L'Après-midi d'un faune (Nijinsky)

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Nijinsky as a Faun, 1912

L'Après-midi d'un faune (Eng. The afternoon of a faun ) is the title of a piece by Vaslav Nijinsky to Claude Debussy's piece of music Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and Stéphane Mallarmé's poem L'Après-midi d ' un faune choreographed ballets in one act, which was premiered in 1912 by the Ballets Russes in Paris. The play is about a young faun chasing several nymphs in vain.

L'Après-midi d'un faune is considered to be one of the first avant-garde ballets and, thanks to its inspiration from ancient vase paintings, a reference work of artistic primitivism . The clear sexual allusions also embed it in the themed world of the fin de siècle . Like other works by Nijinsky, it gave rise to intense aesthetic disputes. Mallarmé's poetry and Debussy's setting as well as Nijinsky's ballet occupy a central position in their respective art genres and in the development of artistic modernism .

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Leo Rauth : Vaslav Nijinsky dances L'Après-midi d'un faune, 1912

With L'Après-midi d'un faune, Nijinsky appeared for the first time as the author of his own significant choreography . The length of the piece does not exceed a quarter of an hour, and a simple story is told: During the greatest heat of a summer afternoon, a faun lies on a rock and plays his flute. Seven nymphs appear who are on their way to a nearby lake. The faun has never seen such creatures and climbs down from its rock full of curiosity and excitement in order to be able to observe them better. But when they notice him, the nymphs hurry away, frightened. One of them lets him come closer, he tries to grab her, she escapes him, but she loses her veil. Left alone, the faun picks up the veil and caresses it as if it were the nymph herself. Finally he lies down on it and makes an act of love with it. The piece is represented by a dancer in the role of the faun and seven dancers as nymphs.

Emergence

Nijinsky used the symphonic poem Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune by Claude Debussy from 1894 as a musical accompaniment for his work. It was his first major choreography, although there are contradicting statements about how much the leading figures of the Ballets Russes - Sergei Pavlovich Djagilew (impresario), Michel Fokine (chief choreographer) and Léon Bakst (artistic director) - contributed to the development of the work idea and execution . In any case, the collaboration within the Ballets Russes was an important part of the creative process, but Nijinsky claimed the authorship of L'Après-midi d'un faune for himself in his diary entries . The use of Debussy's piece seemed to be in the air, after all; at a New Year's celebration in 1912, before Nijinsky made his project public, Dyagilev suggested that he use this music.

Attic black-figure vase (detail), 6th century, Louvre

The starting point for Nijinsky's work on the ballet was probably a joint visit with Bakst to the Louvre , where the latter made him aware of archaic Greek vase painting . As artistic inspiration, they led Nijinsky to abandon the usual classical poses, facial expressions and figures, which was already included in the Ballets Russes , but now completely; With the two-dimensionality offered by the vase painting, the ensemble had to move across the stage, especially in profile view; the resulting primitivist impression was reinforced by the radically simplified and vague-looking movements, which has generally been compared to cubist painting.

Paul Gauguin: Ta Matete (The Market), 1892

The scenery designed by Bakst for the piece evoked a mythological landscape, a “young” world still in its natural state that looked naively painted. The color palette emphasized primary colors and there was almost no spatial depth. Bakst alluded to the Fauvism and pictures of Paul Gauguin , whose tribal art he saw related to those of pre-classical Greece and which Nijinsky valued very much. Nonetheless, he was dissatisfied with the stage design, which, due to its elaborate design, contradicted the other formal reduction. When the play was performed again in 1922, Pablo Picasso designed a simple curtain in shades of gray. On the other hand, the close-fitting costume of the Faun, which effectively expressed the physicality of Nijinsky's appearance, was popular. In addition to the aesthetic radicalism, this could also manifest the second decisive component, the exploration of sexuality typical of the fin de siècle . The ballet played with hardly disguised erotic gestures and at the end showed a simulated masturbation after the faun remains alone with the lost veil of a nymph and caresses it.

The rehearsals began in January 1912 and were difficult because the ensemble had to acquire a completely new dance vocabulary that hardly seemed to bring the virtuosity they had learned to bear. The dancer Ida Rubinstein , famous for her skill and beauty , renounced the female lead offered to her alongside Nijinsky, who himself took on the part of the faun. A particular challenge was the fact that Nijinsky did not derive the dance movements directly from Debussy's music, but rather developed it in an independent tension. Ninety rehearsals, which also took place in secret, were necessary before the perfection sought by Nijinsky was achieved. The premiere was on May 29, 1912 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris .

Reception and reconstruction

George Barbier: Nijinsky as a Faun, 1913.

As a succès de scandale, L'Après-midi d'un faune aroused similar controversies as the ballets Jeux and Le sacre du printemps created by Nijinsky the following year . Some of the press and the public took violent offense at the sequences of movements that broke with tradition and especially at the masturbation scene. The Figaro wrote of an "incontinent faune, vil, aux gestes d'une bestialité érotique et d'une lourde impudeur" (a "Faun, who can not hold back, which is of lower nature, the movements of erotic bestiality and not performing knows the slightest shame ”). In favor of Nijinsky, however, the painters Odilon Redon and Auguste Rodin , who had attended the premiere and created a statue of Nijinsky.

The importance of the work in the history of ballet and its position in artistic modernism were recognized before Nijinsky last danced the role in 1917. L'Après-midi d'un faune did not disappear from the Ballets Russes ' repertoire like Jeux or Le sacre du Printemps due to the numerous hostilities and the lack of understanding that was expressed, but changes were made to it. It was later performed in different versions, with the role of the Faun, for example, by Nijinsky's sister Bronislava Nijinska in 1922 or his pupil Serge Lifar in 1935. In 1976 Nijinsky’s widow, Romola de Pulszky , and Léonide Massine attempted the restore original choreography; this with the help of her own memories of Nijinsky's appearances and the photos of Adolf de Meyer . Another version from the late 1980s comes from Ann Hutchinson and Claudia Jeschke , who dealt with Nijinsky’s hard to decipher notations (kept in the British Library ).

The Italian illustrator Bruno Bozzetto used the ballet L'Après-midi d'un faune and the music of Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune for his 1976 animated film Allegro non troppo , which was based on Walt Disney's Fantasia , and he told the story gave a humorous, melancholy touch.

literature

  • Jean-Michel Nectoux: L'Après-midi d'un Faune: Mallarmé, Debussy, Nijinsky. Les Dossiers du Musée d'Orsay, N ° 29 (exhibition catalog), Paris 1989.

Web links

Commons : L'après-midi d'un faune  - Collection of images