Margot Fonteyn Centenary

Born on May 18th 1919, Margot Fonteyn was one of the greatest ballerinas of the 20th century. In addition to her dedication and technical skills, Fonteyn had the good luck to be coached firstly by the Russian dancer and ballet teacher Serafina Astafieva (1876-1934) then through joining the Vic-Wells company directed by its visionary founder Ninette de Valois (1898-2001) at a time when British ballet itself developed and came of age.  

Over the course of decades, Fonteyn, along with Irish-born Ninette de Valois, and choreographer Frederick Ashton (1904-88) established ballet as a popular and serious art-form for British audiences. It can even be said that the rapid development of ballet in Britain as an art-form from circa 1935-1960 was primarily through the talents of Fonteyn as prima ballerina , the high standards instilled in the Corps de ballet by company director de Valois and the 'in-house' choreographic skills of Frederick Ashton. These combined factors contributed towards making what was to become the Royal Ballet, a company equal in stature to long established  Russian ballet companies such as the Bolshoi and Kirov.

  

Fonteyn joined Ninette de Valois's Vic-Wells company (later Sadler Wells, later still, the Royal Ballet) in 1935 when precociously young. She soon found herself selected by de Valois for the highly responsible role of prima ballerina of the Company.

In her detailed biography of Fonteyn, author Meredith Danemann notes that it was also at this time that the ballerina had an on-and-off affair with the stage-conductor and composer Constant Lambert (1905-51). According to friends of Fonteyn, Lambert was the great love of her life and she despaired when she finally realised he would never marry her. Aspects of this relationship were symbolised in Lambert's astrologically-themed ballet Horoscope which was first performed on January 27th 1938. Tragically, Lambert was to die of alcoholism in 1951, only six weeks after his ballet Tiresias with its violent, sexual storyline had received hostile, damning reviews. Lambert's friends claim it was these reviews which  led to the composer drinking  even harder, effectively destroying himself at the age of 45.

Margot Fonteyn endeared herself to the British public by performing throughout the Blitz of the war-years. Undaunted by bombs, she refused to evacuate to a safer location and instead catered for the growing demand for ballet during the war, performing sometimes four or five times in a single day. After the war Fonteyn and the Sadler Wells Ballet company enjoyed worldwide fame following a rapturous reception in New York in 1949. They subsequently toured Australia to equally rave reviews. In 1956 Sadlers Wells was granted a Royal Charter by Queen Elizabeth II and became the Royal Ballet.  

Fonteyn and Robert Helpmann in 'Sleeping Beauty' (1946)

In 1962 at an age when most ballerinas would be considering retirement, Fonteyn embarked upon a second career, partnering the charismatic dancer Rudolf Nureyev (1938-93) who had recently defected from the USSR. The ever-astute De Valois describes her first impressions of Nureyev during his curtain-calls after his first performance in London in 1961 thus-

'I saw an arm raised with a noble dignity, a hand expressively extended with that restrained discipline which is the product of great traditional schooling. Slowly the head turned from one side of the theatre to the other, and the Slav bone-structure of the face, so beautifully modelled, made me feel like an inspired sculptor rather than the director of the Royal Ballet. I could see him clearly and suddenly in one role - Albrecht in Giselle. Then and there I decided that when he first danced for us it must be with Fonteyn in that ballet', [1]

Others wrote more dramatically of Nureyev's performance, one dance critic stating it, 'produced the shock of seeing a wild animal let loose in a drawing-room'. [2]

In her book 'Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet' Judith Holman assesses Fonteyn and Nureyev's relationship and the reception of their first performance together in Giselle  on 21 February 1962 thus-

'At first glance, they seemed unlikely match: he was twenty-four and had a sweeping Soviet style, while she was forty-three and the paragon of English restraint. Yet together they created a potent mix of sex and celebrity that made them icons of the 1960s and "swinging" London's permissive scene:... It was pure populism, ballet for the youth generation and a mass consumer age,.. Fonteyn and Nureyev fashioned themselves into balletic rock superstars.

'How did they do it? The onstage chemistry between them has often been explained by sex: that they had it, wanted it, or suppressed it (they never told). But their partnership also stood for something much larger. In their dancing, East meets West: his campy sexuality and eroticism (heavy makeup with teased and lacquered hair) highlighted and offset her impeccable bourgeois taste. Nureyev played his role to perfection: even in the most classical of steps, he flirted with the image of the Asian potentate, and his unrestrained sensuality and tiger-like movements recalled a cliched Russian orientalism (first exploited by Diaghilev's Ballets Russe), which also linked to the escapist fantasies of 1960s middle-class youth: Eastern mysticism, revolution, sex, and drugs.

'The East was one thing; age was another. Nureyev had a gorgeous, youthful physique; Fonteyn was old enough to be his mother. And although her technique was still impressive, she looked her age. Indeed, as Fonteyn's proper 1950s woman fell into the arms of Nureyev's mod man, the generation gap seemed momentarily to close. .. Not everyone was happy with the result: the prominent American critic John Martin lamented that Fonteyn had  gone "to the grand ball with a gigolo". None of this meant , however that Nureyev was disrespectful. To the contrary, when he partnered Fonteyn he did so with supreme respect and perfect nineteenth century manners. To the British, this mattered: Fonteyn, after all, was still "like the Queen" and during the curtain-call of their first performance of Giselle, Nureyev accepted a rose from Fonteyn and then instinctively fell to his knee at her feet and covered her hand with kisses. The audience went wild'. [3]

Fonteyn spoke of Nureyev's gesture after their first performance together thus-

'It was his way of expressing genuine feelings, untainted by conventional words. Thereafter, a strange attachment formed between us which we have never been able to explain satisfactorily, and which, in a way, one could describe as a deep affection, or love, especially if one believes that love has many forms and degrees. But the fact remains that Rudolf was desperately in love with someone else at the time, and, for me, Tito is always the one with black eyes'. [4] 

More objectively, one dance-critic succinctly noted of the relationship -

'One unforeseen result of Nureyev's advent was a new lease of life for Fonteyn. Since Ulanova's retirement, she and Maya Plisetskaya of the Bolshoi shone above all rivals, but now there were sall signs of a possible end to her supremacy through declining technique and confidence. Nureyev changed all that. Responding to his highly charged stage presence, Fonteyn found a dramatic power that had previously eluded her. In place of the formerly reserved, carefully balanced dancer emerged a woman who threw herself impetuously into her roles. Consequently, she went on to many more years of recognition as a unique artist. [5]

Much has been written and speculated upon Fonteyn and Nureyev's relationship on and off-stage, Rudolf Nureyev is recorded as saying of Fonteyn - 'At the end of Lac des Cygnes (Swan Lake) when she left the stage in her great white tutu I would have followed her to the end of the world'. Nureyev later embarked upon a successful career as the director of the Paris Opera Ballet where he continued to dance and to promote younger dancers. He held this appointment as chief choreographer until 1989. Nureyev tested positive for HIV in 1984 and died tragically young from an AIDs related illness in 1993 aged just 54. 

Equally tragic, Fonteyn's husband Tito was shot during an assassination attempt in 1964 resulting in his becoming a quadriplegic, requiring nursing for the remainder of his life. In 1972, Fonteyn went into semi-retirement, although she continued to occasionally dance until late in her life, partly through a need to subsidise her paraplegic husband's medical bills.  

In 1979, as a gift for her 60th birthday, Fonteyn was fêted by the Royal Ballet and officially pronounced the prima ballerina assoluta of the company. The title was sanctioned by Queen Elizabeth II as patron of the company. Dame Fonteyn retired to Panama, where she spent her time writing books, raising cattle, and caring for her husband. She died from ovarian cancer on February 21st 1991, exactly 29 years to the day after her premiere with Nureyev in Giselle. 

The first global super-star ballerina, Margot Fonteyn placed English ballet on the world-stage. She remains inspirational to dancers and loved by balletomanes throughout the world, still alive in spirit, one hundred years old today.

                                           *   *  *  *

There is one role which Fonteyn identified with, the water-spirit Ondine, choreographed especially for her by Frederick Ashton.  Princess Aurora in Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty is another role she made her own. The 'Rose Adagio' in The Sleeping Beauty in which the ballerina remains balanced en pointe whilst receiving a rose from four suitors is considered to be a formidable technical achievement for a ballerina. 

Notes

Some of Fonteyn's greatest roles were filmed. Mostly inexpensive on DVD, they also reflect the technology of the era, filmed over half a century ago; nevertheless they remain valuable records of Fonteyn as a ballerina. 

* Swan Lake - Fonteyn and Nureyev  Philips 1966

* The Royal Ballet - Firebird (Fokine) and Ondine (Ashton) 1960 Network DVD

* Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet 1966 Network DVD. 

    Grainy colouration 

* Sleeping Beauty 1955 VAI  b/w

Recommended Books

*Margot Fonteyn- Meredith Daneman
  pub. Viking 2004  654pp.

*Apollo's Angels- A History of Ballet- Jennifer Homans
   pub. Granta Books 2010 643pp.

* Invitation to the Ballet -Ninette de Valois
   pub. Bodley Head 1937

Footnotes

[1] Ninette de Valois - Step by Step W. H. Allen 1977 cited by Daneman
[2] Alexander Bland Observer 5th November 1961 cited by Daneman
[3] Apollo's Angels- A History of Ballet-Jennifer Homans. Granta Books 2010 
[4] Fonteyn Autobiography cited by Daneman
[5] Modern Ballet - John Percival pub. The Herbert Press 1970 rev. 1980


Documentary/Biopic DVDs

* Fonteyn and Nureyev -The Perfect Partnership 1985
* Margot Fonteyn - A Portrait Arthaus 1989
* Margot - BBC 2009

The Tale of Tales

Loosely based upon one of the earliest of all European collections of fairy-tales, Italian film director Matteo Garrone's adaptation of Giambattista Basile's The Tale of Tales is a triumph of cinematography. Starring Salma Hayek and Toby Jones, Garrone's Tale of Tales (2015) is sumptuous in costume, decor and location and exemplary of magical realism in cinema.

Early in the first of three overlapping stories, the childless King and Queen of Longtrellis consult a ghoulish necromancer who mysteriously declares- 

'the equilibrium of the world must be maintained, every desire and action corresponds to another, every life calls for a life, birth is always stained by death, death in turn is simply one element of birth'.  

These philosophical aphorisms alert one to the fact that the fairy tales collected by the Neapolitan courier and poet Giambattista Basile (1566-1632) The Tale of Tales (Lo cunto de li cunti) are far removed from the sentimental fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75) and even further removed from the syrup and saccharine servings of modern-day Disney adaptations. 

Taking the advice that the heart of a sea-dragon must be found and cooked by a virgin in order for the Queen to become pregnant, the King of Longtrellis duly embarks upon an aquatic hunt. This first story although deviating from the original plot, nevertheless, like each one of the three overlapping stories of Garrone's  Tale of Tales remains in essence faithful to the moral of Basile's fairy-tale collection. All three stories focus upon the deceptive world of appearances and the fatal consequences which occur when obtaining false desires.

Besides being well-acted, notably in the roles portrayed by Salma Hayek and Toby Jones, the Neapolitan flavour of Basile's tales is conveyed well in costume, decor and location. The Tale of Tales was filmed entirely in Italy, including  at Naples at the Royal Palace, at the Palace of Capodimonte and its gardens, at Apulia's Castel del Monte, Sicily's Donnafugata Castle, Gole dell'Alcantara in Alcantara, Abruzzo's Castello di Roccascalegna, Tuscany's Moorish castle of Sammezzano  and the towns of Sorano and Sovana. All of which are atmospheric backdrops contributing to the film's stylish narrative.

    

In the second tale of The Tale of Tales, the fatal mistake of misdirected desire is once more focussed upon. The King of Highhills (Toby Jones) is distracted by a flea while listening to his daughter accompanying herself on guitar while singing. He captures the flea and lovingly nurtures it. The pet flea grows to monstrous proportions to become a secret hobby of greater importance to him than the future of his daughter. When the flea dies the King concocts a bizarre challenge for the hand of his daughter in marriage which backfires with fatal consequences when an ogre visits his castle to take up his challenge.   

In the third story featured in The Tale of Tales the dissolute and lustful King of Longtrellis (Vincent Cassell) also hears a woman singing and becomes obsessed with seducing her.  However, unknown to him, the voice he hears belongs to one of two  aged and withered sisters. Unable to see his obsessive love he persuades her to grant him the favour of at least poking a finger through a hole for him to kiss (some quite overt Freudian symbolism going on there). Once obtaining his full desire and disgusted at her true appearance, he orders his guards to commit an act of defenestration upon his rejected lover. Caught mid-flight in the branches of a tree she is suckled by a sorceress and transformed into a beautiful young woman.  

In Basile's fairy stories the staple diet of fairy tales world-wide can be found, seemingly impossible tasks to be performed, humans transformed into animals such as cats, doves, foxes and whales which talk, dramatis personae of dwarves and ogres, cruel step-mothers, magicians and sorceresses, peasants and Kings, true love found and tales of rags to riches. Basile's stories also include moral aphorisms such as, 'Ingratitude is a nail, which, driven into the tree of courtesy, causes it to wither' and, 'One hour in port, the sailor freed from fears, forgets the tempests of a hundred years'. as well as astrological aphorisms one character uttering, 'He is a madman who resists the stars',  another says 'Praised be Sol in Leo !' The pipes of Pan, with their seven reeds one larger than another are also mentioned. 

Such is the sophistication of Basile's tales in their construction that in the 2007 Penguin translation of his tales, the translator observes - 

Each tale is introduced by a rubric that sums up the story and a preamble that includes a summary of the audience's reactions to the previous tale as well as reflections on the teaching of the tale to come (often leading to discussions of favourite Renaissance and Baroque topics such as fortune and virtue, wit, envy), and concludes with a moralizing proverb, often from Basile's Neapolitan wit [1]

'Heaven sends biscuits to him who has no teeth'.

Basile's plots often reverse expectations, his language is described as - 'an unusual stylized Baroque version of the Neapolitan dialect, at times mellifluous, at times coarse and provocative; his critical commentary on his era was so far ahead of his time that it still has a bearing on contemporary society'. [2]   

'Basile's tales are inhabited by supernatural creatures and propelled by forms of magic entirely disassociated from any religious system, at a time when the strict orthodoxy of the Counter- Reformation influenced public and private expression. The Tale of Tales is a work that simultaneously  evokes the humus of seventeenth century Naples- its landmarks, customs and daily rituals, family and professional life - and conjures forth a fantastic world whose originality still holds strong attraction today'. [3]

Giambattista Basile (1575-1632)

Another critic describes Basile's tales as -'bawdy and irreverent but also tender and whimsical; acute in psychological characterization and at the same time encyclopaedic in description; full, ultimately, of irregularities and loose ends that somewhat magically manage to merge into a splendid portrait of creatures engaged in the grave and laborious, gratifying and joyful business of learning to live in the world - and to tell about it. '[4]

Basile's dark and baroque fairy-tales are equal in importance to those of Charles Perrault (1697) or the Brothers Grimm (1810); indeed The Tale of Tales contains the earliest literary versions of many celebrated  fairy tales  - Cinderella, sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, and Hansel and Gretel among others. Throughout the past two centuries, in particular, the Brothers Grimm highly influential collection of fairy tales, almost every nation and culture from Russian to Lapp to Aborigine have sought to collate a definitive collection of their own fairy-tales. It was not until the 20th century in Italy that a definitive collection of fairy-tales were collated. Basile was a key influence and source to Italo Calvino's masterly compilation Fiabe Italiane (Italian folktales) of over 200 Italian fairy tales, which  Calvino describes thus-

   

Taken all together, they offer, in their oft-repeated and constantly varying examinations of human vicissitudes, a general explanation of life preserved in the slow ripening of rustic consciences; folk stories are the catalog of the potential destinies of men and women, especially for that stage in life when destiny is formed i.e. youth, beginning with birth, which itself often foreshadows the future; then the departure from home, and, finally, through the trials of growing up, the attainment of maturity and the proof of one’s humanity. This sketch, although summary, encompasses everything: the arbitrary division of humans, albeit in essence equal, into kings and poor people; the persecution of the innocent and their subsequent vindication, which are the terms  inherent in every life; love unrecognised when first encountered and then no sooner experienced than lost; the common fate of subjection to spells, or having one’s existence predetermined by complex and unknown forces. This complexity pervades one’s entire existence and forces one to struggle to free oneself, to determine one’s own fate; at the same time we can liberate ourselves only if we liberate other people, for this is the sine qua non of one’s own liberation. There must be fidelity to a goal and purity of heart, values fundamental to salvation and triumph. There must also be beauty, a sign of grace that can be masked by the humble, ugly guise of a frog; and above all, there must be present the infinite possibilities of mutation, the unifying element in everything: men, beasts, plants, things. [5]

In contemporary study of the fairy tale, Jack Zipes, the most industrious scholar in the field, has developed a politically committed, cultural materialist perspective which explores the multiple ricochets between historical facts and mentalities (including class and gender values) with fairytale scenarios. His extensive criticism, from Don't Bet on the Prince (1986) to his recent The Irresistible Rise of the Fairy Tale (2007) has simultaneously helped give fairy tales greater stature as literature and led to sharp controversy about their pernicious or liberating influence upon audiences, especially the young.[6] According to Zipes -

'In the fairy tale man is freed from the mystery's obligation of silence by transforming it into enchantment; it is not participation in a cult of knowledge which renders him speechless, but bewitchment. The silence of the mystery is undergone as a rupture, plunging man back into the pure, mute language of nature; but as a spell, silence must eventually be shattered and conquered. This is why, in the fairy tale, man is struck dumb, and animals emerge from the pure language of nature in order to speak'. [7]

Fairy tales have attracted the attention of many great artists, poets, illustrators and composers. Adapted for theatre as the framework for countless Christmas pantomimes and the inspiration for various composers (some of the greatest ballets of all-time are based upon fairy-tales, namely, Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty as well as Stravinsky's ballet The Firebird) the literary genre of the fairy or folk tale continues to be a source of inspiration, entertainment and interpretative discourse throughout the world. 

Celebrating the power of the imagination the fairy story is a literary genre which may be considered as exemplary of magical realism. In the modern-era, Cinema with its combination of sound and moving image is another medium through which magical realism can be convincingly experienced.

In the Mexican film-director Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006) the worlds of fascist Spain and the dark fantasy world his adopted daughter Ofelia explores are juxtaposed to eventually collide, with tragic, yet redeeming consequences. Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, along with The Tin Drum (Schlöndorff 1979) The City of Lost Children (Caro and Jeunet 1995) Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001) Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze 1999) Amélie ( Jeunet 2001) The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (Brothers Quay 2005) The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry 2006) and many of the films by Terry Gilliam are among my personal favourites. There is however nowadays an increasingly amorphous and mushrooming of the term 'magical realism' and an ever-lengthening list of films which critics claim are exemplary of the generic term, thus rendering the label near meaningless.   

The psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung occupied themselves with the inner meaning of fairy tales and folk motifs, and both had disciples who dedicated full-length studies to the analysis of fairy tales. The Swiss psychologist C.G.Jung (1875-1961) wrote two major studies on fairy-stories, 'The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales' and 'The Spirit  Mercurius' which analyzes the Brothers Grimm's 'The Spirit in the Bottle'. Jung interpreted fairytales, along with alchemy and dreams, as conduits to the unconscious psyche, noting-  

'Fairytales seem to be the myths of childhood and they therefore contain among other things the mythology which children weave for themselves concerning sexual processes. The poetry of the fairytale, whose magic is felt even by the adult, rests not least upon the fact that some of the old theories are still alive in our unconscious. We experience a strange and mysterious feeling whenever a fragment of our remotest youth stirs into life again, not actually reaching consciousness, but merely shedding a reflection of its emotional intensity on the conscious mind'. [8] 

According to Jung, 'As in alchemy, the fairytale describes the unconscious processes that compensate the conscious, Christian situation...the fairytale makes it clear that it is possible for a man to attain totality, to become whole, only with the spirit of darkness, indeed that the latter is actually a causa instrumentalis of redemption and individuation'. [9] 

'Myths and fairytales give expression to unconscious processes, and their retelling causes these processes to come alive again and be recollected, thereby re-establishing the connection between conscious and unconscious'.  [10] 

C.G. Jung believed that - 'It is extremely important to tell children fairy tales and legends, and to inculcate religious ideas into grown-ups, because these things are instrumental symbols with whose help unconscious contents can be canalized into consciousness, interpreted and integrated'. [11] 

The function of the fairy-tale according to Jung is - 'to tell us how to proceed if we want to overcome the power of darkness: we must turn his own weapons against him, which naturally cannot be done if the magical underworld of the hunter remains unconscious'. [12] 

It was however Jung's disciple, Marie-Louis von Franz (1915-1998) who took fairy-tales seriously enough to devote many years of her life exploring their psychological symbolism. von Franz's books remain fruitful reading for those wishing to study fairy-tales from a Jungian perspective in  greater depth. [13]

In conclusion, returning our attention to  Basile's fairy-tales  - In an interview at the Cannes film festival in 2016 the Italian film director Matteo Garrone quoted Calvino's description of Basile as a kind of 'deformed Neapolitan Shakespeare' and described his own film adaptation of Basile's tale as being fantasy with horror. In what must surely have been a labour of love, i.e. to restore a neglected work of Italian literature, Garrone's film is to be applauded for raising the profile of Basile's little-known collection.

Notes

[1] Giambattista  Basile  The Tale of Tales Penguin Books Wayne State University Press 2007
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Italo Calvino  - Italian Folktales  pub. 1956 trans. 1980
[6] Once Upon a Time - A short history of fairy tale - Marina Warner OUP 2014
[7] Ibid.
[8] C.G.Jung Collected Works Vol.  17 para 43

[9]  CW vol. 9 i: 453 'The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales' (1945/48)

[10]  CW 9 ii: 280
[11] CW 9 ii: 259
[12] CW 9 i: 453 'The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales' (1945/48)
[13] The Feminine in Fairytales - M.L. von Franz - Spring Publications 1972
The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Myths in Fairytales - M.L. von Franz Inner City books 1980.

The Wooden Prince

First performed in Budapest, a full century ago on May 12th 1917,  Béla Bartók's ballet-pantomime The Wooden Prince is based upon a fairy-tale which focuses upon the themes of love and loneliness, the contrasting natures of men and women, the artist's relationship to creativity and the triumph of love over adversity.

The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881-1945) is arguably one of the unhappiest examples of a composer who learned to live with neglect. Throughout most of his career, discouragement, the struggle to find an audience, failing health and chronic poverty, dominated his life. It was only after his death in 1945 that public recognition of his musical genius occurred.

In 1914, the writer Béla Balázs, who also wrote the text for Bartok's opera Bluebeard’s Castle, found the composer, “in a gloomy and hopeless state of mind. He was thinking about emigration, or of suicide.” The Wooden Prince was a composition in which Bartók’s fortunes seemed, at least temporarily, to change. Balázs suggested to Bartók the idea of a musical pantomime. Composition began in 1914; it was the first serious work Bartók had attempted in many months. Progress was sporadic, but he persisted, inspired by the promise of a staged production. It may well have been the subtext of Balázs's pantomime about the fate of the creative artist which inspired him.

The orchestral score of The Wooden Prince is the largest ever employed by Bartok. The composer calls for four flutes and two piccolos, four oboes and two english horns, four clarinets, E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, four bassoons and two contrabassoons, three saxophones, four horns, four trumpets and two cornets, three trombones and tuba, two harps, celesta, glockenspiel, xylophone, triangle, castanets, cymbals, side drum, bass drum, tam-tam, and strings. Its total performance time is approximately fifty minutes.

Termed a symphonic poem for dance by the composer, each individual dance of The Wooden Prince varies sharply in character. Highlights of the orchestral score include a terrifying Tolkien Ent-like march of trees, a jazz influenced dance upon waves featuring three saxophones, a playful dance of the princess in the forest scored for solo clarinet, harp and pizzicato strings, and a vigorous comic dance in which Bartok caricatures the movements of the wooden dummy prince lurching through abrupt shifts of tempo with a pulsing, repetitive rhythmic stamp.

The Wooden Prince reveals a number of influences upon the composer's maturing style. Its brilliant, original and colourful orchestration may have resulted from Bartok’s encounter with the repertoire of the Ballet Russe who visited Budapest with the Hungarian premieres in 1913 of Stravinsky’s two new ballets, The Firebird with its libretto based upon a conglomerate of Russian fairy tales, and the puppet-drama Petrushka.

The tone-poems of the Austrian composer Richard Strauss were also an influence upon Bartók who reportedly was stunned when first hearing Also Sprach Zarathustra (1890) at its Budapest premiere in 1902. Other influences include Bartok's careful study of Debussy’s scores at his friend and fellow composer Zoltan Kodály’s suggestion; and the discovery of Eastern European folk music, which had given him a second career as a pioneer ethnomusicologist.

The libretto of The Wooden Prince tells of a handsome young prince who sees a beautiful princess playing flirtatiously among the trees. He impulsively falls in love with her and struggles to win her heart. In his way stand the wishes of a fairy who wishes the prince to belong alone in her magical nature world, and who uses all her powers to prevent him from reaching the princess. In the third dance, termed a 'grand ballet', the forest itself, and then a river are summoned to turn the prince away from his goal, while in the distance the princess sits at her spinning wheel in the castle, oblivious to his effort. To gain her attention the prince fashions an image of himself, that he can lift above the trees for her to glimpse. He takes his crown, his sword, and, eventually, his golden hair, arranges them on a dummy, and watches as the princess instantly stops sewing and dashes down through the forest to find this handsome prince she has seen . The princess falls in love not with the real prince, but with the wooden dummy he has made, resulting in the dejected prince retreating into solitude. The wooden prince is brought to life by the fairy. The princess is disappointed once the dummy breaks down, catches sight of the real prince, and succeeds in regaining his heart. The prince abandons solitude for the embrace of lover. As the curtain falls the story ends with the lovers, now certain of their affection, standing quietly gazing into each other’s eyes.

Opening in the key of C major with distinct reference to the music of Richard Wagner's Rheingold, the introduction of The Wooden Prince displays great psychological mastery as its music slowly transforms from a mood of calm and tranquillity to one of full-blown tension and crisis.

Early in the ballet there is an uncanny evocation of a vast green forest and 'Water- music' in which Bartok vividly conjures a direct image of nature, applying the lessons of his impressionistic phase from the music of Debussy. The French composer's influence can be heard in the third dance of the ballet, Dance of the Waves which features three saxophones. 

The Belgian inventor Adolphe Sax's great contribution to music, the saxophone is featured in various other orchestral works, in particular those of French composers including Bizet in his L'Arlesienne suites dating from the 1870's, Ravel's Bolero (1928) as well as his orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (1922) and Debussy's Rhapsody for Saxophone and Orchestra (1903). Others who composed for the saxophone's distinctive voice include Rachmaninov in his Symphonic Dances (1940), his last ever composition, Vaughan Williams in Job, A Masque For Dancing (premiered in concert form in October 1930 at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival), Alexander Glazunov in his Concerto for  Alto Saxophone and String Orchestra (1934) and Benjamin Britten in his Sinfonia da Requiem (1941).

One would have thought the saxophone to be the perfect instrument to depict a bustling metropolis in Bartok's subsequent work The Miraculous Mandarin, a story of sex, crime, murder and robbery, but in fact it's in the third dance of The Wooden Prince, entitled Dance of the Waves, with its three saxophones, that one of the earliest allusions  in orchestral music to jazz can be heard. 

The full sequence of dances in The Wooden Prince is as follows-

Part 1  [Prelude before the curtain rises]   [Awakening of Nature]

First Dance -  Dance of the princess in the forest.
Prince falls in love with her.

Second Dance -  Dance of the trees.
Trees, brought to life by the fairy, prevent the prince from reaching her.

Third Dance -  Dance of the Waves.

Fourth Dance - Dance of the princess with the wooden doll.

Fifth Dance - Princess pulls and tugs at the collapsing wooden prince.

Sixth Dance  - She tries to attract the real Prince with seductive dancing.

Seventh Dance - Dismayed, the Princess attempts to hurry after the Prince. Prince and Princess embrace. Nature returns to a peaceful state.

In addition to the Italian story-teller Carlo Collodi's world-famous tale of the adventures of a wooden doll who becomes a boy, Pinocchio (1883) there are several ballets which feature a dummy or mannikin.

Leo Delibe's comic ballet Coppelia (1870), Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker (1892) based upon E.T.A. Hoffman's dark tale of 1816, and Stravinsky’s ground-breaking score for the Ballet Russe, Petrushka (1911) all feature a puppet or doll-like character. In the frenzied courtship dance of the princess with the puppet wooden prince Bartok utilizes exotic pentatonic harmonies and vigorous rhythms which are imitative of  music in the score of Stravinsky's ballet, Petrushka. 

A rare Hungarian video-clip of the moment the princess meets and dances with the wooden prince gives an idea of the intricate relationship between orchestral score and its choreography.  

In the ballet's apotheosis the melody featured at the moment of the couple's final coming together is the Hungarian folk-song Fly, Peacock, quoted by Bartók in his First String Quartet and which Zoltán Kodály also quotes in his Peacock Variations.

The librettist of The Wooden Prince, Béla Balázs stated that the wooden puppet symbolizes the creative work of the artist, who puts all of himself into his work until he has made something complete, shining, and perfect. The artist himself, however, is left poor. as in that common and profound tragedy in which the creation becomes the rival of the creator, or the bitter-sweet dilemma in which a woman prefers the poem to the poet, the picture to the painter.

For the American music-historian Carl Leafstedt, the character of the Prince in Bartok’s ballet-pantomime is one of a symbolic chain of lonely selves which populate Bartok’s stage works. These include - Bluebeard, Judith, the Prince, Mimi and the Mandarin -  all of whom are character’s seeking, and sometimes finding, however briefly, the release from solitude and the wholeness which love can bring. Leafstedt also noted - ‘Bartok extends and makes dramatically convincing, the prince’s gradual resignation and his ensuing embrace by Nature, as the fairy commands all things in the forest to pay homage to the disconsolate man. In so doing he enlarges the work’s symbolism: the prince’s grief is not merely a transitory grief over a lost opportunity, but a life-altering moment of realization. He sees, with a clarity never before experienced, the emptiness of humanity’s pursuit of love, and in that moment of realization gains symbolic admittance into a realm lying beyond reason, beyond suffering, where man, alone, can lay down the burdens of his soul on the breast of Nature. This apotheosis forms the emotional centre of Bartok’s ballet; it is surrounded on either side by the quicker, more extroverted dances of the princess and wooden prince. [1]

The literary genre of the fairy tale has become increasingly scrutinized and analysed. Taken seriously by the psychologist C.G. Jung, notably in  his two essays dating from 1948, 'The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales' and in his analysis of the Brothers Grimm fairy-tale The Spirit in the Bottle in his The Spirit Mercurius 1948). Jung viewed fairy tales like myths to be spontaneous and naive products of soul which depicted different stages of experiencing the reality of the soul.

Jung's close associate, Marie-Louis von Franz (1915-98) considered fairy tales, along with alchemy, as examples of how the collective unconscious compensates for the one-sidedness of Christianity and its ruling god image. For Jungian analysts fairy tales are the 'purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes' which represent the archetypes in their simplest, barest and most concise form'. 'In this pure form, the archetypal images afford us the best clues to the understanding of the processes going on in the collective psyche'.

Marie-Louis von Franz  speculated - 'I have come to the conclusion that all fairy tales endeavour to describe one and the same psychic fact, but a fact so complex and far-reaching and so difficult for us to realize in all its different aspects that hundreds of tales and thousands of repetitions with a musician’s variation are needed until this unknown fact is delivered into consciousness; and even then the theme is not exhausted. This unknown fact is what Jung calls the Self, which is the psychic reality of the collective unconscious'.

An attentive reading of  the complex orchestral score of Bartok's The Wooden Prince reveals a multitude of 'copy-book' motifs found in the soundtracks of numerous Hollywood films, including the genre of cartoon or animation. This is none too surprising for some of the most gifted of European composers, including Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, and Bohuslav Martinu, as well as Bartok, sought asylum in America before and during World War II. Their influence upon the development of American music cannot be under-estimated.

With its psychological motifs, impassioned moments and stark rhythms which originate from Bartok's study of Eastern European folk music known as Verbunkos, The Wooden Prince can now be recognised as not only an example of how European orchestral music  influenced future  music-making in America, but also as an orchestral work as radical and innovative as Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) in 20th century music. 

Although productions of The Wooden Prince as a ballet are few in number today, it remains in the Hungarian dance repertoire to the present-day, as can be seen in the following video-clip.

Bibliography and Notes

Bartok Orchestral Music  John McCabe BBC pub. 1974

[1] The Cambridge Companion to Bartok  edited by Amanda Bayley pub. CUP 2001 includes - The Stage Works: Portraits of loneliness  by Carl Leaftstedt

Discography

The Wooden Prince and Cantata Profana - Chicago Symphony Orchestra and chorus conducted by Pierre Boulez  DGG 1991

Naxos - The Wooden Prince - Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop 2008

Illustrations


Top - A photo of Nikolay Boyarchikov's 1966 choreographic version of  The Wooden Prince at the Mikhailovsky Theatre, Saint Petersburg.

Next - Cover of 1917 Budapest publication of Béla Balázs The Wooden Prince.

An essay for Carl living in Hungary.

Peter Rodulfo's 'As the Elephant Laughed'. A Panorama of Evolution

Amongst the varied proliferation of paintings by the artist Peter Rodulfo As the Elephant Laughed is exemplary of stylistic characteristics encountered in his art. These include- sophisticated draughtsmanship and polished brush-work in conjunction with an industrious creativity and an exuberant imagination; all of which harmoniously unite in Laughing Elephant to produce a key-signature work, richly rewarding to view, and well worthy of in-depth analysis. 

Painted in oils on canvas during the winter of 2011/12, and one of his last art-works before relocating studio and home from Norwich to the coastal resort of Great Yarmouth, the foreground of Laughing Elephant (ease of reference title) features titular elephant facing a fox. Above the horizon the brilliant luminosity of a star casts its light upon a vast ocean where a large floating sea-shell supports a youth who stands in an enigmatic pose. The entire centre field of the canvas is dominated by two large, spiral-like waves which swirl and bubble with protozoan life. Two grass-tufted cliffs with homes perched precariously perched upon them frame the canvas on its left and right. The ghostly remains of a church tower, a dinosaur, along with trees caught in a breeze can also be seen, as well as an elderly woman sitting upon a sea-view bench, reflectively looking out to sea.

First impressions include a well-balanced and coordinated tonal spectrum, recollecting the saturated colours of a 1960‘s magic lantern celluloid slide, with a predominance of vivid hues of blue, a colour often linked with spirituality for its association with the sky and heaven.

The element of water in various forms is also often encountered in Rodulfo’s art, perhaps from the artist’s familiarity with the world’s seas and oceans as a well-seasoned traveller.

A good example of the artist’s meticulous attention to detail can be seen in the finely-worked detail of a nautilus-shell (top left) as well as in star-light reflected in water.

Detail  - Nautilus shell (top left)

The artist’s ability to create a multi-layered perspective is also evident, through a technical device which not only juxtaposes differing views, in this case both landscape and seascape, but also in conjunction with the paradox of day-light and night-sky appearing simultaneously.

Like much of Rodulfo’s art, the overall 'mood-music’ of  Laughing Elephant is essentially up-beat, good-humoured and optimistic, yet not without a philosophical dimension, for although measuring only 60 x 82 centimetres its jumbo-sized in artistic expression and interpretive dimension.

With its depiction of a variety of life-forms, marine and mammal, trees, flowers, stars and dinosaur, along with humankind, all seemingly caught in a swirling vortex of life, a receptive viewer is stimulated towards an awareness of their own, as well as humanity’s  relationship to Time and Space, Nature and the Universe.

The centre-field of Rodulfo’s Laughing Elephant is dominated by two large waves which whisk and swirl with protozoan life. According to the psychologist Carl Jung, the spiral is an archetypal symbol representing cosmic force and symbolic of the spiritual journey. The spiral pattern is also considered to represent the evolutionary process of learning and growing, it can be found in structures as small as the double helix of DNA and as large as a galaxy. At Newgrange in County Meath, Ireland, solar aligned tombs can be seen with complex spiral patterns. Dating from around 3000-2500 BC, these patterns decorate structures which are earlier in time than either Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids.

Rodulfo’s imagery is worth exploring, in particular the two pairs of contrasting mammals in his painting, namely an elephant and fox, along with the human figures of a male youth and an elderly woman.

Detail from Rodulfo's As the Elephant Laughed

With a friendly, all-knowing eye and grinning chops, Rodulfo’s elephant raises its proboscis trunk aloft, as if trumpeting in laughter, perhaps at human folly.

Almost all symbolism relating to elephants originates from the Indian sub-continent, where Rodulfo spent a portion of his childhood. In Asian cultures, the elephant is a symbol of good luck, happiness and longevity; its also famed for its memory and wisdom, psychic qualities equally attributable to the English physician and hermetic scientist, Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82) who mentions elephants in each and every one of his major writings.

Sir Thomas Browne on the Elephant

In his Religio Medici Browne exclaims-

'ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of nature, Whales, Elephants, Dromedaries, and Camels; these I confess, are the Colossus and Majestic pieces of her hand'. [1] 

In his gargantuan encyclopaedia Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) Browne considers necks, informing his reader that,

'So have Horses, Camels and Dromedaries long necks, and all tall animals, except the Elephant, who in defect there of, is furnished with a Trunk, without which he could not attain the ground'. [2]

In fact Browne devotes an entire chapter upon the elephant in Pseudodoxia Epidemica discussing its anatomy and refuting the false belief  that it has no joints. It is however, only after informing his reader of ancient world historians who recorded -

‘Elephants have been instructed to walk on ropes, in public shows before the people’, and of that, ‘memorable show... wherein twelve Elephants danced unto the sound of Music, and after laid them down in ...places of festival Recumbency’,

The learned doctor finally remembers having actually seeing an elephant himself-

‘whereof not many years past, we have had the advantage in England, by an Elephant shewn in many parts thereof, not only in the posture of standing, but kneeling and lying down’.

Browne concludes his chapter on the elephant with the speculation that because they exhibit reason, along with the necessary organs of speech, namely lips, teeth and chops, that elephants, ‘might not be taught to speak, or become imitators of speech like Birds’.[3]

Given the fact that Browne believed elephants could be taught to speak, one may hazard a guess, that if he'd heard of a laughing elephant he'd hardly have been surprised at all !

Late in his life (circa 1673) Browne composed Museum Clausum  a catalogue of imaginary, rumoured and lost books, pictures and rarities, which includes the delightful image of-

An Elephant dancing upon the Ropes with a Negro Dwarf upon his Back.  [4]

In modern times, the Irish novelist John Banville remarked of elephants-

‘what amazing beasts they are, a direct link surely to a time long before our time, when behemoths even bigger than they roared and rampaged though forest and swamp. In a manner they are melancholy and yet seem covertly amused, at us, apparently...... If one set out to seek among our fellow-creatures, the land-bound ones, at least,  for our very opposite, one would surely need look no further than the elephants.  [5]

Detail from As the Elephant Laughed'

With its gorgeous russet-red fur, standing alert and looking sly facing titular elephant, the fox is invariably portrayed in world mythology and folk-lore as a cunning trickster-figure, a transgressor who breaks the rules, being at odds with humankind and living upon its wits. Yet in fact the fox shares some characteristics which are associated with humanity being- 

Independent, yet liking company, busy and inventive, yet destructive, too; bold but cowardly, alert and cunning but equally careless, the fox embodies the contradictions inherent in human nature’.[6]

Detail from  As the Elephant Laughed' 

Centre-stage in Rodulfo’s vision of evolution a mysterious youth stands astride a floating sea-shell. He’s engaged in a complex pose which involves one hand on the back of his head and another stretched out, as if shielding his eyes from being dazzled, his palm seemingly feeling the spiralling energy-field above him.

In almost all alchemical iconography the enigmatic figure of Mercurius is invariably portrayed as either mirthful and at play, or in the role of messenger and psychopomp to the gods of antiquity. Rodulfo's sea-shell figure is also a sophisticated variant upon the Renaissance artist Botticelli’s painting The Birth of Venus.

Botticelli -The Birth of Venus (c. 1486).

In stark polarity to this enigmatic, youthful figure there is an elderly woman with grey hair sitting upon a sea-view bench. She’s gazing out to sea, perhaps reminiscing memories from her past. Rodulfo here acknowledges the longevity of woman, along with the often unacknowledged power of matriarchy and of woman as the true vessel of ancestral memory.

In the German polymath Johann Goethe’s drama Faust the hero descends to the "realm of the mothers" — variously described as either the depths of the psyche or the cosmic womb.

Detail from  As the Elephant Laughed'

This pairing of figures, youth and age are identifiable  as variants upon the symbolism of puer et senex, (their technical art term), a pairing frequently encountered in Mannerist art and alchemical iconography representing Youth and Age. Together they symbolize the human life-span and Time in general.   

With its depiction of a wide variety of life-forms, manipulation of perspective in order to create depth of field, evocation of movement, featuring a complex pose, as well as inclination towards symbolism, Rodulfo’s Laughing Elephant may loosely be defined as Neo-Mannerist, for each and every one of the forenamed techniques, themes and artistic concerns associated with the art-movement of Mannerism, can also be seen in his art. Other paintings by Rodulfo which may also be defined as Neo-Mannerist in style and content include his - The Klagenfurt Altar, Across the Bay and The Visitor. 

Characteristics of the art movement of Mannerism include variety and multiplicity, unusual perspective, staged and complex poses and utilization of mythological and esoteric concepts. Mannerist art is now recognised as being highly influential upon the twentieth century art movement of Surrealism. Indeed, the early Mannerist artist Arcimboldo (1527-1593) who used fruit and flowers to create bizarre portrait paintings, was described as the “father of Surrealism” by Salvador Dali. Rodulfo also creates his own quite unique ‘double-imagery’ as well as being familiar with Mannerist art in general. In his painting Hide and Seek an elephant is featured as part of a complex 'double-image'.

Peter Rodulfo's Hide and Seek  Oils on canvas 40 x 52 cms. (2015)

A fruitful comparison in technique, imagery and overall imagination to Rodulfo’s Laughing Elephant  can be found in the Dutch Northern Mannerist artist Joachin Wtewal’s Perseus and Andromeda (1611). Painted near exact 400 years earlier than Rodulfo’s Laughing Elephant, Wtewal’s masterpiece is inspired by the ancient Greek myth of the hero Perseus rescuing Andromeda from a dragon; it also exhibits variety, a strongly developed technique, a sense of movement and vastness, unusual perspective, along with featuring a complex, almost contorted pose. 

Joachin Wtewal's Perseus and Andromeda 

A closer analogy to the thematic concerns and style to Rodulfo’s art in general can be found in the paintings of the twentieth century German artist Max Ernst (1891-1976) and the British artist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). Briefly lovers at the onset of World War II, Ernst and Carrington utilized highly-developed techniques and artistic devices similar to those associated with Mannerist art.  Both artists also occasionally allude to esoteric and alchemical concepts in their respective paintings; and although Rodulfo himself eschews any credence whatsoever to esoteric arcarna, nevertheless casual allusions to esoteric concepts can be discerned in his art, both conscious and unconscious.  

If however any esoteric themes or imagery can be detected in Rodulfo’s art, in all probability its simply because archetypal imagery is often embedded at an unconscious level in the psyche, and therefore the artist’s own encounter with such imagery may paradoxically and simultaneously be both conscious from familiarity and also unconscious in realization.

Crucially, although Rodulfo has on occasions found Classical mythology inspiring, more often his imagery is harvested from his own, home-grown plantation of symbols, producing a rich, allusive language, capable of expressing profound psychological statements. Its an imagery language which in the case of Laughing Elephant, engages in transcendental synthesis, that is, the total sum of its parts hints of a greater vision, one of evolution and humanity’s place within it. Its also a stark reminder in essence, with its depiction of dinosaur and abundant protozoan life, that humanity is only one of nature’s innumerable life-forms alive on Earth, in the past, present and future.

Just as Mannerist art was a product of Renaissance humanism and therefore inclined towards emphasis upon  the relationship between humanity and nature - so too Neo-Mannerist art such as Rodulfo’s Laughing Elephant, expresses the same message. 

Although enjoyable purely as a colourful and fun decorative art-work, the central ‘message’ of Rodulfo’s panorama of life seems to be - all life is involved and inter-connected in evolution, from flower and tree to star and human,  individually and collectively; and as such its ‘message’ is of importance to those alive in the world today.

Part 2

As the Elephant Laughed      Click to enlarge

An increasing interest, acceptance and understanding of alchemical concepts and symbols now permits esoteric concepts to be applied, not unlike the famous melting watches of Salvador Dali, in a, ‘soft and flexible’ way, that is, without any fixed or dictator-like attitude, to works of art, including Rodulfo’s Laughing Elephant. One fruitful avenue of enquiry worthwhile strolling down in discourse upon Laughing Elephant can be found in the lyrics of the multi-media artist David Bowie (1946 - 2016). 

In addition to being a highly original song-writer and a versatile performer who was gifted enough to work in diverse musical genres for decades, David Bowie was also a voracious reader. Throughout his long, front-running career in music, Bowie found recreation in reading spiritual and esoteric literature including Christian Gnosticism, Alistair Crowley, the Kabbalah and the writings of the psychologist Carl Jung, subjects which he sometimes alluded to in his strikingly original lyrics. [7]

Like David Bowie, Peter Rodulfo’s an artist who thrives upon rapid stylistic changes, as well as being erudite whilst maintaining his independence in creative aesthetic. He is also familiar with esoteric concepts, in particular the ideas and writings of Alistair Crowley (1875-1947), a major figure in British esotericism whose present-day reputation Rodulfo accurately assesses as one of character-assassination through the prudery, prejudices and misinformation of the British tabloid press of Crowley’s day. 

David Bowie’s allusion to the ideas of C.G. Jung can be found on the  album with its word-play title, Aladdin Sane, (1973) in the song Drive-in Saturday  in the line - ‘Jung the foreman prayed at work’, a word-play allusion to Jung’s fixation upon the number four or quaternity as the number which he believed symbolizes totality and wholeness best, citing the four points of the compass, the four seasons, four elements and the Christian tetramorph among numerous examples, as expressions of totality.

Whether intentional or not, Rodulfo’s Laughing Elephant features no less than four mammals - an elephant and a fox, a youth and an elderly woman. Together the polarised figures of elephant and fox may be considered as having a relationship to the youthful figure astride a sea-shell and the elderly woman contemplating the sea, that of anthropomorphic aspects of the human psyche. All four mammals in totality form a Jungian quaternity no less; for once the polarity of the figures of youth and elderly woman are identified as symbols representing Youth and Age, (technically known as puer et senex in both Mannerist art and alchemical iconography and commonly associated with the planetary symbolism of Mercurius ei Saturnus), then the pairing of the utterly antithetical fox and elephant may also hint of planetary symbolism when explored through the prism of comparative religion and mythology. 

In Hindu mythology the elephant's thick, grey skin is likened to the latent and hidden power and strength of the sun when occulted by thick and heavy grey cloud [8]. Such symbolism is highly suggestive of the elephant's s association with the solar.

In almost all world mythology and folk-lore the fox with its nocturnal activities and changeable nature is associated with the feminine and the moon. The fox’s feminine and deceptive qualities are reflected in the anima projections of  rock-music lyrics such as Jimmy Hendrix’s ‘Foxy Lady’ and Jim Morrison’s song ‘20th century Fox’ .  More recently lyrics by the brothers Mael of Sparks in their 2008 song This is the Renaissance in which there are Paintings filled with foxy women. Thus its possible to extract from Rodulfo’s Laughing Elephant a planetary quaternity consisting of Sol et Luna in conjunction with the pairing of puer et senex (Youth and Age) which are invariably represented by the planetary opposites Mercurius et Saturnus. This planetary quaternity of two luminaries and two planetary opposites, is identical to those named in the German alchemist Michael Maier’s book of Mannerist styled emblems Atalanta Fugiens (1617). The very same quartet of planetary symbolism is allude to by the quartet of statuettes found upon the funerary monument known as the Layer monument (c. 1600, Norwich).  

Yet even in the ecstatic rubedo moment depicted, there’s a hint of a curtain ready to fall and in an instant black-out Rodulfo’s vision of the inter-connection of life, and for a cyclical return from rubedo revelation to a nigredo state of darkness, gloom and unknowingness. This return to a nigredo state is hinted by a spectral church, perhaps an allusion to the death-throes of Christianity in the 21st century, to houses perched precariously upon cliffs, and above all, by a raven seen entering in full-flight intruding into the frame. (top-right). 

Birds and avian symbolism in general often occur in the surrealist art of Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington, as well as in alchemical iconography where the black raven, dove, eagle, white swan, peacock, pelican, phoenix and vulture among others, are frequently encountered. Birds can also be seen in several of Rodulfo’s paintings, sometimes making a nuisance of themselves by playfully intruding into the frame of a well-ordered composition, quizzically eye-balling the viewer.

In the early 17th century alchemical anthology the Theatrum Chemicum  a black raven settles upon a melancholic adept under the influence of  the malefic planet, Saturn.

An Elephant in the Garden

Rodulfo’s Laughing Elephant has a remarkable affinity with another great art-work which also expresses itself in a lighthearted, optimistic and idiosyncratic, yet visionary manner, and which likewise delights in multiplicity and variety, as well as concerning itself with evolution and the inter-connectivity of life on earth, namely Sir Thomas Browne’s Discourse The Garden of Cyrus . 

Although differing in form, Browne’s hermetic discourse The Garden of Cyrus (1658) shares the same geographical place of origin to Rodulfo’s Laughing Elephant, namely the city of Norwich. Not only does it make specific reference to a wide variety of life, including those depicted in Laughing Elephant such as trees, star-fish and seas, but also elephants, Browne giving example of the quincunx pattern when used as a battle-formation which effectively 'defeated the mischief intended by the  elephants’. 

Rodulfo’s Laughing Elephant like Browne’s Garden of Cyrus, is in essence an idiosyncratic vision of the inter-connection of the cosmos. Although separated by centuries, both works of art delineate nature’s multiplicity and variety throughout the macrocosm. Crucially, both creative artists possess the necessary technical skills of their respective craft in order to construct a communicative frame-work for their vision of evolution. Rodulfo’s Laughing Elephant  like Browne’s discourse The Garden of Cyrus is a work of art which expresses an awareness and sense of wonder of the artist’s own unique place in the world, as an individual and as artist. Ultimately, both works of art engage in transcendent synthesis, that is, the total sum of their imagery and symbolism multiplies into a greater vision, one of evolution and humanity’s place within it.

Conclusion

Not only are all four elements represented in Rodulfo’s Laughing Elephant  via fish and bird, tree and star, but also imagery allusive to the Microcosm and Macrocosm, with its depiction of  the small world of humanity represented by a mercurial youth and a matriarchal senex, as well as the large and cosmic, the Macrocosm; thus it may be be interpreted as a mandala, that is, a work of art which invites contemplation, reminding and refreshing the individual of their place in the cosmos. Together, microcosm and macrocosm, in conjunction with the metaphysical framework of Space and Time, the basic template of all mandala art, can be discerned within the canvas.

The art-historian Arnold Hauser defined Mannerist art as, ‘a vision of a new spiritual content in life, with a tinge of the bizarre and the abstruse’ [8].

Hauser’s definition is applicable to Browne’s Garden of Cyrus as much as Rodulfo's Aquarian-tinted vision of evolution. Indeed, visionary art, such as both Browne's and Rodulfo's invites a receptive viewer to a cosmic ‘soul-journey’ of the imagination. As such Rodulfo’s Laughing Elephant is a canvas which is capable of producing a transcendent or numinous moment by transporting a receptive viewer from the ordinary and mundane, to a place where imagination is unconfined and to where future possibilities and unrevealed relationships are found.

K.Faulkner 2012-2016

In Memorium  David Bowie (Jan 8th 1946 - Jan 10th 2016)

Starman singer and song-writer, actor and multi-media performer.

With thanks to Krzysztof Fijalkowski

Notes

[1]  Religio Medici (1643) Part 1 Section 15
[2] Pseudodoxia Epidemica  (1646) book 7 chapter 15
[3]  Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) book 3 chapter 1
[4]  Miscellaneous Tract 13 Museum Clausum pictues Item 13

[5]  John Banville ‘The Sea’  pub. Picador 2010

[6] Dictionary of Symbols ed.Chevalier and Gheerbrant Penguin 1996

[7] http://tanjastark.com/2015/06/22/crashing-out-with-sylvian-david-bowie-carl-jung-and-the-unconscious/

[8]  De Gubernatis, Angelo - Zoological Mythology (Volume II)  1872. 

[9] Arnold Hauser -  Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art 1964 

Bibliography

Mannerism - John Shearman Penguin 1967

The Alchemy of Paint  - Spike Bucklow pub. Marion Boyars 2009 reprinted 2010 and 2012.

Arcanum 17 - Andre Breton 1945 pub. Sun and Moon 1999

See Also

Rudolfu's Mandala of Loving-Kindness

The Golden Cockerel

Discoursing once more on Russian music, this time focusing on Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel  (previously Swan Lake and The Firebird) and Russian classical music in general.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) the composer of The Golden Cockerel (1907) was one of the 'Mighty Five', also known as 'The Mighty Handful' (Russian: Могучая кучка, Moguchaya kuchka) a group of amateur composers who aspired to create a music which was distinctly Russian. Utilizing folk-song and emphasising the 'asiatic' and oriental aspects of Russia's vast Empire, along with developing a highly original orchestral style and coloration, the 'Mighty Five' endeavoured to create music equal and antithetical to the Western Viennese tradition of music-making. However, in reality the 'Mighty Five' were only four of any significance, for music critic Cesar Cui never wrote any music which was Russian in either style or melody.

Although only amateurs, the four remaining composers of the 'Mighty Five' together created characteristic Russian music in subject-matter, melody, rhythm and orchestral colour. One fanciful way to contrast the styles and artistic temperament of these four Russian composers is to loosely juxtapose them to another group of equally ground-breaking composers, the British 'Fab Four' of 1960's pop music, the Beatles.

The highly-original genius of 'rebel' group member Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) was the composer of the epic national opera Boris Godunov with its sharp observations upon the relationship between church and State in Russia, and the hallucinatory nightmare tone-poem Night on a Bare Mountain. Mussorgsky also had a hedonistic streak of self-destructive bravado in him, resulting in his premature death from alcoholism aged just 42.  He's not unlike a kind of 'John Lennon' figure in his revolutionary ideals and love of the people to the Russian Nationalist composers.

Like Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was also self-taught. Over decades of industrious study he created his own unique sound and orchestral palette, which, combined with his ability to integrate folk-song from Russia's many regions into his music, resulted in his appointment as a professor at the prestigious Russian Conservatoire and becoming a leading figure of Russian music, particularly after Tchaikovsky's death in 1893. As a mainstream composer, especially in the popularity of his operas, many of which were regularly performed from the 1890's onwards, and long outliving Mussorgsky and Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov roughly equates as the 'Paul' of the Russian 'Fab Four'.

The quieter, often overlooked, but no less talented, if not the most productive member of the Russian 'Fab Four', was the chemistry professor, Alexander Borodin (1833-1887). Borodin's tone-poem In the Steppes of Central Asia aurally depicts the geographical vastness of Russia's Imperial Empire, while his opera Prince Igor with its famous Polovtsian Dances, harks back to the splendour of Russia's early history. Borodin may be considered as the 'George' of the Russian Fab Four.

The group's mentor Balakirev, himself an original composer as his oriental tone-poems Islamey and Tamara demonstrate, performed the role of impresario not unlike Brian Epstein in his influence upon the group's image and ambitions. Cesar Cui (1835-1918 )  fulfills the role of  'Ringo' in this analogy.

Although he wrote over 15 operas, Rimsky-Korsakov is nowadays only known by many today for the miniaturist tone-poem, The Flight of the Bumble-Bee, however, a closer familiarity with his music reveals that during  a white-heat of creativity, he composed three great orchestral masterpieces - the suite Capriccio Espagnol, a dazzling pastiche of Spanish melodies, the gorgeous in 'Neo-oriental' orchestral colour, Scheherazade, an orchestral showcase and one of the most frequently recorded works in the classical music repertoire, and the stirring Russian Festival Easter Overture based upon the Slavic liturgy of the Orthodox Church. Miraculously, all three of these works for large-scale orchestra date from the single year span of 1887-1888.

Because Rimsky-Korsakov out-lived the tragically short lives of Mussorgsky and Borodin, he often took it upon himself to edit and complete his compatriot composers' unfinished works. It was not until an original manuscript of Mussorgsky's  tone-poem Night on a bare Mountain was discovered in the 1970's that the full extent of Rimsky-Korsakov's academic styled 'tidying-up' became known. Such are the differences between Mussorgsky's original, rough and vigorous aural depiction of a Witches Sabbath, to those of Rimsky-Korsakov's much better-known 'tidied' version, that the Dutch musicologist Francis Maes declared -

'Rimsky-Korsakov considered the work impossible in the form which Mussorgsky had written it. Rimsky-Korsakov's own version, therefore, cannot be fitted into the category of redactions and orchestrations; it is. rather, a radical composition, loosely based on the same thematic material but wholly different in structure, orchestral colouring, and expression, so much so, in fact, that Mussorgsky can no longer be considered its author.' [1]

Rimsky-Korsakov was paradoxically both a progressive and a conservative composer. His early style was based upon his mentor Balakirev, as well as Hector Berlioz, and Franz Liszt while in his latter development he was heavily influenced by Wagner and Debussy. Considered as directly influencing two generations of Russian composers, in particular Stravinsky, as well as non-Russian composers, Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Paul Dukas and Ottorino Respighi, among others.

In his opera The Golden Cockerel Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov returned to a political theme. Transforming a poem by Pushkin, which in turn was based upon a tale by the American author Washington Irving, Rimsky-Korsakov's fairy-tale opera is in fact a thinly-disguised political statement which is highly critical of Russia's devastating military defeat in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, its also a scathing attack upon Russian Imperialism and even ridicules on a personal level, the last of the Romanov's Tsar Nicholas II. Rimsky-Korsakov never lived to hear his opera performed. The stress caused from its being banned most probably exasperated his medical condition of angina.

Musically, Le Coq d'Or ( as it's frequently known  from its first production in Paris 1914) features some of Rimsky's most developed and radical tonal language. The combination of full orchestra, chorus and soloists including a colorata soprano, results in a musical palette awash with oriental-coloured scales and melodies, often to gorgeous effect and exemplary of Rimsky-Korsakov's so-called Neo-Oriental style, which he first conjured in his Antar symphony, and famously in his large-scale, Arabian-themed orchestral suite, Scheherazade (1888).

In the prologue to the first of three acts of Le Coq d'Or, an astrologer appears announcing a disclaimer- although the following fairy-tale happened far away, a long time ago, such tales can be instructive, he informs the audience. Whether with this disclaimer Rimsky-Korsakov hoped to outwit the Imperial Censors isn't known. A few years earlier his support for students during the 1905 revolution, had resulted in a temporary suspension of his professorship from the conservatoire and a ban on the performance of his works. However the very name of the fairy-tale's Tsar Dodon is a deliberate word-play upon the name of the extinct dodo bird and throughout the opera Rimsky-Korsakov ridicules Tsar Nicholas II personally through the character of Tsar Dodon.  

In the Introduction and Bridal Procession to the orchestral suite of  Le coq d'Or Rimsky-Korsakov employs the startling compositional device of a rapid change of key and mood; the opening alarm-call of the cockerel, announced by trumpet is swiftly followed by a brooding theme upon cellos, to depict the lugubrious mood of King Dodon in his palace. The Introduction quotes all the major themes and motifs of the opera, much of which is in Rimsky-Korsakov's highly-evocative 'neo-oriental' style, it also includes musical passages conjuring a dreamy fairy-tale world along with some exciting syncopated rhythms.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's support for students during the 1905 Russian revolution resulted in his being suspended from his teaching position at the Conservatoire and a ban on the performance of his works. How exactly he hoped to outwit the Imperial Censor's scrutiny is unclear, the very name of the fairy-tale's central character, Tsar Dodon, is a deliberate word-play which strongly hints of the Tsar's likeness to the extinct dodo bird; and in fact throughout the opera Rimsky-Korsakov ridicules Tsar Nicholas II personally through the character of Tsar Dodon.

In the first act of the opera, King Dodon in his Palace, the grotesque and blundering Tsar Dodon, irritable, brooding and bored since youth, is presented by the astrologer with the gift of a golden cockerel which crows whenever a threat of danger to Dodon's kingdom occurs -

Cock-a-doodle-do
Watch out ! 
Be on guard !

However, Tsar Dodon prefers it when the golden cockerel crows the advice -    Go ahead and rule from your bed !

In essence, Rimsky-Korsakov portrays a Tsar who is suffering from the Russian psychological trait of Oblomovitis.

In Ivan Goncharov's hugely popular novel Oblomov (1859) the young nobleman Oblomov rarely leaves his room or bed and only moves from his bed to a chair in the first 50 pages of the novel. Incapable of making important decisions or of undertaking any significant action, the novel satirizes Russian nobility, whose social and economic function became increasingly questioned in mid-nineteenth century Russia. Allusion to Oblomov became well-known throughout Russia, as late as the 1920's, during the early years of the Soviet Republic, Vladimir Lenin declared, -  "the old Oblomov is still around, and we will need to wash, clean, rub and scrub him, before he can be of any real use."

The entrance of Queen Shemakha which is sung by a colorata soprano in the fairy-tale opera, includes extensive and intricate octatonic scales which are as experimental and radical as those of Claude Debussy (1862-1918).

Queen Shemakha introduces an explicitly erotic element to the opera when teasingly she declares to King Dodon -

Thou art to be pitied knowing
The Queen only in her garments.
I am not so bad without them.
When I go to sleep, I look a long time in the mirror,
I throw off all my garments...
I look and see if anywhere
There is a mole or any blemish on my body..
Over my marble thighs

On my breasts fall drops of liquid fire
And I have breasts indeed !
They vie with the glory of the southern roses
Magnificent and firm - and they are
As white, light, and translucent as a dream.....

Tsar Dodon's  response to Queen Shemakha's erotic invitation is to announce he has a stomach-ache. His downfall occurs when, after his ill-matched marriage to Queen Shemakha, the golden cockerel pecks him to death, perhaps an allusion by Rimsky-Korsakov to the rumour that Tsar Nicholas himself was henpecked by his wife, and that it was the Tsarina who ruled the roost of the Imperial Household. Its also worth remembering that the very symbol of the Romanov, that of the double-headed Imperial eagle, the true subject of Rimsky-Korsakov's 'fairy-tale'  bears an avian similarity to the cockerel.

Its little wonder that the opera The Golden Cockerel was immediately banned from theatrical performance by the Imperial Censors. Rimsky-Korsakov's harshest words were reserved for Tsar Nicholas II personally, the operatic chorus singing these words-

He is a tsar in rank and appearance
but a slave in body and soul.
In behaviour and attitude he is a real ape.
His head is devoid of true emotion
his spirit is terribly lethargic.
Among the beauties with their shining eyes
he looks like a ghost.

Ominously, as if alluding to the methods by which autocratic governments remain in power, Tsarina Shemakha warns - Whoever we don't like is done for.

while the chorus, representing the common people, anxiously ask of their future - What will we do without a Tsar ?

When an essentially conservative member of Russian society such as Rimsky-Korsakov feels it necessary to use music as a vehicle to denounce political and social wrongs of his age, the warning signals of a society about to radically transform itself may be imminent. The catalyst for such a transformation occurred shortly after Rimsky's death, through the great loss of life experienced by the Russian people during the first World War, which triggered the 1917 revolution, the abolishment of Imperial Romanov rule and the establishment of the Soviet Republic (1917-1989).

The impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s 1914 Parisian production in ballet form of The Golden Cockerel, (known as Le Coq d'Or from its French production)  in which the singers performed offstage, while mimers and dancers portrayed the characters onstage, became the model for Rimsky-Korsakov's one-time pupil, Igor Stravinsky’s own stage works. A close study of the score of Stravinsky's innovative puppet-drama Petroushka (1910-11) reveals that its radical harmonies derive ultimately from the experimental octatonicism of his teacher, Rimsky's opera. Such was the high regard in which  The Golden Cockerel was held that, when in December 1917, the composer Sergei Rachmaninov hastily left Russia for Helsinki with his wife and two daughters on an open sledge, among his few possessions he carried with him were a few notebooks with sketches of his own compositions including his unfinished opera Monna Vanna and two orchestral scores, one of which was The Golden Cockerel.

Sadly, Rimsky-Korsakov never lived to hear his opera The Golden Cockerel performed. The stress caused from its being banned by the Censors probably worsened his medical condition of angina and he died before its first performance. However his introduction of overt political statement in music paved the way for a younger generation of composers to either integrate or denounce political ideology in their music. The musicologist Marina Frolova-Walker proposed his opera The Golden Cockerel to be the forerunner of the anti-psychologistic and absurdist ideas which  culminate in 20th century 'anti-operas' such as Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges (1921) and Dmitri Shostakovich's The Nose (1930) and that it laid, "the foundation for modernist opera in Russia and beyond." [2] . Rimsky's name today is now celebrated as one of Russia's greatest composers, with the St Petersburg State Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatoire honouring him in its name.

Andrei Bely's Symbolist novel Petersburg (1913) also reflects the fevered atmosphere of the dying years of the Romanov dynasty. Set in the 'window on the west' city of Petersburg, and greatly admired by James Joyce for its fragmentary narrative, Bely's novel features a psychological cat-and-mouse game between a high ranking bureaucratic official and his decadent 'asiatic' would-be anarchist son. Sometimes hilarious, at other times sinister,  the backdrop of an often crepuscular city, whose citizens, not unlike the Dubliners  of Joyce's Ulysses (1922) become a central character of the novel. Bely's Petersburg  not only depicts the social tension of  Russia before the 1905 Revolution, but is a landmark work of 20th century literature.

There can't surely be any connection between Sir Thomas Browne and Norwich with early 20th century Russian history and music, can there ? Well, there's these two tenuous connections - Firstly, in 1922 the English author Virginia Woolf wrote an introduction to a selection of Sir Thomas Browne's writings for the prestigious Golden Cockerel publishing house. Secondly, Browne's Norwich associate, Arthur Dee (1579-1651) was the eldest son of  John Dee (1527-1609) who secured for him the post of court physician to Tsar Mikhail I.  After enduring 14 Moscow winters, sometime in the early 1630's, Arthur Dee left Moscow to retire at Norwich. He abandoned his alchemical writings to the care of the Imperial Library. Centuries later,  the charismatic, shaman-like figure of Rasputin gained access to the Imperial Library through his influence at the court of the last Romanov Tsar, Nicholas II. Rasputin is alleged to have stolen Arthur Dee's alchemical writings. They were later subsequently returned to the Imperial library.

I once imagined the possibility that a fairy-tale about a prophesying bird's introduction into a Royal household, which a whole Kingdom fatalistically begins to rely upon, may have symbolically alluded to what was a commonly-held concern of the time - the unhealthy influence of Rasputin upon Tsar Nicholas II and his family in matters of Russian politics. But no, the dates don't quite match up!

Although Milica of Montenegro and her sister Anastasia, both of whom were interested in Persian mysticism, spiritualism and occultism, are credited as introducing Rasputin to Tsar Nicholas I and his wife Alexandra in November 1905, Rasputin did not gain any real influence upon the Russian Royal family until 1908, long after Rimsky-Korsakov had completed The Golden Cockerel.

CDs

* Scheherazade - Berlin Philharmonic-Karajan 1967

* The Snow Maiden - Sadko -Mlada - Le coq d'or Suite

   Seattle Symphony - Gerard Schwarz - Naxos 2011

* Capriccio Espagnol- Russian Easter Overture etc.

   Seattle Symphony - Gerard Schwarz -Naxos 2011

* Borodin Symphonies 1 - 3 Gerard Schwarz -Naxos 2011

 * Pictures at an Exhibition (orch. Ravel) 

    Night on a Bare Mountain -original and Rimsky's version

    Ukrainian  National Symphony Orchestra  Naxos 2003

    

Books

[1] Maes, Francis; Arnold J. Pomerans and Erica Pomerans (translators) (2002) [1996].  A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 

[2] Frolova-Walker, Marina (2005). "11. Russian opera; The first stirrings of modernism". In Mervyn Cooke. The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera. London: Cambridge University Press.

* Natasha's Dance : A Cultural History of Russia.
   Orlando Figes Penguin 2003

  

*  From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 

    1870-1925  from Moscow and Saint Petersburg. 

    Royal Academy of Arts 2008

DVD  

The Golden Cockerel 

soloists Albert Schagidullin  and Olga Tritonova

with the Chorus of the Mariinsky theatre, Orchestre de Paris 

conducted by Kent Nagano  directed by Thomas Grimm 2003.

Pictures

Top - Ivan Bilibin: Court Astrologer and King Dodon

Video of Natalie Goncharov's art

Ivan Bilibin: King Dodon and the Queen of Shemakha

Below - Rimsky-Korsakov by Igor Repin

By a remarkable coincidence The Golden Cockerel  is currently being staged in a new production at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, Russia. 

The World premiere of The Golden Cockerel was on 24 September 1909, at the Sergei Zimin Private Russian Opera, Moscow. It was  premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre on 14 February 1919  and the premiere of its latest production was on 25 December 2014, at Mariinsky-II, St Petersburg. Next performance, Sunday 1st February 2015.  Here's a trailer of the production.