Antony Tudor's Dark Elegies and the Affirmation of Mahler's Body, 1937–1947

Abstract

This essay places Antony Tudor's Dark Elegies (1937), choreographed to Gustav Mahler's Kindertotenlieder (1904), in the contexts of Mahler performance and reception histories, and advocates for more inclusive, integrated histories and historiographies of music and dance. I argue that in the decade beginning with its premiere, Dark Elegies provided for Mahler's Kindertotenlieder to be experienced in diverse live contexts and articulated an embodied version of Mahler's songs that reconfigured negative associations between his music and the body.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported by a sabbatical leave from The College of New Jersey in fall 2011. For helpful insights and encouragement to pursue this project at different stages, I thank Carolyn Abbate, Judith Chazin-Bennahum, Benjamin Binder, Susan Cook, Jonathan Dunsby, Christopher Hailey, Nicole Koepke, Joellen Meglin, Gay Morris, Jennifer Ronyak, Mary Ann Smart, and Laura Tunbridge as well as two thoughtful anonymous readers. I am also grateful to the staff of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Notes

On antisemitism in its unhyphenated form as not only “emphasizing … this continuity of hatred, but also an attempt to get away from the fictive origins of the word,” see K. M. Knittel, Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010), 6–8; Shmeul Almog, “What's in a Hyphen?” SICSA Report: Newsletter of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, no. 2 (Summer 1989).

Richard Wagner, Judaism in Music (1850), in Richard Wagner's Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, vol. 3 (New York: Broude Brothers, 1966). Wagner revised Das Judentum in der Musik in 1869. That Wagner's Judaism in Music became seminal for antimodern antisemitism is ironic because Wagner himself was one of the composers whose music had been targeted as modern in a negative sense (e.g., in Max Nordau's Entartung [Berlin: C. Duncker, 1892–93]).

I gleaned performance statistics from a survey of several volumes of Chord and Discord: A Journal of Modern Musical Progress, the official organ of the Anton Bruckner Society of America, which also championed Mahler: vol. 1, no. 8 (1936), no. 9 (1938), no. 10 (1939); vol. 2, no. 1 (1940), and no. 2 (1940).

A number of these performances were broadcast by local, regional, or national radio. Performance statistics have been gleaned from a survey of several volumes of Chord and Discord: A Journal of Modern Musical Progress: vol. 1, no. 10 (1939); vol. 2, no. 1 (1940), no. 2 (1940), no. 3 (1941), and no. 4 (1946).

Dark Elegies is listed in the Ballet Theatre Souvenir Program for season 1944–45 (once again at the Met with Dorati and Alexander). The performance on tour in Chicago probably occurred in the early 1940s. The souvenir program and an unidentified Chicago newspaper clipping are located in “Dark Elegies (Tudor),” clippings file, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (hereafter JRDD-NYPL). This file includes reviews, photographs, and interviews related to Dark Elegies from a variety of sources in the United States, Great Britain, and Europe from 1937 to the present.

Dark Elegies was also programmed in New York in May and November 1947. See Robert A. Hague, “‘Dark Elegies' Revived by Ballet Theatre,” PM, May 11, 1947; Walter Terry, “Ballet Theatre: ‘Dark Elegies' by Tudor at City Center,” New York Herald Tribune, November 30, 1947.

Contrast the instrumentation of the Kindertotenlieder with Mahler's Symphony No. 5, composed contemporaneously, which is scored for four flutes (two doubling on piccolo), three oboes (one doubling on English horn), three clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, six horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, harp, glockenspiel, a battery of percussion, and strings.

Quoted in Huxley, “A History of a Dance,” 147. As of this writing I have been unable to confirm who made the two-piano and quintet arrangements for Tudor and Ballet Rambert.

I have not been able to ascertain whether Byrns's arrangement was made in time for the 1940 American premiere.

Percival, “Antony Tudor,” 31, 33. Commonly cited precursors to Dark Elegies, in addition to Les Sylphides, are Nijinsky's Le Sacre du printemps, Nijinska's Les Noces, Massine's Les Présages (Destiny, 1933, to Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony), and Choreartium (also 1933, to the Fourth Symphony of Brahms) as well as Balanchine's Serenade (1934, to Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings). On the abstract nature of Dark Elegies and its precursors, see also David Vaughan, “Tudor, Antony,” in International Encyclopedia of Dance, ed. Selma Jeanne Cohen, et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), VI: 197; and Vaughan, “Antony Tudor's Early Ballets,” 78–79.

“The Sitter Out,” Dancing Times (April 1937): 4. Another review of Dark Elegies reveals an understandable interest in—and the confusion surrounding—the texts of the Kindertotenlieder, which were “excellently sung by Edward Wellman in a language practically no one understood. And while the text was presumably in German, the stage sets had a strong Nordic touch.” Marjory M. Fisher, “‘Dark Elegies' Has Premiere,” clipping from an unidentified newspaper in “Dark Elegies (Tudor),” clippings file (JRDD-NYPL).

Quoted in Reilly, “Mahler in America,” 435 n. 51. Further illustrating Mahler's Romantic stigma is philosopher Theodor W. Adorno's early (1930) essay “Mahler Today,” a reaction to those who too hastily dismissed this composer, particularly from the vantage point of neoclassicism, which Adorno regarded as the true reactionary. Adorno, “Mahler Today,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 603–11.

Erwin Stein, “Mahler Today,” Tempo, vol. 6 (1944): 6. Stein's alignment of Mahler's music with the sociocultural environment of the twentieth century is a distilled version of part of Adorno's argument in his own “Mahler Today,” of which Stein was probably aware. I am grateful for a conversation with Christopher Hailey in Ewing, New Jersey, on July 25, 2012, and for his insights on Stein's relationship to the Second Viennese School and Adorno.

Adorno's Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy [1960], trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) is the seminal argument for Mahler's modernity.

Denby, “The Ballet: Ballet Theatre's ‘Parsifal'.” It was only later, in the wake of the Mahler centenary renaissance, that commentators found Dark Elegies (and the Kindertotenlieder) to be topical (e.g., Percival's retrospective account that “Dark Elegies was given in London during the war to audiences who knew the effect of mass bombing; it continued to ring true”). Percival, “Antony Tudor,” 34.

1. John Martin, “Ballet by Tudor Has Its Premiere,” New York Times, January 25, 1940.

2. Irving Kolodin, “‘Dark Elegies' is Danced at Center,” New York Sun, January 25, 1940.

3. Karen Painter, “The Sensuality of Timbre: Responses to Mahler and Modernity at the ‘Fin de siècle',” 19th-Century Music, vol. 18, no. 3 (1995): 237.

4. Karen Painter, Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 35.

5. Painter, “The Sensuality of Timbre,” 242.

6. See K. M. Knittel, “‘Ein hypermoderner Dirigent': Mahler and Anti-Semitism in Fin-de-siècle Vienna,” 19th-Century Music, vol. 18, no. 3 (1995): 257–76; K. M. Knittel, Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010), 6–8.

7. For an overview of the performance history of Mahler's music from his death until World War II, see Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler. Volume 4: A New Life Cut Short (1907–1911) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1657–63. For a comprehensive discography of the earliest recordings of Mahler, see Péter Fülöp and Zoltán Roman, “The Discography of Mahler's Works: Mahler-Discs and Mahler-Discography Yesterday and Today,” Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, vol. 26 (1984): 219–418.

8. Edward R. Reilly, “Mahler in America,” in The Mahler Companion, ed. Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 428.

9. Reilly, “Mahler,” 426, 430–31.

10. Robert W. F. Potter, “A Plea for the Recording of the Songs of Gustav Mahler,” The Gramophone (June 1936): 8.

11. La Grange, Gustav Mahler, 1657–58.

12. Judith Chazin-Bennahum, The Ballets of Antony Tudor: Studies in Psyche and Satire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 68. On recordings as an important source of Tudor's musical knowledge, see Elizabeth Sawyer, “‘That Englishman Abroad': A Tribute to Antony Tudor,” Dance Chronicle, vol. 20, no. 3 (1997): 262–63. For information on the Horenstein–Rehkemper recording of the Kindertotenlieder, see Fülöp and Roman, “The Discography of Mahler's Works,” 303; and La Grange, Gustav Mahler, 1663. On the 1932 Kindertotenlieder session under Scherchen in Vienna, see La Grange, Gustav Mahler, 1657.

13. Donald Mitchell, “The Mahler Renaissance in England: Its Origins and Chronology,” in The Mahler Companion, 548, 563.

14. On the 1936 Walter recording of Das Lied von der Erde, see also Fülöp and Roman, “The Discography of Mahler's Works,” 331.

15. Muriel Topaz, Undimmed Lustre: The Life of Antony Tudor (Lanham, Md: Scarecrow, 2002), 66, 128.

16. Mitchell, “The Mahler Renaissance in England,” 555, 557.

17. On Shadow of the Wind, see Elizabeth Sawyer, “Antony Tudor's Lost Ballets,” Dance Chronicle, vol. 31, no. 1 (2008): 21–22; Chazin-Bennahum, The Ballets of Antony Tudor, 148–53.

18. Michael Huxley, “A History of a Dance: An Analysis of Dark Elegies from Written Criticism,” in Dance Analysis: Theory and Practice, ed. Janet Adshead et al. (London: Dance Books, 1988), 143–44.

19. Quoted in Huxley, “A History of a Dance,” 146–47.

20. John Martin, “Ballet Theatre Gives Tudor Work,” New York Times, October 30, 1942.

21. “List of Performances,” Chord and Discord: A Journal of Modern Musical Progress, vol. 2, no. 4 (1946): 94. See also Reilly, “Mahler in America,” 430.

22. Erwin Stein, “Mahler Today,” Tempo, vol. 6 (1944): 5.

23. Renate Hilmar-Voit, “Symphonic Sound or in the Style of Chamber Music? The Current Performing Forces of the Wunderhorn Lieder and the Sources,” News about Mahler Research, vol. 28 (October 1992): 8–12. See also Mitchell, “Mahler's ‘Kammermusikton',” in The Mahler Companion, 230.

24. Mitchell, “Mahler's ‘Kammermusikton',” 231.

25. Chazin-Bennahum, The Ballets of Antony Tudor, 69; Topaz, Undimmed Lustre, 55, 66.

26. Irving Kolodin, “Ballet Theater [sic] Gives Tudor's ‘Dark Elegies',” New York Sun, February 26, 1941.

27. From a review signed by “L. B.” entitled “Ballet Theatre,” unidentified newspaper clipping found in “Dark Elegies (Tudor),” clippings file, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (hereafter JRDD-NYPL). See also “Conductor Harold Byrns” [obituary], Central Opera Service Bulletin, vol. 20, no. 1 (winter 1977/1978): 16, available at http://www.cpanda.org/pdfs/csob/2001.pdf (accessed May 17, 2012); and Internet Broadway Database (IBDB), http://www.ibdb.com/production.php?id=1078 (accessed May 17, 2012).

28. Edwin Denby, “Ballet Presents ‘Dark Elegies' and Eglevski,” New York Herald Tribune, October 30, 1942; Denby, “The Ballet: Ballet Theatre's ‘Parsifal',” New York Herald Tribune, April 24, 1944. See also Hague, “Dark Elegies”; Huxley, “A History of a Dance,” 145.

29. Regarding this point, I am indebted to a conversation with Judith Chazin-Bennahum in Philadelphia on June 16, 2012.

30. Quoted in Huxley, “A History of a Dance,” 147.

31. John Percival, “Antony Tudor, Part One: The Years in England” [part one of two special issues], Dance Perspectives, vol. 17 (1963): 31.

32. David Vaughan, “Antony Tudor's Early Ballets,” in The Myriad Faces of Dance, Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference of the Society of Dance History Scholars, University of New Mexico, February 15–17, 1985, ed. Christena L. Schlundt ([n.p], [1985]), 78. See also Rachel S. Chamberlain Duerden, The Choreography of Antony Tudor: Focus on Four Ballets (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 2010), 272.

33. For a retrospective account, see Lucia Chase, “The Dance: Verdict. Director of Ballet Theatre Assesses Recent Experiment in Producing,” New York Times, July 21, 1957.

34. Kolodin, “Ballet Theater [sic] Gives Tudor's ‘Dark Elegies'.”

35. Martin, “Ballet Theatre Gives Tudor Work”; Denby, “The Ballet: Ballet Theatre's ‘Parsifal'.”

36. Acknowledging that choreography necessarily changes over time, I base this and subsequent descriptions and interpretations of Tudor's choreography on a 1965 rehearsal of Dark Elegies by the American Ballet Theatre, preserved on 16 mm. film in the Dance Division of the New York Library for the Performing Arts (*MGZHB 12–63) (with piano accompaniment and without the singer); and also a 2010 revival of Dark Elegies at the Hartt School, excerpts of which are available at http://www.harttweb.hartford.edu/dance.aspx (accessed October 18, 2012).

37. Quoted in Topaz, Undimmed Lustre, 70.

38. Martin, “Ballet by Tudor Has Its Premiere.”

39. John Martin, “Tudor Work Given by Ballet Theatre,” New York Times, February 26, 1941.

40. Kolodin, “Ballet Theater [sic] Gives Tudor's ‘Dark Elegies'.”

41. Martin, “Ballet Theatre Gives Tudor Work.”

42. Peter Revers, “‘… the heart-wrenching sound of farewell': Mahler, Rückert, and the Kindertotenlieder,” trans. Irene Zedlacher, in Mahler and His World, ed. Karen Painter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 177.

43. For example, see Reinhold Kubik, “‘Progress' and ‘Tradition': Mahler's Revisions and Changing Performance Practice Conventions,” trans. Jeremy Barham in Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, ed. Barham (Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2005), 401–15.

44. In order of quotation: anonymous review from the London Times (1937), quoted in Huxley, “A History of a Dance,” 146–47; Martin, “Tudor Work Given by Ballet Theatre”; Walter Terry, “Ballet Theatre Offers Tudor's ‘Dark Elegies',” New York Herald Tribune, February 26, 1941.

45. Henry Simon, “This One is No Light Fantastic,” review dated February 26, 1941, from an unidentified newspaper clipping found in “Dark Elegies (Tudor),” clippings file (JRDD-NYPL).

46. Sawyer, “That Englishman Abroad,” 255.

47. Revers, “… the heart-wrenching sound of farewell,” 182.

48. On Tudor's movement vocabulary in the contexts of early twentieth-century dance modernism(s), see Huxley, “A History of a Dance,” 150–53; Vaughan, “Antony Tudor's Early Ballets,” 73, 79.

49. Martin, “Ballet by Tudor Has Its Premiere,” and Martin, “Tudor Work Given by Ballet Theatre,” respectively.

50. Quotation from Kubik, “‘Progress' and ‘Tradition',” 402.

51. Denby, “Ballet Presents ‘Dark Elegies' and Eglevski.”

52. Simon, “This One is No Light Fantastic.”

53. From an interview in the SoHo Weekly News, May 3, 1979, quoted in Chazin-Bennahum, The Ballets of Antony Tudor, 8–9.

54. From a review originally appearing in the New York Herald Tribune, December 2, 1947, excerpted in Chord and Discord: A Journal of Modern Musical Progress, vol. 2, no. 5 (1948): 98.

55. Jeremy Barham, “Introduction,” in Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, xxiii.