Afternoon of A Faun (Nijinsky) - Critical Response

Critical Response

On 28 May an invited audience attended the dress rehearsal. There was silence as it finished. Gabriel Astruc (a French impresario who assisted Diaghilev with finance, publicity and bookings) came on stage and announced that the ballet would be repeated. This time there was some applause before the audience was presented champagne and caviar in the theatre foyer. On the opening night the ballet was met with a mixture of applause and booing, and again it was repeated. Now the audience applauded, and Auguste Rodin in the audience stood up to cheer.

Critical reaction to the ballet was in general favourable. Commedia carried a long article by its editor Gaston de Pawlowski praising the ballet and supporting articles by Louis Vuillemain and Louis Schneider. Vuillemain wrote "For myself, I admit never having enjoyed as much a so perfect union of mime and music, such complete joy to the eye and the ear." Le Théâtre carried a review by Schneider:

"Nijinsky adopted the choreography of Debussy's work with an absolute sincerity, after having meditated for a long time on the subject and saturating himself with the atmosphere of the tableau painted by the composer... Nijinsky obtained... a fusion more intimate, more perfect, a more direct cohesion between the various elements of the music and the movements which express them."

A strikingly different response appeared in Le Figaro, where the editor Gaston Calmette also carried a front page article on the ballet, but this time to denounce it, declining to publish the favourable report of his normal theatre critic, Robert Brussel. Calmette wrote:

Anyone who mentions the words 'art' and 'imagination' in the same breath as this production must be laughing at us. This is neither a pretty pastoral nor a work of profound meaning. We are shown a lecherous faun, whose movements are filthy and bestiall in their eroticism, and whose gestures are as crude as they are indecent. That is all. And the over explicit miming of this mis-shapen beast, loathsome when seen full on, but even more loathesome in profile, was greeted with the booing it deserved.

Calmette, however, was much more complientary about Nijinsky's other performances as part of the same evening's ballet:

M. Nijinsky ...took his revenge a quarter of an hour later with an exquisite rendering of 'Le Spectre de la Rose' so delightfully conceived by M.J-L Vaudoyer. That is the sort of show to give the public.

Diaghilev responded by writing to Le Figaro forwarding letters of support, which Le Figaro published the following day. The painter Odilon Redon, friend of Mallarmé, suggested how much the author of the original poem on which the works had been based would have approved, "more than anyone, he would have appreciated this wonderful evocation of his thoughts" Rodin wrote,

"Nijinsky has never been so remarkable as in his latest role. No more jumps - nothing but half-conscious animal gestures and poses. He lies down, leans on his elbow, walks with bent knees, draws himself up, advancing and retreating, some-times slowly, sometimes with jerky angular movements. His eyes flicker, he stretches his arms, he opens his hands out flat, the fingers together, and as he turns away his head he continues to express his desire with a deliberate awkwardness that seems natural. Form and meaning are indissolubly wedded in his body, which is totally expressive of the mind within... His beauty is that of antique frescoes and sculptures: he is the ideal model, whom one longs to draw and sculpt.

The dispute spread, taking on a political tone as Le Figaro was accused of attacking the Ballets Russes because it opposed the political policy of France allying with Russia, and this represented an opening to smear all things Russian. The Russian ambassador became involved, French politicians signed petitions and a government commission was asked by President and Prime Minister to report. The Paris police attended the second night of the ballet because of its alleged obscenity, but took no action in view of public support. The ending of the ballet may, or may not, have been temporarily amended to be more proper. Tickets to all performances were sold out and parisians clamoured to obtain them by any means.

Fokine claimed to be shocked by the explicit ending of Faun, despite at the same time suggesting the idea of the faun lying down in a sexual manner on top of the nymph's veil had been plagiarised from his own ballet Tannhäuser, where the hero had lain down in a comparable manner upon a woman. However, Fokine found some points to compliment in the ballet, the use of pauses by the dancers where traditionally there would have been continuos movement, and the juxtaposition of angular choreography with the very fluid music.

Fokine's animosity to Faun is partly explainable by his own difficulties in preparing Daphnis and Chloe, which was to premiere the week following Faun, and was not complete. Diaghilev tried to cancel Daphnis but in the event it was postponed to 8th June and only received two performances, when it was considered a success even by Le Figaro. The company was sharply divided into two factions by the quarrell, some supporting Nijinsky and some Fokine and the final result was that Fokine left the company on bad terms with Nijinsky, when the partnership of Nijinsky as dancer and Fokine as choreographer had been enormously successful for them both.