© Shira Klasmer www.shiraklasmerphotography.com Photographs of the Rome rehearsals, creative team and performances of Persephone and Sacre by Shira Klasmer. Rite of Spring reviews Persephone in reviews 'Reading the Riot Act' Archer and Hodson on the Ups & Downs of a TV Docudrama on The Rite of Spring (February 2006) 'Sacre in Kobe' Hans Rinderknecht's diary and photographs of seeing Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer put Sacre on in Japan (Autumn 2005) 'Seven Days from Several Months at the Mariinsky' In 2003 Kenneth Archer and Millicent Hodson kept a diary for Ballet.co during their staging of The Rite of Spring with the Kirov in St Petersburg. From 2002 Millicent Hodson Interview

Spring is always invigorating, a welcome change, even when winter is mild, as it often is in southern Italy. This year at the Rome Opera spring came twice in a programme entitled “Dedicato a Stravinskij.” When we first staged Le Sacre du Printemps at the Rome Opera in 2001, as part of an evening of our Nijinsky reconstructions, Beppe Menegatti and Carla Fracci, who direct the ballet there, proposed to us another programme, a celebration of spring dedicated to Igor Stravinsky. They asked us to create a version of Stravinsky’s Persephone as a companion work to Le Sacre. Since then other collaborations with them took precedence, but this season, at long last, we realized Stravinsky’s brace of vernal rites. The double bill opened on 27 March with our restaging of Le Sacre du Printemps and our new choreography for Persephone, which Menegatti directed, with Fracci dancing the role of Demeter, queen of summer and mother of Persephone.

The Origins of Persephone

It was in 1933 that Stravinsky was asked to write Persephone, twenty years after the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The mime artist and impresario Ida Rubinstein commissioned the new work for her company in Paris. She invited the composer to create a spectacle based on Andre Gide’s poem about the Greek myth of Persephone and the return of spring. Stravinsky wrote it as a melodrama, in the precise sense of a piece that has a spoken text as well as a sung libretto. The original production, choreographed by Kurt Jooss and directed by Jacques Copeau, was staged at the Paris Opera in April 1934. Rubinstein both mimed the role of Persephone and recited the text.
 

Persephone has not become standard Stravinsky repertoire, despite many passages of great beauty and intensity. The music is unusually melodic for the composer, part of what some critics call his “pastoral” period. And the spectacle is not so much dramatic as ritualistic. But instead of the driving repetitions and primal acts of Le Sacre, there is in Persephone a mystical atmosphere that links the hieratic events. Stravinsky referred to the work as the “celebration of a mystery” and, according to his own account, based it on Egyptian as well as Greek rites, all of them concerned with the continuity of existence in other spiritual realms as well as with fertility and the natural cycle. Due to inherent production complexities, Persephone is rarely staged: it requires a large chorus, a tenor and sometimes a choir of children as well as an orchestra and a company of dancers with a ballerina and an actress--unless, as in the original production, the dancer of the title role masters the speaking part.
 

In the history of this work there are some salutary occasions when the character Persephone both danced and recited. Among them are Vera Zorina’s performances for various Stravinsky productions in the 1960’s, Svetlana Beriosova’s for the Ashton version at Covent Garden in 1961 and those of Fracci herself for Menegatti’s production at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo in the 1970’s. Sometimes, as is the case in Rome’s recent production, there is a Persephone who dances and a Persephone who speaks, dividing the persona as Martha Graham did for some of her heroines, like Emily Dickinson in Letter to the World. Zorina recited Persephone when Karin Von Aroldingen danced the role for Balanchine’s Stravinsky Festival in 1982. This spring in Rome the well-known Italian actress Pamela Villoresi performed the text for Menegatti’s new Persephone while Anjella Kousnetsova and Sara Loro alternated as lead dancer. Fabio Grossi played Pluto, Domenico Casedonte was Mercury and Gerardo Porceluzzi did Triptoleme. For Le Sacre the Chosen One was danced by Gaia Straccamore of the Rome Opera, Alexandra Iosifidi of the Maryinsky and Anabel Segura of the Portuguese National Ballet. The two guests were from productions we did recently abroad.

Gide’s Modern Heroine

As directed by Menegatti, the ritual elements of Persephone are emphasized, bringing to the fore the unique blend of Christian ethics with French Communist principles that Gide espoused. Persephone is a heroine who seeks to alleviate the suffering of the Shades in the underworld. The abducted ingénue of Greek myth, ravished by Pluto and held captive by him as king of the underworld is still present but superceded. Gide makes the climax of the melodrama Persephone’s exercise of her free will. She returns annually to the nether regions, not so much as Pluto’s queen but as champion of the Shades in their distress.
 

Menegatti proposed that Persephone dance her triumphant springtime return to earth bound by cords which Pluto holds. He gives her plenty of slack, neither controlling her nor releasing her. At the end the actress removes the cords from the dancer’s wrists so that Persephone in both her personae makes the decision, as the text declares, to descend again “to the utmost depths of human suffering.” Apart from certain ironic passages with jazz syncopations that deftly characterize Pluto and his retinue, Stravinsky adds depth and majesty to Gide’s poem through references to Gregorian chant and Russian Orthodox Easter music. Persephone becomes a female Christ figure and an archetypal revolutionary heroine. Gide provided a mould which Menegatti filled with contemporary resonance—memories of Che Guevara, Mother Theresa, Medicines Sans Frontiers, charity workers on university gap years.

The Rome Production

The décor of the Rome production, based on paintings by contemporary Italian artist Bruno Caruso, and the costumes by master costumier Anna Biagiotti, developed Menegatti’s vision of the work. The setting is an ancient amphitheatre of the Mediterranean world, where the chorus sits on marble steps at the sides of the stage. A backdrop shows the sea in greens and blues with a vista that seems to be Mount Etna in the distance. Scattered across the stage are stone ruins, some of them urns with flickering flames. Upstage centre there is a great tree stump with steps that allow performers to descend into the action. In front of it is a large box-trap that is lowered and raised for journeys to and from the underworld by Persephone and the Shades as well as Pluto and his sepulchral guards with ladies-in-waiting encased in wire skirts. There is something of a court masque about Persephone, much as the Renaissance evoked antiquity. Menegatti had Biagiotti garb the infernal royalty in massive ruffs and hoops, all in blacks, dark greens and reds. For the guards we designed triple-bladed sabres that could serve both as weapons and as wings for these fantastic masque characters, not devils, but not humans.
 

Mengatti uses a variety of Caruso paintings as narrow drop curtains to change place or mood. The first is a great tree in full bloom which appears as Persephone is born to Demeter. In Italy this Caruso image has special significance because it has long been used as the logo for an organization committed to cancer research. It stands for life. But Menegatti transforms this recognizable image so that, as the mother loses her daughter—Persephone slowly descending—another curtain appears with the roots of the great tree reaching deep below the surface of the earth. The image becomes a reminder of nature’s persistence despite human neglect and transience. When Mercury in the underworld tempts Persephone with a pomegranate, a re-imagined Caruso canvas is lowered, the image doubled, one right side up, one upside down, suggesting the two worlds. The image is a coral encrusted gold chalice from which grows a huge natural coral plant. The colour and magnificence make vivid the world Persephone misses during her time in the underworld.

The Choreographic Sequence

It seemed to us, from the choreographic point of view, that Persephone has one key idea in each of its three acts. In the first Demeter tries to protect Persephone from her obsession with the narcissus, a kind of drug which stimulates hallucinations of the underworld. Demeter enlists Nymphs to engage Persephone in various games and configurations to attract her away from the fatal flower. Act I ends when at last Persephone breaks through the lines of defence and games of distraction to pick the narcissus. In all these situations we sought to apply principles of Greek choric dance, using the traditional linked chains of Nymphs to form functional choreographic structures, like arbours, fences and gates.
 

Act II in the Menegatti production begins with a dance of grief by Demeter, in which he asked us to use vocabulary from the cycle of Isadora Duncan solos which we choreographed for Fracci in the 1990’s and which she has performed worldwide. When we made the solos, we learned how devastated Stravinsky had been by the drowning in the Seine of Duncan’s children several weeks before the premiere of Le Sacre in Paris, and we tried to instill that same feeling into Demeter’s dance, using classic lamentation gestures like the trembling, tearing of hair and rending of garments familiar from Greek vases and bas-reliefs.

The key idea of Act II is the perpetuum mobile of life in the underworld. For the Shades no action is ever complete. They perform a march of non-existence and endlessly pour the water of the River Lethe from one urn to another. Pluto watches with pleasure as Persephone at length drinks the water, committing herself to his world. The Shades, as Menegatti urged us to present them, recall victims of many contemporary calamities, a throng of the dispossessed. Their vocabulary is minimalist and understated, set up in canons of recurring gesture.

Musically and dramatically, the subterranean ostinato is broken by the arrival of Mercury, who at Pluto’s behest, tempts Persephone with the pomegranate, whose scent and colour in the frigid underworld provide a sudden vision of life on earth. A real moment of court masque ensues as Mercury dances with grandeur backed up by a chorus of Hours performing pendulum movements in long gowns. Persephone succumbs to temptation, sealing her fate to spend half the year underground. So the dirge returns in the music with Demeter in mourning clothes wielding a torch in the snowfall, searching everywhere for her daughter. At the end of the act Demeter is rescued by the Eleusinian king Seleuce, whose son, Triptoleme, she raises in the hope of preparing an eventual husband for Persephone.
 

Act III is the triumphal return of Persephone to the earth so that it may flourish during spring and summer. In the original score the fanfares of the third act overture are meant to be orchestral entertainment. Menegatti suggested we use that music as a kind of vision, outside the time scale of the melodrama, showing the terrestrial marriage of Persephone to Triptoleme. As master of the arts of agriculture, he binds his skills to her creativity, thus making the earth fertile again. For this Menegatti wanted a kind of Soviet poster pas de deux celebrating fecundity. So we purposely used Bolshoi lifts and something of pre-perestroika heroics as well as folkloric wedding steps. This dance leads to the entrance of the Celebrants at the temple of Demeter, with everyone in red garments, the men carrying scythes and the women stalks of wheat, as the libretto specifies. For this piece we again incorporated elements of ancient Greek choral dance, including linked chains of figures, the kick-back step (a kind of parallel attitude) familiar from vases and the metric variation of walking steps typical of ancient drama. The idea of return which shapes Act III is trumped at the end when Persephone leaves the earth not just because it is her destiny but also her choice.

Rhythm and Pulse

While Stravinsky was composing Le Sacre, he scribbled on his manuscript score the notion that “rhythm is to music what pulse is to life.” Despite the lack of rhythm in Persephone compared to Sacre, the pulse that Balanchine so famously valued in every Stravinsky work is unfailingly there. Menegatti encouraged our determination to find and amplify the pulse with the hope of creating strongly visualized rhythms in the choreography. Among our techniques for doing so were the doubling of the tempo for some steps so that they had an urgency on top of the music and also the occasional run of Persephone’s foot rhythms against the music to highlight her moments of agitation. Persephone evokes a world of greater psychological complication than Le Sacre yet its rhythms are much more elementary. But the two works are unified by Stravinsky’s austere sense of ritual, the unfailing pulse he provides for dance and a faith in the return of spring that emanates from the pages of both scores.
 

The question of rhythm inherent in language was the source of a conflict between Stravinsky and Gide during the original production process, causing a rift that never mended. Gide quit Paris for Sicily in order to avoid the premiere and did not attend any subsequent performances. Stravinsky was there for all them, of course, present as conductor as well as composer. Despite the remarkable work they had created together it was apparently the least happy collaboration in the long careers of both artists.

Stravinsky was a citizen of France by the time of Persephone and fully at home with the language and culture. With his previous experience of setting Latin as well as Russian texts to music, the composer was apparently untroubled at the prospect of a musical creation based on French poetry. The results, however, upset Gide, who believed that Stravinsky had ignored the rhythmic integrity of the verse. It is not the word that a composer sets to notes, Stravinsky parried, but the syllable. The composer maintained that the meaning of words in a libretto accrues from the sound of syllables. Consider a straightforward example: when the chorus sing as Shades, asking Persephone to tell them about life in the upper regions, they vocalize the following syllables: “Par-le nous, par-le nous, Per-se-pho-ne.” In spoken French it would not break into such short, note-for-note units but sound like “Parle nous, parle nous, Per-se-phone.” The whole hour of the score did not ring true for Gide, who felt betrayed by Stravinsky. The composer struggled in vain to clarify that a sung text had to have discreet sound units that build a pulse. So impassioned did Stravinsky feel about this argument over scansion that he published an article defending his syllabic approach in the Parisian journal L’Excelsior just after the premiere of Persephone.
 

The example above translated into Italian is even more rhythmic, given the more strongly accented character of the language. It becomes “Par-la noi, par-la noi, Per-se-fo-ne.” The original French is mellifluous and mysterious, with its tendency to liaison and unvoiced endings. Italian gives the verse more definition. Menegatti had hoped in the planning stages of the recent production to present the Italian translation of both libretto and text by the renowned maestro Vittorio Cui, who called it a “rhythmic version” of the original. It was this version that Fracci had recited and danced earlier in Palermo.

But the Rome chorus had started rehearsals with the French libretto whilst Menegatti engaged the actress Villoresi to recite in Italian. The German conductor Will Humburg was willing to do either language but wanted the matter settled quickly so that an appropriate tenor could be engaged. In the end the multi-lingual Jean-Francis Monvoisin sang in French, like the chorus, but he was able to follow Villoresi’s Italian with ease. This compromise benefited the Rome audience, most of whom were native Italians who could thus understand the recitation of the actress. And, thankfully, there were no projected surtitles which inevitably would have distracted attention from the spectacle on stage.
 

During rehearsals in the studio, our pianist Renata Russo managed to play and sing simultaneously, an onerous task. And sometimes she would do so first in Italian, then in French. So the dancers had some forewarning of how the chorus would sound in performance. Because of Russo’s studio performances we were able to imagine how a spectacle in Italian would sound, and it is quite different despite the same exact musical base.

The conductor Ernst Ansermet, Stravinsky’s life-long friend from Ballets Russes days, wrote in a late letter to the composer his reaction to conducting a performance of Persephone in translation, a version rendered into Spanish by Jorge Luis Borges in 1936. The performance had been a concert version for the Stravinsky Festival by the New York Philharmonic in July 1966. Ansermet raised the old issue of the relation between “the syllable and the word,” bringing Stravinsky’s argument full circle:

What seemed strange to me was the syllabic declamation. This shocked my sense of the language, which is not made up of syllables but of words provided with certain tonic accents. In the performance, however, I noticed that the music made one forget its syllabic nature, the vocal and orchestral parts bringing into focus a certain bucolic character.*

In the Rome productions of Persephone and Le Sacre du Printemps, it was rhythm that unified the programme, even more than the doubled subject of the return of spring—the rhythm of visual and choreographic design, of music, colour and movement.