The Mariinsky Ballet Revival of “Scheherazade”

Back in 2018 I wrote about my colleague who liked to say that, in the history of modern ballet, Michel Fokine was the Father, George Balanchine was the Son, and Frederic Ashton was the Holy Ghost. There are any number ways in which this claim may be refuted. Nevertheless, in accepting the role of Resident Choreographer in the Ballet Russes founded by Sergei Diaghilev, Fokine definitely played a pivotal role in the transition from the ballets of Marius Petipa, such as The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, to new inventive approaches to both the subject matter for ballet and the techniques through which those subjects would emerge as choreography.

The month of June, 1910 was a particularly critical one for Fokine and the Ballet Russes. On June 4 the company presented his one-act ballet “Scheherazade,” which was followed on June 25 with his first joint project with Igor Stravinsky, “The Firebird.” (The following year the two would again collaborate on “Petrushka.”) I find it somewhat interesting that these two Stravinsky ballets were preceded by a setting of music by Stravinsky’s teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, his Opus 35 symphonic suite, also entitled Scheherazade.

However, while Fokine structured the narratives for both “Firebird” and “Petrushka” around Stravinsky’s music, the choreography for “Scheherazade” required that Rimsky-Korsakov’s music be reworked in several ways. Opus 35 was, indeed, a suite in four movements, each of which depicted one of the stories from One Thousand and One Nights, the tales that Scheherazade told to her husband Shahryar, working him into an overall framework entitled the “Story of King Shahryar and HIs Brother.” Fokine’s scenario takes that framework as a point of departure, and both Shahryar and his brother are characters in that scenario.

He then unfolds a single tale about Shahryar and his favorite concubine, Zobeide. I like to summarize the plot as being about how, when the cat is away, the mice will play; but, when the cat returns, the mice must pay dearly. Zobeide’s “play” involves her passionate love for a character known only as the Favorite Slave (originally danced by Vaslav Nijinsky). When the cat (and his brother) return, Zobeide knows she’s in trouble. However, rather than submit to either torture or execution, she stabs herself with a dagger and dies at Shahryar’s feet as the curtain descends.

This narrative required a major restructuring of Rimsky-Korsakov’s suite. The first movement was of no service at all to the narrative, so an abridged version of it was performed as an overture before the curtain rose. There was a certain amount of shuffling of the remaining three movements, but the music that concluded Opus 35 was perfectly well-suited to Zobeide’s tragic end. As might be guessed, the movement entitled “The Young Prince and The Young Princess” made for a similarly good fit for the pas de deux of Zobeide and the Favorite Slave. Fokine then picked and chose among passages from Opus 35 to establish a viable framework for the overall narrative.

I have to confess that, when I first saw a performance of this ballet in the early Seventies, I hated the damned thing. In retrospect, however, I had seen a performance by the English National Ballet (known at that time as the London Festival Ballet); and any traces of Fokine’s actual choreography were little more than accidental. Fortunately, the current generation of the Mariinsky Ballet seems to be far better “historically informed” about Fokine’s technique, including the visual details of the single set and the costumes conceived by Léon Bakst as follows:

from Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

This revival is available for viewing as a YouTube video, which was captured during a performance in 2015. The camera work is consistently attentive to its alternations between close-ups and “the big picture.” This allows the viewer to appreciate the stunning quality of the magnitude without compromising the intimacy in how each soloist presents the necessary traits of his/her character. There is no denying that there are dated qualities to Fokine’s rhetoric, but those qualities never seriously undermine the foundational narrative.

As is often the case, however, there are a few moments in which clueless members of the audience break the spell. One occurs near the beginning, when applause after the conclusion of overture drowns out the passage for solo violin that Rimsky-Korsakov intended to represent Scheherazade’s voice telling the tale. The other took place near the end, when two members of the audience decided to leave early and blocked the lens of the camera that was currently active. Nevertheless, when compared with the many insights one can gather about Fokine’s highly imaginative legacy, it is easy to disregard those few unpleasant moments.