| Sergey Diaghilev's Sleeping Princess ballet (1921) was a spectacular representation of Russian Imperial splendor that failed, equally spectacularly, when created in the West. Based on the Chaikovsky/Petipa Sleeping Beauty (1890), the Ballets Russes re-creation of the nineteenth-century romantic ballet did not find favor in postwar London, despite Diaghilev's updating of the music and dance, and new decor. Diaghilev's innovative Ballets Russes had pushed ballet further and further away from the original ballet's emphasis on sublime beauty, with the result that Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes collaborators found it difficult in 1921 to present The Sleeping Beauty both sincerely and convincingly. Like many artists during the early twentieth-century, and especially after the Great War, Diaghilev, to borrow a phrase by musicologist Richard Taruskin, "sacrificed sincerity to irony." Numerous alterations made to the music, choreography, and decor of The Sleeping Princess attest to tension between competing aesthetics. Diaghilev and Igor Stravinsky revised the music of Chaikovsky according to an imagined eighteenth-century aesthetic, which had been gaining favor in France. Stravinsky's orchestrations of two Chaikovsky numbers suppressed the presumed sentimentalism of the older composer by interpolating elements of his own style, particularly compression of form and neutrality in affect. Bronislava Nijinska excised the outmoded mime. She adjusted other choreography and stage action, often according to her aesthetic views regarding movement; these ran counter to Petipa's original performance practice. Leon Bakst re-imagined the decor of the ballet as an intensely nostalgic desire for a lost Russia but also incorporated important ironic and parodic images. Shaped by different artists with different agendas, The Sleeping Princess was an uneasy suspension of elements that collided with traces of the original spectacle and its romantic aesthetic: super-saturated visuals, pared-down music, and choreography guided by an aesthetic different from that of the original. Applying terms anachronistically such as modernism or neoclassicism does not adequately encompass the messy mixture of specific stylistic traits evident in The Sleeping Princess. Nonetheless the collision of different aesthetics in The Sleeping Princess was not untypical for this time of transition, and it complicates our view of the Diaghilev legacy. |
