Les Présages
Anna Volkova
Anna Volkova, second from left.
My first impression of Les Présages was in 1935 when I became a full member of Colonel de Basil’s Ballets Russes. By that time it was hailed as a great masterpiece and certainly a novelty in the world of music, as until then no ballet had ever been staged to any great symphony. Massine was then our only choreographer, Balanchine having left the company a few months before to form his own company in the USA.
To me it was a time of learning and absorbing so many things. My beginning in Les Présages was in the corps de ballet – I had never worked with a choreographer or in a large ballet before that. It was most bewildering and frightening. Our stage manager, Mr Serge Grigoriev, usually took the rehearsals and as this ballet had been performed previously there were just a few corrections to be made and their parts taught to new members of the company.
Massine left that mainly to Mr Grigoriev but he was usually present at all the rehearsals. His manner was calm and detached. He very seldom shouted, never showed any favouritism or familiarity with the artists when he was working with us. He would show us the movements which we would repeat after him, then he would make a few corrections but no comment and would leave it at that. In all the years that I worked with him I can honestly say I did not really know him.
Soon after I had learned my first part in Les Présages (we were in London’s Covent Garden theatre then) a new dancer was enrolled. Her name was Kyra Nijinska – the daughter of the famous Vaslav Nijinksy. Her manner was friendly but rather odd. She was put in the corps de ballet in Les Présages and Mr Grigoriev told her just to follow me.
At her first performance, in the finale the whole company was on stage – jumping, turning running – and as I glanced behind me to my horror I saw that I had lost Kyra! Luckily the curtain mercifully fell soon after but as we were all standing in the wings waiting for our turn to take a bow, I saw her – she was wet through with perspiration, quite dishevelled, but with a huge grin on her face!
She grabbed my arm and yelled, ‘I made it, I made it and I loved it all!’ Then she rushed on stage without waiting for any of us and took a deep bow. Kyra did not last long in the company.*
My next memory of Les Présages comes from two years later. We were touring Australia and I was given the opportunity to replace Tatiana Riabouchinska as Frivolity in the third movement. But that is another story ….
*Early in 1936, Kyra Nijinsky married Igor Markevitch, Diaghilev’s last protégé, at the Coronation church in Budapest. There would be one son of the marriage to continue the line of Vaslav and Romola,’ (Richard Buckle, Nijinsky (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971, p. 422). The couple were divorced in 1945, after which Kyra lived in Rome and later San Francisco and San Rafael, where she died in 1998, aged 84. Markevitch, a composer and conductor, married Topazia Caetani in 1947 and their son, Oleg Caetani, born in 1956, is currently the chief conductor and artistic director of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Ed.
Anna Volkova was born in Moscow, trained in Paris with Preobrajenska and Egorova and became a permanent member of Col. de Basil’s Ballets Russes in 1935. Staying with the company until 1943, she visited Australia in 1938 and 1940, where her leading roles included the first waltz in Les Sylphides, the Cockerel in Le Coq d’or, Papillon in Le Carnaval, Frivolity in Les Présages and the Woman in The Eternal Struggle. She has lived in Australia since 1945, from 2000 in Sydney.





