The Royal Ballet's Sylvia, review for The Tablet, 13 November 2004
In 1952 the Royal Ballet premiered Frederick Ashton’s Sylvia, which he choreographed as a star-vehicle for the ballerina Margot Fonteyn, then in her prime. It was a curious work for its day. Only a year before, the Festival of Britain had proclaimed Herbert Morrison’s vision of “a new Britain springing from the battered fabric of the old." Instead Sylvia is a glance in a rear-view mirror at the Paris Opera’s traditions of the nineteenth century. Sylvia was wrong for Ashton’s audience, whose eyes were determinedly set on the future, and it did not long survive in the repertory.
More than half a century later, and forty years after its last performance, Sylvia has returned to Covent Garden and it turns out to be a gem. The ballet is a miracle of restoration. No choreographic score had ever been written down and the only reliable record was a grainy film of a rehearsal. Christopher Newton who staged this latest production supplemented the evidence of the film with the memories of dancers who had been cast in the original production. (Newton is one of the anonymous cultural heroes of our time. It is thanks to him that there is a proper record of Stravinsky’s and Nijinska’s masterwork Les Noces).
The plotline, it has to be said, is complete nonsense. Eros tricks Sylvia, a huntress and nymph sworn to chastity, into falling in love with Aminta, a shepherd. She is then kidnapped by the evil hunter Orion, but escapes and fends off the wrath of Diana, the huntress and goddess of chastity to marry her beloved. Curtain. But Sylvia transcends the slightness of its story. However archaic it seems on the surface, it breaks with the nineteenth century romantic ballet’s ethereal image of woman as fairy or sylph. Instead, the heroine is presented here as a maiden warrior.
At the performance I saw, Sylvia was danced by Zenaida Yanowsky, who is a coolly intellectual dancer, with a powerful stage presence. In some ways Yanowsky is the very antithesis of Fonteyn, Ashton’s original muse. Despite this she was believable, elegant in a dance style which is not native to her, and brought to it a combination of seriousness, musicality and contemporary wit.
What is principally striking about the revival of Sylvia is the cumulative aesthetic force of the performance - choreography, music and design. The musique dansant score by Delibes is a delight, in George Balanchine’s words, “a floor for the dancer to walk on”, and Tchaikovsky wrote of Sylvia, “If I had known this music before, I would not have written Swan Lake.” The score was first performed at the Paris Opera in 1876 with choreography by Louis Mérante. For Ashton’s 1952 version, the designers, the brothers Robin and Christopher Ironside, recreated an appropriate and luxuriant vision of antiquity, expressed in the style of the period of the original Paris production, that of the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Ashton’s choreographic style too owes much to the nineteenth century (his contemporary, the dance writer Richard Buckle, playfully – and with some truth – accused him of living in a nineteenth century dream world).
Dance is perhaps the most ephemeral of all the arts. It lives only in dancers’ bodies and is not easily captured either in dance notation or on film. If works are to survive, they must be performed and that performance tradition must be nurtured. Sylvia was very nearly lost, and it has been revived successfully, primarily because there are former dancers still alive who remembered the ballet in their bones. This is no threadbare exercise in archaeology. Although the Royal Ballet needs to settle into the work, Sylvia is theatrically credible and from its opening performances it has come alive as a striking evocation of the sensibility of another time.
Royal Opera House to December 3. http://info.royaloperahouse.org/
In 1952 the Royal Ballet premiered Frederick Ashton’s Sylvia, which he choreographed as a star-vehicle for the ballerina Margot Fonteyn, then in her prime. It was a curious work for its day. Only a year before, the Festival of Britain had proclaimed Herbert Morrison’s vision of “a new Britain springing from the battered fabric of the old." Instead Sylvia is a glance in a rear-view mirror at the Paris Opera’s traditions of the nineteenth century. Sylvia was wrong for Ashton’s audience, whose eyes were determinedly set on the future, and it did not long survive in the repertory.
More than half a century later, and forty years after its last performance, Sylvia has returned to Covent Garden and it turns out to be a gem. The ballet is a miracle of restoration. No choreographic score had ever been written down and the only reliable record was a grainy film of a rehearsal. Christopher Newton who staged this latest production supplemented the evidence of the film with the memories of dancers who had been cast in the original production. (Newton is one of the anonymous cultural heroes of our time. It is thanks to him that there is a proper record of Stravinsky’s and Nijinska’s masterwork Les Noces).
The plotline, it has to be said, is complete nonsense. Eros tricks Sylvia, a huntress and nymph sworn to chastity, into falling in love with Aminta, a shepherd. She is then kidnapped by the evil hunter Orion, but escapes and fends off the wrath of Diana, the huntress and goddess of chastity to marry her beloved. Curtain. But Sylvia transcends the slightness of its story. However archaic it seems on the surface, it breaks with the nineteenth century romantic ballet’s ethereal image of woman as fairy or sylph. Instead, the heroine is presented here as a maiden warrior.
At the performance I saw, Sylvia was danced by Zenaida Yanowsky, who is a coolly intellectual dancer, with a powerful stage presence. In some ways Yanowsky is the very antithesis of Fonteyn, Ashton’s original muse. Despite this she was believable, elegant in a dance style which is not native to her, and brought to it a combination of seriousness, musicality and contemporary wit.
What is principally striking about the revival of Sylvia is the cumulative aesthetic force of the performance - choreography, music and design. The musique dansant score by Delibes is a delight, in George Balanchine’s words, “a floor for the dancer to walk on”, and Tchaikovsky wrote of Sylvia, “If I had known this music before, I would not have written Swan Lake.” The score was first performed at the Paris Opera in 1876 with choreography by Louis Mérante. For Ashton’s 1952 version, the designers, the brothers Robin and Christopher Ironside, recreated an appropriate and luxuriant vision of antiquity, expressed in the style of the period of the original Paris production, that of the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Ashton’s choreographic style too owes much to the nineteenth century (his contemporary, the dance writer Richard Buckle, playfully – and with some truth – accused him of living in a nineteenth century dream world).
Dance is perhaps the most ephemeral of all the arts. It lives only in dancers’ bodies and is not easily captured either in dance notation or on film. If works are to survive, they must be performed and that performance tradition must be nurtured. Sylvia was very nearly lost, and it has been revived successfully, primarily because there are former dancers still alive who remembered the ballet in their bones. This is no threadbare exercise in archaeology. Although the Royal Ballet needs to settle into the work, Sylvia is theatrically credible and from its opening performances it has come alive as a striking evocation of the sensibility of another time.
Royal Opera House to December 3. http://info.royaloperahouse.org/
posted by Brendan McCarthy at 6:00 pm
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