STAGE AND SCREEN
BALLET Paganini Rhapsody No executive musician, with the possible exception of Liszt, has ever seized the general imagination so firmly or held it so long as Paganini. His is one of the few names surviving a century, as to which one need still not specify the particular sphere in which he exercised his art. It was mainly, of cours; that his gaunt, familiar form, the eyes blazing in the sallow, waxen face—evidence of an enormous spiritual vitality within the shell of a sickly physique—the long black locks, the rumoured loves and recklessness, all combined to make of him the very pattern of the artist in the age of Byron and Poe and Hoffmann. It needed only a touch of morbid imagination— and there was more than a touch of that in the air—to add to the outwardly romantic appearance the still more romantic notion of traffic in the black arts and pacts with Satan. The popular imagination was not so wide of the mark, if we accept a surrender of artistic integrity for the sake of notoriety as a deal with the devil. For Paganini was a good part mountebank.
Yet his spell held long after his death and worked with musicians as wide apart as Liszt, who was of his spiritual kin, and Brahms. More recently Rachmaninov, the last survivor of the race of virtuoso-composers, has taken the same 24th Caprice, which Brahms used for his Variations, as the theme for a Rhapsody for pianoforte and orchestra. This composi- tion, with a new and beautiful ending, has been used by Fokine for his latest ballet. It makes excellent ballet-music, being sharply defined in rhythm and cast in the variation- form that provides the choreographer with movements of manageable length. That it also fits the dramatic theme which has been imposed upon it, so naturally that it might have been designed for this purpose, may be set down, in part, to good luck but must be largely credited to Fokine's imaginative perception of its potentialities.
The result is an idealised biography of Paganini. There is no suggestion of the charlatan. He is the eternal great artist " up against " misunderstanding, silly adulation and four- faced gossip. The fascination he exercises upon the public In the concert-hall and upon individual women in private is, indeed, shown as having in it that element of the sinister which his contemporaries saw in the great violinist. But the final apotheosis, in which Paganini's genius leads his soul to heaven while Satan is left with his corpse, is funda- mentally commonplace and sentimental, no better than those picture-postcards, which one could buy at Bayreuth a few years ago, showing Liszt or Wagner, according to the pur- chaser's taste, similarly wafted to eternal bliss by the Eternal Feminine. Yet so beautifully is this scene staged that in look- bag at it, one forgets the commonplace—till afterwards.
There is not a great deal of real dancing in this ballet, and least for Paganini himself. Yet it holds the attention, because it is all conceived upon the plane of poetic imagina- tion—poetry being, I take it, the communication, without resort to literal word or gesture in whatever form it is given, of emotion, and that communication being more direct and therefore more potent in effect than if literal word or gesture were employed. Beside this important achievement, it matters comparatively little that the first scene does not quite come off, in which Paganini is shown playing in public and there subjected to slander and rivalries and overborne by devilish visions. All those jumping grotesques amid the still grotesques of the audience in the forefront of the scene just fail to achieve the poetic effect desired. The second and third scenes are completely successful—the one a lovely idyll, whose beauty is enhanced by the pathetic, unintended touch of the sinister in the central figure, the other a macabre death-scene resolving into the aforesaid apotheosis. How skilfully Fokine has devised the pas de deux for Paganini and the Florentine girl without lapsing into the commonplaces of the classical ballet!
The ballet owes its success in the first place to the miming of Dimitri Rostoff, who not merely looks like Maclise's picture of Paganini, but has all the grave air of an artist concentrating upon his playing and fingers his instrument like a true violinist. But one must not overlook the less obvious share contributed by the young pianist, Mr. Eric Harrison, who brilliantly plays the pianoforte-part, subduing his virtuosity to the needs of
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