Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3808/Egypt in Venice
"La Légende de Joseph."
Those who know the kind of attractions that the Russian ballet offers in so many of its themes could have easily guessed, without previous enlightenment, what episode in the life of Joseph had been selected for illustration last week at Drury Lane. But they could never have guessed that Herr Tiessen, author of a shilling guide to the intentions of the composer, would attach a transcendental significance to the conduct of Potiphar's Wife "Through the unknown divine," he informs us, "which is still new and mysterious to her, an imperious desire awakens in her to fathom, to possess this world"—the world, that is to say, which Joseph's imagination creates in the course of an exhibition dance. If this is so, I can only say that her behaviour is strangely misleading.
The scene opens at a party given by Potiphar in Venice. Venice, of course, was not Potiphar's home address; and I marvel a little at the change of venue when I think how much more harmony could have been got out of an Egyptian setting. But then I remind myself that the Russian ballet is nothing if not bizarre. The long banqueting-table recalls the canvases of Veronese, but with discordant notes of the Orient and elsewhere. Potiphar himself, seated on a däis, has the air of an Assyrian bull. By his side Mme. Potiphar wears breeches ending above the knee, with white stockings and high clogs.
For the entertainment of the guests there was a dance of nuptial unveiling and a bout between half-a-dozen Turkish boxers. But it was a decadent and blasé company, and something more piquant was needed for their titillation. This was supplied in the shape of an original dance by the fifteen-year-old Joseph, whom my guide describes as "graceful, wild and pungent." He was introduced in a recumbent posture, and asleep, on a covered stretcher, and at first I had the clever idea that he was the customary corpse that appeared at Egyptian feasts to remind the company of their liability to die. But when he woke up and began to dance I saw at once that I was wrong.
I now know all about the interpretation of Joseph's dance; but I defy anyone to say at sight and without a show-man's assistance what precisely he was after. In the Third Figure (according to my guide-book) "there is in his leaps a feeling of heaviness, as if he were bound to earth, and he stumbles once or twice as one who has missed his goal;" but how was I to guess that this signified that his "searching after God" was still ineffectual? or that when in the Fourth Figure he "leaps with light feet" this meant that "Joseph has found God"? I don't blame the boy for not knowing the rule that forbids one art to trespass on the domain of another; but there is no excuse for Herr Strauss, who must have been well aware that, for the conveyance of any but the most obvious emotions, mute dancing can never be a satisfactory substitute for articulate poetry.
However, Potiphar's guests seemed better instructed than I was, for they threw off their apathy and took quite an intelligent interest in Joseph's pas soul. Indeed, one young man (the episode escaped me at the dress rehearsal, but I have it in the guide-book)—one young man, "sobbing, buries his head in his hands, upsetting thereby a dish of fruit." As for Potiphar, it failed to sir the sombre depths of his abysmal boredom, but his wife, whose ennui had hitherto been of the most profound, began to sit up and take notice, and at the end of the dance she sent for Joseph and supplemented his rather exiguous costume with a gross necklace of jewels, letting her hand linger awhile on his bare nexk. Already, it will be seen, she was intrigued with the "unknown divine." Joseph, on the contrary, received her attentions without empressement.
In the next scene—after a rather woolly and unintelligible interlude—we see Joseph retiring to his couch in an alcove behind the place where the banqueting-table had been. You will judge how urgent was the lady's keenness to probe the mysteries of his divine nature when I tell you that she could not wait till the morning to pursue her enquiries, but must needs visit him in his chamber at dead of night, and wearing the one garment of the hour. At first, still half dreaming, he mistakes her for an angel (he had already seen one in his sleep), but subsequently, growing suspicious, he repels her with a dignified disdain. For I must tell you that, whatever the guide-book may allege about the loftiness of her designs, the music gave her away. It reverted, in fact, to the motive of those passages which had already accompanied and illustrated the nuptial dance, the dance (as Herr Tiessen calls it) of "burning Love-longing."
At this juncture, Potiphar and his minions break upon the sciene. His wife, after denouncing Joseph, is distracted between passion of hatred and passion of love, and there is some play (reminding one of L'Après-midi d'un Faune) with the purple cloak which Joseph had discarded. Presently she eludes her dilemma by fainting.
Meanwhile it has been the work of a moment to order up a brazier, a pair of pincers, a poker, a headsman and an axe. The instruments of torture waste no time in getting red-hot; and we anticipate the worst. Joseph, however, who has ignored these preparations and maintained an attitude of superbly indifferent aloofness, suddenly becomes luminous under great pressure of limelight; and most of the cast, including a ballet of female dervishes, are abashed to the ground.
Now appears, on the open-work entresol at the back of the stage, an archangel. The guide-book is in error where it says that he glides downwards on a shaft of light radiating from a star. As a matter of fact he walks down the main staircase to the ground floor. Approaching Joseph he takes him by the hand and "leads him heavenwards" by the same flight of steps; and we are to understand that, in the opinion of Herr Strauss, the boy's subsequent career, as recorded in the Hebraic Scriptures, may be treated as negligible.
I should like, in excuse of my own flippancy, to assume the same detachment, and to regard this ballet-theme as having practically no relation whatever to Biblical history, but being just one of many themes out of Oriental lore, mostly secular, that lend themselves to the drama of disappointed passion. My only serious protest is against the hypocrisy which pretends, with regard to Potiphar's Wife, to see a spiritual significance in what is mere vulgar animalism.
I ought, by the way, to have said that, in a spasm of chagrin, she chokes herself with the pearl necklace which lent the only touch of superfluity to her night attire, and was carried out—but not up the main staircase. Thus ends this sordid tragedy that so well illustrates that quality in Herr Strauss to which my guide refers when he speaks of his realization of a "poignant longing for divine cheerfulness."