Under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s government has invested heavily in the arts, including a massive renovation of Budapest’s Hungarian State Opera House, an imposing structure that dates from 1884. For evidence of the generous resources at hand, one need look no farther than the Hungarian National Ballet’s opulent new production of La Bayadère, staged by Albert Mirzoyan, a longtime dancer with St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater, who later served as the ballet master there and at the Vienna State Opera, among other posts.
La Bayadère is one of Russia’s best-known ballets, though it took a long time to find its footing in the West. Like so much else in Russia’s cultural universe, it has a complicated history. Conceived for the Mariinsky in imperial times by the famed French-born ballet master Marius Petipa to a libretto by the dramatist Sergei Khudekov, the ballet’s premiere in 1877 came just as Russia’s mid-nineteenth-century foray into realism began to yield to its “Silver Age” explorations of the psychological and exotic. Although Bayadère employed a rhythmic score of successive crowd-pleasing dances by the Austrian composer Ludwig Minkus, Petipa and Khudekov’s project reached far beyond Russian national tropes to explore mystical Asian sources, either directly or refracted through European observations. The French word bayadère, which refers to a Hindu temple dancer, itself comes from the Portuguese bailadeira (from bailar, “to dance”) and is an artifact of Portugal’s contact with the subcontinent, modern Europe’s first. Goethe, who aspired to practice ethnography among his many other vocations, wrote a ballad on the theme, “The God and the Bayadère,” which found a place in the European imagination. Along with other Indian lore, it inspired numerous theatrical works, including the French ballet Sacountala (1858), choreographed by Petipa’s brother Lucien to a score by Ernest Reyer long before the tale reached St. Petersburg.
La Bayadère opens with a tiger hunt, during which the warrior Solor sends a secret message to his love Nikiya, the temple dancer of the ballet’s title, asking that she await him for an assignation. When they meet, the High Brahmin overhears them declare their love and promptly informs the ruler, Rajah Dugmanta, who wants Solor to marry his daughter Gamzatti. To the High Brahmin’s horror, Dugmanta decides to get Nikiya out of the way by killing her. Gamzatti tries first to buy off her rival with jewels, but Nikiya remains steadfast in her love for Solor. Compelled to dance at the betrothal festivities, Nikiya performs with a basket of fruit on her head, only to be bitten by a poisonous snake hidden within by Gamzatti’s treacherous nurse. Facing imminent death, Nikiya refuses the High Brahmin’s offer of an antidote in exchange for renouncing her love and expires. Solor is inconsolable and spends the third act in an opium-induced dream sequence, “The Kingdom of Shades,” in which he imagines Nikiya’s soul among a flurry of spirits descending a mountain. In waking life, he is compelled to abandon the vision and marry Gamzatti, but the god Vishnu exacts horrible vengeance and sends a storm to destroy the temple, killing all within and uniting Solor and Nikiya for eternity.
La Bayadère’s plot surely owes much to other “Orientalist” creations of the era. The unequal rivalry of a princess and servant for a male protagonist’s love recalls Verdi’s Aida, which premiered just six years before, while the divine intervention that destroys the temple and the evildoers therein anticipated the finale of Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila, which premiered later the same year. Nikiya’s death by snakebite recalls the death of Cleopatra, whose exotic end has inspired countless interpretations over the centuries. Deathly consequences for profane challenges to the sacred in subcontinental settings also defined Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers (1863) and Delibes’ Lakmé (1883).
Bayadère, however, is far from derivative and has never ceased to hold the Russian stage, even though the Act IV vengeance scene was lost to performance for decades. In 1924, the second-worst flood in the history of St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) ruined the act’s elaborate scenery, which included stage machinery essential for the destruction of the temple. The incipient Soviet state’s arts commissars pleaded a lack of resources to restore the act, and their atheistic communism in any case disfavored stage depictions of divine justice. For decades of Soviet performance, the ballet ended with Solor’s “Kingdom of Shades” dream sequence. A vast ensemble of spirits with solo dances for the two principals, it eventually proved to be the ballet’s gateway to the West, where Bayadère remained virtually unknown. In 1961, the dream sequence appeared as a standalone excerpt in the Mariinsky (then known as the Kirov) Ballet’s tour program in Paris when Rudolf Nureyev, who appeared as Solor, sensationally defected. After Natalia Makarova defected in London nine years later, “Kingdom of Shades” was one of the first pieces she performed as a free artist in the West, before staging the full ballet, including Act IV, as reconstructed from meticulous notes on Petipa’s choreography, in 1980 for the American Ballet Theatre. Nureyev also staged a full Bayadère for his professional swan song over a decade later, but without the fourth act. Russia did not see the full ballet again until Sergei Vikharev memorably staged Bayadère for the Mariinsky (by then returned to its imperial-era name) in 2002, with both a restored Act IV and Soviet-era innovations that dragged the performance out to nearly four hours.
Mirzoyan took a tauter approach for Budapest’s main ballet stage, where Bayadère clocks in at just over three hours (with two intermissions), leaving out much of the extraneous Soviet material while preserving Petipa’s choreography. A few additions are accompanied by music that Minkus composed for a later Petipa ballet, titled Nuit et Jour (1883), which was performed to celebrate the coronation of Tsar Alexander III but promptly forgotten. For this production, the Hungarian composer György Lázár orchestrated the musical additions from a piano transcription and stitched them into the rest of the score, which Péter Dobszay admirably conducted.
István Rózsa’s sets capture Mughul India in all its glory. Along with Nóra Rományi’s sumptuous costumes, they luxuriate in rich reds, yellows, and blues, conveying the dazzling life of a princely court and its surroundings.
The principal casting was an international effort. Tatiana Melnik, a Russian dancer employed on the Hungarian stage, brought fluent motion to the part of Nikiya and admirably conveyed passion, despair, and supernatural hope. The British-trained Louis Scrivener, who has also found a creative home here, was an irresistible Solor. Maria Beck, a Russian-trained American dancer who has joined the Hungarian company full-time, was a domineering Gamzatti. The greatest standout among the supporting cast was Motomi Kiyota, another principal dancer for the Hungarian National Ballet, who hails from Japan. In a succession of elaborate dances staged to celebrate Gamzatti’s betrothal to Solor, Kiyota displayed an uncommon athleticism in the role of a Golden Idol. Mikalaj Radziush ad György Szirb performed well respectively as the High Brahmin and Rajah Dugmanta. With standards vaulting to these heights, Budapest is firmly on the balletic map.
