The Ocean and The Pearls
A Ménage from the Deep
(All pre-1918 Russian Dates are given Old Style)
- With a special contribution by Kathleen Smith Epstein -
Introduction
Following the pas de trois from Swan Lake and Paquita, The Ocean and the Pearls is the last surviving classical f/f/m trio from Russia’s Imperial Ballet era. ‘Ocean’ is a divertissement belonging to Alexander Gorsky’s 1914 staging of The Hump-backed Horse, with perhaps more to it than just being a romping triad.
History
Of all the fantastic tales that were turned into imperial ballets, The Hump-backed Horse (or The Tsar-Maiden) was, amid the preferred French-based libretti, the sole Russian one. Cesare Pugni’s ballet was based on Pyotr Ershov’s story in verses. The choreographer was Arthur Saint-Léon, who created it in 1864. He staged it for Moscow two years on, where it was revived by José Mendez and Ivan Khlyustin in 1893. In 1895, Saint-Léon’s version was overwritten by Petipa for the Mariinsky. The ballet survived the first half of the 20th century in Alexander Gorsky’s renditions; until 1963 at the Mariinsky and in Moscow until 1952. Aside from its Russian Dance, The Ocean and the Pearls still stands.
The Petersburg born Alexander Alexeyevich Gorsky (1871-1924) gave up dancing at 30 to choreograph for Moscow’s Imperial Ballet. As régisseur and then ballet master, he completely reshaped the company’s repertoire. In his first Hump-backed Horse staging (1901), Gorsky replaced Pugni’s Grand Pas1 for the final act with three variations to music by Tchaikovsky, and set Swan Lake’s Russian Dance for the Tsar-Maiden. It survives to this day as a sort of ballet gala bonbon, representing an idealised Russian past, in similar vein to the 20th century lacquer boxes. Gorsky equally amended the Underwater Kingdom of Act III, where the magic pony and the hero Ivanushka are to retrieve a ring. It is here where we find the ancestry of The Ocean and the Pearls.
Back with Petipa in St Petersburg, the realm was overseen by the (returning) Nereid Queen, now leading a Bacchanale. Anna Johanson danced it, and was succeeded by Varvara Rikhlyakova, Lubov Egorova, Julia Sedova and Agrippina Vaganova. In Moscow, Gorsky replaced the Nereid Queen with The Moon/Tsar-Maiden’s Mother, danced by Elizaveta Charpentier, a dancer of colour. Going by the role’s name, it may have been allotted drama-driven properties. In Act III, Charpentier was paired as Water Queen to Water God, a part for the hunky Alexandre Volinin, who was fresh out of school. Gorsky obviously enjoyed to professionally engage with these young men; the year before, Mikhail Mordkin had been his pre-graduate Jean de Brienne (Raymonda).2 Later on, Water God was danced by Lavrenty Novikov, whom the West would come to know as Laurent Novikoff with Anna Pavlova’s company. The role was also taken by a young Kasian Goleizovsky. The two characters performed an adagio to Tchaikovsky’s Nocturne op. 19.No. 4; Gorsky likely being the first in a lengthy row of choreographers to make use of this piece. Other ‘seabed inhabitants’ participated, which probably entailed movement echoing during the reprise. Variations and coda followed. Then there was a Pearl, Ekaterina Geltser. She awoke from a big clam - a ballerina-divan also seen in ballets such as Pharaoh’s Daughter, Camargo and The Pearl - to dance with yet another allegorical entity, Sunbeam. Sunbeam was often performed by Vassily Tikhomirov. Tikhomirov was a danseur noble, the Clark Kent to Mordkin and Volinin’s Superman, so to speak. So, slightly out of character here, the dancer Margarita Kondaurova recalled how he looked ‘dashing, tall, and strong in his golden-yellow costume,’ and that the clam produced light when Pearl woke up in it, answering when Sunbeam penetrated the water. A pas de deux ensued.
In 1912, when Gorsky staged Hump-backed Horse for St Petersburg, he paired Pearl to Water God, using new music by Boris Asafiev and some by Andrei Arends, taken from the two previous pas de deux.3 Elsa Vill and Pierre Vladimirov danced. Six months into the war, Gorsky revised his Moscow staging. It seems that his aim was to shorten the ballet by cutting dances, as he had done at the Mariinsky. The fact that a sizeable part of his corps de ballet was conscripted cannot have helped. A major revelation was The Ocean and the Pearls, substituting all the previous underwater soloists.
Music
The music’s provenance is repeated subject of discussion. Bolshoi programmes for Western tours passively credit Pugni. Another suggestion is that ‘Ocean’ is the work of Gorsky’s close collaborator Andrei Arends (1855-1924). The conductor/composer was actually called Hendrik Arends, a name that gives away a firm Dutch descent. Obscure in the West, Arends graduated the Moscow Conservatory in 1887 after studying with such greats as Ferdinand Laub (violin) and Tchaikovsky (composition). He started at the Imperial Bolshoi in 1899, and went on to become Chief Conductor a year on. His collaboration with Gorsky culminated in Salammbô (1910). Soviet writer Vera Krasovskaya proposed that The Ocean and The Pearls was compiled from music of the 1901 ‘Pearl & Water God Pas de Deux.’ She lumped the characters Sunbeam and Water God together, leading to the misapprehension that Pearl & Water God actually danced together in Moscow.
It was Gorsky’s biographer Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov who asserted that The Ocean and the Pearls was indeed Drigo’s, with the male variation by Ernest Giraud, once inserted in The Harlem Tulip (and in The Goldfish). However, he claimed that The Ocean and the Pearls originates in La Fille mal Gardee. Drigo composed it, uncredited, as a pas de deux4 for Hedwig Hantenberg’s 1894 performances in St Petersburg. Gorsky experienced those from close-by: he played Nicaise (Alain) to Hantenberg’s Lise. But those who surmise that The Ocean and The Pearls is adapted from Riccardo Drigo’s The Pearl, are proven right by its surviving score. This was Petipa’s one-acter for Nicholas II’s coronation (1896), in which Gorsky participated as well. There are the Grand Adagio (b), Armées du Roi Corail (f), variation du Genie de la Terre (h) and Coda (j). It would be quite something if Drigo reworked Hantenberg’s pas de deux for The Pearl, if that occasion did not prompt a brand-new composition. In any case, it is safe to assume that Arends make some necessary tweaks – which would then merge all existing theories with fact.
Mythology
Why did Gorsky scratch Water God and fill the niche with a character called Ocean? The source of inspiration cannot be Ershov, who generally makes use of the word ‘sea’ in his book, ‘ocean’ features just once. Did Gorsky want to enhance the pearl theme? He knew pearls were harvested from the Pacific Ocean, yet there seems to be more to Ocean than merely representing a big sea. More often than not, the divertissement numbers Gorsky grew up with were miniature stories, or referential at least. Like all well-to-do Russians, Gorsky was a Black-Sea vacationer. While looking out over the (pearl-less) water from his beach chair, he could have gotten inspired to go for Ocean. An educated man, Gorsky would have known about Homer’s Black Sea equation; the cause – as it appears - being Odysseus's travel to the Cimmerians, whose fatherland, lying beyond the Oceanus, is described as a country away from sunlight. Gorsky was also indubitably aware of the titan called Ocean, Oceanus. He was the eldest son of Ouranos and Gaia, which makes him a deity of the Second Order, the generation that precedes the Olympian Gods. Ocean has better press than his peers because he disengaged from the Titan Wars, his ticket to spending Zeus’s reign without worries.
An infamous habit of divine machos was ravishing nymphs and ephebes, one of the worst examples being Poseidon raping Athena’s priestess Medusa, with known ghastly consequences. The mythological Oceanus (Okeanos) wed his sister Thetis4 and fathered thousands of children, male, river gods, and female, the Oceanids (a type of nymphs). He was also not beyond taking his daughter Theia (resulting in the Cercopes, the original naughty brothers). This practice appears to be referenced in the adagio of The Ocean and the Pearls, subtly and watered down of course; balletic playfulness harbouring a darker subtext. When Ocean separates the two Pearls to dance with each of them, does he metaphorically have his way with them, before returning them to the arms of the other to rest?
Choreography
Which brings us to the stage action. Krasovskaya asserted that there were many choreographic novelties. During curtain-up, the Pearls are frozen in a front-stage embrace and Ocean storms in. Pieces of flowy gauze, attached to his arms, suggest rolling waves. The girls wear pearl-shaped caps and Greek skirts. The Pearls prefer to remain in their ‘caressing, intimate embrace’ (Souritz, Belova), but Ocean immediately starts to sunder them. Technically, the adagio builds on double work in the traditional manner with a demi-character twist that reliably got more and more lost over the years. The crescendo is cleverly used; rather than indulging in a banal, powerhouse whip crack lift, Gorsky has the Pearls below Ocean’s arm level, read covered by the waves. The variations follow suit. Ocean takes the first, with big jumps and turns: temps-levé with bend knees, jeté entrelacé and fouètté to the knee. Surmising, this vocabulary was designed to go beyond canon, suggesting jumping up from, and riding waves in a dolphin-like manner. The Pearls then dance a dual variation that expresses their bond. Their unusual, non-classical steps (read hops in parallel position in naïve style), were quite reminiscent of Isadora Duncan (Souritz, Belova), as were the ‘free’ arms with flexed wrists (Krasovskaya). The variation ends in a little Russian dance. Concept-wise, it followed Petipa’s The Pearl, which featured duos of Black and Pink Pearls. The Pinks were made up of Moscow dancers. The variation tentatively precedes Nijinska’s sexually ambiguous Petite Chanson Dansee from Les Biches. The coda is somewhat more run-off-the-mill, with a jeté manège and tours à la seconde for Ocean, and a diagonal of turning steps for each Pearl. No doubt that these were soon tailored to the abilities and strengths of individual performers. The trio ends the way it begun, with the Pearls clinging together, but Ocean now joins them in a commanding pose.
Dancers
The first cast of The Ocean and The Pearls had Novikov together with Vera Karalli (Pink Pearl) and Alexandra Balashova (Blue Pearl), who was superseded as Tsar-Maiden by Geltser for Hump-backed Horse’s revival. Soon after, Novikov partnered Elizaveta Anderson (Pink) and Margarita Froman (Blue) regularly. Oliver Martin Saylor saw Froman dance in the days of the revolution, and mentioned her ‘grace and personal charm.’ This trio performed up until the 1915 performances safe one, when Novikov was replaced by Leonid Zhukov. Gorsky’s Hump-backed Horse was frequently given in the 20th century, punching a hole in the 1950s before it disappeared from the Bolshoi stage, providing opportunities for many casts.
Another Ocean of those years was Nicolai Tarasov, an artist who gained fame as a published teacher. Other names of the early 1920s were Ivan and Viktor Smoltsov, while the 1930s saw the debuts of Alexander Rudenko and Alexander Tsarman-Mladschi, names that rarely if ever pop up in Western print. Names that do resonate internationally down the century are Alexei Ermolaev, Mikhail Gabovich and Asaf Messerer, the last two starting out as 1920s Oceans. Gabovich danced the role until well after WWII, but champion here is Messerer, who was so fond of the role he danced it for a staggering 30 years, from 1922 to 1952. Pearls of the 1920s include Lubov Bank and Valentina Kudryavtseva (Blue), Anastasia Abramova and Nina Podgoretskaya (Pink), but unlike the first cast, records show that the dancers switched now and then. If these entries are not inaccurate, they changed colour simply for the fun of it. The pearl-colour distinction was dropped in the late 1920s or early 1930s. Later casts include Galina Petrova, a now forgotten soloist, but once described by Marina Semeonova as ‘one to watch,’ and Vera Vasilyeva, Moscow’s first Maria in The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. Future principal dancers that appeared as Pearls were the Leningrad-transferred Elena Tchikvaidze and Irina Tikhomirnova (wives of resp. Leonid Lavrovsky and Fyodor Lopukhov), and the acclaimed Raisa Struchkova. The Gorsky/Pugni Hump-backed Horse was eventually binned and replaced by a completely new version. The music was by Rodion Shchedrin and choreography by character artist Alexander Radunsky, who incidentally had also been on the team of Pugni’s last revival. The Ocean and Pearls, however, survived as a separate number and was frequently presented on tours.
Amsterdam
‘Ocean’s’ performance history made an exceptional detour to the West. Picture Amsterdam in the early days of 1964, with its canals damp, cold and chilly. The founding artistic director of Het Nationale Ballet (The Dutch National Ballet), Sonia Gaskell, had good connections behind the Iron Curtain and so managed to invite dancers and ballet masters on a regular base, a period rarity. In that capacity, Natalia Orlovskaya, a former Bolshoi soloist and GATOB teacher, taught class and compiled a divertissement, eventually televised as Russian Concert Programme. On stage, it became part of a tried-and-tested recipe called Tribute to Pavlova, shoehorned between the epoch-fitting Les Sylphides and Polovtsian Dances and, for some reason, Balanchine’s Pas de Dix from Raymonda, staged by John Taras. There were, inter alia, The Dying Swan (Le Cygne), three Soviet duets (Pyotr Gusev’s Waltz, Vassily Vainonen’s Dolls and Messerer’s Melody) and The Ocean and the Pearls. Some of these bagatelles had been seen, but not staged in the West. The premiere took place on 21 January 1964. Mrs. Kathleen Smith Epstein, principal dancer with the company from 1962 to 1967, remembers:
“For the Pavlova Memorial Program […], nine of us were chosen to perform in the divertissements by Mme. Orlovskaya, our coach whom Sonia Gaskell had engaged from the Soviet Union. As part of these divertissements, Panchita de Péri, Sylvester Campbell, and I were selected to dance The Ocean and the Pearls, which Mme Orlovskaya herself had danced in the Bolshoi Ballet. Stylistically it was quite a quaint and challenging piece, but we came to love dancing it under Mme’s stern yet precise and inspired guidance. On the morning of the premiere in the Stadsschouwburg [now International Theatre Amsterdam, ITA, P.K.], we danced the dress rehearsal at 9 o’clock, which already made it an especially stressful and tiring day. Upon completing all of the pieces only Panchita, Sylvester, and I were told to go to the main studio for notes with Mme Orlovskaya. Unfortunately, our interpreter was not present. Mme Orlovskaya entered the studio, glanced at Panchita and me and commanded, “posa!” We dutifully took our opening positions as Sylvester waited aside to make his entrance. Facing each other in effacée derrière, toe to the floor with working leg slightly bent close to the standing leg, we bent backward, our backs parallel to the floor as the choreography required. Mme Orlovskaya began to rant, in Russian of course. Minutes passed and our backs began to stiffen. So we began to straighten up, at which time Mme Orlovskaya again shouted, “posa!” We dutifully bent backward once more and waited for the tirade to end. A few minutes later, which seemed like an eternity, she left the studio with us still standing there! To this day, we have no idea what she was saying to us!”
Principal dancer Simon André (1942-2020) designed the costumes. He remembered how Orlovskaya asked him to use different shades for the skirts of the girls. This indicates that the one-time colour distinction between the Pearls may have been just a playbill loss.
The theatre was crammed to capacity and the evening a huge success, leading the audience to shout with one voice ‘Let the Russians come’ (De Volkskrant, 22 Jan 1964). And that in NL, with its restrained audiences, amid the Cold War.5
Conclusion
The Ocean and the Pearls is still rarely seen outside Russia, where it now mostly serves as a vehicle for student performances. This has the disadvantage that a correct academic execution usually prevails over artistry. Some stagings put the Pearls in tutus now, a travesty that both negates and contradicts the aesthetics Gorsky wished. His output began to dissolve already after the 1917 revolution. This places The Ocean and the Pearls among a few unique, extant pieces. Some choreographic licence cannot extinguish its unique perfume, which puts colour into our dreams of a bygone era.
© Peter Koppers
Notes
1) According to the Sergeyev Collection, Petipa had in turn replaced Pugni’s original Grand Pas with (music from) the pas de deux of Saint-Léon’s The Pearl of Seville (1861).
2) Mordkin’s pre-graduate repertoire was impressive: before Raymonda there were leading men of Cavalry Halt, Colin in La Fille mal Gardee, The Magic Slipper and Fortuné in Sleeping Beauty’s Cinderella duet.
3) Krasovskaya’s description matches the preserved performance of the Kirov’s Nina Gruzdeva, which indicates that the female variation was imported from Moscow.
4) The pas de deux was inserted in Fille’s Act I, scene 2. Hantenberg danced it with Georgy Kyaksht. Kschessinskaya, Hantenberg’s successor as Lise, mentioned her success dancing ‘a’ pas de deux with Kyaksht.’ It is not certain, but very probable that Kschessinskaya returned to the chosen pas de deux of her stage debut, to a transcription of the song Alla Stella confidente by Vincenzo Robaudi (1870). It was introduced and performed by Zucchi, whom Kschessinskaya admired. Although not yet in a position to make great demands, she should have endeavoured (and succeeded) to repeat her first big hit.
4) Not to be confused with the nymph Thetis, mother of the hero Achilles.
5) The mentioned Elena Tchikvaidze was to stage The Kingdom of Shades from La Bayadere later during the same season for Het Nationale Ballet.
Sources & Bibliography
Simon André
Ballet Master A. A. Gorsky, Elisabeth Souritz, Ekaterina Belova
Bolshoi Archives
Cyril Beaumont
Dancing in St Petersburg, Matilda Kschessinska
Ezhegodniki Imperatorskikh Teatrov
Het Nationale Ballet 25 Jaar, Luuk Utrecht
Historisch-archief.nl
Natasha’s Dance, Orlando Figes
Panchita de Péri
Планы и воспоминания - Г.А. Римский-Корсаков
Русский балетный театр второй половины XIX века, Vera Krasovskaya
Kathleen Smith Epstein
The Russian Theatre under the Revolution – Oliver Martin Saylor
The Sergeyev Collection
Soviet Ballet, Iris Morley
Theaterarchief.nl
Photo Credits
A.A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Artchive, Bolshoi Archive, St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music / Санкт-Петербургского государственного музея театрального и музыкального искусства, St Petersburg State Theatre Library / Санкт-Петербургская государственная театральная библиотека, Mariinsky Theatre Archive, Peter Koppers Photo Archive, Salvador Sasot Sellart