Secret Muses

Julie Kavanagh's biography of Frederick Ashton has been splendidly reviewed below, but there are one or two things I should like to add. This biography of Sir Frederick Ashton is a panorama of 20th century dance in Britain and, in some aspects, America also. It is, and will remain so for future generations, a marvellous "Who's Who" of the British ballet establishment.I confess I started to skip the love letters to and from the boys. A little love letter goes a long [long] way. Was Ashton really so creatively tied to such people as Martyn Thomas? His choreographic talent was such that I am left wondering how very much greater Ashton's work might have been without the sturm and drang of those relationships. Was Ashton 'passionately lazy' or did he, I wonder, suffer from undiagnosed depression from most of his life because he could not be the great dancer he longed to be? His attempts to 'keep the slate clean' as far as having a good war record and not get caught out in his homosexuality at a time when it was illegal in the UK are commendable, but how stultifying for him artistically! He could never let go and have a really life-enhancing grand passion. I have the feeling that secretly Ashton longed to be a voluptuously beautiful courtesan with the world at his feet. He had his world at his feet most of the time, and his palace was the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, so there were compensations of course. The whole hypocritcal business of the illegality of homosexuality in the UK affected not only Ashton but Noel Coward, Cecil Beaton, Terence Rattigan and above all, Benjamin Britten. How much greater might their artistic output have been otherwise? It doesn't matter that many of Ashton's ballets have not stood the test of time. Some of them certainly have, Les Patineurs and Les Rendezvous are great works for, beside, and because of, their choreographic content, they are wonderful for improving and strenghtening any corps-de-ballet - and how many ballets of the 20th century can one say that of? Symphonic Variations and Scenes de Ballet are masterpieces of their genre. Daphnis & Chloe was a marvellous realisation of the score, as was La Valse. I use the past tense deliberately. Julie Kavanagh has captured the essence of the life Ashton led, and brings him to life with more sympathy than perhaps he deserves. Objectively, then, one should seperate the man from his choreography, and it's up to each reader to do so. One aspect of his art that Ms Kavanagh has captured is the man's 'theatrical theatricality.' Ashton was theatrical in the best sense of the word. It pervades his ballets and certain effects, such as the billowing curtain in Marguerite & Armand stay in the mind's eye, [well, it has in mine anyway], long after the image of the choreography has faded. That a man of Ashton's years could produce A Month in the Country is a testament to his genius, his theatricality and his self-revitalising humanity. As Ms Bonifaccio points out below in her r

The most amazing thing about Ms Kavanagh's book is that it NOT a hatchet job on what seems to be a rather unpleasant man. Underneath the many layers of Ashton's exhibitionism, egocentricity, tightfistedness and manipulative scheming Kavanagh reveals a rather sad, but talented, figure, whom one feels a certainy sympathy for. Was Ashton a great choreographer? Probably he was. Future generations will be hard pushed to know though, as his ballets are massacred by the Royal Ballet in the UK. One should, I feel, never judge a ballet by it's revivability. Those of us present at the first night of "Enigma Variations" or "A Month in the Country" knew we were in the presence of greatness. In many ways Ashton was a choreographic Somerset Maugham, who managed to evoke a lost world in a few steps of a short ballet, very like Somerset Maugham's short stories. Who knows whether they will stand the test of time?I can't help feeling that Ashton wasn't a very pleasant person, though not as unpleasant as the snarlingly awful Antony Tudor with his chips on his shoulders and his deep seated inverted snobbery. Ashton's sexual politics within the Royal Ballet would be considered highly politically incorrect, [while his treatment of some of the dancers would be considered sexual harassment and, if pursued through the courts would have won huge payouts], in this day and age. The whole set up sounds [and probably was] terribly incestuous. Ms Kavanagh quotes extensively from Ashton's love letters to and from young men, letters which, in most cases, are too foolish and should have been submitted to a strong editorial hand.It's bizarre to read that Dame Ninette de Valois retired from the Royal Ballet in 1964 for she wielded enormous influence there even 30 years later. In fact there was no real reason for her to retire then at all, as her retirement caused a choreographic block in Ashton. Her shoddy politics in the affair do not show her in a good light at all. It's also bizarre to think that the cradle of British ballet as such was in the hands of these people, who were little more than dilettantes, and who lost in the early post-war period the two great influences on them; Constant Lambert and Sophie Fedorovitch. What was the alternative? Marie Rambert? I think not! Page 476, Ashton to Kavanagh: "There are things I have to say about Ninette....but I'm not going to tell you while she's alive." Did he ever say them? I bet he did!I do have some small issues with Ms Kavanagh's approach. She talks about the men of the early post-war Royal Ballet as having good techniques. This is nonsense. Believe me, until the advent of Nureyev British male dancing was of a pretty poor standard as there were no outstanding male teachers at the Royal Ballet School in those days. For instance, there was no male variation for the Prince in Sleeping Beauty until just before the Royal Ballet's Russian tour in 1961 and no coda to the pas-de-deux until well into the late sixties. There were one of t