cymbal crashes add to the sense of drama (Example 3). Such passages seemed to pose a problem even for Tchaikovsky’s advocates. In a lavish collection of essays published by the Sadler’s Wells to promote their work, for example, writer Dyneley Hussey noted the less-than-subtle way in which the composer sought to seize the audience’s attention: the ‘sharp accents and unstable tonality are calculated to arouse excitement’. ‘It is all rather garish and blatant by absolute standards’, he continued, ‘but it serves its purpose admirably’.47 In other words, it was precisely because Tchaikovsky’s music did its job so well that it made critics uneasy. The narrative that had grown up around the original (1890) production did little to simplify matters. In brief, when theatre director Ivan Vsevolozhsky invited choreographer Marius Petipa and Tchaikovsky to collaborate on a new ballet for St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre in 1888, he made explicit his hopes that it would move beyond ‘the predictable rhythms of made-to-order ballet music’ to realise a ‘higher’ artistic ideal.48 The result – which fused the popular Italian ballet-féeries with seventeenth-century French and contemporary Russian aristocratic traditions – received a decidedly mixed reception.49 Nevertheless, by the 1940s, Sleeping Beauty was widely considered to have been a turning point in the history of ballet music: in Lydia Lopokova’s words, it marked the moment when ‘the first great musician […] decided to compose expressly for the ballet’, liberating the medium from the formulaic approach of ‘hack’ composers.50 The unusual freedom that Tchaikovsky was reportedly given in the compositional process inspired claims that this was the first balletic Gesamtkunsterwerk.51 47 Hussey, ‘The Composer and The Music’, 37. 48 For a detailed account of the circumstances surrounding its creation, see Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (London, 2010), 270-9; Tim Scholl, “Sleeping Beauty,” A Legend in Progress (New Haven and London, 2004), 1-29. 49 Although it was a huge success with the general public, critical opinion was divided: while some considered the music too symphonic, the narrative too ‘thin’ and the choreography too ‘elaborate’, others – according to Scholl, ‘mostly music critics’ – hailed a new era in the history of ballet: Scholl, “Sleeping Beauty,” A Legend in Progress, 2. 50 Lydia Lopokova, ‘Music and Choreography’, The Music Bulletin 8, 2 (1926): 45-6. 51 In ‘The Composer and His Music’, Hussey recounted how Petipa had given Tchaikovsky only vague guidelines for the composition (for example, requesting simply ‘a little introduction for a Pas de Six’, rather than specifying a precise Page 12 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly Such pretensions promised to elevate the work, but they were also a reminder of the extent to which the music was bound up with – or, as detractors would have it, restricted by – the demands of another medium. For many critics, Tchaikovsky’s ‘skill in writing to the demands of the choreographer’ was overshadowed by a belief that, in general, the ballet music did not stand up to the ultimate test: it ‘would not be congruous in the concert-hall’.52 Aside from the obvious formal constraints imposed by the medium, the music’s ‘illustrative’ nature posed a significant issue for critics.53 From the moments of high drama, to those of sentimental lyricism, the score seemed to tap into broader anxieties about ballet audience’s love of emotive spectacle – a penchant that the traditions of Opera House attendance made it hard to ignore. For if the lavishness of the occasion was reminiscent of the moneyed excess of pre- war patrons, in the eyes of certain critics it also came perilously close to the glamour that drew large crowds to – and incited intellectuals’ discontent with – lowbrow forms of entertainment. Despite Covent Garden’s illustrious history, then, the 1946 production of Sleeping Beauty was far from unequivocally highbrow. Rather, the management’s desire to retain the venue’s historic prestige while attracting a more diverse audience was timely. It reflected a preoccupation that had plagued both CEMA’s and the Sadler’s Wells’ work from their respective inaugurations: how, in the famous words of the former’s first slogan, to ensure that ‘the best’ in art reached ‘the most’. The difficulty as far as ballet was concerned, however, was that the characteristic that drew such large audiences – the art form’s spectacle – also threatened to undermine its prestige. Of course, this tension between prestige and popularity was specific neither to these organisations nor to mid-century Britain: since at least the late nineteenth century, intellectuals had been debating how they might broaden access to high culture without compromising its elite status.54 Nevertheless, during the 1930s and 1940s, when political number of bars): 36-7. See also Tim Scholl, From Petipa to Balanchine: Classical Revival and the Modernization of Ballet (London, 1994), 21-45. 52 Lambert, ‘Tchaikovsky and The Ballet’, 21. 53 Ibid. 54 Nor was it unique to ballet: opera trod a similarly fine line between popularity and prestige, spectacle and art. As Chowrimootoo explains, while one moment it was ‘being denounced as a bastion of elitism’, the next it was ‘being charged with prefiguring “some of the worst abominations” of the culture industry’: ‘Bourgeois Opera: Death in Venice Page 13 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly circumstances were heightening calls for cultural renewal, this problem became intertwined with nationalist rhetoric in a new way. Indeed, as a brief exploration of the Sadler’s Wells’ evolution reveals, critics’ ambivalence towards balletic spectacle went to the heart of a pervasive uncertainty about what ‘British’ ballet might look like. The Pursuit of a British Ballet The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed an explosion of ballet in Britain. While charting these developments in any detail is beyond the scope of this article, it is important to note the two principal contexts in which they took place, if only because it was against this backdrop that the Sadler’s Wells came into being. On the one hand, from the late nineteenth century, the idea that art might be appropriated as a means of moral and spiritual development for the masses inspired (among other things) what became a nation-wide trend for founding ballet schools.55 On the other, during the 1910s and 1920s, the presence of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in London offered the theatre-going public an alternative encounter with the art form.56 For those who were eager to establish a British ballet tradition, perhaps the biggest challenge posed by the synchronous development of such contrasting enterprises was the resulting uncertainty about what actually constituted ballet. Was it something practised by and The Aesthetics of Sublimation’, Cambridge Opera Journal 22, 2 (July 2010): 175-216. But while opera producers, battling against higher production costs and lower ticket sales, tended to ‘play for safety and stick to the orthodox repertory’, the ballet, thanks in no small part to Diaghilev’s legacy, ‘throve on modernity’: Dent, A Theatre for Everybody, 111. See also Garafola, Ballets Russes, especially 76-97; Homas, Apollo’s Angels, 290-340. 55 Mary Neal and Isadora Duncan played a seminal role in this: see Edward J. Dent, A Theatre for Everybody: The Story of the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells (London, 1945), 102-4. The weekly ‘Round the Classes’ articles in the Dancing Times are a testimony to the significance of this movement. Belief in the edifying power of art also inspired numerous musical enterprises. For examples, see Catherine Dale, Music Analysis in Britain in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Ashgate, 2003); Charles McGuire, Music and Victorian Philanthropy (Cambridge, 2009). 56 For the Ballets Russes in London, see Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 300-34; 360-74; Gareth Thomas, ‘Modernism, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes in London, 1911-1929’, in British Music and Modernism, 1895-1960, ed. Matthew Riley (Aldershot, 2010), 67-91. Page 14 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly exceptional foreign artists in elitist venues? Or could it encompass the range of styles and new repertoire developing around Britain in ballet schools and young companies?57 By the early twentieth century, British audiences’ tendency to believe that the best in culture had to be imported from abroad was nothing new.58 It was all but inevitable that, having won favour with London’s cosmopolitan-minded elite, the Ballets Russes quickly came to be seen as the pinnacle of balletic achievement – a judgement that led, in Lynn Garafola’s words, to a widespread conviction that ballet ‘was not the art taking root in dance studios around the country (which they ignored), but an imported “craze”’.59 The implications for British dancers were far from promising: as Covent Garden Manager David Webster explained, ‘many people in England refuse to believe that there can be a British Ballet Company of quality’.60 Indeed, many aficionados went so far as to maintain that ‘there were two different things: ballet and Russian Ballet’.61 Despite this, even before Diaghilev’s death in 1929 left a gap in the market, his troupe’s success began to elicit calls for the establishment of a British ballet tradition that might attain a similar stature. Ballet-lovers imagined not just a company of world-class dancers, but also a network of indigenous choreographers, designers, musical directors and composers, who could build a national repertoire. Among the entrepreneurs to respond was the young de Valois who, inspired by Diaghilev’s example, gave up her place in his company to open the Academy of Choreographic Art. Founded in March 1926, de Valois’s Academy aimed to provide a space in which young people could develop an interest in classical ballet and in which aspiring talent could be cultivated to the highest level.62 But her vision did 57 Ballet, as conceived by mid-twentieth-century audiences and practitioners, was a recent (late-nineteenth-century) phenomenon. McLean, Dying Swans, 13-14; 35. 58 For a general discussion about British audiences’ love-affair with continental artists, see Ralph Vaughan Williams, National Music and Other Essays (London, 1963), 4-5. 59 Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 373. 60 David Webster, ‘Editorial: Covent Garden’, The Arts Council of Great Britain Monthly Bulletin 69 (January 1946), 1-3; 1. 61 Evans, ‘Nationalism and the Ballet’, Dancing Times 391 (April 1943), 310. 62 Of the many ballet schools established during the first decades of the twentieth century, the only one that came close to rivalling de Valois’s was that of Marie Rambert, founded seven years previous in 1919. The success of her enterprise led Page 15 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly not end there: de Valois also hoped that her school might ultimately become the basis of a repertory company. Whereas commercial theatres employed artists on a production-by-production basis and consequently tended to show established box office favourites that guaranteed high returns, repertory theatres aimed to offer longer-term contracts. The advantage of the latter model was two-fold: it promised job security, allowing artists to focus on developing their skill; and it gave the flexibility for a greater variety of works – including new or experimental ones – to be staged. Shortly after opening her Academy, de Valois approached Lilian Baylis, manager of the Old Vic, to ask whether the theatre might provide a home for her embryonic company. Despite finding in de Valois a kindred spirit, Baylis could at first only offer temporary work: already housing an opera and a theatre company, the Old Vic could not accommodate any more enterprises. However, Baylis had plans to acquire a second theatre, the Sadler’s Wells; when she finally opened this new venue in 1931, de Valois’s troupe became resident.63 This partnership brought far more than a building: it also required the company to adopt the Old Vic Foundation’s ethics, which were rooted in the work of late nineteenth-century social reformers. More specifically, the Old Vic had been founded by Baylis’s aunt, Emma Cons, to provide a teetotal entertainment venue in the deprived area of Lambeth. Driving this enterprise was a belief that any aspiring person could ameliorate her existence by pursuing ‘all those activities and studies that make life grander, lovelier, sweeter, more human, more divine, more vivid, more humorous’: the ‘things of the mind’ rather than the ‘things of the body’.64 Whereas many reformers focused on schemes designed to to the founding of the Ballet Club at the Mercury Theatre in 1930, which subsequently became the Ballet Rambert. Mary Clarke, Dancers of the Mercury: The Story of Ballet Rambert (London, 1962). 63 Zoe Anderson provides an account of the formative years of this partnership in The Royal Ballet: 75 Years (London, 2006), 7-65. In the interim, de Valois’s enterprise had also been supported by the Camargo Society, an organisation that began in 1929, when ballet critics Philip Richardson and Arnold Haskell persuaded a group of former Ballets Russes dancers and enthusiasts to provide financial support and performance opportunities for British ballet. Angela Kane and Jane Pritchard, ‘The Camargo Society Part I’, Dance Research 12, 2 (1994): 21-65. 64 W. Margrie, The Romance of Morley College: From a Back Room to a Palace of Culture (London, 1934), 19. Cons was supported by Samuel Morley, whose input led to the off-shoot educational initiative that became Morley College (of which Margrie was a student): Dennis Richards, Offspring of the Vic: A History of Morley College (London, 1958). Baylis took over Page 16 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly teach amateurs, hoping that increased public participation in the production of art would revive homegrown culture, the founders of the Old Vic had a different vision: they imagined the public as a broad collective that would patronise performances of the best art. By the 1930s, the paternalistic impulse to promote high art to the general public as a means of moral and social betterment was becoming ever more intertwined with national cultural renewal, not least because the broadening of the franchise and subsequent rise of Socialism foregrounded the government’s obligation to its citizens. In many respects, de Valois’s repertory theatre model was well placed to deliver this ‘Gospel of Culture’ (as a beneficiary would have it).65 As she explained, the long-term outlook brought freedom from commercial constraints; rather than treating the theatre as ‘a community luxury’ designed to give the people what they wanted, managers could instead realise its potential as ‘a community necessity’: a means of public edification.66 Providing high quality entertainment that attracted a broad appeal promised to encourage cultural renewal. But while there was a long tradition in Britain of reformers appropriating spoken drama and even music to social and political ends, the idea of a ballet troupe fulfilling this mission brought new challenges. Ballet’s potential as a vehicle for social reform depended on its elevation from the displays traditionally staged as music hall ‘entertainment’. For although these venues provided an important training ground for aspiring dancers (de Valois herself began her professional life dancing at the Lyceum Theatre), their productions were often regarded by the cultural elite as ‘frivolous’ and consequently ‘disreputable from the moral point of view’.67 Even when a more highbrow tradition began to emerge in Britain in the wake of the Ballets Russes, the art form’s negative associations with spectacle lingered. For one thing, the celebrity culture that quickly grew up around dancers was uncomfortably similar to that which surrounded the stars of emerging mass media, especially managing the theatre in 1898. The subsequent acquisition of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre allowed her to expand her aunt’s philanthropic mission into North London. 65 Magrie, The Romance of Morley College, 20. 66 De Valois, Invitation, 79. 67 Dent, A Theatre for Everybody, 102. Page 17 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly Hollywood cinema. When this star appeal was combined with lavish sets and theatrical music, the overall effect was often sensational to a point that commentators found unnerving. The word most frequently employed to sum up these traits – ‘glamour’ – had lowbrow connotations that critics consciously evoked. An early chronicler of the Sadler’s Wells noted: I am well aware that [glamour] is a horrible Hollywoodised word, but it is no good blinking the fact that glamour is precisely the appeal of Ballet. It has largely lost its real meaning, and today stands for the escape from reality which one very large section of the public finds in the cinema, and another and much smaller section (not, alas, necessarily the more intelligent, but certainly the more imaginative) finds in the Ballet.68 Haskell similarly suggested that, ‘in its theatrical sense’, glamour described ‘the emotion conveyed by the circumstances of a performance rather than by the intrinsic merit of the performance itself’. ‘The film stars’, he continued, ‘have glamour for millions because of publicity, and publicity is a very strong ingredient of glamour. […] Glamour is clearly something external, since an incognito can kill it stone- dead’.69 The problem with glamour was not just its supposedly meretricious appeal; the cultural elite also worried that such spectacle encouraged the wrong sort of audience engagement. As Wilfrid Mellers explained, virtuosic displays appealed precisely because they enabled the audience to forget the ‘failures, nostalgias and disappointments resulting from a lack of creativity’ in their own lives.70 Their enjoyment was premised on ‘complete passivity’: ‘In no sense is [watching such performances] an activity of mind and body […] Rather is it a supine relinquishment of emotions along the channel of least resistance’.71 In short, even in its supposedly highbrow form, ballet often suffered from exactly the same shortcoming as lowbrow ones: a reliance on spectacle that threatened to foster indolence and escapism. From the outset, critics demonstrated a clear desire to dissociate the Sadler’s Wells from the 68 P.W. Manchester, ‘English and Russian – A Contrast’, in Vic-Wells: A Ballet Progress (London, 1942), 63-8; 63. 69 Arnold Haskell, ‘The Birth of English Ballet’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 87 (June 1939): 784-806; 798, 800. 70 Wilfrid Howard Mellers, ‘Musical Culture To-day: A Sociological Note’, Tempo 7 (June 1944): 2-5; 3-4. 71 Ibid. Page 18 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly more problematic aspects of balletic glamour. When de Valois’s company performed its first full evening of ballet at the Old Vic, for example, the Manchester Guardian praised her ‘gift of making the most of the fundamentals of her medium’, which allowed her to ‘dispense with elaborate accessories’.72 A decade later, when praising the company for surpassing ‘their exotic rivals’ (i.e., the Ballets Russes), another critic was careful to note that they had done so through ‘brilliance of personality’ rather than spectacle: ‘There is about the whole Company a spirit of friendliness and co-operation which is delightful to see, but which does not make for glamour’.73 Such comments were rarely substantiated by reference to particular aspects of a production’s choreography, décor or music. Instead, critics based their assertions on more nebulous qualities. One, for example, claimed that ‘what these ballets lack is the Russian feeling, that intangible but quite definite atmosphere which the Wells will never achieve simply because it is English’. 74 Displaying an age-old ambivalence towards spectacle, these writers imagined that the distinctive feature of British ballet might be restraint: its appeal would lie in its artistry rather than recourse to anything sensational. From another perspective, however, diminishing the element of spectacle risked putting off the very section of the public that Baylis had hoped to attract. In May 1942, an article in the Dancing Times suggested that some of the general public had avoided attending the ballet because they lay ‘too great an emphasis on the education value of the art to the detriment of the 100 percent entertainment value’.75 The public, it seemed, did not always want to be edified. But de Valois was adamant that ‘entertainment’ was not something to which ballet should aspire: the notion that it ‘was meant to be “good entertainment”’, she asserted, was what ‘drove [it] into the music-halls 60 years ago, and left it there to 72 E.B., ‘The Vic-Wells Ballet: A Special Performance’, The Manchester Guardian (7 May 1931), 7. 73 Manchester, Vic-Wells, 63. 74 Ibid., 71. 75 S. Blackford Smith, ‘Ballet Hoo for Children: An Experiment in Propaganda’, Dancing Times 380 (May 1942), 393-4. It is obviously impossible to know what the general public really thought about ballet, although a survey about ‘the value of ballet’ carried out by the officers of Eastern Command following a series of lectures by Joan Lawson revealed that, of those who responded, 25 per cent ‘rated it high – as something more than mere entertainment’, while 37 per cent believed ‘that its value was purely that of entertainment’. ‘The Army and the Ballet’, Dancing Times 405 (June 1944), 401. Page 19 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly die for a period of 25 years’.76 In the most extreme cases, critics even argued that an absence of audience approval was evidence of artistic merit. One such was Beryl de Zoete, who viewed the ‘generally carping reception’ of Frederick Ashton’s The Wanderer as ‘really rather a hopeful sign’: recalling the wisdom of Jean Cocteau, she asserted that the greatness of new works of art would only become apparent with time.77 In as much as ballet’s distance from superfluous spectacle increased its potential to edify, the outbreak of war assisted the Sadler’s Wells’ social mission: the limits on resources precluded anything other than the most simple mise-en-scène. But with the art’s growing popularity, its association with the wrong sort of spectacle was compounded from another angle: the unruly behaviour of a certain segment of the audience. Agreeing on where the line fell between appropriate and excessive enthusiasm had long been a challenge for ballet devotees; but the wartime ballet boom only exacerbated the issue. Just as it seemed that ballet might finally dissociate itself from over-extravagance, its heightened popularity became a new thorn in the side of those who wanted to establish it as a prestigious national art. Balletomania! Ballet-going, since the war, has become one of this nations new habits, like (and generally involving) queuing, or Spam.78 When war broke out, the Sadler’s Wells had just arrived in Leeds on their annual tour of the provinces. Faced with the closure of all British theatres, the company was disbanded with immediate effect and the new season, due to begin on 18 September, was postponed. It was, however, barely a matter of weeks before the theatre ban was revoked. The Sadler’s Wells had soon re-formed in Cardiff and 76 De Valois, cited in Haskell, ‘The Birth’, 784. 77 Beryl de Zoete, ‘Review of The Wanderer’, (January 1940), ROH/RBB/4/4. 78 Caryl Brahms, ‘About the Ballet’, Good House Keeping (February 1946), 40-1, 78; 40. Spam was processed, tinned meat that became a staple food in Britain during the war. Page 20 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly planned a tour with a ‘small but representative repertoire’; by the end of December, they had returned to London for a trial season.79 This set the trend for subsequent years, during which the company, with a busier schedule than ever before, spent an unprecedented time on tour, performing in unfamiliar venues, from factory canteens to military camps.80 Shortly after the Blitz began, there was a further opportunity to contribute to the war effort when the Sadler’s Wells Theatre was requisitioned as a shelter for bombed civilians, requiring the dancers to establish a temporary London base at impresario Bronson Albery’s New Theatre in St Martin’s Lane.81 By all accounts, the busy performance schedule and time spent on the road were exhausting; but not without benefits. Refusing to be limited by the dearth of male dancers, props and musicians, the company carved out a special role for itself in wartime Britain – so much so that, by the mid-1940s, its calm defiance of anything that threatened to sabotage its efforts made it a symbol of British resilience.82 What is more, it allegedly ‘gained thousands of new friends in London and all over the country in towns where Ballet had never been seen before’.83 So much so that, by April 1945, the 79 For a detailed account of the company’s war years, see Mary Clarke, The Sadler’s Wells Ballet: A History and An Appreciation (London, 1955), 149-66. Whose decision it was to reform the company remains unclear: de Valois has traditionally been credited with instigating the tour, but a citation in Ashton’s biography suggests that he felt it was his achievement: ‘Ninette – wonderful Ninette – said that a woman’s place is in the home and she went away and disappeared. She absolutely abandoned us. But that’s never written about. When Ninette saw it was going to work she came back and took the whole thing in her hands again’. Julie Kavanagh, Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton (London, 1996), 256. 80 Between the end of December 1939 and September 1940, for example, the company gave 70 performances over 24 weeks in London; during the equivalent period the following year, it spent only 13 weeks in London, but gave 110 performances. Clarke, The Sadler’s Wells, 168. 81 The school continued on the top floor of the old building throughout this period, shutting only for three months in 1944 at height of V1 bombs. Bland, The Royal Ballet, 66; de Valois, Come Dance With Me, 141-4. 82 While male dancers remained subject to conscription laws, female artists of conscription age who were regularly engaged in ‘the more important forms of cultural entertainment’ could gain exemption, if their managers requested it. De Valois, Come Dance With Me, 145. 83 Manchester, Vic-Wells, 49. Such stories are typical of accounts of British culture in the Second World War. Historians Page 21 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly Dancing Times could report that ballet audiences had reached an all-time high and included a broader cross-section of the population than ever before.84 This newfound popularity won the company sizeable profits, allowing it to pay off debts on the theatre and school in Colet Gardens. Against the odds, its financial position at the end of the war was far stronger than at the start.85 More significantly, it consolidated the company’s claim to the status of national institution. As actor and theatre director Michael Redgrave explained, ‘[t]o produce an Aeschylus, or a Michelangelo […] you have got to have a culture resting on the whole nation; a pyramid of which these men represent the top, the base being the people – a truly national culture’.86 If any organisation met these criteria, it was the Sadler’s Wells, a troupe that, in Haskell’s words, was ‘more truly national than any State institution, since it was born out of the sixpences of the masses’.87 Intertwined with a larger narrative about culture’s place in the ‘people’s war’, the company’s wartime experiences made them an emblem of the new democratic era that war promised to usher in.88 have debated whether the reported increase in the popularity of high art during wartime was a reflection of reality, or rather a left-leaning intellectual imaginary. For example, see Nick Hayes, ‘More Than ‘‘Music-While-You-Eat’’? Factory and Hostel Concerts, ‘‘Good Culture’’ and the Workers’, in id. and Jeff Hill (eds.), ‘Millions Like Us’? British Culture in the Second World War (Liverpool, 1999), 209-35; 210. 84 ‘The Sitter Out’, Dancing Times 415 (April 1945), 290-2. 85 Clarke, The Sadler’s Wells, 18. In 1947, the ballet school was expanded: Homans, Apollo’s Angels, 427. 86 Cited in Jack Lindsay, British Achievement In Art and Music (London, 1945), 3. 87 Haskell, ‘The Birth’, 798. A Manchester Guardian critic similarly claimed that, ‘having added wonderfully to its stature even in the war years’, the company ‘had now been truly accepted as the country’s national ballet company’: ‘Ballet First-Night at Covent Garden’, Manchester Guardian (22 February 1946). Despite the Old Vic Foundation’s aims, it is unclear to what extent Baylis’s theatres were ever patronised by the poorer members of the public: what little evidence of audience make-up survives is hearsay and contradictory. It seems that, although ‘the opera gallery certainly used to include a good many of a more humble class’, the theatres ‘were kept going by a middle-class audience [and] especially if any sort of star was performing, the audience was quite obviously a West End one’. Dent, A Theatre, 134, 120. 88 The other British company that played a major part in the democratisation of ballet was the Ballet Rambert. However, this troupe was more severely disrupted by war than the Sadler’s Wells: in 1941, the company was forced to disband after it became financially unviable to continue; it reformed in 1943, having agreed to partner with CEMA. Clarke, Page 22 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly However, not everyone considered the ballet’s popularity with the ‘vast armies of “nomadic” theatre-goers’ a positive sign.89 De Valois, for instance, sensed that, with their ‘tastes […] dangerously catholic and reactions more emotional than intellectual’, the public’s interest in ballet had all the trappings of a fad.90 Indeed, perhaps the greatest challenge for those who believed that national culture should be founded on populism was how to transform the general public into an intellectual audience deserving of even the most prestigious institutions. But fear that mass audiences were driven more by emotion than intellect had only been compounded by Britain’s recent experience of war. The heightened emotional atmosphere of the early 1940s seemed to increase the visceral appeal of the arts: music, dance and drama provided a way for people to process and transcend the trauma of wartime living. Speaking of Ashton’s Dante Sonata, produced during the final months of 1939, one critic noted: a few people […] dislike it for precisely the same reason that it means so much to the rest of us. Because it is an emotional wallow, and they do not approve of such escapism. But most of us feel at times, and particularly in these days, that the world is too much with us, and we would give anything to be able to roll on the floor and tear our hair and scream. “Dante Sonata” does it for us.91 Unlike many pre-war ballets, Dante Sonata could not be accused of an overload of spectacle: with monochrome costumes representing the forces of good (white) and evil (black), the small group of dancers performed barefoot against a simple backdrop designed by Sophie Fedorovitch. But in many critics’ minds, the ballet, even shorn of elaborate décor, still failed to inspire an intelligent response from its audience. To make matters worse, the behaviour of enthusiasts only confirmed ballet’s emotive impact. The phenomenon of mid-century ballet fanaticism was so remarkable that a new word entered the Dancers of the Mercury, 117-47. 89 Ninette de Valois, Invitation to the Ballet (London, 1937), 78. 90 Ibid. 91 Manchester, Vic-Wells, 45-6. Page 23 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly vernacular: ‘balletomane’.92 For those who self-identified as such, ‘balletomane’ evoked a passionate – and, by all accounts, histrionic – enthusiasm for ballet: frenzied applause, showering of the stage with bouquets, obsessive knowledge about ballerinas and a tendency to criticise technique were prominent characteristics. The word was quickly appropriated by detractors, for whom it denoted anything from ‘cheerfully uncritical’ to ‘a lack of good sense’, or even complete hysteria.93 One critic, for example, poked fun by likening balletomania to a ‘contagious and sometimes chronic’ illness that, ‘at the mere mention of ballet, seems either to paralyse or convulse what may be an otherwise well-balanced intellect’.94 Put simply, although far from passive, balletomanes’ emotionality seemed uncomfortably close to the escapist attitudes that intellectuals associated with mass consumption. At the same time, it played into ballet’s negative image as an effeminate art form that was performed and patronised primarily by women and dandies, an association that war had made it only more urgent to lose. 95 What is more, balletomanes’ behaviour – which another critic compared to that of ‘football fans when their team has scored a goal’ – contravened accepted theatre etiquette.96 De Valois was not the only one to fear that such unmeasured support might in the first place encourage complacency among dancers, or later – when the trend passed – undermine their 92 The Oxford English Dictionary notes that this term is of French origin and first appeared in Britain in a Musical Times article of 1923. Oxford English Dictionary, ‘balletomane’ [online]. www.oed.com [accessed 20 April 2011]. A search of ‘British English’ texts on Google Ngram suggests that usage of this word soared during the 1930s, peaking in the mid- 1940s. 93 W.A. Wilcox, ‘Well, The Ballet’s Good’, Sunday Dispatch (2 July 1948), Red Shoes Press Cuttings-1, BFI Archive; Raymond Mortimer, ‘Ballet Design’, The Listener 30 (21 October 1943), 476. 94 Nicholas Bentley, Ballet-hoo (London: Michael Joseph, 1948), 76. 95 De Valois similarly felt the need to defend ballet against its feminine connotations. She argued that, although women are great pioneers, real balletic maturity would only be achieved when men took charge, as they could master feminine dancing more easily than women could master masculine dancing. By 1957 she could proclaim that ‘We are returning to the golden age of ballet again with one of its original truths reaffirmed, namely, the proper emphasis on the male choreographer, dancer and ballet master’. De Valois, ‘What Makes a Dancer’s Life?’, in Step by Step: The Formation of an Establishment (London, 1977), 187-97; 188; and ‘The English Ballet’, in Step by Step, 82-90; 83. 96 Beverley Baxter, ‘Customers Were Right’ (4 December 1943), ROH/RBB/4/5. Page 24 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly confidence.97 In her history of the Vic-Wells, P.W. Manchester noted: the indiscriminate applause from so large a section of the audience is a distressing feature of modern ballet-going, a situation which has grown more acute with the sensational war- time boom in Ballet. […] It is dangerous for the dancers to know that they will be greeted with identically the same ovation whatever their performance may have been like.98 Manchester worried that such unmeasured enthusiasm would have a negative impact on standards, posing a threat to British ballet’s development. She continued: ‘Unless they can be taught to develop a critical appreciation of all that goes to make Ballet, unless they can learn to recognise true artistry as opposed to surface tricks, then English Ballet may find itself back in the dark ages of the old Empire days’.99 Balletomanes’ behaviour was problematic precisely because it undermined attempts to dissociate ballet from spectacle: such elaborate displays of enthusiasm were awkward proof of the art form’s visceral appeal. To complicate matters further, balletomanes’ blind devotion was often couched in the language of elite opinion. Priding themselves on their superior knowledge, they were ‘like a religious community, asserting strenuously that they alone [held] the true faith universal’.100 Worse still, they were clearly able to infiltrate the spheres in which the boundaries of good culture were negotiated: ‘the chief offenders’, explained de Valois, were not found ‘in the commercial theatre, where the audience openly and honestly are supposed to go for superficial amusement’, but ‘in our serious theatres, built for the edification and progress of the true specialised audience’.101 A Trojan horse denouement was equally 97 De Valois, Invitation, 97-104. 98 Manchester, Vic-Wells, 84. 99 Ibid., 84. The Empire Theatre was a music hall in London. 100 Dent, A Theatre, 118. 101 De Valois, Invitation, 105. De Valois’s words bring to mind Virginia Woolf’s famous ‘Middlebrow’ essay, in which she argued that ‘the true battle […] lies not between highbrow and lowbrow, but between highbrows and lowbrows joined together in blood brotherhood against the bloodless and pernicious pest who comes between’ – the middlebrow: The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays. Available online at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/ [accessed 10 July 2014]. Page 25 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly likely within the press – perhaps more so, given that ballet criticism was only just beginning to be recognised as a reputable discourse.102 In the eyes of their critics, balletomanes’ most common trait was their single-minded obsession with dancing: the ‘true connoisseur’, they argued, addressed this ‘only after the ballet has been considered as a whole’.103 Reviewers were necessarily forthright in exposing heretical utterances within their ranks. In a 1941 review of de Valois’s Orpheus published in the Dancing Times, ballet-lover Eveleigh Leith asserted that it is ‘extremely difficult (psychologists may tell us that it is impossible) to be fully conscious of two sensory impressions at one moment’.104 In the following edition, Evans hit back: Because their [balletomanes’] technical knowledge of […] ballet is often above the average they are apt to consider themselves the very salt of the ballet audience whereas the truth is that, whatever their age, they are old fogeys, behind the times, having failed to grasp the three-dimensional aspect of the modern ballet, which consists of dance, music and décor.105 If disparaging remarks cut deep, it was because balletomanes’ conduct drew attention to the very things that made ballet’s claim to the status of high art problematic. When it came to the question of founding a national institution, the diverse audience for ballet that had reached an all-time high during the war was as much a hindrance as a boon. Indeed, just as it seemed likely that the Sadler’s Wells might finally take on the role of Britain’s first national ballet 102 The monthly Dancing Times, founded in 1894, became the first widely successful national dance periodical after it was purchased by Philip Richardson and T.M. Middleton in 1910. It covered a range of dance styles, from ballroom and music hall to ballet, and featured regular updates on the international ballet scene. Arnold Haskell was the first ballet critic to be employed by a newspaper – the Daily Telegraph – after his 1934 monograph Balletomania made him famous. ‘About’, Dancing Times. Available at [accessed 2 August 2013]; Haskell, Balletomania, 3rd ed. (Harmondsworth, 1979), 285. 103 Haskell, The National Ballet: A History and a Manifesto, 2nd ed. (London, 1947), 41. 104 Eveleigh Leith, ‘Afterthoughts on “Orpheus”’, Dancing Times 371 (August 1941), 603-4. 105 Edwin Evans, ‘Seeing and Hearing’, Dancing Times 372 (September 1941), 659-60. Evans’s criticism was somewhat ironic, given that his contributions to the Dancing Times tended to focus almost exclusively on ballet music. Page 26 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly company, its trustees went so far as to argue that the grounds on which the company had become ‘truly national’ – working throughout the war to bring ‘the best to the most’ – were the very things that now put its chances of an illustrious future in jeopardy. Edward Dent summarised the dilemma thus: Are we to return […] to the Royal Victoria Hall in Waterloo Road and Sadler’s Wells Theatre in Rosebery Avenue, and resume our activities as we left them in 1939? Or are we to change our policy altogether and set to work to become the National Theatre and the National English Opera? If we aim at becoming these, that means that we must take the lead in the entire dramatic and musical life of the country. If we go back to being “the People’s Theatre and the People’s Opera” we resign ourselves definitely to a permanently subordinate status.106 His words rehearsed the old contention between popularity and prestige that pervaded discussions about national culture. When it came to the re-opening of the Opera House, however, these supposedly incompatible ideals turned out to have more in common than Dent thought. Anglicising a Russian Classic The ‘pretty paradox’ of an Opera House re-opening with a season of ballet did not go unnoticed.107 Just a month before the great day, the management were still trying to appease disgruntled opera lovers. The Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company, Webster explained in CEMA’s Monthly Bulletin, were ‘possibly the most internationally famous British theatrical company’. Opera had not weathered the war as well;108 the resulting absence of an opera troupe of comparable standing meant that the Sadler’s Wells residency was the surest foundation for what Webster 106 Dent, A Theatre, 133. Dent was a governor of the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company. 107 Williams, ‘The Garden Blooms Again’. 108 The perceived absence of an opera company suitable for the re-opening complicated CEMA’s plans, because Mecca’s contract gave them the rights to renew their lease unless the building was needed for opera. Frances Donaldson, The Royal Opera House in the Twentieth Century (London, 1988), 40-2; Witts, Artist Unknown, 131-53. Page 27 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly hoped would become a very British institution: it augurs well for the new regime at Covent Garden that its first company should be one whose dancers and choreographers are British, whose productions are largely designed by British artists, and many of whose scores are contributed by British composers.109 However, invoking the troupe’s national credentials was a risky publicity strategy: their perceived Britishness was perhaps their biggest challenge. As noted previously, aficionados and experts alike maintained that the Ballets Russes’ unparalleled standard had placed them at the forefront of an international ballet culture. Although the ever-improving quality of the Sadler’s Wells dancers had gone some way to narrowing this divide, they had not yet trumped the Russian troupe’s hegemony. To do so, it seemed, they would have to compete on their rival’s terms. So it was, for its Covent Garden debut, that Keynes suggested not a ballet from the burgeoning repertoire by British choreographers that de Valois had worked so hard to promote over the past two decades, but instead a Russian classic.110 With the war over, the possibility of elaborate staging was no longer a pipe dream. In a bid to do justice to the illustrious heritage of building and ballet, producers and audience readily embraced the opportunity for excess, glamour and spectacle. But how exactly did the critics deal with this conspicuously opulent affair? Following de Valois’s lead, those who had formerly sought to distance the Sadler’s Wells from ballet’s dubious tendency towards spectacle changed their tune. Put simply, they now appropriated the glamorous Russian heritage as evidence of British achievement.111 Russianness, then, became a quality to 109 Webster, ‘Editorial’, 2. 110 See above, fn.22. 111 The appropriation of a purportedly ‘international’ culture for nationalist ends was, of course, unique neither to Britain nor to the twentieth century. Other recent studies of this phenomenon include Tamsin Alexander’s work on the role of Russian opera in shaping French, British and Czech national identity around the turn of the twentieth century: ‘Tales of Cultural Transfer: Russian Opera Abroad, 1866-1906’ (Cambridge PhD Thesis, 2014); and Gundula Kreuzer’s study of Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich (Cambridge, 2010). Page 28 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly which British dancers aspired, but from which they paradoxically sought to distinguish themselves. This dynamic had interesting ramifications for the inaugural production. Critics considered the choice for the opening night ‘encouragingly significant’ on account of the work’s status as ‘the most famous of all classical ballets’ – an assertion whose confidence obscured the term’s problematic history. For one thing, the canon was a product of recent years and the work in question had in fact only been referred to as a ‘classic’ in public since 1939.112 Another issue was ballet’s history as an oral and physical tradition that had been sustained by advanced dancers passing on routines to younger ones. Ballerinas tended not to memorise anything beyond their own roles. Consequently, although ballet was centuries old, only a handful of ‘classics’ had survived, almost all of which were a product of nineteenth-century France or Russia. Realising the difficulties this posed for the survival of the repertoire, Nicholas Sergeyev had devised a system of choreographic notation, with which he had sketched more than twenty of Petipa’s ballets. However, as Jennifer Homans has explained, these records were incomplete, not endorsed by Petipa and in a variety of hands.113 Nonetheless, to de Valois this repertoire conveyed ‘the glories of an ancient and extravagant past’, a past that she desired to reproduce.114 Since Sergeyev’s record was the closest to an original, the 1946 production was based on his reconstruction of Petipa’s choreography, with only a few exceptions: Ashton created a new Garland dance in Act One and turned the Jewel Fairies’ dance into a pas de trois; and de Valois choreographed ‘a short Russian number, “The Three Ivans”’, after Nijinska.115 British dancers’ ability to reproduce this Russian repertoire was seized on by critics who sought to affirm the Sadler’s Wells as the inheritors of an international tradition. Hubert Fitchew argued that 112 ‘Ballet First-Night’; Beth Genné, ‘Creating a Canon, Creating the “Classics” in Twentieth-Century British Ballet’, Dance Research 18, 2 (December 2000): 132-62; 148. 113 Homans, Apollo’s Angels, ix-xix; 420. 114 De Valois, Invitation to the Ballet, 142. 115 Anderson, The Royal Ballet, 90. Page 29 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly the ‘arrival of native artists, creative and interpretative’ was ‘a legacy inherited from Diaghileff’.116 That various former members of the Ballets Russes taught at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School and consulted on productions – a notable example is Tamara Karsavina – can only have encouraged belief in such a lineage.117 In a discussion of ballet’s ‘true line of succession’, Haskell made an even stronger claim: that ‘when we see those [of Petipa’s ballets] that have survived – Le Lac des Cygnes and Le Mariage d’Aurore – Petipa, and all the dancers who have performed in them, live once again. The line goes on unbroken to our day’.118 His nonchalant slippage from Petipian past to present enabled him to use the French master’s Russian classics to justify Britain’s current claims to greatness. But if the apparent fluidity of these identities made such appropriation possible, it also made it hard to define what exactly made a repertoire national: contradictions abounded. While de Valois, for instance, stated that Russian ballet had only been recognised in Western Europe once its ‘national element’ had developed, she also argued that ‘Petipa may have been a Frenchman, but this bore little relation to his work, which was of an orthodox international classical form’.119 Haskell similarly claimed that Hilda Munnings, who danced with Diaghilev’s troupe using the name Lydia Sokolova, ‘for all her English birth, can only be thought of as a Russian dancer whose fine work was a valuable contribution to a great Russian organisation’.120 Such assertions sat uneasily with the common belief that national expression was natural or innate – an idea that inspired Joan Lawson’s suggestion that an English ballet might emerge if dancers combined the best elements of Italian, French and Russian ballet with an ‘English spirit’.121 For the most part, the Arts Council sought to encourage ‘British’ culture by giving priority to native artists, even as they sought to establish a national performance tradition built from the European heritage. But, as Lawson’s 116 Hubert Fitchew, ‘English Ballet’ (7 January 1940), ROH/RBB/4/4. 117 For Karsavina’s involvement, see Anderson, The Royal Ballet, 124, 143-5. 118 Haskell, Balletomania, 25. 119 De Valois, Invitation, 180-1. Elsewhere, when speaking about ‘certain international influences’ on English ballet, she noted ‘the Russian ballet in Western Europe as personified in the Diaghilev Russian Ballet’ had been ‘the main guiding force on the artistic and creative approach of the English ballet in the theatre’. De Valois, Step by Step, 85. 120 Haskell, ‘The Birth’, 789-90. 121 Joan Lawson, ‘An English School of Dancing’, Dancing Times 386 (November 1942), 60-2. Page 30 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly words suggest, the notion that there was an innate dimension to national expression continued to shape ideas about what it meant for European art to be appropriated for national ends. At the same time, if the classics’ nebulous Russian essence reinforced their prestige, it also threatened to lock them in a time warp, making them ‘museum pieces’, out of touch with contemporary tastes.122 Lambert was among those to express concern that the emphasis on classics might hinder the development of ‘experimental ballets’, leaving Britain with ‘a superb body of executants living artistically speaking in the past’.123 Haskell, on the other hand, argued that new productions of the classics were crucial to their survival: ‘otherwise the work dates and a living classicism becomes sterile academicism’. In a rare acknowledgement of the complicated ontological status of the classics, he continued: No carbon copy of a classic would have any meaning to a contemporary audience. A work is continually modified from night to night, by a change of cast. It is this very fact that makes the classics enduring.124 But how much of a work could be modified without undermining its status was less clear. Directors walked a fine line between respectful reproduction and artistic stagnation. The one aspect of the classics that it was usually deemed acceptable for producers to tamper with was the design, provided that the ‘romantic element’ was maintained.125 Design was also the area in which previous productions by British companies of The Sleeping Beauty had most notably fallen down – a shortcoming that had not gone unnoticed: ‘“The Sleeping Princess”’, one critic complained in 1942, ‘the most brilliant of all [the classical ballets] in the first place, suffers most in its English translation. It is so obviously designed to be treated with the utmost lavishness’, but this was ‘simply not 122 Martin, ‘Sadler’s Wells’. 123 De Valois, Invitation, 142; ‘The Sitter Out’ (June 1940), 531. 124 Haskell, Balletomania, 56-7. 125 Ibid., 57. Page 31 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly forthcoming’.126 If drab costumes and sets had been an attempt to limit British ballet’s spectacle, the re- opening of Covent Garden demanded a different approach. Messel’s wealthy upbringing, expertise and magical imagination made him an apt choice for the new production.127 Keen to emphasise the design’s cosmopolitan purview, critics reported that Messel had drawn inspiration from a broad European heritage, including Watteau’s water colours and the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian Bibiena family, whose ornate baroque architecture had similarly inspired Léon Bakst’s designs for Diaghilev’s The Sleeping Princess 25 years before. (The era was that of Charles Perrault’s La Belle au Bois Dormant (1697), on which the ballet was based.) At the same time, they also noted the influence of British art, such as ‘early Romantic scene-painters […] like “Warwick” Smith’, whose paintings of ‘“[p]recipices, mountains, torrents, wolves, rumbling” and other paraphernalia of the Alps’ informed the ‘moonlit forest-scene with its brave clash of pink and puce, lemon and scarlet against the sombre browns and purples of the background’.128 This last artist was an apt point of reference not just on account of his nationality: his paintings had been ‘for English amateurs’ (or so Hussey claimed), which suggested Messel’s broad appeal. To defend the designer against possible charges of unoriginality, Hussey also argued that from this eclectic frame of reference he had ‘woven […] his own individual style’. How the ballet music fitted into this nationalist agenda was less obvious. While critics welcomed the commissioning of new costumes and sets as a way of anglicizing the design, and pursued the idea of an English style in the dancing, they devoted far fewer words to the question of how Tchaikovsky’s score might be appropriated as ‘British ballet music’. The reasons for this silence are far from clear, not least because there certainly was a general consensus among critics that music would play a crucial part in the successful establishment of a national institution: paying greater attention to the unity of dance and music, they argued, promised a way for British companies to better their Russian predecessors. Haskell, for example, praised the Sadler’s Wells for having ‘a policy of musical integrity’: 126 Manchester, Vic-Wells, 70. 127 For Messel’s background, see John Gielgud, Oliver Messel: A Biography (London, 1986). 128 Dyneley Hussey, ‘Music – Covent Garden Re-Opened’, Britain To-Day (May 1946), 34-5. Page 32 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly ‘While the Russians marked time musically’, this troupe ‘reconciled those often warring elements, music and movement, doing violence to neither’.129 Several first night reviewers claimed to recognise such a quality in Sleeping Beauty: the Observer critic, for example, reported that the dancing was ‘true to the spirit of Tchaikovsky’s music’.130 Typically, however, he failed to present any evidence for this judgement. Nor – like most of his fellow commentators – did he give even a passing nod to the orchestra or director. From the opening night, critics responded enthusiastically to de Valois’s anglicised Russian classic. Where previously she had been ‘severely criticised in many quarters for attempting anything without calling upon the help of a good number of foreign artists; this, in particular, with reference to the male dancers’, her doubters now found themselves eating their words: the season at the Royal Opera House was unanimously acclaimed a great success.131 The Sadler’s Wells, it seemed, had finally trumped the great impresario, staging a ballet that even he had failed to make successful.132 Ticket sales confirmed the troupe’s achievement. Initially planned to show until 23 March, the run ended up being significantly extended: over almost 19 weeks, more than a 250,000 people attended the Opera House’s longest ballet season to date.133 This was British ballet at its Russian best, a first-class spectacle worthy 129 Haskell, National Ballet, 55-6. 130 Martin Raymond, ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, The Observer (24 February 1946), 2. 131 De Valois, Come Dance, 168-9. 132 Diaghilev’s attempt to stage this ballet under the title The Sleeping Princess in 1921 had left him bankrupt. Various factors contributed to this failure. The ballet was longer and in a different tradition to that with which Ballets Russes audiences were familiar. The performance was also hindered by the small theatre and the fact that some of the stage effects did not work – for example, the forest snapped in half. Jane Pritchard, The Ballets Russes in England Episode 1 [radio broadcast], BBC Radio 4 (23 February 2010) 11.30am-12.00pm. Critics subsequently argued that Diaghilev had been too far ahead of his time: John Martin, ‘The Dance: Premier’, The New York Times (9 October 1949), 10. Diaghilev allegedly changed the ballet’s name because ‘some of his Auroras were far from being beauties’; it was not until 1946 that the work’s former title was reinstated by de Valois in honour of the occasion. Frank, Margot, 65. 133 Frank, Margot, 67. During the opening weeks, Sleeping Beauty was the only ballet performed: preparing it had absorbed most of the company’s resources. From 18 March, a broader schedule included The Rake’s Progress, Nocturne, Miracle in the Gorbals, and two new ballets: Helpmann’s Adam Zero to music by Arthur Bliss and Ashton’s Symphonic Variations to Page 33 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly of a war-weary but victorious democracy. It would be hard to deny that the re-opening of Covent Garden marked a new sensibility for British ballet. The return to peace, combined with the Sadler’s Wells elevation to the status of a national company, created a new space for an indulgence in glamour, grandeur and high spectacle. The practices that had encouraged Britain’s royalty, nobility and later Bohemian aesthetes to patronise the Ballets Russes – the same practices that had cemented Diaghilev’s troupe’s place at the forefront of a cosmopolitan, international high culture – were now appropriated by the pioneers of British ballet for their own ends. Having out-grown the amateur dance studios in which it had taken root, having surpassed the standards demanded by its broad wartime audience, British ballet eagerly embraced even those aspects of the Russian tradition from which it had formerly sought to distinguish itself. Sleeping Beauty proved an apt vehicle: with its enchanted plot and sumptuous new costumes and sets, the production did anything but shy away from excess. The irony, of course, was that, whereas in the past ballet’s tendency towards spectacle had threatened its chances of becoming a prestigious art form, the new theatrical context transformed this same characteristic into a mark of prestige. So if the spectacle on stage was at all excessive, if the audience’s enthusiasm was unduly exaggerated, critics, rejoicing in the country’s achievement, silently turned a blind eye and a deaf ear. The commitment to developing a cultural vehicle that was at once international, yet reflected the moderate sensibilities of the country’s intelligentsia, had been abandoned at the final hurdle. To reduce the re-opening of the Royal Opera House to an unmitigated triumph for elite culture, then, is to miss the more nuanced insight that this event gives into national culture as it was imagined in mid-century Britain. The Sadler’s Wells’ transition to a national institution rehearsed – rather than resolved – the period’s broader anxieties about the boundaries between mass and elite culture, popularity and prestige, national and international appeal. This performance offers a snapshot of a moment when it still seemed possible that the foundation of a people’s culture might go hand-in-hand with the promotion of an elite tradition centred on the European canon: the idea of a democratic César Frank’s work of the same name. Clarke, The Sadler’s Wells, 201-10. Page 34 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly national institution that could represent Britain on an international stage did not yet seem impossible. The decision to lower ticket prices and scrap the white tie dress code was a clear gesture to democracy that reflected the management’s commitment to broadening access to high art, not so much by encouraging amateur participation, as by diversifying audiences. At the same time, the prioritization of foreign repertory helped to alleviate the potentially negative connotations of this new audience. Indeed, rather than viewing de Valois’s choice of ballet as evidence of Britain’s artistic shortcoming, critics and artists alike sought to appropriate this purportedly ‘international’ heritage to nationalist ends. Since the European canon continued to garner huge respect in Britain, they hoped that the successful reproduction of this repertoire would bring the prestige that Britain sought. In other words, it was precisely because of its Russian heritage that Sleeping Beauty was such an appropriate choice for de Valois’s aspiring national company: it promised international acclaim. By combining appeals to the prestigious Russian legacy with a large dose of spectacle and the optimistic climate of postwar London, the producers of Sleeping Beauty hoped to chart a middle-ground for national culture, attracting a broad audience for high art without undermining its elite cultural status. They could only realise this idealistic imaginary by quietly obscuring a paradox: the very things that made ballet well positioned to navigate a path between popularity and prestige also made it a problematic vehicle for national culture. In another context, critics would have deemed its glamour and accessibility unedifying. But to have done so on such an illustrious occasion would not only have been uncharitable; it would also have risked exposing the hypocrisies of an elite that delighted in spectacle as readily as did the masses from which they sought to distinguish themselves. With the guardians of high culture eager to proclaim a new, democratic era in the history of the Opera House, such inconsistencies were best glossed over – or, better still, ignored. Page 35 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly Page 36 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly Page 37 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 64 4 Page 38 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly Page 39 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 For R eview O nly Page 40 of 40 https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ml Manuscripts submitted to Music & Letters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60