Nureyev Remembered

<First published in the Times Literary Supplement, May 9, 2003. In 2008, Robert Gottlieb generously reprinted its uncut original version in his anthology “Reading Dance”. For this 2026 republication, I have made one correction and one small addition.>

It is ten years since Rudolf Nureyer died, From St. Petersburg to Monte Carlo, from Tokyo to Toronto, there have been galas, film seasons, exhibitions, tributes written and spoken and danced. (There has even been a Nureyev novel, Colum McCann's “Dancer”. It actually comes far nearer catching Nureyev's essence than the first two posthumous biographies.) Doubtless the sheer spread and quantity of these commemorations have something to do with the fact that there are two wealthy Nureyev foundations. Still, Nureyev’s place in history is secure.

Nureyev travelled the globe, but for twenty-four years — 1962-85 - he bestowed a high concentration of his phenomenal energies upon London: first in the intensity of his association with the Royal Ballet, where he would dance a cross-section of repertory every season until 1977, and secondly in the annual Nureyev Festivals (1976-85) at the London Coliseum, in which he would dance seven performances a week for weeks on end. So it's fitting that London has done most to honour his memory. The season of Nureyev films in January at the National Film Theatre was well attended; there have been exhibitions both at the Theatre Museum and at the Royal Opera House; the Royal Ballet in April gave seven performances of a diverse Nureyev tribute.

Predictably, something is missing, even in the photographs and the films. Nureyev's most historic achievement —making both men and women dance differently, from Vienna to Sydney - could only be proven if an exhibition or film season also included a good deal of pre-Nureyev and non-Nureyev material. In photographs, you see Nureyev in front of a curtain extending an arm and proudly smiling to acknowledge the applause; but you need a memory to know how long he waited before extending that arm or smiling - how he worked the suspense. In many of the films, you see the thickness of the make-up; only if you were there in the theatre can you credit that it was submerged by his glamour.

Still, many of the photographs and enough of the films certainly show that Nureyev was a rare beauty: not the textbook Adonis that other male dancers have been, but a new extreme, a radical archetype for the changing notions of masculinity in the 1960s and 1970s. The contrast between the breadth of his shoulders and the slenderness of his waist was drastic, the same kind of drastic as the contrast between the slab-like cheekbones and the Brad Pitt mouth, with its strikingly full lips that parted to reveal so brightly fierce a smile. Nureyev had become a star just before the Beatles and Mick Jagger, and in his haircuts and those lips he was often compared to both. In the film of Roland Petit's “Le Jeune homme et la mort”, he looks like a male Brigitte Bardot.

Ballet people often speak of Fonteyn and Nureyev as if they were tailor-made for each other, but the pictorial evidence rightly proves that what made them exciting was they were as dissimilar as Tarzan and Jane. He the gorgeous prowler, she the poised cat-with-the-canary; he the luscious velvet, she the diamond; he the wayfaring brigand, she the beating heart.

Though Fonteyn eloquently spoke of how much more concerned Nureyev was with technical precision than she, photography confirms that he was far less academically picture-perfect than many dancers. With Nureyev, though, how much does that matter? When Ferruccio Busoni took Egon Petri, then his pupil, to hear Eugen d'Albert play, the latter was way past his prime.

Petri kept making a whistling sound under his breath every time d Albert played a wrong note until, at the end of a piece, Busoni turned to him and said with a smile, "Don't you wish you could play wrong notes like that?" Film suggests that Nureyev played wrong notes throughout his career, but for a good many years — you can still see this he played them heroically.

What of the repertory? Nureyev was no muse. It would be rich fare to watch all the ballets, pas de deux, and solos that various choreographers made on such individual dancers as Fonteyn, Tanaquil LeClercq, Lynn Seymour, Anthony Dowell, Suzanne Farrell, Mikhail Baryshnikov. But even if you could collect every single dance made upon Nureyev by George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan, Roland Petit, Rudi van Dantzig, Glen Tetley, Nureyev himself, and others, you would find next to nothing of lasting importance. (The Royal's Nureyev tribute included a rare revival of the "Two loves I have" pas de trois from MacMillan's 1964 Shakespeare sonnet “Images of Love”. Unlike some of the non-Nureyev dances that survive on film from the same ballet, it shows how early MacMillan was already inclining to clumsy, gesture-heavy, expressionist portentousness.) Even Ashton's “Marguerite and Armand” was just a pastel sketch made occasionally tremendous by the hair-raising timing of certain moments, by the thrill of its casting, and the febrile blaze that both Fonteyn and Nureyev could kindle. More valuable was the Prince's solo that Nureyev added to the Royal Ballet “Swan Lake” in 1962, a truly distinguished piece of work that beautifully challenged him and other male interpreters for over twenty years. (He never made a better dance. Over the next thirty years, his choreography grew steadily more ambitious and less competent. I strongly suspect that Ashton lent an editorial hand in shaping its musical timing.) The lyrical essence this solo encapsulated is still to be felt in much of the choreography that Ashton went on to make in the later 1960s for other male dancers, notably Dowell. It was Dowell who went beyond Nureyev in making a male dancer's line poetic, whose arabesques flowed and melted and shone with yet further precision, and who took cantilena phrasing to a peak that no male dancer has ever surpassed. But Dowell, another icon of the 1960s and 1970s, would not have become Dowell had it not been for Nureyev, often present on the same stage, challenging him to greater feats.

Meanwhile Nureyev burnt himself indelibly onto certain male roles of the existing ballet repertory. Paul Czinner's film of him and Fonteyn in the “Corsaire” pas de deux is still momentous. But film's effect on the spatial three-dimensionality of dance is always flattening, its rendition of live dance musicality always blurring. You would not know from that “Corsaire” film that, at the apex of his highest leaps, Nureyev (bare-chested, in harem pants) seemed to hover — sit and hover, with feet tucked up under him, as if perched on a stool — in the air. Nor would you know that both of them showed timing and nerve so exhilarating that, when the Royal Ballet first programmed it as the brief sole centerpiece of a program, Frederick Ashton assured the alarmed Fonteyn that the applause would last twice as long as the pas de deux, and was proved right. In the Royal's 2003 Nureyev tribute, Carlos Acosta danced the solo from this “Corsaire” pas de deux, with nonchalant prowess. Yet Acosta's unforced way of dancing is the opposite of Nureyev's explosiveness. When Acosta applies exotic colour, it seems like a calculated afterthought. With Nureyev, such strokes seemed the core of his very being. With Acosta, the solo itself looks trite, obvious, even bland. Nureyev (like Callas or Sutherland irradiating Donizetti) brought more texture and dynamic excitement to this material than anybody else can ever have done. Though the whole “Corsaire” pas de deux is routinely credited to the nineteenth-century Marius Petipa - actually, it was  first added after Petipa’s death by Samuil Andrianov - its male role must have been extensively revised in the Soviet era; and when Nureyev danced it, I used to say that the “Corsaire pas de deux” had been choreographed on him by God. He became its sole author and first cause.

For years, it seemed as if the whole of London felt the same way. In summer 1977, if you travelled down the King's Road Chelsea or the Fulham Road, you could see eight different walls on which someone had written the name "Rudi" in letters a yard high in red, with a heart instead of a dot above the "I". Was there any doubt as to which Rudi this referred to? During the 1976-77 Royal Ballet season, straight after filming “Valentino” for Ken Russell, and while growing his hair back into his usual mane, he had danced several ballets at Covent Garden (sometimes replacing Dowell, who was injured for a year); at the Queen's silver jubilee gala in May '77, he and Fonteyn had danced the premicre of Ashton's “Hamlet and Ophelia”; and June and July had seen the second Nureyev Festival. He had launched it with the premiere of his own production of Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet”, dancing Romeo himself, for twenty-five consecutive performances, he had danced “Giselle” for a week (June 27-July 2) opposite Natalia Makarova or Eva Evdokimova, and for one extraordinary week (July 49) he had danced a mixed program with Makarova, Lynn Seymour, and Fonteyn. At each performance, he danced with all three ballerinas in “Les Sylphides”; with Fonteyn, he danced their last-ever performances of “Marguerite and Armand”; and with Makarova (in heart-stoppingly exultant form), he danced performances of the “Le Corsaire” pas de deux. He had passed his thirty-ninth birthday in March 1977. Yet those “Corsaire” performances, pausing in the air, burning round the stage, blazing through pirouettes, made even senior critics feel that time had stopped and that Nureyev was still dancing as he had with Fonteyn in “Corsaire” in 1962.

Until and including that week, Nureyev was the greatest star I have ever seen. Not the greatest dancer, nor the greatest artist, but the performer who burned the brightest. He was the dance embodiment of hubris - a word that I was taught to translate as "pride before a fall." When he hurtled around the stage in one of the various manèges of leaps that occur in many classic ballets (the “Corsaire” pas de deux not least), you would often hear people gasp, not at the height of his jumps (though until '77 he could still show tremendous elevation), but at the risks he was taking, the angle at which he would lean. Everyone expected him to fall, to break an ankle. In my first “Swan Lake” (1975), he did fall. The audience gasped; he glared straight back and swept offstage. Then, as soon as Monica Mason, as Odile, had spun through thirty-two diamantine fouetté turns and won a wave of applause, he was onstage again, spinning in turns that seemed to compete with hers and to rebuke the audience for doubting his brilliance. Glamorous, sensual, flaring energy poured forth, from the very center of his body.

He was a Dionysus who had committed himself to an Apollonian art, and his dancing had been an act of defiance from his teens on. He liked to say that he performed better when he danced more often, even though already in ‘77 there were performances (notably in his own “Romeo”) when he seemed to have too much else on his mind. While there are connoisseurs who will still insist that his true prime had ended as early as 1964 - as well as colleagues who attest that he often danced less well in towns and cities not known for ballet connoisseurs - most of them will agree that he was still capable of top-level performance up to that week in July 1977 when he danced with that Fonteyn-Makarova-Seymour troika. Ballet is a singularly demanding art, and no dancer can ever have driven himself harder. The quality that seems to have increasingly characterised his dancing is force, though film footage, including a “Corsaire” solo he performed when still a Kirov dancer, shows that he was never a completely pure stylist. He forced more, he encouraged others to force, and this kind of heroic straining became one of his trademarks. When Makarova - who had been another luminary of the Kirov's 1961 first tour - first danced with him in the West, she told him, "You dance like them." He replied, "Je danse comme moi." Essentially, such strain is alien to ballet's classicism, but Nureyev made it theatrical and (as a pertormer if not as a choreographer) musical. And, for years, his strain paid off: he was the most exciting of dancers even when he was the most over-emphatic. He was tempting fate; we knew it; and we had to catch his glory while it lasted.

Nureyev’s hubris was punished again and again. And every time his method was, as Fred sings to Ginger, "Pick yourselt up, brush yourself off, start all over again." The biggest crash came in the seventh and final week (July 11-16) of the 1977 Nureyev Festival. As soon as he took his very first arabesque, it was evident that his back had "gone”. Arabesque - the position in which a dancer presents his extended line, through a straight leg, from toe to fingers — was not a position in which Nureyev excelled; but it was not one in which he had ever disappointed. Now, however, he was lurching forwards, every time. His spine had lost its strength. Nor did it ever recapture its former power.

Within months, his whole lustre seemed to drain away. One program of the Nureyev Festival of 1978 began with Hans van Manen's “Four Schumann Pieces”, a taxing vehicle choreographed in 1975 for Anthony Dowell. In the interval afterwards, I remember overhearing one man say to his wife, "Good, now we'll see Nureyev." She explained to him that they'd already been watching Nureyev. "Him?" the husband exclaimed. "But he couldn't even stand." This was true; and to those of us who remembered how Nureyev could, when he chose, stand still and - because of the concentrated energy that flowed from the centre of his body even without moving -  stop an audience from watching whichever dancer was performing elsewhere on the stage, it was heart-breaking. As for the “Corsaire” pas de deux, danced with a minor European ballerina, he now seemed to be like a man chasing after the last bus.

Did he learn? No. There was scarcely one important role in which he didn't go on appearing too long, there were roles (Nijinsky's “L’Apres-midi d'un faune”, Balanchine's "Rubies") which he acquired far too late, and, in London alone, he went on dancing those gruelling seven-performance-a-week Nureyev festivals until 1985, when he was forty-seven years old. When the young Sylvie Guillem made her debut at Covent Garden in 1988, her partner was Nureyev, now aged fifty, and looking it, In Paris, London, and elsewhere, he choreographed new ballets and produced old ones (skills at which he seemed to get steadily worse with the years; he directed the Paris Opéra Ballet (1983-89); he appeared in a North American tour of “The King and I”; he conducted concerts. His 1989 tour with the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical — a production in which his partner, Liz Robertson, once said she felt he never gave a single completely good performance - went on despite his responsibilities to the Paris Opéra: he ignored all the requests to return to Paris until finally he was sacked. When AIDS came, he refused to admit as much; and this too was in character. He died in January 1993. It is often said that he died young, but that is not how it felt if you had followed his career.

It's easy to overlook the fact that Nureyev was fun, but he was. Mischief was part of his lustre. And, amazing as it may seem, he could laugh at him-self. The NFT season included his appearance on the “Muppets” TV show. I missed it this time around, but, it memory serves, the great moment came when Miss Piggy tried to seduce him in the sauna. Nureyev pouted with grim ruefulness, and said, with his finest Russian accent, "Last week I was in ‘Swan Lake’ with Natalia Makarova. This week I am in steam bath with lady pig."

@Alastair Macaulay 2003