Premiere and reaction
On 28 May 1912, an invited audience attended the dress rehearsal. There was silence as it finished. Gabriel Astruc, a French impresario who assisted Diaghilev with finance, publicity, and bookings, came on stage and announced that the ballet would be repeated. This time, there was some applause before the audience was presented champagne and caviar in the theatre foyer.
The Afternoon of a Faun was premiered on 29 May at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. The faun was danced by Vaslav Nijinsky, senior nymph by Nelidova, and Bronislava Nijinska danced the 6th nymph. The conductor was Pierre Monteux. On the opening night, the ballet was met with a mixture of applause and booing, and again it was repeated. After the repeated performance, the audience applauded, and the sculptor, Auguste Rodin who was in the audience, stood up to cheer.[12]
Comoedia published a long article by its editor, Gaston de Pawlowski, where he praised the ballet and supported articles by Louis Vuillemain and Louis Schneider.[13] Vuillemain wrote that this ballet had the most pleasing acting, dancing, and music he had ever seen before.[14] Le Théâtre carried a review by Schneider where he applauded Nijinsky's ability to accurately adapt his choreography to Debussy's composition.[15]
A strikingly different response appeared in Le Figaro, where the editor, Gaston Calmette, also carried a front page article on the ballet. Calmette denounced the ballet after declining to publish the favourable report of his normal theatre critic, Robert Brussel.[16] Calmette wrote that the ballet was not artful, imaginative, nor meaningful. He then goes on to criticize the choreography of the faun as being "filthy" and "indecent", which he argued deservedly incited the booing at the initial showings.[17] Calmette was much more complimentary about Nijinsky's other performances that were part of the same evening's schedule as the showing of the Faun. He applauded Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la Rose, which Michel Fokine choreographed, and said that this was the kind of ballet that should be performed for the public.[17]
Diaghilev responded to Calmette by forwarding letters of support to Le Figaro which they published the following day. The painter, Odilon Redon, a friend of Mallarmé, suggested how much the author of the original poem on which the ballet had been based would have approved: "more than anyone, he would have appreciated this wonderful evocation of his thoughts."[18]
In another letter that Diaghilev submitted, Auguste Rodin wrote that Nijinsky's acting and attention to detail over the movements of his body worked wonderfully to convey the character and mind of the faun. Rodin noticed the antique forms of the frescoes and other art in Nijinsky's display. The artist expressed the feeling that Nijinsky was a sculptor's "ideal model."[19]
The dispute over the ballet spread, taking on a political tone. Le Figaro was accused of attacking the Ballets Russes because they opposed France's political policy to ally with Russia, and that they represented an opening to smear all things Russian.[20] The Russian ambassador became involved, French politicians signed petitions, and the President and Prime Minister asked a government commission to report. The Paris police attended the second night of the ballet because of its alleged obscenity, but took no action after they saw the public's support. The ending of the ballet may have been temporarily amended to be more proper. Tickets to all performances were sold out, and Parisians clamoured to obtain them by any means.[21]
Michel Fokine claimed to be shocked by the explicit ending of Faun, despite at the same time suggesting that the idea of the faun lying down in a sexual manner on top of the nymph's veil had been plagiarised from his own ballet Tannhäuser. In this ballet, Fokine choreographed the hero to lie down in a comparable manner upon a woman. However, Fokine found some points to compliment in the ballet, including the use of pauses by the dancers where traditionally there would have been continuous movement, as well as the juxtaposition of angular choreography with the very fluid music.[22]
Fokine's animosity to Faun is partly explainable by his own difficulties in preparing Daphnis and Chloe, which was to premiere the week following Faun but was not complete. Diaghilev tried to cancel Daphnis; instead it was postponed to 8 June. Daphnis only received two performances even though it was considered a success by critics such as Le Figaro. The company was sharply divided into two factions by the quarrel, some supporting Nijinsky and some Fokine. The final result consisted of Fokine leaving the company on bad terms with Nijinsky regardless of the fact that the partnership between Nijinsky as dancer and Fokine as choreographer had been enormously successful for them both.
The Ballets Russes chose not to show Faun in the London season immediately following its Paris appearance. Instead, the company premiered L'Oiseau de feu, Narcisse, and Thamar for the first time in London. In the autumn, a German tour began at the Stadt-Theater in Cologne on 30 October before moving to the New Royal opera House in Berlin on 11 December. The Berlin programme included Faun which was performed before the Kaiser, the King of Portugal, and sundry dignitaries. Diaghilev reported to Astruc that this showing was a "huge success" which resulted in ten encores without protest.[23] Serge Gregoriev, who had just resigned from the Mariinsky Theatre to join Diaghilev full-time as stage manager, was more sanguine, reporting that "faun fell flat," but he confirmed the overall success of the German tour.[24]
In spring 1913, the ballet was performed in Vienna, where it again had a cool reception, though not so bad as Petrushka, which the orchestra of the Vienna Opera House initially refused to play because they disliked the music.[25]
In 1931, shortly after the death of Diaghilev, when some of his dancers settled in London, the Rambert Ballet took L'Après-midi d'un faune into its repertoire.[29] Leon Woizikovsky, who had danced the faun in the last years of the Diaghilev company and whom Nijinsky taught, reproduced the ballet for Rambert's company.[30] Rambert Ballet revived Faun for several years.[31] The reproduction met with criticism from Cyril Beaumont who commented in his book that the ballet becomes “meaningless, if given, as sometimes happens, without the essential nymphs.”[32]
At the Nureyev Festival at the London Coliseum in July 1983, Rudolf Nureyev danced the faun as part of a Homage to Diaghilev in a mixed bill of ballets.[33] Then, in the late 1980s, dance notation specialists
