After a year spent in Algeria, composer and music pedagogue Émile Jaques-Dalcroze returned to his native Switzerland, where he developed a series of movement exercises to help students learn the rhythmic and harmonic principles of (Western) music. Known as “eurhythmics,” the method drew from insights the former Paris bohemian discovered in the Arab music and Islamic mysticism he encountered in French-occupied Algiers. Chapter 3 demonstrates how eurhythmics gave visual form to both musical and social relations at the turn of the twentieth century, outlining a map of “social harmony” that helped consolidate group identities and affiliations. While Nazi pageants such as Rudolf Laban’s A Spring Wind and a New Joy (1936) modeled themselves after Jaques-Dalcroze’s own civic festivals to express the organic unity of a collective social body through uniform mass movements, other modernist works - such as W. E. B. Du Bois’s Star of Ethiopia pageant (1913, 1915, 1916, 1925), and the Ballet Russes’s Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) - set complex movement patterns on performers to enact both consensus and difference within a nationalizing body politic.

In a way, Igor Stravinsky’s turn to Greek antiquity as a source of inspiration came about as a gift to the man who arguably played the most important role in the composer’s artistic development: Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929). Indeed, Stravinsky’s very first work on a Greek theme, the opera-oratorio Oedipus rex (1926–7; rev. 1948), materialised as an anniversary present to the Russian impresario for the twentieth season of the Ballets Russes, in 1927.1 The fact that Diaghilev disliked what he described as ‘un cadeau très macabre’ (a very macabre present), says very little about the significance of this work – or, in fact, of Stravinsky’s subsequent works on ancient Greek topics – in the composer’s artistic evolution.

Where am I? From the vantage point of a small, pedestrian-only square (nowadays a popular selfie spot), a trio of visual oddities looms large. To the north is a modern-looking edifice with exterior escalators, electrics, plumbing and ventilation pipes. Opposite is a chaos of water-spurting sculptures, including a snake, a treble clef, a bowler hat, giant lips painted rouge, an elephant, some sort of avian creature and a red-headed mermaid with oversize breasts. Equally bizarre, to the west, is a huge graffitied face, a black-and-white self-portrait by the French street-artist Jean-François Perroy (he prefers ‘Jef Aérosol’). Two bulging eyes stare down at those paddling in the shallow water of the fountains, while a single finger, pressed against pursed lips, calls for silence: Chuuuttt! (Shhhhh!).

Born at the twilight of imperial Russia, Igor Stravinsky inevitably partook of its cultural conventions and rituals, moving closely with particular individuals, associations and vogues in what Alexandre Benois called ‘that hysterical and spiritually tormented time’.1 Among Stravinsky’s many connections in St Petersburg, for example, was the group of artists, writers and musicians known as the World of Art (Mir iskusstva) which, undoubtedly, played a formative role in his musical career.2 True, some observers are hesitant to accept the proximity, finding that ‘there is no real evidence that [Stravinsky] paid attention to the journal [Mir iskusstva] at that time or hankered after any particular association with its authors’.3 On the other hand, Stravinsky’s long friendship and professional liaison with the leaders of the World of Art (Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, Sergei Diaghilev, Nicholas Roerich), his intense collaboration with Roerich on The Rite of Spring at Talashkino (the estate of Princess Maria Tenisheva, primary financier of the World of Art journal)4 and his close alliance with the Ballets Russes – which, in many ways, was the extension of the aesthetic platform of the World of Art – would seem to furnish evidence that Stravinsky did, indeed, appreciate the cultural consistency of the World of Art.

David J. Code explores the reception of Vaslav Nijinsky’s L’Apres-midi d’un faune, a 1912 choreographic reworking of Claude Debussy’s orchestral Prélude (1894). He peels off layers of historical reference, looking backwards to Debussy and Stéphane Mallarmé from Faune’s 1912 Nijinskian embodiment. In the process, he questions the ballet’s accepted relationship to cubism in favour of a Matisse-inspired framework for understanding the underlying modernity of the Faun. With attention to scene and character types, structure and style, diegesis, eroticism and Freudian psychological interiority, Code highlights ways in which music and dance might both embody and subvert typically modernist modes of dramatic expression.