Paul Dukas' La Péri as Interpreted by Two Balletic Collaborators
Paul Dukas (1865–1935) had once mentally consigned his ballet, La Péri, to the funeral pyre.1 In the weeks leading up to its aborted premiere, Pierre Lalo recounts that the composer approached him for an honest assessment of his composition: "if you find that it is too bad . . . I will destroy the manuscript; it is all that it merits."2 Against all odds, the curtain that finally rose on La Péri on April 22, 1912, turned Dukas' reveries of ash into flame.
La Péri, in piano score, was completed by March 1911.3 Gabriel Astruc arranged for Serge Diaghilev and Valsav Nijinsky to hear this version.4 With Diaghilev on board, the ballet's premiere by the Ballet Russes was set for that same year,5 yet the venture was fraught with obstacles. Telegrams from Diaghilev highlight problems with unsigned contracts and impossible rehearsal schedules.6 Nijinsky was billed to appear in the star couple, along with Natasha Trouhanova.7 But both Nijinsky and Michel Fokine (whom Diaghilev had hired as choreographer) would agree to the project only if Dukas would serve as conductor.8 Diaghilev meanwhile failed repeatedly to persuade Trouhanova to sign her contract. Judging by Diaghilev's telegrams, Trouhanova did not attend scheduled meetings, and it appears that she refused to sign her contract until she could be granted exclusive rights to perform La Péri elsewhere.9 In spite of setbacks, preparations for the performance went ahead. By May 1911, Leon Bakst had completed his designs for décor and costumes, and a photograph of Trouhanova wearing her costume appeared on the cover of Comœdia Illustré (June 1911).10 And yet, as Diaghilev reported in a May 22, 1911, telegram to Astruc and Bakst: "We have a fortnight till the Paris opening . . . I have still not received Trouhanova's contract signed. . . . Obviously we can't plan a work without the co-operation of its chief interpreter. . . . Now I am in a most embarrassing position with regard to Dukas."11 Despite Diaghilev's determination "to get Péri on,"12 the first staging of Dukas' last large-scale work ultimately fell to the director of the Théâtre des Arts, Jacques Rouché.
Stage music occupied a prominent place in Dukas' career: his work list includes two inchoate ballets, Le sang de Méduse (1912) and Variations chorégraphiques [End Page 117] (1930),13 along with two completed works, the opera Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1907) and the ballet La Péri (1911). Dukas also penned several essays, two of which, "Le Théâtre lyrique" (1893) and "La déception scénique" (1896), explore the precepts of collective theatrical creation: specifically, the participation of music in tandem with stage movement, décor, and so on. Dukas observed that music in particular "could no longer act on its own" in a theatrical context.14 Rather, the evaluation of a work must treat that work as an ensemble of parts—as multimedial.
La Péri, like all dance-music works, is inherently flexible and ephemeral, assuming different guises in each new performance, depending on the wills of each new set of performers. The "work" itself exists as a concatenation of these different versions, over time becoming a distillate of changing performance conditions, artists, cultural backdrops and, of course, scholarly intercession. For La Péri, Dukas' own involvement in particular (in 1912 for the premiere, and in 1935 for the revival) attests to the ballet's malleability; one sees that the composer played a crucial part in its changing ontology.
The aim of this article is to use evidence gleaned from annotated choreographic scores from two versions of Dukas' La Péri to address what responses the dancers and the director of La Péri may have had toward Dukas' music, and in doing so, to begin to understand La Péri as interdisciplinary. For...
