Salomania and The Russian Disease

Guest post: Dr Megan Girdwood, Durham University

Fig. 1: ‘In the Beardsley Manner: The Salomé of the Russian Ballet’. The Illustrated London News, 28 June 1913. Source: National Library of Scotland.

La Tragédie de Salomé might serve…as an answer to the question, When is a ballet not a ballet? In all these latter performances which the Russians have staged, they appear not only to misconceive the functions of ballet, but to overlook its limitations…. The sooner the controlling influence of Michel Fokine is restored to the Russian Ballet the better. Otherwise there seems imminent danger that so much fertility will merely run to seed.[1]

This damning verdict, delivered by A.E. Johnson in his book The Russian Ballet (1913), reflects the general feeling amongst critics that the little-known ballet La Tragédie de Salomé (1913) was a failure. Choreographed by the young dancer Boris Romanov and set to music by Florent Schmitt, it was designed as a vehicle for the Ballets Russes’s star ballerina Tamara Karsavina (Fig. 1), who had often found herself overshadowed by the virtuosity of her male partner, Vaslav Nijinsky. By the early years of the twentieth century, the decadent figure of Salome, the Judean princess who dances for the head of St. John the Baptist, had become a widespread cultural phenomenon and ought to have provided the Russian dancers with a sure-fire hit. Unfortunately, any expectations of a major success were dampened by the ballet’s reception. Despite some positive reviews, Salomé largely went under the radar when it premiered on 12th June 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in a programme that included Petrouchka (1911), L’Après-midi d’un Faune (1912), and Prince Igor (1909).[2] Set alongside these iconic works, Karsavina’s Salomé struggled to make an impact. That summer, it also received a tepid response in the British press after performances at Drury Lane’s Theatre Royal, where the bulk of the praise was saved for the brilliant Petrouchka. Since the company’s first European tour in 1909, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes had altered the landscape of modernist performance with a stream of rapturously received one-act ballets, but there was a sense in some quarters that the latest crop of experimental productions – including Nijinsky’s original choreography for Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) – might be too challenging for certain tastes.

This scepticism is certainly evident in Johnson’s critique of La Tragédie de Salomé. Although Nijinsky was not involved in its creation, Johnson discerns his imprint on both this misguided venture and what he calls the Ballets Russes’s ‘later style’, a general shift away from classicism towards a heightened mode of modernist experiment.[3] After Michel Fokine’s acrimonious departure in 1912, Nijinsky ascended to the position of lead choreographer with a series of radically inventive works that posed a challenge to the foundations of classical ballet and its core ideals of beauty and grace. The two-dimensional block movements of Faune – inspired by the antique images on Greek vases – and the primitive, shuffling steps of Le Sacre du Printemps sought to return dance to its origins in ritual, making the human body a source of bewildering, erratic energies, quite unlike the neo-Romantic elegance of Fokine’s Les Sylphides (1909). Crucially, Johnson frames this evolution of the Russian style as evidence of a fruitless decline: the metaphor of abundance ‘run to seed’ indicates the degeneration of a promising artistic scheme, undone by its own hysterical excess. An absent and necessary corrective is embodied by the figure of Fokine, here described as the tempering influence required to counter-balance the dissipating creativity of Nijinsky (who was also, at this time, Diaghilev’s lover). This is the familiar narrative of decadence as ill-disciplined and self-defeating; as queerly sterile, superfluous, and over-extended. For Johnson, Salomé is the most decadent of ballets: alternately ‘grotesque’, ‘pseudo-macabre’ and ‘frightfully grim’, it is a distended and parodic resuscitation of the fin-de-siècle’s signature choreographic theme.  

While deployed in a pejorative sense by certain critics, decadence provides a fruitful context for my reconsideration of La Tragédie de Salomé, a ballet that reactivates the cultural and aesthetic codes of an earlier decadent imaginary. Johnson’s fertility metaphor ironically chimes with the way that the theme of Salome reproduced itself on the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century stage, ‘spawning’, as Lois Cucullu puts it, ‘an entire industry that, under the banner of Salomania, attract[ed] and produc[ed] willing converts on and off stage and screen’.[4] The value bestowed upon the very concepts of disease and contagion by decadence’s proponents allowed for a reframing of this cultural epidemic – ‘Salomania’ – as simultaneously parasitic and regenerative. During this period, the Ballets Russes had garnered popular acclaim with its own ‘exotic’ ballets devoted to seductive female leads: Schéhérazade (1910), Cléopâtre (1910), L’Oiseau de feu (1910). Nevertheless, Salome was in some ways an odd choice for a ballet in 1913, which may go some way to explaining its lukewarm reception. Nijinsky had just staked his claim to ‘newness’ with Jeux (1913), the first ‘contemporary’ ballet set during a Bloomsbury tennis game. He was also busy exhausting his dancers with fastidious instructions for Sacre, a wholly avant-garde collaboration with Igor Stravinsky. Appearing as a kind of ‘exotic’ anomaly during this experimental season, La Tragédie de Salomé nonetheless constitutes an intriguing and often-overlooked addition to the Ballets Russes’s repertoire, evoking an already classic decadent phenomenon within the context of the company’s own modernist choreographic project.

Wildean Origins

Given their comparable levels of popularity during this period, it is surprising that Salome and the Ballets Russes did not make a more harmonious match. Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, written in French in 1891, was perhaps the most famous and controversial iteration of the Salome narrative, which Diaghilev’s company loosely adapted several decades later. Wilde’s highly lyrical and ornate play-text had embraced the ‘Salomania’ of the French Symbolists, taking inspiration from a range of sources including Stéphane Mallarmé’s unfinished closet drama Hérodiade (1867-98), Gustave Flaubert’s short story ‘Herodias’ (1887), and Joris-Karl Huysmans’s decadent novel À rebours (1884), familiar to Wilde’s readers as the seductive ‘yellow book’ in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). By the time the Ballets Russes staged La Tragédie de Salomé, Salome’s ‘dance of the seven veils’ and her triumphant coddling of St John the Baptist’s severed head were hallmark images of decadent femininity and its sadistic eroticism. Despite the ban on productions of Wilde’s play on the English stage, the popularity of his biblical theme during this period is hard to overstate. Richard Strauss’s opera Salome (1905) used a German translation of Wilde’s text for the libretto, while the Canadian performer Maud Allan achieved unprecedented success with her Vision of Salome (1906), a sensual solo dance that was performed for over eighteen months in London’s Palace Theatre, after initially being scheduled to run for just two weeks (Fig. 2). In 1907, the New York Theatre opened a ‘School for Salomes’ to train young performers for the vaudeville circuit, and the profusion of Salome dancers prompted the actor Marie Cahill to write to President Roosevelt about ‘pernicious subjects of the “Salome” kind’ and their worrying spread in civil society.[5]

Fig. 2: Maud Allan as Salome in The Vision of Salome. Postcard by Foulsham & Banfield, 1908. National Portrait Gallery, London.  

The enthusiasm stirred for the dancers of the Ballets Russes was framed in similar terms as a type of decadent contagion. The English theatre designer Charles Ricketts was a notable balletomane and a regular presence at Covent Garden whenever Diaghilev’s company was in London. In August 1913, he wrote to the Dutch Symbolist painter R. N. R. Holst to express surprise that Holst had ‘escaped the Russian Ballet mania’, entreating him to come to England the following year: ‘leave your brushes and catch the Russian Disease’.[6] Like many of his literary peers, Ricketts was effusive in his praise of the ballet’s leading dancers, describing them as transcendent vessels for the realisation of a complete aesthetic spectacle:

Nijinsky outclasses in passion, beauty, and magnetism all that Karsavina can do, and she is a Muse, or several Muses in one, the Muse of Melancholy and of Caprice, capable of expressing tragedy and even voluptuous innocence; the wildness of chastity and the sting of desire; she is the perfect instrument on which all emotion can be rendered.[7]

Presenting a clear opportunity for ‘La Karsavina’ to combine her tragic instinct with a paradoxical sense of ‘voluptuous innocence’, the theme of La Tragédie de Salomé ought to have piqued Ricketts’ interest. Yet it is a conspicuous absence in his diary entries and correspondence, which otherwise contain vivid accounts of ballets including Schéhérazade, Carnaval, Narcisse, Le Coq d’Or, and La Légende de Joseph. As a friend of Wilde, Ricketts also had a personal and professional investment in the subject matter of La Tragédie de Salomé. In 1892, he had been involved in the earliest attempt to stage Salomé in Paris, when he and Wilde apparently hoped to conjure a unique synaesthetic experience for the audience, using symbolic blocks of colour to designate character and mood while suffusing the theatre with perfumes.[8] These plans did not come to fruition and the play’s early performance history was marked by a series of defeats and squandered opportunities. A much-fêted 1892 London production starring Sarah Bernhardt was cancelled by the Lord Chamberlain, who lambasted Wilde’s text as a profane distortion of its biblical source material, exemplified by Salome’s carnal longing for the body of the Baptist. After Wilde’s death, Ricketts did eventually stage the play in 1906 at the King’s Hall in Covent Garden, although he seems to have missed his chance to see the celebrated Karsavina dance the role in 1913.[9]

Wilde’s original play clearly influenced the artistic vision of the Ballets Russes. Serge Soudeïkine’s set and costume design for La Tragédie de Salomé paid homage to Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for the 1894 English translation of Wilde’s text, conjuring a spectacular Art Nouveau aesthetic that even A.E. Johnson reluctantly praised for its ambition:

‘Pure Beardsley’ was the popular phrase with which the ballet was summed up on its first production. […] In sheer theatrical effect this ballet of Salome is quite dazzling. Its bizarre decoration, and the eccentricity of the action, capture the eye, as the music captures the ear, by sheer audacity of assault. It is only when a conclusion is reached that the whole appears to have been a profitless, if dazzling diversion.[10]

At the centre of Soudeïkine’s ‘bizarre’ set was a tall column, atop of which the Baptist’s severed head could be dimly seen. It was framed by ‘giant foliage of formal design’ and a ‘curious pyramidal staircase’, from which Salome descended to perform her solo dance.[11] For her entrance, Karsavina wore an elaborate headdress and heavy cape embossed with a rose design, which was discarded at the crucial moment to reveal a flapper-style dress and limbs tattooed with Beardsley’s images, cementing the ballet’s obvious debts to the visual culture of the 1890s (Fig. 3). Yet it was perhaps such crass signalling of its antecedents that led to the ballet’s failure to convince the critics. Couched in a suspicion of glamour for its own sake, many reviewers suggested that La Tragédie de Salomé prioritised a superficial sense of the spectacular above deeper narrative and aesthetic coherence, producing a stream of diverting but ultimately empty images.[12] In this respect, the ballet’s reception revealed a lingering anxiety regarding the moral vacancy of decadence and a l’art pour l’art manifesto that was associated with a Wildean strain of aestheticism in England. By 1913, more than a decade after Wilde’s death, such a decadent revival may have seemed fatally anachronistic, although other performers had enjoyed much success with the same subject.

Fig. 3: Review of La Tragédie de Salomé with images of Serge Soudeïkine’s set and Tamara Karsavina in costume as Salome. Jacques Debey, ‘La Tragédie de Salomé’, Comoedia Illustré [5 July 1913], 906-7. Bibliothèque nationale de France. 

Choreographic Intertexts

Beyond its literary influences, Romanov’s ballet had important precursors in the world of dance, circumventing the already porous boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. It was a work layered with complex resonances, recalling earlier dance productions such as Maud Allan’s Vision of Salome, and Ida Rubinstein’s notorious Salomé (1908), performed in St. Petersburg with a choreography by Fokine and costumes designed by Léon Bakst (Fig. 4). This production had been censored by the Russian Orthodox Church for its use of Wilde’s homoerotic play-text and Rubinstein’s rumoured decision to strip naked during the climactic dance scene. In his memoirs, the designer Alexandre Benois recalled the thrill surrounding Rubinstein’s embodiment of this degenerate role, an association she would strategically evoke for the Ballets Russes in her performance as Cleopatra the following year: ‘the young Ida Rubinstein, gradually discarded all her veils and gave herself up to the ecstasy of love before the eyes of the whole audience’.[13] Like Rubinstein, the dancer Natalia Trouhanova developed a risqué association with Salome’s exoticism by performing the dance in a 1907 version of Strauss’s opera and a 1912 production of La Tragédie de Salomé (not under the auspices of the Ballets Russes). Through their varied performance histories and different trans-national contexts, these artists moved dance to the centre of modernism’s assorted cultural projects, rendering Salome a capricious – and often problematic – emblem of choreographic modernity.  

There was another, less controversial source for the Ballets Russes’ engagement with this theme. Florent Schmitt’s score for La Tragédie de Salomé had originally been composed as a ‘ballet’ in 1907 for the American modern dancer Loïe Fuller, with a scenario written by the French poet Robert d’Humières. Fuller’s association with the role of Salome was significant and longstanding, although she did not always conform to popular configurations of this character as a lascivious femme fatale. In the early 1890s, she had entranced Parisian audiences with her original dance creations, including her famous ‘serpentine dance’, which saw her manipulate voluminous silks with hand-held rods to produce a stream of continually evolving shapes and images, illuminated by electric lights and magic lanterns. Concealing her body beneath these spiralling draperies, Fuller choreographed a powerfully feminist performance that bore little relation to the explicit striptease represented in images such as Beardsley’s ‘Stomach Dance’, one of the ‘naughty scribbles’ he produced for the published version of Wilde’s play.[14] Fuller’s choreographic project offered an alternative, seductively modern take on the concept of a ‘dance of veils’, leading to her being dubbed ‘the modern Salome’ in the French press, and adopted as an icon of the new age in the 1900 Exposition Universelle.[15]

Fig. 4: Léon Bakst, costume design for Ida Rubinstein as Salomé, 1908. Wikimedia Commons. 

Fuller had devised her own Salomé in 1895, a pantomime lyrique composed of four tableaux, including a ‘Fire Dance’ that drew particular acclaim and was later revised as a standalone work (Fig. 5). For this scene, Fuller danced above a pane of glass, through which blue and red lights were projected to give an intensified impression of a dancing flame. On the whole, however, the production was poorly reviewed, with the French writer Jean Lorrain providing a scathing assessment: ‘[Miss Fuller] was luminous without grace, with the gestures of an English boxer and the physique of Mr. Oscar Wilde’.[16] Twelve years later, when she returned to the theme in La Tragédie de Salomé, Fuller staged a newly ambitious spectacle, apparently cleaving more closely to Wilde’s vision of Salome as a provocative New Woman immersed in the camp grandeur of Herod’s palace. Her costume for the role reportedly incorporated four thousand real feathers, while the severed head was illuminated by hundreds of stage lamps.[17] By recycling the music and scenario of Fuller’s La Tragédie de Salomé, the Ballets Russes implicitly cited her in their decadent 1913 production, creating an intriguing dialogue between the spheres of women’s modern dance and avant-garde ballet, with Wilde and Beardsley lurking as the more obvious ghosts in the wings.

As with many of the Ballets Russes’s works, it is difficult to gain a detailed understanding of Romanov’s choreography for this production. Most reports stressed the exuberance and rapidity of the movement design: Karsavina’s dance of the seven veils matched the energy of Schmitt’s score and reflected the style of the company’s other antique ballets, such as Cléopâtre and Schéhérazade.[18] In a generally positive account of the ballet, Jacques Debey described the dancing of the slaves – performers in blackface wearing white ostrich feathers and bulbous headpieces – as ‘sometimes wild, sometimes serious’, while Karsavina’s ‘frénétique’ movements occasionally jarred with the ‘melodious and rhythmic’ music.[19] While accentuating Karsavina’s star power and giving her the opportunity to dominate her own one-act ballet, this work did not have the kind of transformative effect on European dance culture made by Nijinsky’s contemporaneous choreographies. Nonetheless, the various creative choices underpinning the production drew together an intriguing range of aesthetic and formal influences, from the feminist individualism of Loïe Fuller to the erotic orientalism of the Ballets Russes’s own repertoire.

Fig. 5: La danse du Feu: Loïe Fuller. Poster by Jules Chéret, 1897. Bibliothèque nationale de France. 

After performances in Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, and Monaco later in 1913, La Tragédie de Salomé seems to have been quietly retired, although a different production with the same title was staged at the Théâtre nationale de l’Opéra in 1919, with Ida Rubinstein reprising the lead role. Karsavina’s short-lived incarnation of Salome also left an impression on later avant-garde versions of the narrative. The 1922 silent film Salomé: An Historical Phantasy by Oscar Wilde – made by and starring the Russian actor Alla Nazimova – recalled both Beardsley and the Ballets Russes with its camp Art Nouveau set and costumes. The film’s designer Natacha Rambova, herself a former dancer, may well have seen La Tragédie de Salomé on her numerous visits to see the Ballets Russes in London and Paris, where she spent time training under the dancer Rosita Mauri. Nazimova herself claimed that she conceived the film ‘in the style of the Russian Ballet’, which is evident in numerous aspects of the film’s visual construction and movement vocabulary.[20] The monochrome cape worn by Nazimova as she awaits the delivery of Iokanaan’s severed head closely resembles Karsavina’s costume for Salome’s entrance, evoking the tangled black roses that dominate so many of Beardsley’s illustrations. In choreographic terms, the collective movements of the attendants echo the Ballets Russes’s focus on the three groups of dancing slaves, while Nazimova’s dance of the seven veils comes intriguingly close, at certain moments, to a Fuller-esque serpentine dance.[21]

La Tragédie de Salomé may have been a minor work in the canon of twentieth-century dance, but it was more than a glamorous compendium of existing theatrical imagery. Karsavina herself saw it as a significant role and a form of ‘reparation’ for the loyalty she had demonstrated to Diaghilev during a turbulent time for the company. ‘Salome’, she declared, ‘[was] a ballet entirely for me. After that I had no cause to complain: marvellous parts simply poured into my lap’.[22] As the ballet’s reception makes clear, its relationship to decadence was not merely thematic: both formally and aesthetically, the production revived familiar decadent taxonomies, not least in its exaggerated ornamentation and design, feverish movement style, and elevation of female degeneracy, suggesting, to some, that the Ballets Russes was entering its own decadent age. Following in the wake of previous Salome performers like Fuller and Allan – modern dancers who lacked classical training – this ballet also created new interplays between different strands of choreographic modernism, which would meet again productively through the avant-garde filmmaking of Nazimova. Coinciding with one of the most disruptive and creative periods in the Ballets Russes’s history, this production articulated a double investment in the undertakings of fin-de-siècle decadence and women’s modern dance, making an important, if undervalued, contribution to Salome’s tangled mythology.

Notes

[1] A.E. Johnson, The Russian Ballet (Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston; New York, 1913), 221.

[2] Jane Pritchard, ‘Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes – An Itinerary, Part 1: 1909-1921,’ Dance Research 27 (1) (2009), 109-98.

[3] Johnson, The Russian Ballet, 215.

[4] Lois Cucullu, ‘Wilde and Wilder Salomés: Modernising Wilde’s Nubile Princess from Sarah Bernhardt to Norma Desmond’, Modernism/modernity 18 (2011), 497.

[5] ‘The Salome Dance Gets into Politics’, New York Times, 24 August 1908.

[6] Charles Ricketts to R. N. R. Holst [Autumn 1913], in Cecil Lewis (ed.), Self-Portrait: Letters and Journals of Charles Ricketts, collected by T. Sturge Moore (London: Peter Davies, 1939), 184.

[7] Charles Ricketts to Gordon Bottomley [12 May 1912], Ibid., 177.

[8] A full account of Ricketts’s involvement with Wilde’s Salomé is given by William Tydeman and Steven Price in their invaluable Wilde: Salome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 44-57.

[9] That season, Ricketts was perhaps preoccupied with the more controversial premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps. After seeing Nijinsky’s ballet, he claimed that the music by Igor Stravinsky made him ‘want to howl like a dog’ (Self-Portrait, 183).

[10] Johnson, The Russian Ballet, 215-16.

[11] Ibid., 216.

[12] One critic admired Karsavina’s ‘Aubrey Beardsley costume’ but found the second half of the ballet ‘exaggerated and meaningless’. See ‘The Russian Ballet: Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salome’, The Observer, 6 July 1913, 7.

[13] Alexandre Benois, Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet, trans. Mary Britnieva (De Capo Press: New York, 1977), 296. Benois also captures the sense of scandal generated by Rubinstein’s performance: ‘But still greater excitement was caused by the rumour that in the dance of the Seven Veils, Salome was gradually to throw off all her coverings and appear completely naked. The news was especially exciting in the case of Ida Rubinstein; it would, after all, be an unusual situation for a young girl belonging to a conventional and well-to-do family’ (277).

[14] Wilde referred to Beardsley’s illustrations as ‘naughty scribbles a precocious schoolboy makes in the margins of his copybook’. Qtd. in Robert Tanitch, Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen (London: Methuen, 1999), 138–9.

[15] Rhonda K. Garelick, Electric Salome: Loïe Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 102.

[16] Jean Lorrain, Poussières de Paris, qtd in Penny Farfan, Performing Queer Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 29.

[17] Toni Bentley, Sisters of Salome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 44.

[18] Deborah Jowitt describes the ‘mobile’ torsos and ‘sensuous plasticity’ of the female dancers in the Ballets Russes’s ‘exotic’ ballets in Time and the Dancing Image (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 114-15.

[19] Jacques Debey, ‘La Tragédie de Salomé’, Comoedia Illustré [5 July 1913], 906-7.

[20] Gavin Lambert, Nazimova: A Biography (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1977), 260.

[21] I expand on this comparison in my recent book Modernism and the Choreographic Imagination: Salome’s Dance after 1890 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021).

[22] Tamara Karsavina, Theatre Street: The Reminiscences of Tamara Karsavina (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1961), 288.