Diaghilev’s missed opportunity: new English music and Vaughan Williams’s

In the 1920s Diaghilev attempted to appeal to the popular English musical and theatrical taste on more than one occasion, most notably perhaps in 1928 in The Gods Go a-Begging, based on the music of Handel. He had even employed an eccentric British aristocratic composer, Lord Berners, to compose a kind of pantomime-ballet, The Triumph of Neptune, for his 1926 London season. Neptune had “a hodge-podge of a plot […], harlequins, fairy princesses, drunken sailors, and allegorical figures like Brittania.” The Berners score was made up of short miniatures in a variety of traditional dance forms -- a schottische, a hornpipe, a polka – and mood pieces -- a frozen forest – but it was all modeled on French music of the 1920s,⁵¹ rather than the new English national music that had been developing since the late 19^th century.

1. 
   The English national revival in music down to 1929
   

In 1871, Arthur Sullivan and his librettist W. S. Gilbert began their very original partnership which would produce over the next 25 years a brilliant series of comic operettas in a new English style. Other budding English composers of the late Victorian period were Frederick Delius, Edward Elgar, Charles Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford. New musical institutions were opening new horizons: Parry in 1872 helped found the Oxford University Musical Club; in 1875, Sullivan opened the National Training School for Music in London, which in 1883 became the Royal College of Music (RCM), with George Grove as its first Director. Oxford musical circles generated a renewed interest in England’s foremost Tudor and Elizabethan composers, such as Tallis and Byrd, and in the Jacobean composer Henry Purcell, the bicentenary of whose death was much celebrated in 1895. Parry and Stanford and their RCM students in 1882 began speaking of all this activity as an English Musical Renaissance, and became involved in the collection of old English folksongs as a wellspring of a native English musical tradition, distinct from the other, more recognised musical folk traditions of the British Isles: the Welsh, Scottish and Irish.⁵³

A climate of English musical life thus developed between 1870 and 1900 that allowed genuine native talent to prosper and English musical traditions of the past to be recovered. And a younger generation of brilliant English composers took up the challenge after the turn of the 20^th century, notably Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams and John Ireland. Henry Wood, as a young conductor in 1895, had begun in London annual seasons of Promenade Concerts for the general public, which would popularize iconic works that soon became part of the English national identity, such as Holst’s The Planets and Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Pomp and Circumstance marches. In the early 20^th century, an English national music was being born and consciously celebrated.⁵⁴ Vaughan Williams even put the new English national style on the stage in his operas Hugh the Drover (1914) and the Shakespearean Sir John in Love (1924, first staged 1929), which included elements of older English dance.

2. 
   Can we produce a genuinely English ballet? The Job project.
   

Diaghilev’s attempts to put a British spin on some of his English ballet productions of the later 1920s did not work very well because he did not recognise the importance of the new English national music. In essence the English seasons of the Ballets Russes, however popular, were still continental importations. In this situation it was inevitable that English musicians and intellectuals should sooner or later ask the question “Can we produce a genuinely English ballet?” The answer would be Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Job: A Masque for Dancing.

The notion evolved gradually, and through personal as well as artistic connections. Sir Geoffrey Keynes, the brother of Bloomsbury Group economist John Maynard Keynes and hence brother-in-law of the ballerina Lydia Lopokova, was a physician and surgeon with a life-long cultural interest in both ballet and the works of English poet and artist William Blake. In particular he admired Blake’s cycle of engravings illustrating the biblical book of Job. Gwendolen Raverat, sister of Sir Geoffrey’s wife, Margaret Darwin Keynes, was a stage designer, and the composer Vaughan Williams was on his mother’s side a cousin of the two sisters.

Geoffrey Keynes and Gwen Raverat had the idea of producing an English ballet based on the Blake engravings and with new English music. In 1926 and 1927, Keynes wrote a scenario for Job, which Raverat, in consultation with Lopokova, sent in French translation to Diaghilev in 1928 as a proposal for a Ballets Russes production, together with a portfolio of the Blake engravings. No musical score was included, as it was not yet decided whether Gustav Holst or Vaughan Williams would compose the ballet.

What happened next is not entirely clear. Diaghilev, who was already ill, may never actually have seen the proposal, which might have fitted well enough with his English vision. What we do know is that Diaghilev’s over-protective secretary and sometime librettist, Boris Kochno, sent Keynes and Raverat a rejection letter, saying that it was “too English” and “too old-fashioned”.⁵⁵ However, Kochno kept the folio of Blake illustrations of Job and, suspiciously, the next year, 1929, in the last season of the Ballets Russes, there appeared not one but two biblical ballets, a new departure for the company. Judith, with music by the French composer Arthur Honegger, was premiered in its London season that year, while L’Enfant prodigue (The Prodigal Son), with music by Sergei Prokofiev and choreography by Balanchine, was put on in Paris.⁵⁶

The rejection by Diaghilev’s circle only strengthened the determination of Keynes, Raverat and Vaughan Williams to put on Job as an independent English production. When Diaghilev was approached, Vaughan Williams had plunged enthusiastically into composing the music, scoring it for a rather large orchestra. But the way to staging the ballet was not easy, so the composer turned it first into a concert suite, which he conducted on 23^rd October 1930 at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival in St Andrew's Hall, Norwich, with the Queen's Hall Orchestra. When the ballet was eventually produced the next year, the music was arranged for a smaller orchestra with the help of Constant Lambert, the resident conductor of Ninette de Valois’s new company at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre.

De Valois, who had danced with the Ballets Russes in the mid-1920s as a soloist in Les Biches and Le Train bleu, had carefully understudied Diaghilev’s methods. She left the Ballets Russes in 1927 at the age of 29 to establish her own ballet schools in the British Isles: the Academy of Choreographic Art for girls in London, and the Abbey Theatre School of Ballet in Dublin, in her native Ireland.

In London, her ultimate goal was to form a repertory ballet company, with dancers drawn from the school and trained in a uniquely British style of ballet. Students of the school were given professional stage experience performing in opera and plays staged at the Old Vic Theatre, with de Valois choreographing several short ballets for the theatre. Lilian Baylis was the owner of the Old Vic at that time, and in 1928 she also acquired and refurbished the Sadler's Wells Theatre, with the intention of creating a sister theatre to the Old Vic. She employed de Valois to stage full scale dance productions at both theatres and when the Sadler's Wells Theatre re-opened in 1931, de Valois moved her school into studios there, under the new name, the Sadler's Wells Ballet School. A ballet company was also formed, known as the Vic-Wells Ballet. The Vic-Wells ballet company and school would be the predecessors of today's Royal Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet and Royal Ballet School.⁵⁷

Geoffrey Keynes had suggested to Ninette de Valois that she might create the choreography for Job, which the promoters now hoped might be staged by her and Baylis. The composer had doubts about a choreographer who had danced for Diaghilev.

Vaughan Williams and de Valois met, although he was reluctant to give her permission, as now he felt that it could be done only by a dedicated amateur folk-dance group and hated the notion of "ballet." But once he was satisfied that de Valois would not dream of using pointe work and classical dance in the production, he agreed to her doing it. ⁵⁸

The composer insisted, however, that the ballet be called a “masque for dancing”, to evoke an older British theatrical tradition.

The problem was to find sponsors and a venue. The great entepreneur had died in August 1929, his company had disintegrated and it became apparent that there would be no big ballet season in London in 1930. The Sadler’s Wells was not ready yet. Who would fill the void left by Diaghilev’s death, and organize ballet in London?

Enter the Camargo Society, a group of about twenty leading London ballet supporters first convened by Philip Richardson, editor of the Dancing Times, and the writer Arnold Haskell in a restaurant in Soho on 3^rd November 1929. De Valois belonged to it, though she found its committee meetings somewhat “woolly-minded”.⁵⁹ The Camargo Society set out to continue Diaghilev’s work by sponsoring a series of small ballet programmes privately, four times a year at a West End theatre on Sunday evenings and Monday afternoons, when there were no commercial performances. This would lead eventually to full-scale public ballet performances.⁶⁰

Ninette de Valois was involved in choreographing several of the short works to be performed for the Camargo Society, beginning with Debussy's Danse sacrée et danse profane at the inaugural performance of the Society at the Cambridge Theatre, London, on 19^th October 1930.⁶¹ Also noteworthy was her London production for the Society at the Apollo Theatre on 26^th April 1931 of Darius Milhaud’s La Création du monde, previously a success for Diaghilev’s rivals, the Ballets Suédois, in Paris in 1923.

3. 
   The ballet Job comes to the stage: Diaghilev’s English legacy
   

The refurbished Sadler’s Wells Theatre had opened on 6^th January 1931 as a second stage for the Old Vic, and Ninette de Valois and her fledgling Vic-Wells ballet company were now ready to undertake a more ambitious programme of work, dancing at the two theatres in a series of operas as well as in major ballets. Their first big critical success was to be the long-awaited ballet production of Vaughan Williams’s Job: A Masque for Dancing, mounted by the Camargo Society at the Cambridge Theatre in London on 5^th and 6^th July 1931.⁶² It is a measure of the new ballet’s popular success that it was repeated at the Old Vic on 22^nd September 1931, and again sponsored by the Camargo Society at the Savoy Theatre, London, for a full two weeks’ run between 6^th and 18^th June 1932. Job may also have been performed once outside London in July 1931, at the festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Oxford.⁶³ It remained in the Vic-Wells and Royal Ballet repertory until 1972, though revised with new designs in 1948, and it was still winning new admirers when it was revived in 1993 by the Birmingham Royal Ballet.

Here is a précis of the composer's synopsis and stage directions, as prepared in connection with a recent recording of Job.⁶⁶

Ninette de Valois’s choreography for Job has been analysed by Patricia Wade Wiles, who notes especially de Valois’s careful attention to the language of gesture in the Blake illustrations.⁷⁰ As music critic Frank Howes declared, "What the dance does is to give movement to Blake's drawings, to add temporal rhythm to graphical design, to absorb and be absorbed by the music, which has itself the double inspiration of Blake and the Bible.”⁷¹ It is an eclectic mixture of classical steps, folk-dance patterns, angular expressionist movement and carefully selected mime,

[which] sums up de Valois' mastery of every modern trend of the time in dancing. The eloquent, expressive groupings and gestures of Job and his family relate to her use of movement in Greek drama. Masked expressionist dance is effectively employed for the Comforters, for the powerful scene where Satan drives on War, Pestilence, and Famine, and for the pyramidal ensemble of white hands emerging from black hooded figures which parts to reveal Satan in power. Lyrical feeling and curving, fluent lines are brought in from plastique movement, while English folk dance yields steps and patterns to evoke the pastoral happiness of Job's sons and daughters. For Elihu […] she turned to classical dance, while for Satan she evolved a vibrant personal idiom deriving from classical and ethnic sources. ⁷²

In the opening performances the pivotal role of Satan was danced by guest star Anton Dolin, who had danced with de Valois in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the 1920s.⁷³ Dolin’s angular and sinuous movements were especially evocative of the figure of Satan in Blake’s illustrations. Elihu, the graceful young man of Scene 7, was danced by Stanley Judson, and the corps de ballet of the other scenes included mostly English names of young dancers from the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School. But Dolin, who had remained with Diaghilev until the end in 1929, appearing that year along with Serge Lifar in the maestro’s final ballet, The Prodigal Son, so dominated the premiere of Job in 1931 in his role as Satan that the new English ballet masterpiece could almost be considered as a sequel to the most daring choreographic productions of the Ballets Russes.

Richard Capell, reviewing a later performance of the ballet at Sadler's Wells, made no bones about saying: “This is a masterpiece […] The idea of Job is grand and it is carried out with daring and nobility. Indeed a unique work—a ballet that attains to the sublime!” Capell went on to say, “There is one preeminent dancing role, that of Satan, a role in which the art of the male dancer is used to uncommon effect. One of the great moments of contemporary theatre is that in which the afflicted family, turning to heaven for help, suddenly sees the sky transformed and Satan seated on God's throne.”⁷⁴ The script was biblical, but the theatrics were pure Diaghilev.

Although not a Diaghilev ballet, Job in many ways bore his imprint. At the Cambridge Theatre in London on 5^th June 1931, his spirit was still alive, and all his English projects came of age.

Sergei Diaghilev had come to England before World War I with a company that was already taking Paris by storm through its innovative approach to Russian ballet, and revolutionised the English ballet scene and the taste of English audiences as he had done in France. At the war’s end and during the first year of the peace the Ballets Russes spent sixteen straight months performing in England, launching major new works there. During the 1920s in England the long, annual seasons of the Ballets Russes made it a British cultural institution, influential not only in dance but also in art and letters. Diaghilev’s success and influence in England in the late 1920s led to a desire to produce a genuinely British ballet, and bore fruit soon after his death in Vaughan Williams’s Job: A Masque for Dancing, and subsequently in the formation of the Royal Ballet.

The Secretary of the Camargo Society had written of the English ballet scene in 1930: “If it would not be just to say that Diaghilev found ballet in the condition of Cinderella, it cannot be denied that he left that art worthy to assume the position of a young and lovely sister of Opera and Drama.”⁷⁵ In England as in France, the Russian impresario was instrumental in reshaping the ballet into a vibrant and energetic new synthesis of the arts for the 20^th and 21^st centuries.