Mavra—this ballet marks one of the most important moments in the career of the great Russian musician: a career which without ceasing to be unified has been extremely rich in articulations. In Noces one finds the same purity of inspiration, the same pursuit of a simple theme, the same contempt for every picturesque quality that was already marked in the revolution of Le Sacre du Printemps. The ballet is the simple history of a country betrothal, commented by mixed choruses, where simple percussions on the strings, the woodwinds, the gongs, the brasses are enough to render the most poignant emotion. "Briefly the principle is that of jazz," Darius Milhaud told me, "but without ever sacrificing the melody"; more an oratorio than a ballet. We are looking forward with impatience to the pleasure of hearing it in a concert room, or rather of hearing it again, for the rehearsal of the piece at the home of the Princess Edmond de Polignac revealed it to us with a perfection which has not been equalled since. However, the stylized choreography of Nijinska, against the sober monochrome of the settings by Goncharova, was never harmful and often was a help.
I thought, as I left the Theatre de la Gaieté, that contrary to the other arts, where the confusion of the last thirty years has persisted, the ages of modern music seem to be as clearly separated already as the reigns of separate kings. We should be thankful. Tristan, Pelléas, Le Sacre du Printemps: are these not three accessions to a throne (these three legendary forms of a same symbol, the abdication of the human will before the fatality of fecundation, before the libido)?
Pierre Loti is dead. We have lost a great writer, but the whole of his work had already been given us before the war, by a sort of advance bequest, and the death of its author was not so much a tragedy as a natural phenomenon. The only event to be mourned with tears of blood is the death of an artist who still has something to say. Along with Loti exoticism disappears from our literature. Exoticism is a sort of coloured photography which is no longer suited to our age. It is no more than a surprise-effect, absolutely opposed to the new cosmopolitanism, the aim of which is not to describe distant lands at random, by a selfish caprice and to the exclusion or even at the expense of one's own country, but rather (and here is its dignity and its use) to attempt to establish a closer
