Ballet
Beautiful, Strong Syllables
By CLIVE BARNES IN his autobiography Stravinsky quotes ap- provingly an anecdote concerning Mallarme and Degas. The painter, who dabbled in poetry, one day said to Mal- larme : 'I cannot manage the end of my sonnet, and it is not that I am wanting in ideas.'
Mallarme replied : 'It is
not with ideas that one makes sonnets, but with words.' By the same token Frederick Ashton makes choreography with steps; and on my first glimpse of his new staging of Stravinsky's Persephone at Covent Garden last week it was the simple quality of supremely efficient craftsmanship that won my admiration.
Persephone is one of those theatrical hybrid monsters which flourished between the wars. Described as a melodrama, !! mixes speech, singing and dancing in something of the manner of a masque. It was commissioned by Ida Rubinstein and first performed by her company in 1934 (since when it has been virtually banished to the concert hall). The score is set to a poem by Andre Gide, who has taken the Homeric myth of Persephone and coloured it with the Christian conception of grace. This Persephone is moved by her feelings of compassion, willingly embracing the fate which makes her a missionary of Light in the Kingdom of Darkness. The theme, no longer merely the pagan myth of the seasons, delves deeper and raises questions of joy and suffering, good and evil, life and death. How- ever, it was not the equivocal symbolism of the piece that primarily attracted Stravinsky, who wrote at the time of the first performance : 'For Persephone I wanted nothing but syllables— beautiful, strong syllables—and an action. This is exactly what Gide has given me. . . .' Gide took leave to differ, and never became recon- ciled to Stravinsky's `syllabisation' of his poem.
Ashton's approach to Stravinsky is much the same as Stravinsky's approach to Gide. In quite a number of places he has apparently used the score as if it were abstract music innocent of specific stage action—all he has asked for is beautiful, strong syllables, and this, he seems to be saying, is exactly what Stravinsky has given him. Sometimes this has made the choreography inappropriate to the action : for example, Persephone's friends are at one point given a sophisticated little peacock strut hardly sug- gestive of Gide's 'premier matin du monde,' though physically dovetailed into the music. Pluto is a shade too animated, while Mercury is anything but mercurial for all his gallant, one- legged prancing. At first sight and sound Gide might appear to have been finally polished off-- not only buried by the composer, but with the choreographer performing an eloquently formal dance over his grave. In fact the very opposite
happens: Gide's symbolic theme, quite lost in the concert hall, emerges triumphant. The notes are right, the steps are right and Gide's ideas fall neatly into place. Where Ashton has done his job particularly well is in maintaining the con- tinuity and making the work seem homogeneous. In a widely quoted remark to Robert Craft Stravinsky is reported as expressing doubts about the mixture of idioms in Persephone, saying: `Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.' For the most part Ashton has succeeded in absolving them by interweaving movement and static poses sa skilfully that the music's sudden gear-changes from speech to song or orchestra never disrupt the flow of the narrative. He has, in fact, breathed dramatic life into the work and made the 'hybrid monster' function as a viable theat- rical entity.
While the general conception of the choreo- graphy is superbly right in texture and atmo- sphere, there are a surprising number of minor blemishes and one howling blunder in the charac- terisation of Persephone's mother, Demeter, who is played naturalistically as a hair-tearing neurotic. Even more unfortunate are the Greek painter Nico Ghika's designs, which seem to me quite out of keeping with both Gide and Stravinsky. Everything is carried out in a sort of primitive literalism, with clashing colours and busy, eye-distracting sets. The designs have in- trinsic theatrical merit, but they belong to an- other ballet. What Persephone needs here is either the unemphatic stylisation of a Fedoro- vitch or the abstract fancy of a Noguchi.
The production makes modest demands on Covent Garden's technical resources which are not invariably met. Persephone speaks her lines through a transistor microphone. This is handled so badly that in certain parts of the house her voice sounds as if it were coming (as in fact it is) from loudspeakers at the side of the stage. This, I understand, could be prevented by the use of what is known as a 'delay tape.' Whether this is true or not, obviously something needs
to be done. Even worse was the complete failure of the microphone on the third night. a piece of crass inefficiency which ruined the performance. Svetlana Beriosova's Persephone is, I think, the best thing she has ever done. When the stage staff permit her to make herself heard, she speaks the part with just the incisive musicality it needs, while she acts with a blank-faced pathos all the more moving for its lack of obvious emphasis. The orchestra, under John Lanchbery, does well, but Andre Turps warm Italianate tenor is sadly out of place in the lean, asexual music of Eumolpus.
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