Form and meaning are indissolubly wedded in Nijinsky's body . . . he is the ideal model, whom one longs to draw and sculpt. Nothing could be more striking than the impulse with which, at the climax (of L'Apres-midi d'un Faune) he lies face down on the scented veil, kissing and embracing it with passionate abandon. I wish that such a noble endeavour could be under- stood as a whole; and that . . . all our artists might come for inspiration and to communicate in beauty.
Rodin writing in 1912 of Nijinsky
Vaslav Nijinsky gave his last public performance in Montevideo on September 30th 1917.
Twenty-two years later, a group of press photographers was invited to a Swiss hospital where the dancer was resident, having been given a series of insulin shock treatments for his chronic schizophrenia. Before them, Nijinsky attempted to reprise his famous leap, and pictures of this were later published in Paris Match and Life magazines.
These photographs are extraordinarily poignant. They show a middle-aged man (Nijinsky was then 50), balding, overweight, wearing a too-tight suit, attempting to jump into the air. They might be a parody of ballet had the man caught by cameras not once been the most famous dancer in the world.
We can never experience or even fully understand the genius of Nijinsky. While still in his prime, he was captured by the photographer Baron de Meyer in some of his most famous roles. The late American balletomane Lincoln Kirstein in Nijinsky Dancing described the Russian as "the first dancer in history who seems to have collaborated consciously with a photographer on the level of art". One set of de Meyer images records the choreography of a single sequential movement from Fokine's 1911 ballet Le Carnaval.
But because of the relatively primitive nature of cameras at the time, Nijinsky would not move while being photographed; he had to take a pose and then hold it for several seconds. As a result, the gesture for which he is best remembered - his leap through a window in Le Spectre de la rose where he seemed to hover motionless in the air before landing - was never captured.
The best-known of de Meyer's photographs are those taken a year later of L'Apres-midi d'un Faune for what was to have been a luxury album with contributions from Rodin, JacquesEmile Blanche and Jean Cocteau; only six copies of the original book still survive, thereby adding to the mythological character of Nijinsky's life. No one, after all, was to know that within a few years of these pictures being taken, the dancer would be incarcerated in a sanatorium.
What has been lost is not just Nijinsky but also the circumstances in which he performed. The excitement, the fanatical devotion, and the virulent hostility which the Ballets russes inspired are inconceivable today, just as are the riots prompted by the first production of Synge's Playboy of the Western World. The debut of the Rite of Spring in 1913 was remarkable not only for Stravinsky's music - to Parisian ears at the time so strangely barbaric, to our own so comfortably familiar - but for its choreography and costumes, the athletic abilities of the dancers, the unfamiliar Russian world which it portrayed. Were it staged today, would members of the audience come to blows over the work's merits? That seems unimaginable. Nijinsky was a genius - of his era.
One can only deal in superlatives in describing Miss Callas's singing - her velvet tone, her exciting phrasing, her hair-raising coloratura, her stage presence, her majesty of bearing, her fine acting. At the end of each act . . . the audience shouted, stamped and rushed forward to clamour for Miss Callas in curtain call after curtain call.
Newell Jenkins in Musical America, writing about Maria Callas's performance in Bellini's I Puritani in Florence, January 1952 Maria Callas is widely accepted as the consummate singing actress of the 20th century, an opera performer who, more than any other, succeeded in conveying the drama underlying the music. All of her greatest roles are still available on disc, whether recorded in studio or live in various opera houses. And yet, despite this extensive legacy and all the accumulated material which means every aspect of her life and art is available for study, for anyone who never saw her perform, she must remain as mysterious as her 19th-century precursors.
In January 1831, George Sand saw Maria Malibran - the singer who more than any other seems to anticipate Callas - appearing in the title role in Rossini's Desdemona and afterwards wrote: "She made me weep, shudder, in a word, suffer as if I had witnessed a scene of real life. This woman is the foremost genius of Europe . . . the foremost singer and the foremost actress." In case Sand's enthusiasm for Malibran was still unclear, she added: "I am in raptures about her." The same rapture greeted Callas. When she returned to New York's Metropolitan Opera as Norma in 1964, hundreds camped for four days outside the building in the hope of securing standing tickets. Can her recordings manage to convey the loyalty she generated, or explain why her devotees were so obsessed with her? Of course not.
There are a number of short films showing Callas singing, all but one of these being concert performances. Caught close-up, her mouth is in a state of permanent contortion, her eyes bulging, her hands clawing away at a stole wrapped around her shoulders. She looks, frankly, absurd. In addition, there is the complete second act of Tosca, filmed in Covent Garden in February 1964. Among its drawbacks: the film is poorly lit and in black and white; the sound is intermittently distorted; the camera moves constantly from long shot to close-up. Worst of all, Callas's performance seems "stagey", as though she were an actress in a silent movie, full of grandiose gestures and melodramatic facial twitches. What may have been stunning when seen from the stalls of a theatre becomes faintly embarrassing on a television screen.
The best way to understand Callas's mesmeric stage is to listen to the recording made on December 7th 1960 of the opening performance of Donizetti's Poliuto, the opera in which she returned to La Scala after several years' absence. In Scene Two of Act One, after a few introductory chords from the orchestra, she made her first appearance of the evening and, without opening her mouth, was hit by a storm of cheering and applause. It is the sound of an audience in love.
He had a powerful, clear, equal and sweet contralto voice, with a perfect intonation and an excellent shake. His manner of singing was masterly and his elocution unrivalled. Though he never loads adagios with too many ornaments, yet he delivered the original sound with the utmost refinement. He sang allegros with great fire, and marked rapid divisions from the chest in an articulate and pleasing manner.
German composer and instrumentalist Johann Quantz on the castrato Francesco Bernardi, known as Senesino
Some performance styles are lost for good and perhaps none more so than the singing of castrati, which reached its peak during the 18th century. Their voices were more powerful than those of boys and women and could reach much higher than those of men. Described in 1659 by French poet Pierre Perrin as "l'horreur des dames, et la risee des hommes," castrati were, on the contrary, in demand throughout Europe with some of them, such as Senesino, Caffarelli and Farinelli becoming enormously wealthy through their singing.
Such was the beauty of Farinelli's voice (he could sing up to a high D) that for 10 years he assuaged the melancholy of Philip V of Spain by performing the same four arias every night. Music criticism being a barely developed art at the time, little information survives about the sound a castrato would have made. Only one member of this now-vanished tribe may be heard, Alessandro Moreschi. Then in his mid-forties, in 1902-03 he recorded a number of arias and pieces of sacred music on disc. The results are of interest only because their singer was a castrato; music critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor noted that "in some passages, he fumbles for his notes and wavers almost as comically as Florence Foster Jenkins". Although he had sung at the funeral of Umberto I of Italy in 1900, it is hard to imagine Moreschi managing to win the approval of a living monarch.
For the soundtrack of the 1994 film Farinelli Il Castrato, an attempt was made to approximate this vocal type by digitally combining the singing of a countertenor and a soprano. The outcome, while naturally unsatisfactory, goes some way to giving a sense of the castrato voice in its simultaneous strength and sweetness. The sound made by a counter-tenor rarely carries much power, although American singer David Daniels (described in one recent review as having the appearance of a butcher's apprentice and the voice of an angel) can hit the back wall of any theatre with terrifying force. Still, until young men once more submit to castration in the name of art, the authentic sound of the 18th century can never truly be recreated.
